Love to Indie Bookstores, Love to Indie Publishers
Does a trip to the bookstore count as self-care? I suppose it does.
I’ve been needing to decompress for a while, so I took a personal day from work (which basically entailed logging into Slack from my living room desk just long enough to say I was taking a personal day, then logging out again) and rode the subway into Manhattan for the first time in more than a month. I had a library book that I had checked out in late February I needed to return, and then as long as I was downtown I thought I’d stop by McNally Jackson and look for a book.
I’ve always loved indie bookstores, and one of the most frustrating aspects of staying sheltered in place for nearly eight months is that I simply haven’t had much opportunity to just go to any of the really great bookstores in New York City and spend an inordinate amount of time browsing, compiling wish lists, and picking up what I could. The frustration has been more than personal. We’ve known about the threat Amazon poses to independent booksellers for two decades now, but the economic aftershocks of the COIVD-19 pandemic have underscored that this isn’t just a bookselling problem—it’s a problem for all our local economies, and the communities bound up in those economies. As the science fiction writer Charlie Jane Anders says, “this isn't just a crucial moment for American democracy — it's also a life-or-death struggle for our bookstores.”
I could drop a whole spiel here about neoliberalism and market capitalism, but I’m trying to keep the newsletters brief so I can do more of them throughout November, just in case anybody’s giving National Novel Writing Month a go. Maybe I’ll come back to it one day…actually, you know what, I will touch upon it briefly, to say that not only should you support independent booksellers—and if you don’t know where the nearest one to you is, Bookshop.org can help—you should also do as much as you can to support independent publishers.
I know this is a tricky ask. Three years ago, when an alt-right figure about halfway through his fifteen minutes named Milo Yiannopoulos got a $250,000 book deal from Simon and Schuster, and some people said we should all boycott the publisher. Well, it wasn’t quite as simple as that, because as readers we like who we like, and many of us weren’t prepared to stop buying and reading, say, Stephen King just because the corporate entity that published him also (nearly) published a bratty little hatemonger from the Internet.
Even beyond that kind of rare, provocative cases, the simple fact of the matter is that large conglomerate publishers work for a certain class of bestselling author. They get the books into stores, making it much more likely that readers will see them and buy them, and they get money to the writers. So that’s not a system the writers or the bookstores are likely to want to upend.
And yet small, independent publishers can be awesome in so many ways. Which is how I ended up buying How to Connect, the latest little book on mindful living from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Parallax Press. (I suppose, technically, it’s a self-published book.) There have been a few of these How to… books in recent years, and I’m a fan, so when I saw it displayed on the information counter, I didn’t hesitate. I also picked up a new novel, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, which has been shortlisted for a slew of literary prizes on both sides of the Atlantic, and which is published by Grove Atlantic—which is actually a fairly successful enterprise, as indie publishing houses go, having had about a century to refine its business model.
I don’t know much about Shuggie Bain other than that it’s up for all those awards, and that it’s published by Grove Atlantic, but in some ways that’s good enough for me. Not simply because it’s an indie house, but because it’s an indie house that I’ve read somewhat widely in, and I’ve come to trust their judgment. (It helps to be on the fringes of the publishing world, which enabled me to have sporadic contact with people there, but that’s not necessary from a strictly literary standpoint—all you need to do is read books, and pay attention to who consistently puts out books you like.)
So we’ll see.
How about you? Have you read a great book from an independent publisher recently? And did you buy it at an indie bookstore? Tell us about it in the comments.