On the blog, we have recently published reports on four bookstore interviews I conducted recently: Doylestown Bookshop, the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop, Moonstone Mystery Book Store, and Buffalo Street Books. This project began because Sisters in Crime asked Stefanie Pintoff and me to interview Otto Penzler and Ian Kern of Mysterious Bookshop about the state of the retail book business. SinC regularly creates deep dive reports on some aspect of the book business and last year they covered independent bookstores. The report is available here and is worth reading.
It got me thinking about how many independent bookstores there are in our chapter’s large region. Most of us know nothing about any except for our local stores. I thought it would be useful to do some interviews and publish the results for our members. The always-helpful Jenny Milchman, Queen of the Mystery Book Tour, made suggestions.
Now is the time for summing up.
The news, perhaps surprisingly, is good. The interviewees cautiously agreed with the folks at Mysterious Bookshop, that the independent bookstore business appears to have stabilized, after a long period of enormous damage from the growth of both online bookselling and e-books.
Storeowners are seeing that there are people still want to hold books and browse the shelves in person. As to online sales, one owner made the point that she could get any special order overnight, just as good as the Big A. All of them said their customers want and value what online shopping cannot provide: personal recommendations from knowledgeable staff.
On September 23, The New York Times, which covers the book business very well, published this article that said much the same thing and in great detail. This is good news for readers and certainly for writers.
I discussed store events with all of them and their suggestions, as well as complaints, were similar.
1. Make it personal. They prefer personalized contacts. Send a hand-written note with your package, remind them you’ve met, and send a message to the store’s Face book page. Don’t have it go through your publishers, either.
2. Be a partner. Be prepared to help in promoting the events. No surprise, that is essential.
3. Be creative. If you come up with a fresh, clever idea or a ready-made program, they would be happy to listen.
4. Be interactive. They also spoke a lot about the author being engaging, about being a person who really interacts with an audience. One said what she would find most useful from MWA is teaching authors how to do this better!
I hope this and the interviews have given each of you a new insight or idea.
A small typo that got past me. At the end, listing how store owners would like to be contacted, it should have been OR not AND: “remind them you’ve met, OR send…”