Chain vs. Indie?

Cricket McRae

 

With the release of Wined and Died last month I’ve been doing the usual promotional activities: guest posting on blogs around the Internet, sending postcards to custom lists – in this case wineries and meaderies – and showing up in bookstores to give talks, read, chat with folks and sign books.

I’m a bit of a signing addict, from the other side of the podium. I once moved to a house near one of my favorite bookstores, Third Place Books, just so I could attend more author talks. During the two years I lived there I went almost weekly to hear writers speak, including Dave Barry, Hilary Clinton, Carl Hiassen, Lewis Black, Ralph Nader and our own Keith Raffel.

I do miss living by that bookstore.

But last week I had my fifth opportunity to perform my dog-and-pony show for my Home Crafting Mysteries at Third Place, and it’s always a thrill. I’ve also appeared at a number of other independent bookstores lately, all welcoming, all with loyal customers and staff who hand sell books.

Before I left for Seattle though, I had a rather discomfiting signing at a local Barnes & Noble store. I sold one book. One. ONE. And it wasn’t even my latest.

I’m not one of those fabulously arresting personalities that draw people like moths. I can’t bring myself to wander the store and track people down in the mystery aisles, thrusting my shiny new bookmarks at them and suggesting they buy my book. But if you put me by the front door of a store, I will spend hours engaging people in a low-key way, feeding them cookies or cheese or homemade bread and butter, showing them how to spin on a drop spindle, and finding out about their lives. I always meet interesting people, often good research contacts, librarians and book club members, and at the end of the day I am usually quite satisfied with my book sales.

Barnes & Noble. One book.

I gotta say, I don’t think it was me. As the afternoon wore interminably on and my feet started to ache (never sit down!) I took notes about what I observed and here’s what I saw:

People used the bookstore to meet people and to get coffee. No books involved.

Nine Nooks went out the door. No books in hand for these folks, but good news for ebooks. Yes, I got two of them to download my first mystery, Lye in Wait, which is free for the Nook until the end of August.

At least fifteen percent of the people who came in the door were either on the phone or madly texting. No way was I going to catch their eye.

Several customers bought school supplies. Who buys school supplies at Barnes & Noble? Well, they did.

A lot of people bought gifts for children – books, games, etc. But no books for themselves. Good for the kids in their lives, though.

Of the customers who bought actual books written for adults, most were non-fiction. I saw three people walk out with three or four genre paperbacks, but otherwise they purchased travel books, how-to manuals, cookbooks, and a few had lists that made me suspect they were buying textbooks.

Oh, and The Help, of course. I’ll have to get around to reading that one of these days.

My publicist says most people who shop at the big chains are going to Borders since everything is cheap cheap cheap for their going out of business sales. Maybe. And maybe there are people who only shop at the chain stores and never venture into the independents. I dunno.

At a couple of my talks in the Seattle area I hijacked the question-and-answer period at the end of my yakking for a few of my own questions. I asked how people felt about e-readers, how many owned one, what kind, and whether they’d buy ebooks from an independent bookstore even if it were a little more trouble. I asked how they felt about self-publishing both as writers and readers (because, of course, there were a bunch of writers in the audiences). And I asked how their reading habits had changed over the last ten years.

Mostly they said that people who like to go see authors in person also prefer to read on paper. Few, if any, owned e-readers or wanted to. It was a small sampling, though, so I’m not sure their answers indicate a trend..

Have you noticed a change in the attendees at author appearances, either as an author or as a fellow audience member? Any differences between chain stores and independent bookstores?