The other day I noticed a comment my friend, Sally Anderson, the manager of the Bookstore at Fitger’s, had posted on Facebook. Seems Fox News was doing a piece on the status of independent bookstores in our region without bothering to interview the manager of the only independent bookstore in the region. The post bugged me but I wasn’t bugged at Sally. I was bugged at the state of writing, books, publishing, and bookstores in these United States of America and the fact that, since I started hawking books (a term I love to use; sorry if I’m being repetitious) back in 2000 when The Legacy was first published by Savage Press, we’ve lost so many bookstores in the Northland. Think about it. A little over a decade ago, we had the Bookstore at Fitger’s, Sunhillow Books, Northern Lights Bookstore, a little Indie tucked in the back of DeWitt Sietz (where the fish market is now)in Duluth and J.B. Beecroft in Superior providing local readers with independent access to great books. All of them, including the very successful and nationally renowned Northern Lights, with the exception of the Bookstore at Fitger’s, are now history. This isn’t a trend that is unique to Duluth/Superior. There’s a great article up at http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/12-stats-on-the-state-of-bookstores-in-america-today/ that chronicles the demise of the little corner bookstores that all readers, myself included, love to spend time in. While the article tries to put a positive spin on the current state of affairs, two statistics leaped out at me when I read the piece.
First, the US had some 4,000 independent bookstores open for business in the 1980s. We now have something over 2,000 stores still in business. And second, as of 2011, Amazon had cornered nearly one-quarter of all book sales, not including eBook sales, in the US. Coupled with this loss of physical bookstore space across our land, and Amazon’s emergence as the largest seller of books in America is the fact that, with the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle, 30% of all adult fiction purchased in 2010-2011 was in the form of an eBook. 30%. That of course means readers who bought the e-version of a novel were unlikely to buy the print version, which means in turn, less sales for brick and mortar bookstores, including megastores Barnes and Noble (BN) and Borders.
Borders, of course, has itself closed its doors. Whether you enjoy the concept of big box retail bookstores like BN and Borders (or Chapters to our north in Canada), the loss of 600 retail outlets selling books and music across the country is not a good thing for authors famous or, as my son Dylan says, semi-famous like me. Every bookstore that is shuttered, whether owned by a corporate giant or your neighbor, is one less place for me, or John Grisham, or Garrison Keillor, or Margaret Atwood to sit behind a table in the middle of a cozy store on a dreary, rainy day, meet folks, chat about our writing, and maybe, just maybe, entice a sale. But even when stores or chains (remember, we once had a Waldens here in Duluth, up at the Mall?) fade away, the stores that remain behind, particularly the remaining BN locations, have, due to decreased sales, changed their retail footprints. Walk into a BN store today. What do you find? A larger area devoted to greeting cards. Space, considerable space, devoted to BN’s electronic reader, the Nook. Aisle upon aisle of toys and games, a sideline that, so far as I can recall, didn’t exist in BN stores ten years ago. Along with BN’s shift in focus from being a book and music store to something more diverse has come an attitude, at least in my mind, that regional authors like me are unlikely to be invited to a book signing. This despite the fact that the industry still insists on its archaic and economically devastating return policy: A BN store may order 10 books. If I show up and sell 5, the other 5 are likely to be returned the next day or maybe a month or two down the line for full credit. Often times, the books returned are dirty and torn from customers fondling (but apparently not buying) them on the shelf. The returned books often become paper in my recycling bin, a loss to my little enterprise. Independent bookstores (Indies) usually order only what they actually want or need and return few books. But sadly, there are so few Indies left, their impact, against the corporate weight of BN and Amazon is slight. Sigh…
Sally’s post got me to thinking, thinking about the economic and promotional ride Cloquet River Press has been on during its 12 years of existence. I’ve had some great experiences meeting folks and talking about my stories from Akron, Ohio to Calgary, Alberta. From Thunder Bay, Ontario to Denver, Colorado and all points in between. My loyal blog readers have followed my travels back and forth across Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Iowa as I attended outdoor craft festivals in an attempt, as independent bookstores have retrenched and as the corporate monoliths, BN and Borders have either reduced their stores or become extinct, to add direct sales to the mix. Remember B. Dalton stores, once owned by Target, and later, part of the BN empire? Bookstores in a shopping mall like any other shop. Walden’s fitting that same model. All gone. My efforts to supplement the closure of smaller corporately owned and family-owned bookstores worked for a while. And then 2008 hit and the whole damn world of disposable spending went in the tank. You’ve read my posts. I’ve given up on that model. It’s been two years since I last set up my EZ-Up and tried to sell books in the rain to strangers. I miss the interaction with my readers and potential readers. But I don’t miss the uncertainty of the skies or the loss of my leisure time that each such event entailed. But back the main point of this post.
Recently, you all have been reading announcements (I hope!) on Facebook and on this blog that I have successfully converted all my work, including my novels, into eBook format available on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. Most of you don’t know that the Indies have their own eReader, the Kobo, available at selected independent bookstores or online at http://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/.
The problem for Indies in selling the Kobo is that the store receives some money from the sale of the device but very little thereafter when a customer downloads an eBook. Every eBook sold to an Indie customer is sort of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But given the status of the bookselling industry, little guys like me really don’t have much choice: It’s either go digital, and include the “big boys” (BN and Amazon) in the conversion or starve. I’ve had Laman’s River , the first book I released simultaneously as a trade paperback and an eBook , up on Kobo for over a year. I’ve sold one copy to a Kobo user. One. Now, to be fair, sales of that title and all my other titles on Kindle and Nook are very modest. But I’m at least paying back the conversion costs with those sales. Not so with the Kobo versions of my books. Still, I will continue to include Kobo in the mix due to a sense of fairness and my fondness for the little guy, the independent bookseller.
But there’s another issue facing folks like me. The initial printings of my more recent novels have significantly undersold when compared to my first three books. The Legacy has sold over 3,000 copies. The same is true for Suomalaiset. Pigs, my second novel, has sold over 1,500. Anything over 1,000 copies sold by a self-published, regional fiction author is considered a “bestseller”. My more recent offerings, Esther’s Race and Laman‘s River, while receiving the same positive, critical support from readers as the earlier novels, have not sold as well. Granted, those novels came out in 2007 and 2012 respectfully, during the worst recession we’ve seen since the Great Depression. But for a small company like CRP, the loss of sales has been a troubling circumstance. Unsold inventory is not a good thing when trying to balance the ledger.
Which leads me to this point and the point of the new cover of Pigs you see above and the new cover of The Legacy you’ll find below. Create Space (CS), a tentacle of the Amazon octopus, is a godsend for little authors like me with backlisted (formerly out-of-print) titles. CS has formatting software that makes converting an existing manuscript via PDF into a new book, complete with a new cover. Free of charge. Yes, that’s right: Free of charge. And the cost to print a book through their print on demand (POD) printer is modest, very competitive to what I pay commercial printers to print my books. The main reason for going with CS for my out-of-print books is that I can order them one at a time as customers order them (hence the term “print on demand” or POD). No upfront costs. No inventory. No red ink. There are some technical drawbacks to the process in terms of making the same POD version of my books available to brick and mortar stores like the Bookstore at Fitgers, details that I won’t bore you with here. And yes, I am cognizant that by “feeding the beast” in this way, I am likely hurting, rather than helping, the Indies I love and cherish. But I am an author. I want folks to be able to find and read my books. Given the way of the world, I have little choice in the matter.
With apologies to my friends and supporters in independent bookstores everywhere, it’s a path I need to walk.
Peace.
Mark
