Indie bookstores redux

a quick update and response to last week's newsletter

Last week’s newsletter led to lots of comments and debates, so I took down the subscribers paywall. If you want to follow this week’s newsletter, probably best to read that post before this one.

In response, and privately, many people wrote to me expressing frustrations with indie bookstores who don’t carry the types of books they read, and some felt their reluctance to stock more horror, manga, sci-fi, etc. was elitist.

Other independent publishers — my cohort—commented on my points about many indies stocking primarily Big 4/5 titles, becoming corporate storefronts of a sort, and often displaying the same 25-30 ‘buzzy’ big 4/5 titles each season, rendering them not that dissimilar from each other.

Indie booksellers I heard from agreed they rely heavily on corporate publishers; however, they were vocal in denying they depress prices. In my example, I said sales representatives tell me too high a sticker price discourages indies from ordering our books, and thus (sometimes) they r…