Storytellersunplugged

by Jeff Mariotte

We sit at home, or on airplanes, at work, God forbid at Starbuck’s—if we’re Ernest Hemingway, we stand naked at a podium, but how many of us, really, are Hemingway, and if you are then lock up the damn shotgun. We clack away at keyboards or we scribble in wirebound notebooks or we pierce our veins with penpoints and scrawl on scraps of human flesh. However we go about the process, we write.

And the purpose of writing is communication. By definition, we haven’t communicated unless we have reached an audience—it is the act of reading what we have written that makes our words something more than oddly shaped little figures against a contrasting background.

If we write books, as I most often do, that means getting through the publishing process and the retail process and into the hands of people who will pay money for them and then read them.

That, most often, involves booksellers.

I’m distressed whenever I see how many of my fellow authors have websites that link to Amazon.com. It’s because of their affiliate program, I’m told when I ask. They pay a few cents for every book purchased by someone who links from the site to Amazon’s site.

To which I can only say, if you’re Stephen King except you’re selling most of your books via your website instead of in bookstores, maybe you’re making some real money that way. If you’re not—and really, there is only one more Steve King among us than Hemingway—then what you’re doing benefits Amazon just fine, but it does nothing for you.

If it’s about the affiliate program money, then link to booksense.com, which also pays those few pennies per copy sold. The difference is that booksense.com drives readers to independent bookstores in your neighborhood, not to Amazon, and that is a fundamental difference. Check out my booksense.com links at www.jeffmariotte.com (and while you’re at it drop by my blog)!

If you’re serious about writing books, you should make every effort to “adopt” a local bookstore. As a horror writer, if you happen to live in the vicinity of a good specialty store like Dark Delicacies or Dark Carnival or or Dreamhaven or Mysterious Galaxy, so much the better. But it doesn’t have to be a specialty store, and it doesn’t absolutely have to be an independent.

You’re better off, though, if it is, and I’m here to tell you why. I’m speaking here not just as the author of thirty-some books, but as an bookseller of twenty-five years.

An independent bookseller, if he or she likes your work, can push you in a way that a chain can’t. Chain store display space is bought by publishers, so if your books aren’t high on their list of priorities—and except for the really big names, horror isn’t, except briefly around Halloween—you can’t count on much, if any. Independents decide for themselves what goes in the window, what goes on endcaps, what goes on the front display table. If you’d like your book to end up in any of those places, you’ve got to get yourself known to independent bookstores.

I’ve known chain store employees who were disciplined for spending too much time talking about books with customers. I’ve also encountered chain store employees who knew next to nothing about the books they’re supposed to be selling. Not every chain store employee fits into these categories, of course. But these tend not to be problems at independent bookstores. The people are there because they love books, and love the process of putting books into the hands of people who will appreciate them. It ain’t for the money, I can assure you. At independent specialty stores, in particular, the chances that the people selling your books will have actually read your books increases geometrically over chain stores.

If you can adopt an indy store where you and your work are appreciated, the benefits to your career become immediately apparent. They’re likely to keep your books on hand as long as possible, even if they go out of print. They’ll order more to begin with, and they’ll restock when they run low. They will probably have a website, to which you can link from yours, thereby generating sales that will be appreciated (which, if you think Amazon appreciates the 10 orders a year they’re getting from your site, you’re kidding yourself). They may do events for you, signings, reading, launch parties. And booksellers talk to other booksellers, so if you generate good business at one store, others will hear about it.

At the first store I managed, I was one of the couple dozen or so booksellers in the U.S. selling Clive Barker, back when we had to buy his work through an importer. I’m claiming no responsibility for making him the superstar multimillionaire that he is today—but when his stuff became available in the U.S. and he started touring for it, we had a ready-made customer base already aware of and interested in his work.

Likewise, early in James Ellroy’s career, he toured frequently, often appearing at independent bookstores like mine. Ellroy developed a persona, the “demon dog of American crime literature,” and a shtick, and in the earliest days, before he was well known, he thought nothing of buttonholing people who happened to be in the store and not paying attention to him. It wasn’t just his bookstore appearances that built him into a major bestselling author—his brilliant writing had a lot to do with it—but it didn’t hurt.

Bookstores are there to sell books. If you, as an author, can help them sell your books, they will appreciate that. They will show that appreciation by increasing orders, recommending your work, writing it up in newsletters and on websites, telling other booksellers. In this way, word about your books can spread.

Alternatively, you can link to Amazon and think you’ve done all you need to do.

Amazon sells a ton of books. Not a ton of any single book, with the very few exceptions of the Harry Potters and a few others, but small quantities of lots of different things. That’s fine, and it doesn’t hurt you to be there. But are they, as a bookstore, recommending you to readers? Are they helping you develop the personal relationship with your readers that builds lifelong fans? Are they making efforts to raise awareness of your books? Of course not. You, to Amazon, are virtually meaningless. A number, a few bucks from customers who clicked over from your site.

And when they do sell your books, the money from that purchase doesn’t even stay in your neighborhood. When someone buys your book from your local bookstore, the portion of that money that doesn’t go to pay the publisher is spent locally. It pays the bookseller, who uses it at the grocery store or for rent or mortgage, or whatever. We may stay home and write, but we still live where we do, and the more of our money that goes to support our neighbors and add to our local tax base, the better.

I’ve met authors who tell me their book is carried on Amazon, as if that gives it some legitimacy it wouldn’t otherwise have. I’ve even met at least one author I can think of who has that fact on the business card that he hands to booksellers. Frankly, as a bookseller, I don’t care if your book is on Amazon, except that if you put that on your business card I’m going to think twice about even carrying your book.

So if you have that Amazon link and only that, give it some more thought. You aren’t helping your career with it. Making friends with the bookstore in town, however, will.

Get away from the keyboard for a while and find out how.