I’m starting this letter on National Cheese Doodle Day. A day for cheese doodles. People love to rib on Infinite Jest but it sure got the idea of subsidized time right, or a version of it. Each day feels connected to some object or emotion, on top of the historical moment it represents.
In addition to being Women’s History Month, March is also Independent Press Month in the bookselling community, or Small Press Month. I found this out when my boss asked if I wanted to do something special with a display I curate to spotlight independent publishers at the bookstore. She’d received an email from a book industry community-building organization and wondered if I’d take a look and decide if it seemed like a fit for the store. The organization was promoting Indie Press Month and inviting bookstores to join in the fun. There were prizes bookstores could compete to win, which of course meant guidelines. Suggested hashtags. Assets to use on social media. One caveat in particular left me scratching my head: a percentage of the books on display had to come from a list of titles this organization had chosen.
It was a very “So that’s how the soy chorizo gets made?” moment for me. I was confused: Aren’t we an independent bookstore? Don’t we pride ourselves on our curation? I looked at the organization’s website. Many indie presses I admire are members, but a few notables were missing. When I checked the list of titles we were supposed to include in our display, several were titles we stock, several seemed like a fit for the store, but not enough to meet the required display percentage. (The math on this is I typically pull 10-25 titles for the Read Indies display. I’d have needed 4-10 titles from this list. Four to six was doable. Eight would have been stretching it for my best guess about what would sell in my community. Bookseller math can be a bummer sometimes, friends.) My sense was that adhering to a list misses the point of the shop’s painstaking, bespoke curation. So we passed on this version of celebrating Indie Press Month.
One thing I’ve found helpful about my adventures in bookselling is accumulating kernels of knowledge that offer glimpses of how things work, how things are. At the same time though, any new bit of info also reveals to me how utterly mystifying this industry remains. How much we can’t possibly predict or game. Publishing is a machine. Bookselling is a machine. (Both are probably many machines if you break each down even further: majors and indies, corporates and indies.) Sometimes I despair over this knowledge. Other times, I find it freeing. Separating art from machine is a free pass to do what I like with my writing, and figure out the rest later.
So I did what I do every month. When March began, I refreshed the Read Indies shelves, a project I asked to take on when I started working at the store in 2021. The idea was that I’d rotate the publisher each month, drawing attention to independent presses, their books and authors. The same way I may finish a book on a Sunday and write a shelf-talker for it on a Monday. Part of my job is to suggest books people might want to read. Part of my job is being like, Look at this.
The mission is part personal—I’m an indie press author. I edited for an indie press for eight years. And while I don’t have hard stats, I know indies publish a significant number of the books I read.
Then there’s this: emerging from my second Ithaca winter ten years ago, I shuffled around town, trying to find a venue to host a reading series I’d dreamed up. My first meeting was pretty discouraging. When I shared my vision for a series devoted to independently published authors, the person I was talking with said that indies always made them think of “crappy DIY” books. I used to (lol, maybe still do?) carry a chip on my shoulder about this interaction. When my generous mind prevails though, I think this person just didn’t know.
When I swap out the indie press display each month, it feels meaningful to me. It makes me feel like it’s possible to broaden a reader’s ideas about who makes books and how they make them and the writing that exists beyond the arm of major publishing.
Isn’t it part of why we read? To make the world more expansive. By definition, independent publishers are imprints not beholden to a corporation. The card I made for the display says something like: “independent publishers prioritize vision and voice over profit.” Maybe that’s a bit too impassioned—and perhaps it overlooks the reality that everyone has to eat and books require colossal resources to publish—but this idea of a distinct vision is what sets indies apart from majors for me. Each indie brings a very specific something to the shelf in its mission and flavor.
The longer I sell books the more I think about all the ways people read, and the less I think of how I wish people would read. I’ve grown a deeper appreciation for the fact that all kinds of readership means all kinds of authorship.
It’s my job to be able to pull a book for any reader who walks through the door. Yet it’s not my job to slouch home pondering why someone who came in asking for my most recent favorite read plus that book they saw on TikTok left the Gina rec and bought the TikTok book. It’s not my job to have a critical opinion on a buzzy romantasy series that people already recognize. I need to know the synopses and who might like to read these series, sure. Beyond that though, these books don’t need much beyond me telling the customer I hope they enjoy reading their spicy sword book out in the sun. And I do want them to enjoy the book. I want them to enjoy reading.
It’s not my job to make people read like me. I just want to be a bridge between someone’s existing taste and where they want to go next. If I can heighten the awareness of the options, all the better.
It’s become a quiet mission that isn’t so quiet now, I suppose: devoting downtime on the clock to highlighting books I believe in, books readers may miss in the self-perpetuating feeds that cater to their personal tastes.
It’s something I do too; I’m just as susceptible to reading deeper into my echo chambers. A kind of “I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip-flops, so I bought army pants and flip-flops”…except for me it’s like, “I saw so-and-so’s NYRB sale haul, so I shopped the NYRB sale.”
If a bookstore is a space where a reader may seek out a recommendation, I like to channel their attention where they may not know to look. How nice when someone comes up to the counter with an Elena Ferrante book, like, “I didn’t know she was published on an indie press!” How nice when I get to learn too, shelving a stack of books from an imprint a coworker discovered. Among my favorite moments at the store are the encounters when I get to be like, “Isn’t that so cool?!” The occasions when I feel like it’s possible to shift the sense of how things are.
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