[00:00:01.690] – Sunyi
Hi, I’m Sunyi Dean.
[00:00:03.670] – Scott
And I’m Scott Drakeford.
[00:00:05.900] – Sunyi
And this is the Publishing Rodeo Podcast. In 2022, we both launched debut novels in the same genre with the same publisher in the same year. But despite having very similar starts, our books, and subsequently each of our careers, went in very different directions.
[00:00:21.970] – Scott
That pattern repeats itself throughout the industry over and over. Why do some books succeed while others seem to be dead on arrival?
[00:00:30.650] – Sunyi
In this podcast, we aim to answer these questions and many more, along with how to build and maintain an author career.
[00:00:38.490] – Scott
Everyone signing a contract deserves to know what they’re really signing up for. In an industry that loves its secrets, we’ll be sharing real details from real people. We’ll cover the gamut of life as a big five published author, from agents to publishing contracts, finances and more.
[00:00:59.490] – Sunyi
So last episode, Scott and I touched a little bit on part of our publishing journeys over how Scott was kind of screwed over from the start, whereas I was better set up for success. We didn’t have a chance to go into that in detail. And this whole podcast will be deconstructing our experiences. But on today’s episode, we’re going to talk about a part which I think is a linchpin to all author experiences. The bookseller and the kind of the corporate playbook for how your book gets into stores. What happens when they’re there, the role of booksellers, their significance in this process and the ways in which your publisher handles all of that which have an impact on your book’s launch and performance. So today we are really excited to invite three fantastic guests, the first of which is Jeremy Greathouse. You might know him as JT Greathouse.
[00:01:47.500] – Jeremy
If you know me at all.
[00:01:52.450] – Sunyi
Jeremy is both a fantasy author and a bookseller, so he’s very uniquely positioned. And we also have the wonderful Claire and Kerry, who have kindly agreed to join us today. And after today’s episodes, Scott and I will get together and do a deconstruction episode later. But for the moment, I just want to welcome Jeremy, Claire and Kerry.
[00:02:12.870] – Kerry
Thanks for having us.
[00:02:14.970] – Claire
Happy to be here.
[00:02:16.350] – Scott
Do you want to tell us a little bit about your bookstore, what you guys are all about, and then we’ll launch into some questions.
[00:02:23.090] – Kerry
Auntie’s Bookstore here in Spokane opened 1978, so we’ve been around for a while. We are the biggest independent bookstore in our area. We’re right in the heart of downtown. Yeah.
[00:02:33.730] – Claire
Maybe even between Seattle and Moscow.
[00:02:36.440] – Kerry
Probably. Yeah, I think so. I can’t think of another one. We’re kind of a big deal, but.
[00:02:42.850] – Jeremy
Regionally kind of a big deal.
[00:02:44.640] – Kerry
I am the general manager at Auntie. I’ve been there for about six years. I do a lot of front list buying, a lot of sideline buying, day to day reorder stuff, I do a lot of.
[00:02:56.660] – Claire
My name’s Claire and I’ve been at Auntie’s for about four years. And I used to run our events program and then transitioned into doing more wholesale buying for the store, bringing more front list in.
[00:03:09.740] – Kerry
Yeah.
[[00:03:11.150] – Jeremy
I’m Jeremy and I’ve just been a bookseller there. Used to do consignment when I worked full time. So getting a lot of local authors books into the store. And now I just work part time there, mostly because I can’t leave. They’ve got hooks in me emotionally and also selling books on the cheap.
[00:03:29.250] – Kerry
I think we’re like a generalist bookstore. We stock a little bit of everything. We have to have things that are appealing to sort of all demographics. We’ve got a really healthy children’s section, so we really do just do everything.
[00:03:43.500] – Scott
So you guys mentioned a whole bunch of terms, some of which I know, but some I don’t. So if you don’t mind, before we launch into the real questions or whatever, and if it’s okay with you, Sunyi, can I ask real quick what each of these means?
[00:04:06.940] – Kerry
So frontlist means new stuff that’s coming out. Some publishers put out their big sort of omnibus catalog that’s seasonal. So it’s like spring, summer, fall, and winter quarters. They put out these big catalogs with all the new shit that’s coming out. And so the backlist then would be the stuff that isn’t the new stuff. I forget exactly when the time frame is, it’s kind of a specific time frame. But I don’t, off the top of my head, remember when it is. It’s just basically like new releases versus sort of the old standbys.
[00:04:34.150] – Scott
Yeah. And so you use the term sideline buying. Is that, to you, backlist?
[00:04:40.330] – Kerry
No, sideline. We’re primarily a bookstore, but people love to buy other things. Bookstores have survived through the big box guys, and then, of course, the A-word that won’t be named. It’s kind of like a side hustle. So in addition to books, we sell tea and stickers and T-shirts, and we try to keep it kind of all like, okay, what’s the thing that you need to have an afternoon of reading experience. And we try to provide that. Other bookstores have gone way harder in some of the gifty sideline ways. But yeah, socks.
[00:05:22.960] – Claire
People spend so much goddamn money on socks.
[00:05:26.260] – Jeremy
We sell more socks than books at this point.
[00:05:28.730] – Kerry
But it is funny sometimes to have someone be like, $30 for a hardcover book! and then turn around and buy seven pairs of socks for $12 each.
[00:05:36.250] – Scott
How long until it’s a combo bookshop liquor store?
[00:05:44.030] – Claire
We’re getting there.
[00:05:50.270] – Sunyi
So I will say this for the benefit, since you don’t necessarily know us, and for anyone who maybe is starting not at episode one. Scott and I have the same publisher. We debuted in the same year. We write the same genre, but we had very different experiences in our launch years. And we are kind of looking at publishing from that angle of what happens when authors fall on other sides, opposite sides, of that mid list dividing line. And I did notice that when our publisher was preparing for my debut year, they were really going after booksellers very hard. I don’t know. I’m guessing your experience is not that, Scott.
[00:06:29.010] – Scott
This is the point in the podcast where I decide how much I want to say. I couldn’t even get answers. I would ask about, hey, I’m hearing that this is kind of a big deal in getting ready for launch. Like, what are you doing and what can I do to help? Right? Because I was full time already at that point. I was very willing to dig in and do whatever I could to help. And it was just vague answers or silence or deflection. And I was left very confused. But also at the same time, I could feel it coming. I kind of got a sense at that point of like, oh God, this isn’t going to go anything like what I thought it was going to be. And I learned some of the terms that we’re talking about now, just the basic stuff. So, like, frontlist and backlist. Just because I happened upon the–I don’t know how you say it in correct English or German, but–Edelweiss, however you say it. And I probably heard about that from Sunyi, actually. And I saw the Tor catalog come out, right?
[00:07:43.400] – Scott
And I had to scroll all the way down to find my book, and they didn’t have my cover in there. And I think, oh, my bio was wrong at that point.
[00:07:53.740] – Sunyi
It was the wrong author.
[00:07:55.360] – Scott
Yeah, it was the wrong author. Yeah. My real name is Scott Smith, and I didn’t publish under the name Scott Smith because there’s another Scott Smith who publishes thrillers, and he’s also a screenwriter. And he’s fairly well known. He’s my agent’s favorite thriller author. So my agent and my editor were like, yeah, you should probably find another family name. And so Drakeford is a family name. So, come to find out, I look up the catalog and they have that guy’s bio. Like, they ignored the bio I sent them. They ignored the bio that my agent had given them. And my editor is fully aware that I’m not this other Scott Smith. And I’m using this name because of the other Scott Smith. And yet they literally just went online, I guess, and stole this other guy’s bio. Like he has film credits for whatever books have been turned into movies. I’m like, what the fuck? This guy’s going to come sue me now. Anyway, my introduction to publisher catalogs was not great.
[00:09:07.860] – Kerry
No.
[00:09:09.310] – Sunyi
On the flip side, the same publisher basically said, we’re going to hold your hand and do everything for you and don’t worry about a thing. And that was a fairly accurate summary of my experience. So I have nothing to complain over and no one can sue me. But I’m very aware that I’m extremely lucky and privileged. So, yeah, we’re curious what that looks like from the bookseller side, if you see that divide between books and authors and how that comes across and how publishers push different titles or don’t.
[00:09:37.790] – Kerry
Yeah, definitely. We were just cringing at the no cover image thing.
[00:09:44.410] – Claire
We have so little to go on. So these catalogs are–so I just did all of Macmillan Spring. So that’s every imprint that Macmillan distributes and publishes, it’s 700 titles.
[00:09:58.750] – Kerry
And that’s pretty standard for the big four, big five, whatever it is now. Yeah, it’s just like this huge list. And you get markups, so they send you… first you get sort of the big omnibus and then a little bit later your sales rep says, hey, I did markups for you. And so some of the 700 titles will have little notes about, like, this is what this is about. These are the reactions we’re getting. These are the marketing things we’re going to be doing for this title.
[00:10:31.070] – Claire
This is essentially why you should be paying attention to it. Every book in the 700 page catalog has remarks that are sort of quick. They have the detailed synopsis of the book and then a list of comparable titles. So you can look up sales data for those. And that’s helpful to a point. Our meetings with our regional sales reps are the things that really put things into relief a little bit more.
[00:11:03.910] – Kerry
But it is interesting because there are definitely, like you can tell, okay, these are the ones that they’re pushing. Yeah. They’re highlighted in yellow, they have a ton of different notes on them that are like, this is this, this is this, here are all these blurbs we have already. And half the time there’ll be a little thing on it that says lead read. So it’s like, yes, this is the Indie Next priority. They’re really pushing it.
[00:11:32.320] – Claire
Or the sales rep will say, this is such and such imprint’s lead title for this quarter. I don’t know how this tracks for you, but we can download digital review copies and which books have digital review copies for us? Because that’s a big reason why I take a chance on things. A lot of the time, if I take a look at it and I think it’s good, even if it’s got a small print run, I’m like, oh, okay, slap this on a table. Maybe we can sell it.
[00:12:00.310] – Kerry
Totally.
[00:12:01.040] – Scott
Yeah. Where are you typically pulling those digital review copies from?
[00:12:06.520] – Claire
Directly from Edelweiss.
[00:12:07.900] – Kerry
Yeah.
[00:12:08.760] – Scott
Okay. Very interesting.
[00:12:11.260] – Kerry
A lot of us personally read from a very wide variety of things we’re interested in, like smaller presses. And it is frustrating sometimes because there is sort of a lack of access to a lot of the things that I think we would be interested in bringing into the store. And oftentimes I’ll just order blind anyway because it’s like, great cover, interesting premise.
[00:12:34.890] – Claire
Good blurbs, like the press.
[00:12:35.680] – Kerry
Yeah. Oh, I know that I like New Directions, so I’m going to take a chance on stuff that they’re putting out, but it is frustrating sometimes when you’re like, I want to know about this book, though. I know that Colleen Hoover is going to sell, but tell me more about this other stuff. Pushing this stuff.
That’s an area where I feel like we have a lot of power. The kind of makeup of the staff at our bookstore has changed a lot in the last three or four years. And with the things that people put, we sell books that are kind of obscure just because one person on staff liked them a lot. So I wouldn’t be surprised with some of these smaller press books if we’re selling 50% more than another bookstore in the region just because of one staff pick. And so we have the power to move those things.
[00:13:24.290] – Jeremy
Think about how many copies of When We Cease to Understand the World we’ve sold, Claire, just because you and I both wrote shelf talkers for it. Nobody else probably is selling anywhere near that many copies of it, even though it’s like an award winning book, because it just flew under the radar.
[00:13:40.700] – Kerry
Yeah, and when you read the blurb for that, you’re not necessarily like, that’s not a bestseller sounding book. Well, that’s a little weirder than what people–
[00:13:52.310] – Claire
But your shelf talker, Jeremy says this is simultaneously like, what is it? The best work of horror and science? The bookseller recommendations really matter, or even just like where it is in the store. If we like something, we’re going to put it on our display and it’s going to sell on a display, which is a little disheartening sometimes. It’s like, things get lost.
[00:14:14.530] – Kerry
That’s kind of the power, though, of having a bookseller vouch for something. There are so many books on our shelves and people come in, you see their eyes glaze over a little bit. You’ve got the people who all they want to do is spend hours browsing the stacks, but then you have people who come in, they’re just like, oh, my God, I just want to read something fun. Like they don’t know where to go. You can stand up and go like, this is the book you want. They’re like, yes, this is the book I want. Thank you. And it’s great. You can really get some interesting things into people’s hands that way.
[00:14:49.520] – Jeremy
But the problem is we can’t do that if the publishers don’t get us information about the book. Right. So when new things are coming out, it feels like I learned about things months after they’ve come out that I think are really cool that we never got ARCs for or we never heard about.
[00:15:11.490] – Jeremy
They didn’t do anything to let us know that this existed. And then it’s only after one of us has sort of looked, like, seen it on the shelf because we ordered, like, one copy and then read it that we realized, oh, this is amazing and we should be selling this. Right?
[00:15:24.970] – Sunyi
Yeah, I remember Scott telling me that… you can go into it in a minute, Scott. But basically that he couldn’t get Tor to send ARCs out to booksellers at all. And on the flip side, I mean, I’ve got two publishers, one for the American, one for the UK side and I’m in the UK. My UK publisher was sending custom cake pops to the bookstores here. That disparity blew my mind. It’s like, I’m literally like, I spent two days driving around bookstores in, like, a 60 miles radius just delivering cake pops.
[00:15:58.610] – Scott
Yeah, that was another thing. I knew I was well and truly fucked when my editor came back and said, oh, yeah, we’re not doing ARCs for books anymore. And I was like, aren’t you though? I saw Orbit doing the special edition ARCs for Richard around that time. And I had met Sunyi around that time.
[00:16:25.960] – Sunyi
I had galleys and ARCs. Sorry, mate. Sorry, man. I’m sorry.
[00:16:36.190] – Scott
That was an interesting journey. But I just want to back up real quick because we mentioned some things that people might not be aware of, even new authors because I found out about this relatively late. So we referenced Edelweiss. And correct me if I’m wrong, especially Kerry, Claire and Jeremy but Edelweiss is just a site for essentially, like, wholesaling information, right, from publishers?
[00:17:06.460] – Jeremy
Yeah.
[00:17:08.790] – Kerry
And I think it’s grown even just in the last, like, five or six years a lot. But all of the major publishing houses upload their full catalogs, both front list and backlist, so you have access to basically everything that’s still in print from these publishers. And more and more smaller publishers and presses are getting onto Edelweiss which is really cool because it’s just a really straightforward, and I would think, so much less expensive way of getting your catalogs out to buyers than trying to send out print catalogs. But, I mean, that just has to get faster and less expensive. For small presses, like, you can’t do it. At least if they can upload their catalog to Edelweiss and start sending out email blasts of like, hey, come check out Verso fiction or whatever.
[00:17:56.250] – Claire
And having it all be linked with… there’s a place for booksellers to leave reviews for Indie Next, which is kind of the trade public newsletter that nominates books and highlights books. Also, that’s where all of the sort of bidding for events happens.
[00:18:16.110] – Kerry
You know more about this than I do. But for them to send out grids and they send out these lists of, like–
[00:18:25.090] – Claire
This is who is going on tour, this is what we’re looking for, and I can raise my hand and say yes, at Auntie’s Bookstore, we would like to host this person. Here’s why it’s a good fit.
[00:18:32.600] – Sunyi
If you are an author, you can make an account on Edelweiss. Any person can, as far as I know. You’re limited, I think, depending on what type of account you have, but there is a ton of information there, some of it more useful than others. I think the print runs always threw me because they appear to be a complete fantasy totally disconnected to reality, and particularly Tor’s. The phrase my agent said is, it’s more of a vibe than actual facts. I think my print run on Edelweiss was listed at about 150 and we were maybe 30, which was still a solid print run on the day, but it’s not 150K.
[00:19:13.090] – Scott
Yeah, mine was listed at, I believe, 75,000 and they printed 10,000. I know of other debut authors because I mostly know debuts, but I know of other debuts that were publicized at 75 or 100 and they had 5000, 6000 printed. So yeah.
[00:19:38.950] – Sunyi
That number goes up before they know what the print is. Because I think print runs are decided like, the month before you go. So they’re saying, well, we hope, for our wildest dreams.
[00:19:48.400] – Jeremy
I think that many things in publishing are this way. Many of the numbers that you receive as an author or as a bookstore in marketing material is an optimistic estimate. Right. It’s like, we would like to do this. Because we get a lot of advanced reader copies that come with… on the back of the arc will be the promotional plan. Or like, here’s what we’re going to try to do to push this book. It’ll say, like, national tour and then that never actually materializes for the book. The national tour might be like Boston, New York and Philadelphia, right?
[00:20:22.470] – Scott
Yeah.
[00:20:23.590] – Jeremy
But it’s a lot of like, here’s what we would like to do for this book, and if enough people decide to order it to their store, we might do some of these things because that will indicate that there’s momentum for it. But none of it is a promise.
[00:20:38.330] – Sunyi
Never believe promises in publishing. If you’re an author, just throwing that out there, they will promise you the world. And even if they promise you a lead title, I think in the end, money talks and action talks, doesn’t it?
[00:20:50.590] – Scott
Contracts, too, even. It’s not 100, but yeah.
[00:20:55.880] – Jeremy
Contract is better than them saying something.
[00:20:58.450] – Sunyi
So how are initial ordering numbers determined for you guys? How do you decide this is going to be a big order or this is going to be a small order?
[00:21:07.440] – Scott
And real quick, before you answer that, did I hear right that every season, so four times a year you get catalogs just from the big five that each have 700 to 800 books?
[00:21:20.070] – Claire
Yeah, most of us do more than one, too. Kerry? Scott?
[00:21:23.540] – Kerry
Yeah, I do part of Penguin Random House. The Penguin Random House is huge. I always split it into three different catalogs, and they’re all burly. And then Simon & Schuster has, like, Simon & Schuster’s catalog and then Simon & Schuster’s distributed, so, like, their partner’s catalog. And each one of those is, like, 600 to 800 titles. So it’s like, you’re just slogging through. And then HarperCollins is, like, massive. And then Harper Children’s is also massive. And you’re just like, oh, boy. When I first started doing it, because I had worked as a buyer for other places and we did smaller book sections, it was all just like, this is cool, whatever gut reaction to stuff. But yeah, when you’re slogging through 800 titles.
[00:22:07.150] – Claire
Yeah, and especially with stuff that… I think I have a lot of familiarity with things that I am not personally interested in, just from working at the bookstore for as long as I have. But if you’re if you’re trying to pick which fucking cozy mystery you think is going to sell…
[00:22:23.310] – Kerry
Do we go with the meeting pun? Do we go with the fudge pun? Do we do the geek pun? Yeah, it’s hard. And it is like we were saying, some of them have more notes than others. These are the guys that got the big advances. So we’re, like, really pushing these guys. And then kind of by the end, sometimes it’s almost like, did my rep run out of steam?
[00:22:50.870] – Claire
I know when there’s zero comps.
[00:22:52.920] – Kerry
Yeah. You’re just like, okay, well, I got it.
[00:22:55.780] – Scott
So from the author perspective, A) if your publisher isn’t pushing it through your sales rep or B) if the sales rep for your publisher’s owner, because it sounds like in our example, it would be a Macmillan rep, not a Tor rep, right?
[00:23:13.780] – Kerry
Yes.
[00:23:14.110] – Scott
Correct. If they’re sick or having a bad day when your book is coming out, you’re just hosed.
[00:23:22.700] – Kerry
Yeah. And I think it probably is, like…
[00:23:29.650] – Claire
I think it starts before it gets to the rep. I think it happens way above the sales rep.
[00:23:35.620] – Kerry
Because most of our sales reps are, like, in the regional. They’re, like, based in Seattle.
[00:23:40.470] – Claire
And they also, for three months, presumably, for 40 hours a week, they are looking at the same catalog we are.
[00:23:49.040] – Kerry
Well, honestly, we sort of put a little bit of stocker faith into the idea that your rep has some insight into the books that are being published this quarter. But there’s no way any of them have time to really pour over 600 to 800 titles in a couple of months. It’s just not possible. I would say a pretty heavy downside of there only being, like, a big five in the publishing industry, is, like, there’s just so much. So many titles are in the hands of so few that there’s just no way everybody can get the attention that they deserve.
[00:24:30.510] – Claire
Stephen King said during the Simon Schuster Penguin hearing, competition seems good.
[00:24:37.280] – Kerry
Seems like I’ve heard it’s a good idea.
[00:24:38.990] – Scott
So going back to Sunyi’s question, how do you determine how much of each book to order? So, which, and how many, of each one?
[00:24:50.650] – Kerry
Some of it’s kind of a no brainer. I mean, if it’s like Brandon Sanderson. We’re going heavy on that. Colleen Hoover’s got something out. Great, 12, 15 copies. And for us, for our store, at least, if we order more than like, 24 copies, I mean, 24 copies is a big initial order for us. Yeah. We kind of think in terms of like, okay, what are we going to sell? How many copies? When I think of how many copies will I sell in the first, like, two weeks of having this, I can see six people coming in and wanting this. Like, okay, yes, six people. What about eight people or about twelve people? Like, how many people are going to wander in and go, hey, this book, I’ll take it.
[00:25:33.390] – Claire
And we do have historical sales data. Our system goes back 15 years.
[00:25:42.590] – Scott
Historical sales data for your store. Okay.
[00:25:47.600] – Claire
So we can see every order we’ve made, every sale we’ve made, and what day that happened, if it was tied to a particular customer, if they have an account with us, we can see that, which is also helpful. Like if we sell one book and it was something that somebody had the special order… thinking… maybe.
[00:26:07.910] – Kerry
I feel like there’s a sort of no brainer Ones. You’ve got a few authors that are, like, Jess Walter, who lives in town, Jess Walter has a book coming out. We’re ordering 600 copies, which is insane for us. It’s totally wild, but totally the outlier. Jess Walter. Katee Robert,, another local romance author whose books have just gone off the charts.
[00:26:31.760] – Claire
She was self published for a long time.
[00:26:33.540] – Kerry
Yeah, so those are the sort of… if it’s a Stephen King. If it’s somebody that we know will probably do 24, maybe like 36 if it’s Christmas, that makes a huge difference, too. If it’s the fourth quarter and we’re like, okay, we might have one shot at ordering this. How many are going to sell through the holidays?
[00:26:55.830] – Claire
And on the other side of that. I’m not going to go very heavy if something’s coming out in January.
[00:27:04.950] – Kerry
Honestly, a lot of it is just kind of knowing what works at our store, knowing what people come in and ask for.
[00:27:14.190] – Claire
Which I feel like you have a good handle on just from being on the floor. And even just shelving. Even just the day to day task of seeing what comes in in the big boxes, and then what we have to then put on a shelf and put on a cart and put on the shelf.
[00:27:30.570] – Scott
Yeah, absolutely.
[00:27:32.930] – Kerry
And a lot of it is… it sucks to say it, but sometimes cover matters.
[00:27:39.410] – Claire
I feel like it really matters.
[00:27:41.150] – Kerry
A kickass cover, someone’s going to like… that is what makes people pick the book up in the first place. Looking for… what angle do people take on this? Is this something that I haven’t seen recently? Is this something that I’ve randomly heard people asking about, or is this hot right now?
[00:27:57.480] – Claire
I think about Circe. There are a million Circe by Madeline Miller, which is a retelling of the Greek myth. There are, like, three or four.
[00:28:17.310] – Kerry
Well, that’s the thing, too, I think the first one comes out, and you’re like, oh, great, there’s a market for this. And then a couple more come out. You’re like, that’s kind of interesting. And then all of a sudden, there are, like, 15 different titles, and you’re just like, okay. That’s when it comes down to, like, all right, now I got to scrutinize each one of these retellings to decide which one maybe is interesting and fresh and which ones are just like, hey, have you heard of Circe? There’s a certain point we’re just like, okay.
[00:28:50.190] – Jeremy
So I have kind of a hypothetical for you, Kerry, and Claire that I’ve wondered about in the past, but let’s say you’re looking at the catalog, and there are three books out from the same imprint that are all vaguely similar. They’re all chasing a trend, right? How do you make that decision between the three Greek myth retellings or whatever? If you’re looking at three things that are, like, on paper, very similar, how do you decide?
[00:29:14.960] – Claire
Is the author a known quantity? Is the cover good?
[00:29:19.510] – Kerry
Sometimes I will have days where I’m good about trusting my gut, which I totally believe, as a buyer, you just sometimes have to go with the gut thing. And a lot of it is, okay, if I had to read one of these right now, which one seems the most interesting to me? Which one, if someone was like, my grandma just read Circe and she loved it. Do you have anything else? Which one would I read? Which one would I feel most comfortable being like, hey, no, if you’re looking for something like this, this one seems the most interesting to me. And sometimes I’ll get real weird. Sometimes I read through everything, and then I look up who the author is, and I try to figure out, I don’t know, does this author sound interesting?
[00:30:03.110] – Claire
You want to bring the highest quality into the store, and we do have the luxury of, like, we have time. I got my spring Macmillan order, like my catalog, a month ago. I’m not going to have to do anything about it for a month.
[00:30:18.020] – Kerry
Right.
[00:30:20.070] – Claire
But again, unless you’re going to read every single book in the catalog and maybe you will read all three vaguely similar books, that’s not outside of the realm of possibility for me. But I don’t know. Again, it does feel like a vibes thing. And I do think trusting yourself because ultimately I’m a lot like a lot of our customers probably, right?
[00:30:39.480] – Kerry
At the end of the day, if I can find some little nugget of interest in this thing that’s been done to death, that’s the one I’m going to go with. Something has a really bitching cover. You’re just like…
[00:30:50.870] – Claire
And you see it. You see people, you’re standing at the register, you see people browsing. You see what they pick up and turn over and look at and read a few pages of.
[00:30:58.440] – Kerry
Yeah, we’re magpies. We like pretty things.
[00:31:02.130] – Sunyi
Do you read reviews on, like, NetGalley? Do you follow… sometimes books go through Twitter drama and stuff like that. I don’t know if that impacts decisions or not for booksellers.
[00:31:12.610] – Claire
I’m not very online.
[00:31:15.350] – Sunyi
That’s a good thing.
[00:31:17.370] – Claire
But yeah, I look at bookseller reviews. Those are the ones I look to.
[00:31:21.200] – Kerry
Those are the ones I look at too.
[00:31:22.710] – Claire
Blurbs from other writers. They are what they are. Often I look at blurbs to sort of see what kind of book it is.
[00:31:30.970] – Kerry
It’s like a vibe check.
[00:31:32.650] – Claire
Like, this person. I feel like I know what kind of book this is. What did she say about it? I don’t know. I didn’t necessarily read it, but the bookseller reviews… it’s a triumph, and a tour de force.
[00:31:44.350] – Kerry
But definitely on Edelweiss. You can read other booksellers reviews of things. And to me, of course, there’s politics in that too, because you have your rep saying, hey, please read this and review it. If I send you this, will you review it? Will you nominate it for Indie Next? There’s pressures to read a book and like the book and then glow about it in your…
[00:32:06.730] – Claire
I mean, you’re only reviewing things that you liked, generally speaking.
[00:32:10.490] – Kerry
And sometimes I think there’s pressure, even if you think it’s not that great to go on there and be like, oh, this author is at the top of their game, or whatever. But by and large, I do trust that if a bookseller goes on and writes a really thoughtful review about why this book is worth reading, I trust that more than like, I don’t know, random Goodreads.
[00:32:32.680] – Claire
Yeah, I mean, I do think that nobody sits down for 400 words during the course of a busy work day where they’re just like, not making that much money for something that they don’t care about a little bit.
[00:32:42.690] – Kerry
No, if I don’t finish something, I’m not going to go on Edelweiss and be like, I didn’t finish it.
[00:32:46.890] – Claire
I know. I’d rather, like, shoot rubber bands at you and Jai.
[00:32:51.350] – Scott
And so we’ve talked about a lot of different things that might catch your eye or might factor in if you happen to see them. Right. But I have to imagine that being sent a physical ARC or physical something factors pretty heavily, and that has a pretty high conversion rate on the bookstore side. But what does that look like from your perspective? How many titles get physical ARCs or galleys or whatever you want to call them? What matters when that happens? And are there any other factors that are like, this really works on us. Right. This will get me to at least give it a shot more times than not.
[00:33:35.480] – Kerry
Yeah.
[00:33:36.000] – Claire
The ARC thing is hard to gauge.
[00:33:37.980] – Kerry
We get a lot of ARCs. It’s wild to hear you say that they… and I know this is true, that they don’t do ARCs for a lot of books, but when we’re getting five copies of the same book, it’s like, why are you sending the same store five copies of this?
[00:33:57.370] – Claire
And especially with… I think people are active enough on Edelweiss. They know what we read. I got the same Churchill biography three times. I have never read a World War II book that I reviewed on Edelweiss.
[00:34:09.890] – Kerry
You sort of create a relationship with a rep, and sometimes they specifically… do you have an ARC of this? If you don’t have an ARC, can you send me a finished copy? I really want to read it. I’m really interested. I think it’s going to be something that we can sell, and oftentimes they will do it, but the things that the publishers just send out, it feels random, and sometimes that feels really pointed. I mean, again, it feels like you’re really pushing this women walking away, World War II in France book that like, again, I don’t need six ARCs of this. Could you maybe send me one ARC and then maybe put some energy into printing ARCs for other titles that aren’t… I say Pam Jenoff just because that’s what they did.
[00:34:53.970] – Claire
They sent us four of them.
[00:34:56.110] – Kerry
It’s too many! We don’t need those.
[00:34:58.750] – Claire
The other part of it, I think, is making sure that things get in the right hands. At Aunties, it probably doesn’t matter that much because Kerry will get a big box of ARCs, and she puts it on by the microwave, and we all kind of pick through it. But during the pandemic especially, things were getting sent to people’s homes sometimes, and it was just like, oh, I sent an ARC to this person. And I’m like, well,that person doesn’t like that kind of thing.
[00:35:23.030] – Kerry
And that is fun. We know each other well enough at the store to be like, this sounds like a Claire book. This sounds like a Jai book. This sounds like something Jeremy would like. We have a working knowledge of our own staff enough that we can do that. This is a wasted opportunity. It seems like getting, like, smaller quantities of more titles out into the hands of booksellers seems like a better thing than just like, here’s another one of this.
[00:35:47.150] – Claire
And I think we could… I mean we all read a lot. We could absorb it.
[00:35:52.750] – Kerry
It is nice that the Edelweiss thing has opened that up a lot.
[00:35:56.020] – Claire
Yeah, there are way more digital review copies than there used to be. That’s awesome.
[00:35:59.990] – Kerry
So you do have access to things that maybe they aren’t throwing so much money and effort behind. Like, you don’t get the physical copy, but you know what? I’ll read it on my phone while I’m making spaghetti. I do that all the time. I’m learning to love digital download stuff because I just get more access to a wider variety of things than they’re going to print for us.
[00:36:25.610] – Claire
Well, I think we both pretty much now have a physical book that’s going and a phone book, which for me is usually an advanced reader copy.
[00:36:33.950] – Kerry
But yeah, it’s weird. And then sometimes, every once in a while you get the cake pop phenomenon. Every once in a while, you get a big box that’s, like, glossy and printed full color. It’s got all these graphics on the outside. And you open it and it’s like, here’s a pound of coffee. Here’s a candle. Here’s some nail polish. Here’s a copy of the book. It’s all branded toward it. And you’re just like, whoa, buy this one.

[00:36:58.010] – Claire
I know, and I’m also like, I don’t know how you feel about this, but I kinda don’t give two shits.
[00:37:06.390] – Kerry
It’s like, oh, you think you can bribe me with nail polish. I have no idea. It’s a mystery to me, except for what I can think of. If there was some sort of bidding war, and you’ve put a lot of money into it, so you need to hustle to earn it back out. I think some of those are that, but it’s a mystery to me. The things that sort of fly under the radar and you find later and you’re like, this is an amazing book. Why didn’t I know about this sooner? And the things that you’re just like, okay, stop beating me over the head with this. I get it. This book is coming out. I don’t know what the calculations are, but it’s bizarre.
[00:37:44.360] – Sunyi
Sometimes for debuts, I will say that my experience has been it’s often very based on the editor. So if your editor is massively supportive of certain titles in their list, they work very hard to push that. And that enthusiasm feeds out to the sales teams and the sales reps and then hopefully the booksellers. But it probably depends on each publisher, I’m guessing. I know that Harper Voyager UK on this side, they have less titles, and they try to give them all special things. Wayward hit shops over here recently, and they were giving away, like, themed T-shirts and stuff to booksellers and all kinds of stuff like that. I think they’re always trying to capture in this country the Instagram market and the book crate market, which are huge here, but not so much over there. And things that look good in photos are a big part of that. They’re hoping for these influencer booksellers who will put it online.
[00:38:39.110] – Kerry
Yeah. I will say, too, sometimes… you’re saying an editor being particularly passionate about something, or a rep. Like, we do get those moments where you can tell this isn’t some flashy PR thing that’s happening. But it is like, sometimes you get handwritten notes from editors or something, and they’re like, I just wanted to make sure that… I just wanted you to actually look at this because I really believe in it, and I think it’s something that’s worth looking at. And those I feel like, if anything, that’s what kind of gets me, when it’s like, I’ve seen your other Edelweiss reviews. I really believe in this title, and I hope that you specifically, Kerry, read this book. And I’m sure they’re doing that with a ton of people. I know it’s not just like, oh, my gosh, they value my opinion so much. But it does kind of feel like, okay, this was more intentional than just like, hey, you work at a bookstore? Yeah. Want a scented candle?
[00:39:32.030] – Scott
Did I hear right that you’re getting personalized notes from editors at imprints?
[00:39:39.730] – Kerry
Sometimes, yeah.
[00:39:41.150] – Claire
Is it editors? I mean, I feel like I get it a lot from…
[00:39:42.760] – Kerry
I feel like it’s like Graywolf or small presses. But every once in a while you do. Every once in a while, somebody is sending out blasts where it’s like, hey, this is a book that I think is really good, and the reps will do it, too.
[00:40:00.990] – Claire
I trust my reps to sort of know, because my reps know my personal taste, and they know and I have explained to them what works in our store. They don’t work there. They can’t know. But they’ll say, for your store, and I also really loved this, and it seems right up your alley. And they know us, and I trust them.
[00:40:20.950] – Kerry
They’re really great reps, and they’re really oh, my God, not so great reps.
[00:40:24.780] – Claire
Not to name any names at all.
[00:40:27.880] – Kerry
But some of them really do pay attention to what you like and what you say works at the store, and others are just like, this is our lead read. You should get 15 of them. And you’re like, okay, thanks.
[00:40:40.750] – Claire
Authors, sometimes they will approach us, like authors themselves. And being nice and understanding that your booksellers are busy and just, like, being a good human. There was this one guy who wrote. His name is John Searles. He’s a very nice man.
[00:40:56.290] – Kerry
Very nice. Yeah.
[00:40:57.010] – Claire
He was just, his husband was in town with a touring production of The Christmas Carol or something, and his husband came in, he was like, whose email can I get? My husband’s book is coming out. And they were just, like, so gracious and lovely. And we did a lot more work for John Searles than, yeah, so I mean, I would just encourage debut authors to just meet their booksellers. Like, just go in and introduce yourself and say, hi, this is my deal.
[00:41:23.530] – Sunyi
I was too shy to do that. And then a couple of times, I was in town with my partner and he was just going to booksellers. He’s like, look, this is my girlfriend. She’s got a book coming out. Can I tell you about it? And I’m like dying in a corner. Oh, my God.
[00:41:34.720] – Claire
We’ve had that happen too. If I’m at the register, I’m like, okay, great. Three on order. She’s local.
[00:41:42.350] – Kerry
But it is hard. I imagine it would be. I mean, anytime you’re trying to schmooze, sell yourself. It’s this thing that you’ve tended to for so long, and then all of a sudden you’re having to go out and be like, hey, I’m a salesperson now. Here’s my book.
[00:41:59.830] – Claire
Here’s my baby, right?
[00:42:02.150] – Kerry
Like, here’s my baby.
[00:42:03.040] – Claire
Please judge something that was really, yeah.
[00:42:07.370] – Kerry
And again, it’s a question of, do you have access to galleys and ARCs that you can give to people? Like, which sucks if you don’t. I mean, that really kind of takes the wind out of your sails a little bit. If you can’t walk into a store and say, hey, I just wanted to drop this off for one of your buyers to look at, or whatever. But I’ll get postcards or letters or whatever addressed to me sometimes, and it won’t have the actual copy of a book in it, but it’s just a thing that they’ve like, hey, I wrote this book. It’s available on Ingram. This is a little bit of what it’s about. This is a little bit of my deal. I’d really appreciate it if you just looked at it. And I always look at them. I don’t always buy them. They’re not always right for the store. People self publish a lot of things that are on wildly opposite ends of the spectrum. But I always look if someone takes the time to write out a thing or make a little flyer and send it to me, I always check it out.
Because I appreciate the time it takes to just make that happen. The time and the energy and the tears of that process. And I’m always down to try to look at the fruits of somebody’s labor in that way, especially if they’re in our region or community. Because we are a community bookstore. We’ve had something that I think we take seriously, wanting to serve people in that way.
[00:43:41.540] – Jeremy
One thing to not do, though, and this is something… there was one guy in particular when I was the consignment manager who drove me insane with this. Don’t go to the store and tell them to put your book on display. The displays are not for you as a local author to put your book on. They’re for the store to highlight specific things that they want to highlight for whatever reason. There was this one dude who would come in once or twice a month and just tell me, like, you should put my book on the table. It’s really good. If people knew about it, they would buy it. And I looked at his book, I wasn’t interested in it and I wasn’t going to read it. He was talking to, one, the wrong person to try to convince of this, and two, he kept doing it, which just made it more frustrating every time I saw this guy. Letting the bookstore know that your book exists, great. Being nice to them, kind of building a relationship is a great idea. Harassing them because you think that they’re not selling your book well enough is going to have the opposite effect.
[00:44:35.980] – Jeremy
It’s going to make them think you’re a dumbass.
[00:44:38.590] – Kerry
Yeah. Do you remember that guy who asked three different people on staff to read it? And so one person was like, nice enough to give him really honest feedback. And then I remember he came up to me and was like, oh, I don’t think that that guy was the right audience. Will you read it? It was wrong.
[00:44:52.110] – Claire
That guy was yeah, he was ungodly. He would come in and just drop off more books without telling us.
[00:44:59.460] – Kerry
He would just throw them, put them on the shelf, or he would come in and like it’s alphabetized by author’s last name. That’s just the organizational style that we have adopted. And it makes sense. And he would come in and take his book, move other books, and misshelve it up high at eye level. And it was just like, oh, my God, man, you are doing everything you can to make all the booksellers here hate your guts. How do you think that’s going to pan out for you? Don’t do that stuff. Don’t do that.
[00:45:32.830] – Sunyi
I’m in quite a few Facebook groups for writers online, and people do give each other that advice, and I think that’s maybe part of where it comes from. You’ll see people telling each other, go and be persistent, keep doing, keep asking. Put your books on shelves, and there’s a gamut of bad advice online, and that’s some of it. And I wonder if some of that comes from that culture in writing groups.
[00:45:54.310] – Claire
I sympathize with people, really. And most people, I mean, vastly people are just kind and polite and lovely. Yeah, but man, sometimes you just get some people who are so disconnected from reality.
[00:46:07.200] – Kerry
And you’re like, okay, well, have you talked to anyone about it? Have you tried to set up? Do you have Instagram? And they’re like, well, no, that’s not my job, and it’s like, well, it kind of is part of it.
[00:46:28.170] – Scott
Selling their book isn’t necessarily your job. Your job is to make money for the bookstore. Right.
[00:46:32.990] – Kerry
Yeah. There’s a give and take. Like, we do what we can, but there are ways for people to get their stuff out there. All right. I printed it, and I threw it on a shelf. Done.
[00:46:47.650] – Claire
Maybe that used to work, but not now.
[00:46:52.950] – Scott
I have to say, this has been extremely interesting for me even a year later. Right?
[00:47:00.390] – Sunyi
Agreed.
[00:47:01.510] – Scott
It’s almost exactly a year, actually, since my debut published, but especially before I had gone through some of it and learned any of this, I wouldn’t have known. I did not have a clue what I could be doing, and the answer is probably still not much, but I didn’t have a clue what I could be doing that would be on the good side of that line versus the bad. Right. I would guess, especially in the world of people who choose to spend thousands of hours writing books instead of talking to people, there’s a lot of hesitation when it comes to being that person who’s in people’s face about their own work in particular. Okay. We’ve covered pretty well, I think, some of the different aspects, some of the different things that can affect whether something’s ordered in the first place. But say you’ve ordered a book, maybe you took a chance on a debut, or maybe it’s even a pretty well known name that you’re used to ordering. What does the performance have to look like in terms of sales and velocity of sales for any given title for you to reorder? And at what point do you send a book back to the publisher, and what does that look like?
[00:48:23.860] – Kerry
So generally speaking, and we have a bigger store than some, but if a book sells every six months, we get it back in because it takes a while for people to find books. You know, again, there are a lot of them on the shelves. You can’t put every single title that you have on a table. We just don’t have space for that. If it sells every six months, our point of sale system is great. We create a report every day that looks at the books that we sold the previous day. We go through everything that we sold the previous day and decide, on a one by one basis, do we want this back in? Do we need to delist it now?
[00:49:05.330] – Claire
Do we want to order more?
[00:49:07.020] – Kerry
Right. Did TikTok pick it up? And now all of a sudden, we’re selling insane amounts of it. Was it on Good Morning America? And now everyone just is clamoring for this book that came out. That’s weird. Like The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.
[00:49:22.350] – Claire
Hey, we finally got the title.
[00:49:23.710] – Kerry
I know. Not The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and his hole, which is what we always joke about, which is terrible. It’s really hard not to say after that. But yeah, that book had been out for, like, a year and a half, two years or whatever, and then all of a sudden, Christmas time, one year a couple of years ago, it was like on Good Morning America or something. And we have consistently sold, like, what, ten to 25 copies of that book every month ever since that happened, which is insane. Yeah.
[00:49:53.870] – Claire
I mean, it’s probably something we sold the most of in the store.
[00:49:57.950] – Kerry
So we kind of go through every day. Look at this report, what sold yesterday. And as you’re looking at that, you can kind of see like, okay, it sold yesterday, and it didn’t sell before that. Since early 2021. Great. We’re probably not going to get that back in. Or you look and it’s like, yeah, we sold it yesterday, but then we sold it the day before that, and then we sold it two days ago. And you’re like, okay, instead of getting one copy, we’re going to do three copies or four copies, or again, however much we think, how many of these am I going to sell before I can get more? In that kind of calculation?
[00:50:36.650] – Claire
Because the goal is to have it continually in stock, something we want.
[00:50:40.650] – Kerry
If it’s something that’s selling really steadily, it’s just sort of death to be like, oh, man, people are looking for this book, but we have to wait three days for it to get back in. Because people say it. They just say it right out. All right, well, I guess I’ll order it from Amazon then. And then they just, like, walk out the door and you’re like, shit.
[00:50:58.610] – Claire
Keep in mind, and I think this is true of a lot of independent bookstores, we can get things really quickly in two days a lot of the time.
[00:51:08.310] – Kerry
But I don’t know, people like to punish us for that.
[00:51:13.430] – Claire
No, my favorite thing is when they’re saying it like they’re doing you a favor. Oh, no, it’s okay. You don’t have to order it.
[00:51:18.560] – Kerry
I’ll just get it on Amazon.
[00:51:24.170] – Scott
What does the middle of the road look like? Like, what did that book have to do to stay on your shelves for a year and a half? And at what point are you actually shipping stuff back to the distributor or whoever you ordered from versus letting it just sell out and not order more?
[00:51:42.690] – Kerry
We will do sort of pull reports where we kind of create a report and say, okay, tell me everything in the biography section that hasn’t sold at all in eight months or eighteen months.
[00:51:58.790] – Claire
Especially stuff that gets really crowded, like biography. Many biographies come out. Many current affairs books come out that are no longer relevant. So that might be, like, a shorter time frame for the report, for sending things back.
Some things, it’s like… when I first got there, I remember looking and we hadn’t sold a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in nine months. But I’m not going to pull that. That’s something we probably need to have. That’s something that somebody is going to look for. But like the random celebrity memoir, if it hasn’t sold in eight months, I’d…
[00:52:36.690] – Kerry
Be done with it.
[00:52:37.410] – Claire
Yeah, fuck it. It’s going in the box and sending it back to Penguin. And we get full credit at most of the big guys and we can send them back. If it is still in print, we can send it back. So we have a lot of flexibility and that also enables us to take chances in our frontlist. Yeah. And it is kind of nice for me at least, to kind of be on both ends of that. So if I’m doing pulls for return, I can say, oh, I know that somebody went heavy on the ordering side and here I am sending six back, or here I am only sending one back because the paperback is coming out.
[00:53:14.270] – Kerry
That’s another thing we were talking about. Every time there’s been an embarrassing amount of some book going back to the publisher, it’s because I didn’t think it was going to work. And my rep talked me into instead of getting two copies, maybe you should get twelve because it’s a really big deal. And then, okay, fine, I don’t get two, I get twelve. And how many do we sell? Two. And we send ten back. And it’s just like, damn it. Because we know, we know what sells in the store better than the sales rep who is doing the best they can, but they have pressures from above and they’re also wrangling like, how many different bookstores in the region. They don’t know. But yeah, it’s an eye opening experience. Once we started really doing pulls regularly, it was like, oh, wow, that’s such a huge part of being an informed buyer is like knowing what goes back, like what’s been sitting on the shelf.
[00:54:06.390] – Claire
And I feel like I feel this on kind of an emotional level. Sometimes I’ll be doing pulls for a return and I’ll be like, oh, but I liked this. And then I’ll usually keep it cause I can hand sell it or whatever, but then when you’re buying, you see that, you feel that.
[00:54:29.740] – Kerry
You’re like, what if this is the book that somebody’s going to love? And we buy one copy and it’s…
[00:54:41.130] – Kerry
Like one copy, it’s just like, yeah, no one’s going to see this, but I can’t get six copies of everything and throw it on a table. You know, like, it’s hard to make those decisions, but yeah, but the return thing is really nice. It’s unique to the bookselling world, too.
[00:54:59.060] – Claire
I think it’s how we’ve managed, how bookstores have managed to stay healthy businesses, because it does, like, it enables us to take chances, and it also enables us to have enough stock that people are interested in coming in.
[00:55:14.690] – Scott
Yeah. So am I hearing right that there’s not necessarily, like, a set time frame? Sounds like with biographies, it makes sense to have maybe a shorter time frame, but other than that, there’s not, like, a set time frame. A book that you take a chance on has, like, a year or six months or whatever to make it. Well, if you sold half of them, maybe we’ll stick it out and see what happens.
[00:55:38.170] – Kerry
The general rule of thumb we go by is six months. Something has to sell one copy every six months, and then we kind of reconsider. And if it’s something that no one has any kind of emotional attachment to, it probably goes back again. If it’s that thing where you’re like, oh, but I really like this, then you’re like, okay, you know what? I’m going to make this work. Then I want to have this in the store. I believe in this book. I’m going to write a shelf talker. I’m going to put it on a table.
[00:56:04.170] – Jeremy
It’s sort of our hack. I remember we didn’t have any of the Culture books in stock, and I was really mad about that. So I wrote a shelf talker for Player of Games, and we got five more, and now it sells regularly. If there’s a book that we want to keep and we want to sell, we can generally make it happen.
[00:56:21.120] – Kerry
Yeah. People for some reason think we know what we’re talking about when it comes to books. The general rule for me: someone is like, hey, I really want to get this book in. It’s been delisted. Like, we used to carry it. It didn’t sell. But I really like this book, and…
[00:56:33.660] – Claire
Some of our own staff.
[00:56:34.960] – Kerry
Yeah, one of our employees, it’s like, great. Order a few copies, but write a shelf talker if we’re going to get this back in, make it happen. If you believed in this book, throw your weight behind it a little bit. And every time someone has done that, it worked. I think the power of booksellers is pretty good. At least in our own little store, we sold some weird titles just because someone loved it.
[00:56:59.270] – Claire
I think about that ketchup factory book. Yeah, that’s a self published book that we took on consignment. We have it on one of our semi permanent displays. And I mean, we’re probably doing four or five a month, which is really good.
[00:57:14.410] – Kerry
It’s the power of like, if you have a book and you can get it into the hands of a bookseller, you can get a bookseller to like it. At least that’s one store that’s going to be on board to help people find it for you. Honestly, part of the problem is just there’s so many for us to see, that it does sometimes take somebody being like, hey, look at this one, though. Like this one, this one is the one you want to read next. And it’s like, okay, maybe let’s try it. And it works. It totally works.
[00:57:45.750] – Sunyi
Given that you guys are so important to the whole publishing ecosystem, and I really do think that booksellers are, like, the great foundation of our industry, what do you wish publishers understood about the bookselling experience?
[00:57:58.760] – Claire
We want more ARCs.
[00:58:00.010] – Jeremy
I don’t want six copies of Babel. I want one copy of everything.
[00:58:03.850] – Kerry
And again, I think it’s a symptom of these behemoth catalogs where they can’t pay close attention to every single thing when there are multiple smaller publishing houses. And that’s what I appreciate about things like, I don’t know, like Soft Skull or Verso or Graywolf. Their catalogs are much smaller, but they will email you and say, like, here are the eight books that are coming out this quarter. Here’s a thoughtful write up about all of them. Here’s my personal email address if you want to see anything. I don’t know how publishers could go back from that. I mean, they don’t want to.
[00:58:45.510] – Jeremy
They’re too big, they literally couldn’t do it. Logistically too much.
[00:58:50.120] – Kerry
That’s a gripe that I don’t know the answer to.
[00:58:52.720] – Claire
Yeah.
[00:58:53.310] – Jeremy
One thing that I wish they were better at was cover art. There are so many books that come out that have… I’m thinking of the gene wolf re-releases from Tor. The covers of those are awful, and it’s really hard to hand sell them because you show them to people and you’re like, I’m trying to sell The Fifth Head of Cerberus or whatever, and I’m explaining it’s one of the most interesting science fiction things I’ve ever read. But they’re looking at this cover that’s like a chain link fence, and they’re like, what are you talking about? This looks awful. I think that publishers don’t really understand the degree to which that is the thing that gets people to stop and look at a book and pick it up and start thinking about whether they want to buy it. And when all the books on the shelf look the same, it doesn’t help anyone.
[00:59:36.810] – Claire
The other thing I would say is I want more trade paperback originals. So few people are going to spend $30 on a hardcover book, and we have a really good track record with things that initially come out in paperback. Somebody will spend ten fewer dollars on that, and then you’ll sell six more.
[00:59:59.010] – Kerry
The latest round of frontlist that I’m working on, hardcovers are now solidly $30. You know, it’s not 26 anymore. It’s not 27. It’s like thirty dollars to thirty five dollars for, new authors who people are taking a chance on. Yeah, I don’t understand why they’re just clinging to the hardcover format as much as they are.
[01:00:22.970] – Claire
And it makes sense for your Diana Gabaldon. Sure. Prince Harry or your Obama. The nerve of that man to charge $45 for his biography.
[01:00:33.870] – Kerry
Yeah, but to be like, here’s this new author. Haven’t heard of them. Oh, you don’t want to spend $35 on this book? Oh, well, then I guess this author doesn’t work.
[01:00:42.090] – Scott
It’s like their career is over. Yeah.
[01:00:45.150] – Sunyi
This is a sore point for Scott.
[01:00:47.070] – Claire
Yeah, it’s kind of bullshit.
[01:00:50.520] – Kerry
It’s just like setting people up. It’s like an uphill climb for sure.
[01:00:55.780] – Claire
If I have to spend $7 on a loaf of bread, right?
[01:00:57.350] – Kerry
Yeah. Paperback originals.
[01:01:02.910] – Claire
I want more paperback originals.
[01:01:05.390] – Kerry
Yeah. I love a paperback original. Something comes out… honestly, in some ways that’s like a signal to me that it’s a book that I’m going to like. If it doesn’t come out hardcover first, it’s a paperback original. I’m like, okay, this is going to be a little bit weirder, a little bit more literary, a little bit more experimental, whatever. There’s some angle to this that’s going to speak to me a little bit more. I don’t know.
[01:01:27.120] – Scott
To me that’s really interesting. And my guess there, this is not an authoritative answer, but my guess is margins. Right. I would guess that the margins for publishers are a lot better on hardcovers because they’re probably not spending that much more on some extra thick card stock.
[01:01:46.450] – Claire
I would just assume hardbacks are way more expensive, and so…
[01:01:48.230] – Kerry
No, I think they make more money on them, but it’s like…
[01:01:52.850] – Sunyi
They make more money and we get better royalties.
[01:01:56.790] – Scott
This is a rumor, and I’m fully willing to be a rumor monger, but I’ve actually heard and I want to know if you all have heard of this, but I’ve heard that some publishers will actually take unsold hardcovers, tear them apart, de-bind them or whatever you call it, and turn it into a trade paperback for the next round.
[01:02:23.070] – Jeremy
Yeah, I haven’t heard that.
[01:02:24.430] – Scott
I couldn’t believe it, but it was an industry insider who told me this and I still don’t believe it, but yeah, that’s weird.
[01:02:34.700] – Claire
I’m going to start looking for damage.
[01:02:39.410] – Scott
Yeah, how would they even do that? Physically? That doesn’t make sense to me.
[01:02:42.650] – Kerry
I don’t see how that would be any less of a process either.
[01:02:46.780] – Claire
Like, shelf wear and tear is not nothing.
[01:02:52.870] – Scott
Yeah, I would guess it’s probably not on return books. I would guess it’s sat in their warehouse or whatever with the publisher, if that even happens. But anyway.
[01:03:05.790] – Sunyi
I think it all feeds into a bigger divide, where it becomes a thing of like, well, people don’t tend to spend for hardcovers, so we’re going to only have a few of our titles who are hardcovers and we want people to buy them. So then all the money goes into a few books every season. And on the UK side, the hardcover thing is huge. It’s tied up with prestige. It’s tied up with, kind of, literary respect, I guess.
[01:03:27.490] – Kerry
Yeah, I could see that. I mean, I do think there’s sometimes even just like, well, this is a paperback release, though. It’s like this sort of tone of, I don’t know, amongst even the reps a little bit. But it’s like, I don’t know, I’m all for it. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s like a smaller press. There’s just something kind of weird, which I’m all about weird stuff, but sometimes you can tell it feels like, oh, they don’t believe that this is going to be a thing.
[01:04:03.420] – Claire
I mean, that makes sense to me. If we think about… well, more just taking chances. I mean, it is like, you know, Diana Gabaldon is going to sell X many, but a debut author writing something that’s not historical fiction…
[01:04:24.040] – Kerry
Right. Like, One’s Company. That novel came out, that was a paperback original, Ashley Hutson, and it was great. But it’s weird. It’s got kind of a weird premise, you could see. But I feel like that was perfect because someone’s not going to take a chance on kind of a weird woman wins lottery and proceeds to recreate the Three’s Company universe on a secluded mountain. Like, that’s a weird premise for a book. And I’m not necessarily going to spend $32 to take a chance on it, but I will spend $16 to take a chance on it.
[01:04:58.350] – Claire
I think we as a store, I mean, if we had ordered three or four of those on hardcover, I think… we as a store made a lot more money on it in paperback than we could have if it was a hardcover.
[01:05:09.560] – Kerry
Yes, because we sold way more. And then on top of that, we both read it ahead of time and I was like, this is going directly on my staff favorites. And so it’s just right there for people to see.
[01:05:20.710] – Claire
But I feel like that happens a lot on our end. I mean, I will go heavy on something because it’s cheaper and I think we can move it more. Yeah, absolutely.
[01:05:29.760] – Scott
Yeah. This is a selfish question because my paperback just came out last month, but does this apply to a paperback that comes out after a hardcover as well? Especially in the case where maybe the hardcover launch didn’t go great. But do you pay attention to formats in that case? Or is it mostly when it’s a trade paperback release from the get go?
[01:05:56.980] – Kerry
No, there have definitely been books where I’ve been like, shit, I don’t think I can sell this as a hardcover. But a year from now, when it comes up in catalogs as paperback, I’m going to get them to put it on the new release paperback table. Because it’s like, again, $30 versus $16 is a huge jump.
[01:06:17.450] – Claire
And typically, if I see that I sold three copies of this book in hardcover, I’m like, okay, it’ll go. Maybe I’ll do four or five in the paperback for an initial order when it first releases.
[01:06:31.230] – Kerry
You can very safely be like, we sold X amount in hardcover. I’m going to double that for my initial run of paperback.
[01:06:37.220] – Claire
But then also, it’s kind of the other thing that Kerry was saying. I’m not sure about this, but I do believe it will go in paperback.
[01:06:45.010] – Kerry
When you think about people who buy hardcovers, I feel like it’s like really die hard fans of people. People with a lot of throwaway income, and then people who are just so wrapped up in, like, oh, everyone’s reading this and I have to read it too.
[01:07:01.210] – Claire
Or like, people who don’t really know how to browse in a bookstore, I think.
[01:07:05.210] – Kerry
Or people who only buy three books a year. So it’s like, I’m only buying four books a year. I can afford to spend $35 on them versus, you know, I’m eating books every day. I can’t drop $100 on three books.
[01:07:22.190] – Jeremy
Yeah, I never used to buy hardbacks until I worked at the store and I could get them at half price. Basically, I would wait for things in paperback. And so I totally think that publishers shoot themselves in the foot with a lot of releases. I think authors like having their book come out in hardback because, as Sunyi was saying, it feels like, oh, I got hardback. I’m important. But it can be a bad thing. It can definitely make it harder to move copies because people don’t know who you are. They don’t want to spend that much money on something they don’t know about.
[01:07:55.290] – Scott
Well, that’s interesting. Maybe I should start paying more attention to my paperback. Oh, goodness gracious. Well, I’m just about out of questions. You have given us so much good information that I really don’t think is common knowledge. Maybe I’m just dumb. Well, dumber than average.
[01:08:20.500] – Sunyi
Nah. I’ve got one more for JT, actually. For JT, what was it like having a debut book come out and also being a bookseller? Because I feel like we get told so little, but you’ve got a foot in each world. Do they ever try and bullshit you? Tell you things that you were just like, no, that’s not how it works.
[01:08:40.230] – Jeremy
Well, my experience is a little weird because my book is published by a major publisher in the UK, but was essentially self published in the United States. I did have the advantage of knowing how book distribution worked. So when we were setting up my self publishing thing, I knew what I needed to make sure was possible. Like, the book needed to be returnable. It needed to be at a 40% discount to the bookstores. It needed to be available through Ingram. And so I was able to make all of that help happen, which I think is why it’s done okay. We sell a lot at Auntie’s, but it does sell in a few other independent bookstores around the country. Gollancz has been pretty straightforward with me. We’ve kind of talked about this in the discord a bit, but I have not had the experience of my editor telling me something that turned out to be false. Pretty much everything that they’ve told me has happened. But also, I was not like, a huge deal and they were never trying to convince me that I was going to be a huge deal. So there were moments where I heard a number and I was like, that number doesn’t sound right.
[01:09:44.560] – Jeremy
Like, they would tell me, this is your initial print run. This is what we want your initial print run to be. And I was like, I bet it’ll be half that. And I was right. But I don’t think that that was them, like, bullshitting me. I think that that was them being optimistic. And then other things happened and it didn’t turn out as well as they had hoped. But the one thing that’s really cool about being a bookseller and an author is like, those weird interactions I’ll get to have where I’m working at the store and somebody’s just picked my book up off the shelf and is going to buy it and like, oh, I wrote that. And then they’re like, what? And then I’ll sign up for them and it’s cool.
[01:10:24.470] – Claire
It was really fun when you came in on pub day. It was like, Jeremy, you’re here!
[01:10:27.930] – Jeremy
Yeah, I went in the day it came out and signed a bunch, and that was cool. But I think I also just have the advantage of working at a bookstore. I know a lot of booksellers and I know how booksellers think. So when I’m talking to people and trying to convince them to carry the book, I know kind of like what works and what doesn’t and what’s annoying and what’s helpful and all of that. Plus, I have a bunch of champions at Auntie’s who hand sell the book for me and it’s got like three shelf talkers on it or something. That definitely doesn’t hurt.
[01:11:02.220] – Sunyi
That’s awesome. Thank you, man. Yeah, I’m done. And that was a wealth of information. Thank you all so much for coming on and telling us all that. I wish I had known it two years ago, or at least that Scott had known it two years ago.
[01:11:18.250] – Scott
Where were you all a year and a half ago? Yeah, that’s totally your fault. I guess one last thing before we sign off. Do you have anything you want to plug? Give a quick shout out to Auntie’s in Spokane and maybe even give authors a way to send buyers your way, if that’s a thing.
[01:11:50.450] – Kerry
Yeah. So, Auntie’s, if you’re local, we’re just right Downtown Spokane, pretty easy to find. We also have auntiesbooks.com, our website. We ship all over the country. So yeah, that’s us. You can find out about events and book clubs and whatever it is we’re doing on the website.
[01:12:09.910] – Claire
If you want to get a hold of a buyer, the best way is just to call and say, this is my book. And they’ll give you the right email.
[01:12:17.130] – Kerry
What else? We have our little radio show, a book show where we talk about books called Dummy Copy on TPG Radio here in Spokane.
[01:12:25.450] – Sunyi
Feel free to plug yourself, JT.
[01:12:27.620] – Jeremy
Oh, yeah, well, I’m JT Greathouse. My book, The Hand of the Sun King is the first in the Pact and Pattern trilogy from Gollancz and JABberwocky in the United States. You can get signed copies from Auntie’s bookstore, order them online. You can leave a little note if you want me to draw something in it. Thanks for having us on. It was really fun to chat.
[01:12:47.890] – Sunyi
It was a pleasure. Thank you.
[01:12:49.360] – Claire
It’s super fun.
[01:12:51.090] – Scott
Yeah. Thank you guys for spending an hour and a half with us. This has been amazing.
[01:12:56.010] – Sunyi
You’ve been listening to the Publishing Radio Podcast with Sunyi Dean and Scott Drakeford. Tune in next time for more in depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.