Lamenting the Closing of Another Independent Bookstore

By Beth Groundwater

I am still absorbing the sad news of the closing of the last bookstore in my new hometown, Breckenridge, Colorado. It is an independent bookstore that has been a long-time (26 years) local institution and supporter of Colorado authors: Weber's Books & Drawings. It's one of about 500 independent bookstores that have closed in the past decade, but this closing is especially tough for us Breckenridge residents because Weber's is our only bookstore.

Owners Jolanta and Charles Weber have become friends, and I sympathize with their desire to retire and enjoy some relaxation away from the pressures of running their own business. They had tried to find a buyer for the store for a couple of years, but with no takers, they made the reluctant decision to close the store and are selling off their inventory at 35% off list prices.

Jolanta and Charles have been actively hand-selling my books even before I made Breckenridge my full-time home. They sold over seventy copies of my To Hell in a Handbasket title that is set in Breckenridge, and they have displayed two shelves of my autographed titles on an end-cap that faces the front door of the store. I'm definitely going to miss having that local showcase!

And its not just Breckenridge residents and Colorado authors who are lamenting the store closing. Visitors to our area who return year after year have been coming in to say their goodbyes to Jolanta and Charles. Some customers have cried. We will all miss the personal touch they brought to selecting just the right books for our reading tastes. A great article about the closing, including a photo of the store owners was included in the Summit Daily News.

Below is a photo from a signing of To Hell in a Handbasket that Weber's hosted. The woman with me is Jolanta Weber. Notice that she even dressed in colors to match the book cover. What a businesswoman! I was hoping to have a signing for my May release, Wicked Eddies, at Weber's, but now I'll have to find another local venue.


How about you? Do you have a favorite nearby bookstore? Or did you have one, and it's now closed? How do you feel about the recent trend of bookstore closings?

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?

High Tech to the Rescue of Independent Bookstores?

Keith here

Of the 200 Borders stores across the company that are closing, I’ve done signings in half a dozen. That makes the chain's bankruptcy just a little more personal. I recently spoke to the proprietor of a large independent bookstore near where I live in Palo Alto. I suggested that there was some consolation -- at least Borders’ problems would be good for his store. He disabused me of that notion, saying that after getting stiffed for tens of millions of dollars by Borders, publishers are tightening up on credit with his store and other independents. He doesn’t need another problem given the threat posed by e-books to his book-and-mortar store.



So is there any future at all for the independent bookstore? Today, the independents, along with Borders and Barnes & Noble, are becoming less booksellers and more book showrooms. People wander through these brick-and-mortar stores, look around, and then go home to buy print-and-ink copies of their choices from Amazon or, alternatively, they buy downloads from Amazon or another e-book retailer. This is no secret. Booksellers at brick-and-mortar stores tell me looky-loos in their store shamelessly admit they are looking to find a good book so they can go home and purchase it over the Web. But here’s the critical point: these looky-loos prefer seeing books on shelves and talking to booksellers who know their stuff as compared to trolling through websites to look for a book to read. The problem with their preference, of course, is that there will be no book-and-mortar stores to shop at if people just come to bookstore to look without buying.

Google is making a first effort at addressing this problem. Google eBooks permits independent bookstores to offer their e-books on their websites today. (See here for example.) The store then gets a cut of the sale. Of course, buyers can also download books directly from Google’s own site. The portent may be promising, but even here in Silicon Valley not too many people are bothering to go through the bookstore sites. Still, here’s what I suspect is coming and, if it’s not, it should be. People who are checking out the shelves in an independent store will just point their iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android phone, e-book reading device at the book they want and have it instantly downloaded. The device will interpret the new generation barcode with the squiggly lines that’s already being used on billboards and magazines to send potential customers to websites, maps, videos, and such. (It's just to the left of the bottom of the Mountain Dew bottle in the ad to the right.) The e-book will be downloaded right then and there.



And guess what? Most of those devices have GPS software built in. That means Google eBooks or other e-book suppliers will know exactly what bookstore the purchaser is standing in and can pay a commission to the store. This way the store is compensated for acting as a showroom staffed with bibliophiles. By the way, with this approach, a user of Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader can just point it at a book on the shelf at a B&N and have the book ready to read, too. The model doesn’t work for the leading e-reader, Amazon’s Kindle, because Amazon doesn’t want you buying a book or e-book from anybody but them. On the other hand, a model where readers can download an e-book instantly while holding the print-and-ink version in their hands will begin to give Amazon a run for its money.

So, here’s the future. You'll go to your independent bookstore and point and click. Poof. An e-book is on your reading device even before you leave the store. Instant gratification. Rumor has it that the American Booksellers Association is working to make this all a reality. I can’t wait.







Above that's my #3 trying to download Marcus Sakey's latest.

KINDLE ME BLUE

Darrell James

Earlier this month, yet another independent bookseller, The Mystery Bookstore announced its closing. So sad. Located in trendy Westwood, California, a mere block off the UCLA campus, this fabulous stalwart of the printed book has served the mystery reading community for the past 23 years, and has hosted virtually every mystery author, big name or small.

Robert Crais at The Mystery Bookstore (Wow!)
One of the last signings there.

On nearly the same day, the major book chain Barnes and Nobles announced record fourth quarter sales. How can this dichotomy exist?

Well, it seems the source of B&N’s bragging rights came not from book sales in its stores, but from the on-line sales of eBooks for electronic readers. On Christmas day alone, the chain reported that their computers had crashed as a result of being clogged with orders for eBooks for its latest reader, the color Nook. Another statistic said that more than half of all “best seller” sales were eBooks.

In the words of the song artist and poet, Bob Dylan “… the times they are a’changin’.”

For authors, it seems to ring the death knell for printed books. Yet the reality of it is that more books than ever are actually being sold. Just not in the form we’ve come to love.

I’ve come to the eBook revolution kicking and screaming. I love books. Real books. My shelves are crammed with them. My nightstand is stacked with them. I love the look and feel of them. Having spent time in the printing industry, I even love the smell of them—that heady ink-on-paper aroma.(I know you know what I mean.)

I’ve recited all my objections to owning a reader, be it Kindle, Nook, or iPad… “I don’t like reading off a screen.” OR “What happens when the battery goes dead?”

The response from the progressive minded people who already have one or more of these devises, sounds something like: “Yes, but you can’t tuck your book into a purse or pocket. You can have it with you anytime, over lunch, in line at the bank.” AND, “When you go on vacation you can carry dozens… no!… hundreds of books with you. Think about the size of the suitcase you’d need to do that. Huh? Huh? Have you thought about that?”

Okay, I have imagined trying to fit a shipping container full of books into the overhead compartment on an airplane.

The change, though, has left me feeling maybe a bit the way the scribes of old must have felt when Guttenberg first introduced movable type, making their beautifully crafted calligraphy-styled books obsolete.

The truth is, when I listen to the arguments, my objections seem rather lame. Technology has proven itself valuable to the consumer (again). People buy them because they like them. It’s progress.

I envision a day when brick-and-mortar bookstores will mostly be a thing of the past. Possibly a few will exist to service collectors and hippy-holdouts like me—those who still store their music on vinyl record albums, proclaiming… “It sounds better.”

It doesn’t sound better; it just sounds familiar.

For authors promoting their works, perhaps the rest of Dylan's lyrics apply:

“Come gather ‘round people wherever you roam and admit that the waters around you have grown. And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone. For the times…”

You know the rest.

I now have plans for a Nook, Kindle, whatever… “Uncle! I give.”

Still, my heart cries, “It’s not a book, unless its printed.”

Where do you stand on the debate? Have you gone to the darkside of eReadership. Or are you clinging stubbornly to tradition?... Join in. Let’s call it our official poll.

Saving the Brick & Mortars

Cricket McRaeLast year one of Colorado's premier mystery book stores, High Crimes, closed the doors of their shop in Boulder. Unlike many of the smaller independents that have disappeared, they transferred their business to the Internet. Now High Crimes is an online indie that still specializes in mysteries. They even continue to host the occasional author signing at a local coffee house.

Of course, we all know of independent book stores that are either in danger or have gone out of business. Times are hard and the major chains and Amazon are not only accessible but offer discounts. And book stores aren't the only ones in jeopardy; local businesses of all types face increasing odds as the recession wears away at them and their customers alike.

The 3/50 Project is a nationwide effort to stem the flow of dollars out of our local economies. Now, I'm not a fan of the idea that we need to all run out and spend a bunch of money to stimulate the economy. In fact, I get a bit riled every time I hear it suggested. However, we all need to buy some stuff, don't we? Might as well spend our money at home.

A couple of tidbits from the project's website:

"If just half the employed U.S. population spent $50 each month in independently owned businesses, their purchases would generate more than 42.6 billion in revenue."

And:

"For every $100 spent in independently owned stores, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll and other expenditures. If you spend that in a national chain, only $43 remains here. Spend it online and nothing comes home."

The project has gone viral, and has been covered in a number of newspapers and blogs. I'm doing it again here because it's important, and it's something we can participate in as individuals. Other organizations that emphasize local buying are the American Independent Business Alliance, Indiebound, and the Business Alliance for Living Local Economies.

Check these folks out -- and spend your money in a way that not only benefits you, but your entire community.