Tag Archives: bookselling

The Bookshelf Ecosystem

Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor, Episode 2

Welcome to episode two of Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor where I, someone who knows little about either writing or selling books (yet!), presume to teach you about both. For the start of this blog series, check out episode 1, about who buys all these books anyway? here.

[Image via Penguin Random House. Cover design by Amanda Dewey]


I’m currently reading Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, about the origin and philosophical implications of quantum physics. One of Rovelli’s main arguments is that the essence of reality is fundamentally made of relationships, not substances: “[Things] do nothing but continuously act upon each other. To understand nature, we must focus on these interactions rather than on isolated objects.”

With this on my mind, I’ve started looking at the bookshelves of Big Name Bookstore (BN for short), where I work, as a living ecosystem of relations.

Bookstore shelves are an environment more dynamic and fascinating than one might suppose at first glance. They are continuously acted upon by the people in the store (and everything else, according to Rovelli, but we’ll focus on the people), and they themselves act upon people, by design and coincidence.

You choose to pick up a book based on a combination of internal factors (your preferences, history, mood, etc.) and external factors (the book’s cover, marketing, placement on the shelf, etc.). Or rather, you do not pick up the book, and the book does not make you pick it up, but you and the book emerge in relationship with each other.

It’s difficult to wrap your brain around, but I envision this emergence in the way that music emerges only in the relationship of violin bow, tuned string, player, and composition, and can’t just come into being on its own or hang around in the air without something producing and reproducing it.

Similarly, a book emerges on a shelf through relations of writer, publisher, workers producing the physical book-object, the sunlight that went into the trees that went into the pages, etc. And the composition or activity of the broader bookshelf also continuously changes and evolves. 

Most fascinating, in my opinion, is how booksellers and visitors alike engage with the shelves in a kind of guerrilla warfare, or evolutionary struggle, with all the spontaneous organization and furtive acts of sabotage that entails.

I’ve already talked about some of the factors at play in my first “Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor,” regarding the impact of promotion (or lack thereof) and regular book buyer behavior on what happens to a book at the store. But here I’ll look a bit more at how booksellers and visitors operate as active subjects in relation:

Booksellers: are people, and unpredictable

 
Outside of bestselling books, whose promotion can’t be avoided, which books are featured on a shelf can largely fall to the whims and interests of the store’s booksellers. They are human beings, so they bring to their work a complex relation of motivations, ethical beliefs, areas of expertise, physical states like enthusiasm or fatigue, limitations… like being too short to reach the top shelf and organize it… etc. The relations between these shape the actions of the bookseller, and the actions of the bookseller shape the shelf, and through it, the actions of customers and their interest or ability to buy a book.

I was organizing a shelf yesterday and found a book that had, perplexingly, been shelved under the name of the testimonial in small print beneath the title. The cover quoted something like “‘Great book, 10/10’ – Michael Scott,” and so the bookseller had shelved it under “Scott”… Even though the author’s name sat in very large print just above that, and was the only name on the spine. Some mysterious set of relations produced an action the author and publisher could have never accounted for, which made this book effectively disappear from access for who knows how long.

Another example: the vast majority of my coworkers are romance/romantasy/YA readers. So these sections in our store remain impeccably “gardened”—regularly checked and lovingly maintained. The sections closest to customer service, the hub at the center of the store where employees congregate, are also better maintained on average. But sections hosting genres our booksellers aren’t personally invested in, like science, Spanish-language, and true crime, are disasters. Or were, because I personify everything and fall in love with the overlooked and bullied, so I took these areas under my wing like orphaned baby birds.

Case study: my own shelving behavior


To do a deeper dive into bookseller-as-relation, here’s what I’ve noticed about myself.

For my part, when I approach a shelf that needs some books faced-out (cover turned out to highlight the title), and it doesn’t matter which, I tend to promote books based on four basic impulses: fidelity, empathy, sense of humor, and ethics.

Fidelity means I highlight books I love and feel a devotion to because of what they’ve helped me become. I say fidelity and not just affinity, because it feels almost like an indebted sense of duty to pass these books on. I look out for the authors I grew up with like Ursula K. Le Guin, Diana Wynne Jones, and C.S. Lewis, and the authors I’m fanning for lately like Jeff VanderMeer, Tamsyn Muir, and Ann Leckie (also A. K. Larkwood, who isn’t on our shelves sadly, but who I highly recommend—The Unspoken Name is basically the glorious second coming of Le Guin’s Tombs of Atuan, and reads like what it would have been if Le Guin had felt free from male readership bias to let Tenar lead the story and also have a cute gay romance).

Anyway, continuing on: Empathy means books that haven’t been promoted well, yet seem good. I offer my support to these Davids against the Goliaths of authors like Patterson and Brandon Sanderson hulking across the shelves next to them. Because these are books in which I can see myself. Imagining one day I will publish a book that only gets a single ignominious copy sent to the store, I try to give these little friends a boost up.

Sense of humor is usually invoked when I encounter an absurd, oddball cover or an amusing juxtaposition on the shelf. Ship of Destiny by Frank Chadwick is one of my most beloved covers—I can NOT stop laughing at this perturbed owl in a crop top who’s about to kick your ass—so I face it out periodically. Sincere shout out to the artist, Don Maitz, who offers some lovely reflections on craft and cover design here. An example of juxtaposition: in the science section, I like to face out a Stephen Hawking book next to Hawking Hawking by Charles Seife, which condemns the scientist as something of a charlatan, and let this conflict potentially draw in a reader.

[Image credit: Simon and Schuster, cover art by Don Maitz]

Ethical means if I think your book is literally evil, such as encouraging violence or dehumanization of people, I will not help promote it. BN sells more than a few books which advocate for the abuse, dehumanization, and death of people like me, and other minority groups. This is fucked up enough already without me obligingly aiding in their promotion.

Overall, these aren’t conscious guiding principles in how I shelve, but were largely unconscious behaviors to me until I critically reflected on what I do. There are all kinds of processes, conscious and unconscious, that go into the promotion of books at this ground level, and I’d be curious how other booksellers conceptualize their relation to the shelves.

[Nota bene: if you enjoy wacky cover art, check out Funny as Shit Book Covers and r/badscificovers]

Visitors: the left hand of bookselling

Along with bookseller influence over shelving, there’s the even more chaotic element of visitors to the store. (I say “visitors,” not “customers,” because they don’t necessarily come to buy anything). Visitors are not so different from booksellers as you might think, but like the electron to their proton, they participate in the same practice with a different charge: they have just as much access to shelves and control over shelving as booksellers, with none of the responsibility.

Periodically, they awaken to consciousness of this latent power.

Just like booksellers, visitors shelve books, reorganize shelves, choose what to feature and face-out, and what to remove and discontinue. But as the trickster fairy version of staff, they shelve books according to impulse and malice, rather than alphabetically. They re-home books to different sections, sometimes out of carelessness, other times intentionally; for example, often I see Bibles shelved in Self Help by Christians, and in Fiction by Atheists.

Visitors have their own form of face-out, I call “faceover.” They face-out a book over an already faced-out different book, hiding the one and promoting the other. This may cause booksellers to overlook the problem for a while, especially if both books are the same dimensions, assuming they are the same book. It’s like a brood parasite, a cuckoo overtaking a nest.

Visitors also have another technique, which I call “edging” because these are not serious terms. This is when instead of shelving the book with the spine out, they turn it 180 degrees so all you see are pages. This is most often used as a camouflage technique and act of protest, to hamper the sale of certain books. Currently, our most frequently edged books are Ron DeSantis’ The Courage to be Free and all our books about Israel, but especially Israel, a history by Martin Gilbert, which would otherwise feature prominently on the shelf with its many, hefty copies. Visitors will apply a moral judgment to the shelf, to a degree most booksellers avoid, since they have to worry about keeping their jobs.  

Insights for authors: I’m sure everything averages out on a large scale, and a lot of what I’m describing here are odd flukes and strange maneuvering, outlier situations and mutations. But these peculiarities do have effects as unpredictable as they are undeniable, and may be worth considering if you’re involved in the book trade. 

Personally, my chaotic neutral side kind of loves that millions of dollars and years of work can go into producing, marketing, and promoting a book only to be undone in a second by some punk walking in off the street and flipping it around back to front. 

But if you don’t love this, then it should increase your respect for the diligent work of the noble booksellers who, despite only getting paid $11 an hour (💀), walk miles per shift circling the store and fixing displays, putting your book back where it can be easily found by a reader, and perhaps even giving you a helping hand as a newer author.

There’s so much more I’d like to analyze, and may try to tackle, in a future post about the art of shelving, BN versus American Library Association standards, fun terminology (I love learning about the vocabularies of different trades and practices), and following Carlo Rovelli, thinking about the relations of books and people. But for now I’ll leave it here.

If you engage with books, whether as an author, bookseller, reader, etc. what is a (perhaps unusual) way you’ve found yourself making an intervention in this ecosystem? I would love to hear anecdotes from others’ experiences!

Notes from the Bookstore Sales Floor

Well, as is typical with blogs, I lost all momentum as soon as I announced I was starting one. But I have good reasons for it! I started a new job and several volunteer positions, and have been working intensely on writing–just not blog writing. But now that I’m in the rhythm of things, I want to keep blogging periodically about what I’m learning, starting with a series about insights for writers from the POV of a newbie bookseller.

I started working at Big Name Bookstore (BN for short) recently, as a kind of market research project for which I also get paid 😉 Through this position, I’m getting to learn a bit about the business side of writing and about my (hopefully) future readers.

Already, a number of conversations and observations have shaken the way I think about writing and publishing–in an exciting way! I’d like to write a continuing series of posts, focusing particularly on the romance genre and market. For context, I kicked off this year venturing into the romance genre. My heart is with sci fi/fantasy/speculative fiction, but I wanted to step from writing-as-passion towards writing-as-profession, and I thought a good way to make this leap would be to apprentice in the bestselling genre, and a genre I know nothing about.

I might make another blog post about this topic itself, but after two months, I’m now about 10 chapters, 25,000 words into my first romance novel and having a blast. I do think it’s helped improve my writing to work in a genre I’m not as emotionally attached to, because that distance has allowed for a more objective appraisal of what the book is doing and what it needs to be doing to land with readers. I’m able to focus on technique in the detached, demystified way a beginning artist practices shading spheres and cones before trying to paint a portrait of someone they care about.

Learning to write romance while working at a bookstore with a bunch of romance readers and observing the activity and interests of romance reader customers has been a great learning experience, and I hope to share more lessons, anecdotes, and peculiar insights into the sales side of writing. For now, here’s a couple general observations:

Lesson 1: People still buy a lot of books. And people who buy books, buy a lot of books.

Before working here, I didn’t understand how bookstores are still in business, because I considered myself A Reader, yet hadn’t bought a new book in years (I’m a Libby and Half Price Books diehard). I assumed other people were like me, and no matter how much they love books, had a kneejerk reaction against buying anything brand new at full price. Or got everything off Amazon.

But as it turns out, I’m just a miserable skinflint and not representative of the general population. People buy tons of books. Young people, without as many financial expenses to budget for, spend allowances and first paychecks on books. Teenagers buy simple poetry that speaks to complicated feelings. Manga readers buy each new installation in series (serieses?) that span hundreds of installments. Christians buy Bibles and devotionals. Everyone buys self-help. And romance readers… buy every single romance book on the shelf.

What’s more, although I don’t know the actual numbers, I think there’s probably a statistic like 75% of everyday book sales (ie not counting holiday shopping) come from the same 30% of customers. People who buy books tend to be repeat customers. So it seems to me that if you work to know your readers, to inspire and loyally serve them what they love you for, they will follow you to the end of the earth. So I would think, if you want to make money, make readers.  

Lesson 2: Not all books are set up to succeed, but to every book there may be a season

Before working here, I assumed that if your book got traditionally published, actually put on a real shelf in a real bookstore, that meant you had made it. You’d been immortalized. Now I understand that a great number of important and wonderful books aren’t available at the bookstore—half the books I grew up on, which were fundamental for my development as a person and a writer, just aren’t here anymore. And many of the books that are here, won’t last, or get much out of it.

This starts with the publisher and proceeds down a train of people and practices that can help or hurt a book, and there’s a lot more to a book making it than just being on the shelf. Let’s compare two books, both alike in dignity, and yet one will go big and one will fade into ignominy:

Book one: This book a publishing house has decided to go all-in on marketing. We receive 10+ hardcover copies with expertly designed, eye-catching, rainbow-hued covers, and maybe sprayed edges. The publisher and BN make a deal to promote the book with special editions, signage, a display table, putting it on the book club/monthly recommendation list, etc. Books with 3 or more copies on the shelf, which will include these extra promoted books, get “faced out,” or turned to display the cover rather than the spine, which greatly increases the chance of their being picked up and purchased.

Book two: For whatever reason, the publisher doesn’t want to stake much on this one. They treat it as a throwaway title, one of a number of books they go ahead and try, but don’t expect to make a lot off of. We only receive a single, paperback copy. It won’t be on any eye-catching tables at the front of the store, on lists of must-reads and book club picks, and it won’t even get faced out. It is, in my personal opinion, just as good as Book One. But books are largely sold on everything but the actual writing inside. Right out the gate, this book has been condemned to sell poorly, and after the one copy sells, or hits a certain date, we won’t order any more.

This was an important lesson for me. On the business side of things, it stresses the significance of everything that isn’t writing to the profession of writing. The marketing, in a lot of these cases, is better than the book, and you can probably make more money through good marketing than good writing.

It’s also humbling, on the writer side of things. When you write alone in your room, you can start to dream up all kinds of self-aggrandizing visions; there’s nothing to check them. But when working at the bookstore, keeping vigil by the little books, the ones who have not sold a single copy in their years of sitting there, ushering them over the threshold of death when their time finally comes, you get reality checked. You think, damn, I’m much more likely to be one of these little guys than N.K. Jemisin or Brandon Sanderson.

But this isn’t discouraging. In fact, I find it comforting! I feel at home with the little guys [gender-neutral], I feel a kinship and camaraderie with them, and I can let go of that anxiety to punch above my weight. It’s taught me that you can be successful at whatever level you reach, especially if you study marketing and write to market.

And I see that the shelves are continually in flux, their ancient contents now eroded, and now shored up with new soil. How while this one little book may not last, for this month at least it sits where Ursula Le Guin used to sit! That this manga about a toilet holds the place once occupied by beautifully illustrated narratives like With the Light and Mushishi. It assures me that if I just keep learning and working, I can have my turn, and there is plenty of space and need for good books, and simply new books, even more than great books and immortal books.

I think acknowledging this doesn’t mean setting the bar low for yourself, but appreciating where you’re at along the journey, seeking opportunities appropriate to your level, and being mindful of the other factors that go into success besides the writing itself. 

Thanks for reading! Hope to check in again soon.