Here's another installment from my forthcoming book. (I won't post every chapter, only occassional ones.)
VoxPop, Sander and Me -- Chapter 3
“Fifty thousand in cash! Fifty thousand in cash to launch your new indie bookstore! Get your free fifty thousand!” I was passing out translucent envelopes containing banknotes, stickers and silver coins to attendees strolling the aisles of Book Expo America, in the cavernous halls of the Javits Center, New York, June 2005. Two professional women approached the Vox Pop booth and accepted the packets.
I continued, “Yes, it’s fifty thousand in real money, actually more--let’s see--you’ve got a fifty thousand lira coin--that’s from Turkey, plus a one thousand cruzado banknote from Brazil. On the front is Antonio de Machado, the father of Brazilian literature. You can afford to open a nice bookstore with this fifty-one thousand in capital. Now all you need is my book.” I handed them each the review copies I’d had printed back in Amherst--there were only thirty, which I’d have to hoard and distribute carefully. “I’m afraid I can’t give you those, but the actual book ships in August. You can order it from SCB Distributors.” I gestured at the main area of our group of small press booths, where the marketer of us all was headquartered.
The women examined their books. One read the title aloud to the other.
Rebel Bookseller: How To Improvise Your Own Indie Store And Beat Back The Chains. She looked back at me and asked, “So, how do you do that?”
I answered, “Well, you have the capital I just gave you, so that will help.”
They looked at each other. I continued, “No--the book is designed to convince chainstore employees to quit and open their own independent bookstores. I tell about how thousands of us chain bookstore employees of the 80s did that, and it damaged Dalton, Walden and Crown. I’m saying it could happen again, and we could destabilize Barnes & Noble and Borders.” They were looking at me and nodding and smiling. They handed me the books back and drifted away chatting. They had lost interest, lost focus, and probably not even realized they were being rude.
I began calling out again, “Fifty thousand in cash, fifty thousand, free, in capital to underwrite your new indie store,” brandishing my envelopes, leaning forward to press these into the hands of glaze-eyed, slack-jawed passers-by.
This was my industry?
I had attended the old American Booksellers Association trade show for most of the years between 1985 and 1997 when my Chicago bookstores were actively engaged in industry affairs, back when I was looking to buy remainders, sell advertising in my catalog, line up author visits, and build relationships. For eight years since, though, I had been in self-imposed exile. I’d dropped out of ABA in 1998. I had barely noticed the ABA lawsuits against Barnes & Noble and Borders. When the ABA school program and education department had been dismantled, I hadn’t cared. Maybe closing The Children’s Bookstore had sapped my political energy. Maybe I didn’t have time for volunteering once our store at Chicago Children’s Museum had hits its crazy stride: eighty hour workweeks don’t leave much time for industry politics.
In 2003 though, after moving to Amherst to launch Eric Carle Museum’s bookstore, I’d started writing about my 1980s period immersed in ABA committee work. The process of telling this tale had helped me front my opinions and notice the overarching patterns I’d been living inside. My research began to teach me about the world I’d gained and lost since my first job at B. Dalton Bookseller in 1979.
In 1959, the year I was born, there were ten thousand independent bookstores selling new trade books. By 1979, with the growth of the chains, this number had dropped to two thousand. Yet by 1991, there were over five thousand indies nationwide. I realized that I had played a part in this renaissance, as an innovative marketer and then as a writer and educator. I'd assisted in the destruction of that era’s chainstore corporations.
Hence,
Rebel Bookseller’s focus: to revive the revolution for the next generation.
But was it too late? Here at Book Expo America, the ABA Convention’s successor tradeshow, not many blue-badged booksellers were in evidence. Rather the majority of attendees had yellow or red badges: they worked for publishing houses large and small, or support industries. They were authors, agents, librarians or members of the media. The fact that only sixteen hundred independent bookstores remained in the entire country dramatically changed the mood of the show. All these publishers, with all their books, and few bookstore-owners to sell to!
This was my first time manning a publisher’s booth. The book industry tradeshow from this fixed-in-place perspective was repetitive and boring. Keeping up appearances was the issue. Making sure my pitch to passers-by sounded enthusiastic was critical. Somehow, I needed to sell--and no-one, not even those occasional booksellers, was placing any orders.
I’d started the show elated, because
The Wall Street Journal had printed a front-page article using my arguments, theories and proofs about how superstore chains’ excessive ordering and returning were forcing prices up, depressing book sales. I’d first spoken to the
WSJ book industry reporter in January 2005, after reading his article documenting the steady book price inflation of recent decades. That article offered no explanation for the phenomenon. When I’d emailed him with my assertion that superstore returns practices were responsible for the inflation, he’d challenged me to prove it. I’d done a round of research and sent him PDFs of
Publishers Weekly articles from years past. I’d demonstrated how in the 90s, leading industry players had fretted that this very thing was happening. So, one could assume that the current high prices were the predicted and predictable outcome of the returns crisis of the 90s.
I’d also showed him
Rebel Bookseller’s “9th Rant,” called “Publish, Perish,” about a fictionalized book whose bad timing resulted in being shipped and returned, shipped and returned, ultimately to be remaindered and put out of print.
Most importantly, I’d warned him that when he wrote the story, he should seriously consider leaving any mention of me and my book out. I expected Barnes & Noble to hate me for doing
Rebel Bookseller, and I knew the company could be extremely hostile and vindictive toward critics. I told him about his predecessor at
WSJ, Meg Cox, who he said he didn’t know (he’d been on the book industry beat there for eighteen months, he said).
I’d spoken with Meg Cox in 2003. I’d wanted to know if
Wall Street Journal had stood up for her during the 1992 spat over her article "Risky Plot: Barnes & Noble's Boss Has Big Growth Plans That Booksellers Fear," about B&N CEO Len Riggio. She’d told me
Wall Street Journal hadn’t caved in. They’d refused to apologize to Riggio for the "tone" of her article. They’d treated Meg fairly. But her work definitely got harder because for the rest of her time in the job, Len Riggio refused to give her an interview. Writing on the book industry for
Wall Street Journal and never having access to the boss of Barnes & Noble was tricky.
On June 3, 2005, the Friday of the BEA show, when
WSJ’s article
"An Industry Gone Mad" appeared--all about the returns crisis and its impact driving book prices up, including the tale of a single book being shipped back and forth across the country only to end up remaindered--of course I read it fast to see if
Rebel Bookseller or I were credited. We were not. Still, I bought five copies of the newspaper, and showed them around all weekend.
I brought a copy to the
Publishers Weekly booth and pitched my old friend Dick Donahue on reviewing
Rebel Bookseller. “Look, the
Journal’s book reporter talked with me in January and he’s assembled all this quantitative research confirming my book’s central thesis. Superstores are hurting book sales growth.”
Dick wasn’t very surprised, or aroused.
In fact, industry people--longtimers, insiders--none of them were surprised or aroused by me, by
Rebel Bookseller, or by the conclusions in
The Wall Street Journal. They liked Barnes & Noble. Anyway, Barnes & Noble was a fact of life. The old publishing gang looked beaten down and past their prime.
I figured it out. Back in the day, tons of ABA show attendees were independent business people. They owned their own operations, and their presence at the show was exciting and risky for them. They’d come in from all over the country at great personal expense, and they were placing orders, getting specials deals, collecting free swag galore, scouting new opportunities, taking classes, and participating in lively roundtables. But now, in 2005, most of these BEA attendees were working for large corporations. Only a small proportion owned their own businesses--and indeed plenty of these business owners weren’t booksellers, but rather small press people who were suffering from the fact of having paid for an expensive booth only to experience the same absence of buyers for bookstores that I was dealing with myself.
I’d started the day telling anyone and everyone that they should quit their jobs and open bookstores to sell all the books everyone at this show was pitching. But by the end of the first day I was pretty tired of giving my handouts to publishing employees. No one took me seriously. They knew you should never open an independent bookstore. I was a lunatic.
A team from CSPAN-2’s show
Book TV was prowling the aisles. They stopped and asked,
“What’s your book about?”
“I tell how the chains destroyed the book-reading culture in this country, and how we can destroy the chains by working together.”
They asked, “But if the chains are so bad, why did customers choose them over other bookstores?”
“Customers didn’t decide. It was all a hoax played on Wall Street investors. Len Riggio noticed that private stores are capitalized at about five times earnings. But publicly held companies can be valued at ten or even thirty times earnings. So--if you’ve got an operation big enough to go public, and you can pitch the promise of unending sales growth, you can get access to enough capital to over-buy unsustainably on buildout and fixturing. It’s true the customers were entranced by the superstores' buildouts and fixturing. But they didn’t buy enough for all the superstores to be really profitable on a year-after-year basis. The company shares' inflated price-to-earning ratio would only hold up while the company was putting on a fancy show, building lots of new superstores every year— and that couldn’t go on forever. Bookstores aren’t a good sector to invest in, compared to other industries. Bookstore companies shouldn’t be listed on Wall Street.”
They asked, “Then why are you trying to get people to open their own bookstore if they’re not a good place to invest?”
“Because when people like me tie up our personal capital in a bookstore we realize additional intangible benefits. Our lives become more important--we sacrifice some opportunities of potential financial return on investment, but we are more satisfied with our lives as community members.”
“Any last thoughts?”
“Yes. Barnes & Noble is going down!”
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