Storytellersunplugged

The most important lesson I learned while working in a bookstore was taught to me by smut-loving nuns. In so many words, they taught me that people enjoy reading what they enjoy, and that trying to “elevate” them to your particular taste was a foolhardy and condescending endeavor.

The second most important lesson I learned had to do with betting against a sure thing, particularly where a waiter at a downtown bar and a lovely undergrad majoring in massage therapy are involved, but that’s another story.

The third most important lesson, though, is one that is pertinent to being a writer, and is in several senses a corollary to Lesson #1. Specifically, it’s the idea that it’s a lot easier to get people to expand their reading habits one step at a time than it is to change them, and that people are in fact genuinely interested in having someone else give them a reason to read a book.

Sound strange? It seemed strange to me, too, until I realized that the first part of that could be summed as “if you like X, then you’ll like Y”. Amazon.com, among others, use this to great effect, but it’s most important at the personal, and thus interpersonal level. After all, Amazon’s approach is an algorithm spit out of a faceless supercomputer buried somewhere beneath the Martian North Pole and guarded by an army of zombie space wombats[1], while a recommendation from a bookstore clerk comes from someone you theoretically stand a chance of having at least a conversational relationship with.

In practical terms, what this meant for me back in the day was waiting for my regular customers to plow through all of a particular author they liked, and then recommending someone else in a similar vein. If they were Stephen King readers who’d at long last come to the end of our immense King collection, I suggested Brian Lumley or Dan Simmons (and I’d specifically recommend Simmons’ Summer of Night, which in my humble opinion is about as King-like a book as one might find in his oeuvre). Why? Because it was a relatively safe bet to extrapolate their tastes in that direction once I’d been observing their purchases for a while, because they were genuinely good books I thought they’d like, and because they were both authors whom we stocked fairly extensively, so the readers could work up a good head of steam and get excited about their new author without needing to find another one too soon.

And it worked. Even if those same readers had pulled a Necroscope book off the shelf, looked at it, and put it back, once I talked to them and made the connection to what they already liked, they went back and picked it up. Nine times out of ten, they liked it, told me they liked it, and kept reading that author.

All of which was great, of course. It made my manager happy, because we were selling books. It made my regulars happy, because I was finding them new authors and keeping them fed with new books. And it made me happy, because, well, it was fun playing bookshelf alchemy, mixing and matching and generally coming up with gold.

I did realize, however, that what I was doing and what they were getting were two different things. What I was doing was extending their reading and purchasing habits through observation and extrapolation, relying on their trust of my taste and the fact that I “knew” them as readers. What they were getting was, in many cases, something that could only be called a benediction, someone else’s blessing to check out the book and a second opinion when they didn’t entirely trust their own.

Digression: While working in that bookstore, the other clerks and I observed what we jokingly called the Pattern of Picking Purchase

1. If the book was face-out and the cover was appealing, the reader might pick it up.
2. If they picked it up, they might scan the front cover for the title, the author, and any blurbs that might have made it to that side of the spine.
3. If they liked the cover, they might flip it over to read the back-of-book blurb.
4. If they liked the back-of-book blurb, then they might be interested enough to crack the book open and read a few pages.
5. And if they liked those few pages, they might then buy the book.

Five steps, each of which required time, each of which had attrition along the way. It was much easier, then, and more effective, to talk to the customer[2], get a sense of what they were after and provide, as needed, a summary and a recommendation. In other words, we jumped to the end, gave them the condensed version of what they were in many cases looking for.

On one level, it was a hard sell. On another, it was a genuine attempt to connect people with books they would enjoy. And on a third, it was a basic recognition of the fact that a lot of our customers simply didn’t know where to go next with their reading, and appreciated guidance from folks who were presumably experts.

There’s nothing new there, of course. After all, that’s why they put blurbs on the cover; it’s advice from experts. If you like what I write, it stands to reason that you’ll probably like what I blurb, or so goes the theory. Again, though, there’s something much more immediate and telling when the recommendation comes from a bookseller the reader knows. Book buyers tend to be regulars, and that means that they potentially form at least nodding acquaintances with the folks at the stores they frequent[3]. They trust those booksellers to know their tastes and to know what’s on their shelves, and to be able to put those two things together. Tap into that as a reader, and you have a reliable, personal source for good books. Tap into it as a bookseller, and you have happy repeat customers who keep coming around, because you rarely steer them wrong. And if you can tap into it as an author, you’re doing something very smart and potentially expanding your voice in a thousand different places where you can’t be.

Because if the booksellers know and like your work, they’re that much more likely to recommend it to their regular and valued customers. And from where the customers are sitting, if their trusted booksellers are recommending a book, it’s because it’s damn well worth the read.

So mock the lowly bookstore clerk at your peril, would-be authors near and far. For all the whiz-bangery at online booksellers’ disposal, it is still the individual bookseller – one who is not lowly at all – who has the direct and trusted line to the reader, one that has been slowly and carefully established in a million different cases. It is far better to go to as many stores as you can, to talk to the booksellers there as the respected professionals who will in fact be purveying your book to the public, and to get them interested in what you are doing.

After all, if they’re good at their jobs, they’re going to be asked by their loyalists, “What should I read next?” There’s no reason the answer can’t, or shouldn’t – when appropriate – be you.