Tag Archives: carlo rovelli

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!