Fiercely Independent: A Roundtable Chat With Three Indie Booksellers

"Bookstore events often operate at a loss" & other things I learned talking to some booksellers

Florine Stettheimer, Spring Sale at Bendel’s

The idea for this post came about when Fisher the Bookseller stepped into the chat during the popping discourse on the role of sales track in shaping an author’s career. For those who missed it: the Walrus ran a widely-read piece lamenting something we agents often lament, namely that a bad sales track can negatively affect an author’s career and publishers’ valuation of their future books. When I was interviewed with for the piece, I didn’t really consider the part booksellers play in how publishers weigh an author’s past successes when they value their future books. That was my bad, and Fisher’s astute intervention (you should really read his post, but the long story short is that booksellers have to rely on track too) also got me thinking, I should interview some booksellers! So I did. This week I talked to:

• Jazzi McGilbert, founder, owner and creative director of Reparations Club in Los Angeles.

• Stephanie Valdez, owner of Community Bookstore and Terrace Books in Brooklyn.

• Kar Johnson, Event Manager for Green Apple Books in San Francisco.

The roundtable interview isn’t about sales track (I’m not that cruel); instead, I tried to lift the veil on what booksellers do all day, what they wish authors and readers (and their own families) knew about their jobs, and how all of this affects you as writers/readers. Towards the end, we get into the knotty question of author events and why bookstores so frequently say, “No thanks” when you pitch them a reading. This is such a point of frustration for my clients and so many authors I know. I hope the candid and generous answers these booksellers share will help you rethink the bookstore event. As Stephanie Valdez says below, we’re in for a bookstore event reckoning.

Now for the lightly self-promotional part of the newsletter. As you may have heard (from me, one million times), I have a book coming out and if you preorder it, you can enter to win a chance to have me edit your book proposal. Five runners-up will win me editing their galley letters. We currently have about 65 entrants and my goal is to get to 100. (And if you are thinking, “How are there only 65 entrants when this lady has been harping about her preorder contest for months?”—well, you my friend have never seen preorder incentive numbers for a midlist book by a decidedly not-famous person.) You can win this thing, so enter!

Also, you can preorder a signed, first edition of the book from my neighborhood indie, the aforementioned Community Books!

Finally, I have to share this amazing review of TAKE IT FROM ME by Celine Nguyen in her (excellent) roundup of recent reads. She says, “Take It from Me is that rare and wonderful book that addresses both commercial and artistic concerns. Habib writes about the strategic and pecuniary aspects of being a writer (bylines, credentials, contracts, and getting paid)—but she clearly loves literature, and loves the writers she represents, and loves the entire process of shepherding great work into the world.” All true.

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Let’s start by having you share what your role is at your store and how you came to bookselling.

Jazzi: I am the founder, owner and creative director of Reparations Club in Los Angeles, California. I started my career in NY fashion media. So technically, I guess my career started in publishing, but it was a funhouse mirror, fashion magazine side of publishing—very different in many ways but vaguely familiar in others. I was always a very creative, very bookish kid, then I hit 30, my mom died, and nine months later, I emerged from my grief with a whole bookstore. The very first books I sold actually came from my mom’s bookshelf. That’s the Cliff’s Notes version…it’s been a very windy path.

Kar: I’m the Event Manager for Green Apple Books in San Francisco. I was in an MFA program at San Francisco State and about to graduate and needed a job. A friend who worked at the used counter here put in a good word for me, but I did get it on my own merits. I thought, “I’ll be here for a year.”

I learned that book selling was a career, and I really fell in love with it. I started out as just a staff bookseller, doing day-to-day operations: counting the drawer, receiving, unboxing, shelving, doing all the things that make a store run, which I still do. The location I worked in opened with the intention of expanding our events programming. At the time, everyone else did a little bit of it, begrudgingly, but I loved programming. And I said, “Please, please, let it be my main job.” And here I am, nine years later.

Stephanie: I own Community Bookstore and Terrace Books in Brooklyn. About fifteen years ago, I was in my mid 20s, cobbling together a lot of different things, not really sure what I was going to do with my life. My friend owned Community Bookstore and she was ready to try something else—she moved to Albania and left the store behind. I started working here one day a week. Someone else from the neighborhood had come in to buy the store, and I got sucked into the project of rehabbing a store that really needed some love and attention. Then Ezra [Goldstein], my former co-owner, turned to me and said, “Do you want to buy this store with me?” And I said, “Yes, I’m not sure how or why, but yes, I do.”

And so we bought this fixer upper bookstore in 2011. It was in rough shape. It had way too many animals—-two dogs, two cats, a bearded dragon, two turtles and a bunny—but not a lot of books on the shelves. It was more of a pet store than a bookstore.

It was very charming back then, but it definitely had a smell.

Stephanie: One of my first things I did was I ripped out the carpet and put in wood floors. People said I was crazy, that the store was losing its charm. And I was like, “It can be charming without a smell.” We had to rehab the finances of the store too, because it had been under a tremendous mantle of debt, and we had to do it without vast personal resources. Every day, if we made an extra dollar, we spent it on a book. And then I somehow ended up taking over a second store that needed the same treatment.

If you were to describe your store to someone who’d never been there and doesn’t know your neighborhood, what would you say?

Jazzi: We often hear that Rep Club feels like your home away from home. It’s a really warm, comfortable, colorful space—all of the colors are inspired by my childhood. There’s a split pea green that is inspired by my dad, who had this green shag carpet growing up. My grandmother is known for her sweet potato pie, so that’s one of the colors we used too. We’ve got checkered linoleum tile, lots of mixed prints and patterns inspired by Faith Ringgold, who illustrated some of my favorite kids books.

We’re in South Central LA, where I grew up. We are kind of tucked away on a more residential street, and in the midst of a neighborhood in the throes of gentrification. There’s a bright neon yellow door, and that is really the only signifier that we are there, and I kind of like it like that. We don’t have any big signage. When you walk in, a kind of Wonderland opens up. Something flashier might be better for walk-in business, but I like knowing that the people who come in are really walking in with intention.

Creating a space that people wanted to spend time in was the priority for me. What’s the opposite of hostile architecture? That’s us. Having a lot of seating is unusual for retail—it’s not a purely transactional space. We want people to sit and stay for a while. People come, read, work and hang out all day. They really do treat it like their living room. We once had a customer come in with their own full tea set. People really make themselves at home, maybe even a little too much so on occasion, but we’re usually here for it!

Kar: We’re a trio of fiercely independent bookstores. Green Apple Books on the Park is where I spend most of my time and where we have our event programming. We are right next to Golden Gate Park. We’re literally across the street from one of the most beautiful parks in the world and we’re really close to the Botanical Garden too, so we have a lot of foot traffic from tourists who are visiting San Francisco. And we have regular programming at the botanical garden for anything that even vaguely has to do with nature.

Stephanie: Community Bookstore has been here since 1971. The original owner modeled our store on a British bookshop kind of model. It’s very dark and cozy. We have floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on basically every surface of the entire place.

We also have a garden, which is really unusual for bookstores, especially here in the city, and it’s a big part of our identity. Even though there aren’t animals that will pop out at you from every corner, I still try to maintain the sense of it being a unique and non-corporate, cozy and welcoming space. Terrace Books is a light-filled corner space that used to be an antique store. It has creaky floors and these big casement windows and gets a lot of natural light. People just treat it like a third place to meet with their friends to go on walks in the park or pop in before and after things when they have extra time.

It’s nice to be able to welcome people, especially heading into the dead of winter here in New York. It’s sometimes hard to just find places to go when it’s cold and you don’t really want to spend a bunch of money at a cafe.

Could you tell us more about the communities you serve and how that shapes what books you put on the shelves? I feel I have an intuitive sense of what a Community Bookstore reader is because I am one, but I’d love to hear how you’d articulate it.

Stephanie: Years ago, there was an article about an in-flight magazine that was paying authors a lot of money to write for its audience. And I think it was Rick Moody, who was asked about it, and he said, “Well, you know this, this magazine is not for your Park Slope Community Bookstore types.” And I though, “I want to make a t-shirt that says, ‘Park Slope Community Bookstore Type.’”

It’s funny because I know what type he means, but it’s not something I created. The store isn’t patterned on my identity. When my business partner retired a couple of years back, I realized the store was just me. As a Mexican American female business owner, trying to figure out what the Park Slope Community Bookstore is now has been interesting. In New York, you never know who’s going to walk in off the street. We’re always trying to be really open to what that means.

We’re really interested in international literature. We also try to be really aware of what the industry is reading and talking about, because we’re also a store in a company town. I’m always looking to surprise and delight the people who work in the industry and are reading professionally. I want them to see the things that they will expect and the things that surprise them, which is a kind of funny mix in such a tiny, compressed space.

Kids books are also a huge part of what we do. I’m trying to meet kids where they are, whether it’s a Dog Man book or something that’s a really unique gem. We’re trying to get people to think broadly about reading and to be a little ambitious. Book browsing is aspirational, right? We’re always trying to get people to think a little bit outside of their narrow corner of the world.

Kar: As a West Coaster Community Books fan, I also want to say that when I visited last year, my spouse and I found a copy of a children’s book that my mother-in-law wrote in 2009. It’s called BABIES DON’T EAT PIZZA. It was such a miracle to find it on Stephanie’s shelf.

I really do love my job, and I love our neighborhood, and I love our community. I take a lot of pride in being able to stand behind the register and welcome people in and see so many familiar faces. Because we’re in San Francisco, for better or worse, there’s a lot of interest in tech. Usually people that come in our doors are impacted by it in a negative way. When they are looking for something on tech, they’re asking, “How can I kind of reconcile what is happening in our city, in our neighborhood? How do we push up against this?” A lot of that also has to do with gentrification, with how we support our neighbors experiencing homelessness.

That said, a lot of our customers also work in tech and are looking for something that does not have to do with their jobs. We also try to be as hyper local as possible with what we have on the shelves and who we serve. We live in a very storied city and a very storied region of the country.

We also love championing small presses. They’re our bread and butter. We have a small press section that we give a lot of time and attention to, both in our fiction area and our poetry area. Being able to handsell those items feels really good. There’s a small triumph when someone wanders back to the register with a book that you recommended that they might not have seen otherwise.

Jazzi: Perhaps unlike Stephanie’s, for better or worse, my store really formed as a reflection of me and my values. When somebody walks in and the space resonates with them, I feel like they’re really resonating with a part of my identity. And if you hate it, well, you might hate me! And beyond that, the store reflects my family and my community, which are also a deep part of me. I wanted those people to be able to walk in and see themselves on shelves.

I’ve been to a lot of bookstores, but I haven’t always felt seen in them. As a Black, queer, neurodivergent introvert in Los Angeles, it was hard to find spaces where I felt comfortable—but I think introverts in general are really good at creating spaces where other people can feel comfortable. It’s our superpower. There are so few spaces that we want to be in, but if given the opportunity to design one, which I kind of gave to myself, a lot of other people have found comfort in that space as well.

There are a lot of assumptions even the publishing industry makes about Black people who read and what we want to read. For example, we initially got assigned to Christian sales reps because publishers just assumed a Black bookstore was a Christian bookstore. We aim to stoke as much curiosity as possible. How many ways can we show that Black people are not a monolith? I’ll say, I don’t think you’re well-read if you’re not reading from people who don’t look or think like you. I felt called to reflect the breadth of Blackness on our bookshelves, and create space for people who want to engage with that. I lead with curiosity.

I love hearing about how idiosyncratic your bookstores are. It’s akin to the joy of traveling. When you open the door of a bookstore that you’ve never been to, you actually don’t know what’s going to be inside

Stephanie: I think that the publishing industry sometimes wants to flatten those things, and I really try to push back on that, because we’re lucky enough to be in a city full of bookstores and it’d really be depressing if you opened the door to every one of those stores and found the same things inside them.

Jazzi: I really appreciate the publishing sales reps who get specific with each store. Often, Black bookstores get all lumped together, and while they are incredible company to be in, when we are also all quite distinct. I appreciate the sales reps that take the time to visit us and get to know our stores.

Stephanie: Here in New York, there are so many authors that could be termed local. It’s understanding the nuances —Manhattan is not necessarily local if you’re in Brooklyn!

What do you wish people knew about your job and what you do all day? What are some common misconceptions?

Kar: Does anyone else find that when they say that they work in a bookstore or a bookseller, people say, “Oh, it must be so nice to sit around and read all day.” What do you think I’m doing all day? It’s one of my bigger pet peeves.

I get that for my job too!

Kar: If there is a job where that is the only thing that you do, sign me up. Being a bookseller is often very physically demanding. You get shipments every day. Those boxes can be very heavy, and you have to receive them. Especially when the holidays are coming up, we’re getting dozens of boxes of books every day. I’m no longer on the floor all the time, so my colleagues are really doing a lot of that work, but for many years, that is what I did every single day, in addition to opening the store, counting the drawer, doing all the ordering in the morning and then people looking for book recommendations or looking for a particular title—and it’s all kind of happening all at the same time. There’s no sitting down and reading a book.

Stephanie: The physical labor part is important, because people push back when they ask to book an event, and we say we can’t accommodate their request. They’ll say, “But wait, we saw there was nothing on your calendar that night.” And they just assume we have an unlimited amount of bandwidth as a small team.

If we did events every day, we couldn’t really run the store at a level to make it profitable. I don’t think people realize how spread thin we are across a lot of different things, including things like sweeping floors and opening boxes. People are surprised at how much admin work we do. When my son was very young, I found this amazing work space that had a preschool in the front and in the back was a room full of harried parents on laptops, just trying to get their work done. I came across somebody who I knew from the store, and she said, “Well, what are you doing here?” And I was like, “Oh, I just have so much work to do.” She said, “But like .. what?” I spend hours and hours and hours a week on Edelweiss [a digital book catalog], looking through publishers’ catalogs, responding to email, dealing with insurance renewals—all the administrative work of running a small business.

Jazzi: A lot of people seem to think of bookstore owners and booksellers as hobbyists. Reading can be a hobby, but running a bookstore is a whole business, a career. Keeping an indie bookstore afloat, especially in a major city, requires some real business acumen. There’s so much admin and minutia that goes into it. Hats off to anyone that’s pulling it off at all, especially if you’ve been able to sustain or even grow that business. That requires a lot more effort than sitting and reading with your bookstore cat!

I blame all the misconceptions about my job on “Sex in the City.” And I blame all the misconceptions of your job on the Hallmark Channel, because owning a bookstore is a classic Hallmark Channel heroine job: “I’m in my cozy bookstore wistfully reading with my little cup of tea and here comes my matchmaking cat!”

Stephanie: No, actually I’m on Edelweiss dealing with minutiae and throwing out my back.

I’m so glad that you brought up capacity for events. It’s something I deal with a lot as an agent—my authors are frustrated when they can’t get an event booking. What makes you decide which events to book and why is it competitive?

Kar: It’s very competitive because there are a lot of great books out there, and I’m so grateful every time someone sends a query. I really do take seriously that they’re being vulnerable. They’re putting themselves out there and saying, “Hey, I would really like to trust that Green Apple can handle this event, and I think that you’d do a good job.”

But if I look at a particular month, I know my personal capacity, and the capacity of my colleagues, is that we can maybe handle two to three events a week. And that’s a lot! And we are an event store and we do a lot of programming.

We also want to prioritize local authors, whether they’re a San Francisco-based author or from the larger Bay Area. I actively look for those people. If I go on the Edelweiss event catalog, I will control-F “Bay Area. I will always write a pitch for those events first or keep an eye out if it comes in my inbox.

It’s safe to make the assumption that bookstore events often operate at a loss. Whether that means staying open later to accommodate an event, which is what some stores do, or extra staff staying, or ordering books for an event that might not be purchased by the event attendees—it all costs money. In the case of Green Apple, we close off a whole section of our store in order to make events happen. That means there’s a part of our store where people can’t just browse and pick up books, which is how most people buy books. We’re missing basically a third of our store when we close off for an event.

These are all things that we have to take into consideration when we are booking an event. We have to decide, and I wish this weren’t the case, “Can we fiscally handle this? Can we handle this as individual people working in these bodies?”

This is something I try to communicate to my own authors because they take these passes personally. When a store says, “We can’t do the event,” they hear, “They don’t want me.” Or “I’m not good enough.” Or they think, “How could they not want me? I’ll sell books for them. Why don’t they get that!?”

But there are costs— human costs, labor costs, time costs. Getting a sense of those human costs is in part why I do this Substack. Someone that I interviewed put in a really lovely way: within the system of authors and publishing, it’s very easy to forget that someone isn’t just their job function, that someone isn’t just the person answering the email that says, “Yes, come to my store,” but they are person with body that has to work all day and then get home and do all the other things that they’re managing. As an author, you really want your book out there and you want to have your beautiful event with fifty people in the chairs, which makes it easy to lose sight of the individual person who is also sweeping floors and stocking books and—

Kar: And losing money.

Jazzi: We also feel the pressure of having fewer and fewer bookstores who host events, so the inbound requests are mounting every day. We want to do it, I think it’s great for community building, it’s great for authors to showcase their incredible work, but also, if I actually ran the numbers, we are definitely operating our events business at a loss.

There are very limited resources going around, even down to who’s paying for the overstock return shipping after an event.

Think about just hosting a dinner party for a couple of your friends at your house—that can be stressful. We’re doing that multiple times a week, with higher expectations, in front of an audience. And authors’ egos are also often involved in a way that no one really wants to reckon with. We often see conversations with authors saying, “I would be totally happy with two people in the audience!” In reality, if no one shows after we’ve spent time, sanity, and money planning an event, that’s awkward for everyone and no one wants to share the blame. The fact is, our bookstores can’t sustain that, and it doesn’t fully value the labor involved.

I would love for us as an industry to have a conversation about how else we can all do this more effectively. Unpopular opinion, but I don’t believe every launch necessitates a full scale event at a bookstore. There are many other creative ways to introduce a new title to the world!

One of the things I find now as an author is how often I’m asked by people, “What are you doing for your book tour? Are you going on book tour?” And actually, I am. I’m very lucky. I’m so excited, but I want to say to those folks who who ask me, particularly when it’s someone who I know reads a book a year, How often do you go to a bookstore event and how often do you buy a book at one? And if you as an author want there to be these events, you need to also be someone who goes out and supports them.

Stephanie: It does feel like some sort of reckoning needs to happen. Events were one of my first responsibilities when I took over Community fifteen years ago, because we had all these local authors and a lot of pressure to host. I think we’ve all hosted an event where one to three people have come and it’s very useful and important to kind of get through that experience gracefully. It gives you a lot of fortitude to realize that the worst that happens is you spend a night with some nice booksellers. But on the other hand, I think, I think the stakes are very high for stores, for events where we’re just under a lot of scrutiny and pressure to, as Jazzi said, to throw a peak life experience event for authors multiple times a week.

Even hosting local authors is not always a safe bet, because in New York, the market is so competitive that they might have three other events in town, and again, half their friends might have already gotten a galley, and they’re not coming out to buy books.

But the flipside of that is I’m exhausted today because last night I got to host one of my son’s favorite authors. And I think everybody just needs to know we’re working really hard to make sure that the ones we do are good, that we really give something to those events.

Having gone to events that have two people in the audience, do you have any advice to authors who have an event coming up or want to work with their publicist to pitch an event?

Stephanie: Invite people. This is such a silly, obvious thing, but I’ve had events where people have just assumed that their friends would like to find out about it. This is New York where, like, we’re competing against every concert, theater appearance, people’s work lives, people’s personal lives. You might assume that people are all on our mailing list and tuning in, but they’re not. Please invite your people. I know you might think you’re too far gone in your career to have to ask people, but please, tell people about the event. Sometimes when an event has gone wrong, we find out it was that they just forgot to tell people.

Kar: We are a very established store with a following on the internet, but so much of our attendance comes from authors promoting the event themselves. And that cannot be overstated. I think they imagine some sort of magic pill that somehow reaches people in their circles and or that there is some sort of imaginary, huge audience of Green Apple devotees, and while I’m grateful for our devotees, they are not enough to fill every event.

The other thing I would say, if people are looking to pitch an event, please go to the bookstores website, where they likely have all of the information you need about pitching an event. And I will get on my soapbox as I know this is a safe space: please do not link to your book on Amazon to try and sell it to us. Show me your website. Show me the publisher’s website. Please, honestly, anywhere but Amazon. It does not feel good when I see the stats about your book or what you could have given to me in a one sheet just linked to our biggest business competitor. Please don’t send me to that godforsaken place.

Jazzi: It’s so validating to talk to other bookstore people about this topic. Emphasizing the collaborative nature of events, we get blamed when things go wrong, but if things go right, it’s almost anyone but us. Approach things from a collaborative standpoint—-this is all of our success, it’s all of our failure, no one is solely responsible, we’re all just doing our best.