Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
FutureBookStore by glecharles
“The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.”
–Andrew Ross
Opening a bookstore one day has been at the top of my Dream Job / Do What You Love short-list for years, and despite it sometimes seeming about as practical as wanting to become a blacksmith or full-time poet, I haven’t given up hope.
Yet.
I’m a firm believer that independent bookstores are not only critical to the viability of the publishing industry, but also to the cultural and economic fabric of local communities. I’m not anti-Barnes & Noble or Amazon (though I DO hate Wal-Mart on general principle) because I think they serve a more general audience than the independent bookseller can or should attempt to. Indies are Peter Luger’s to B&N’s 7/11, if you will — quality over quantity; curation over commodity.
BUT, I think making that the central pitch of why independent bookstores are important is lame, whiny and stinks of entitlement.
No indie bookseller is going to be able to compete with Amazon or Barnes & Noble on price, selection or ecommerce — IndieBound is well-intentioned but doesn’t even come close to being enough — but they are much better-suited for engaging with their customers, offline and on, than either behemoth.
In preparing for next week’s webinar, Indie Booksellers and the Digital Transition: Opportunity Knocks?, I’ve thought about the bookstores I like, and have been looking for good examples of any that are leveraging the Internet to complement their physical presence, and beyond some solid blogs, haven’t found much of note.
While a blog is a nice start, most tend to only represent the bookseller itself, not its customers nor its local community. And as Vroman’s discovered last week, as popular as Twitter is in the publishing industry, it probably isn’t the ideal forum to reach a local audience of book buyers.
Despite the lip service paid to the importance of independent bookstores to local communities, though, I’ve yet to find any real sense of community on any bookseller’s site. Most are extremely self-centered, either focusing solely on ecommerce; following the personal branding model of social MEdia gurus; or worse, the sad equivalent of a Yellow Pages listing.
When it’s so much easier to go online to Amazon.com and shop, read and write reviews, and even to browse — what can the independent bookseller possibly offer to get me to spend my time and money on their websites and in their stores?
About Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Guy LeCharles Gonzalez works in publishing by day, world domination by night. Over the years he’s lived in Staten Island and South Beach Miami; served in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, US Army, and Dennis Kucinich’s ‘04 Presidential Campaign; won poetry slams, founded a reading series, co-authored a book of poetry, and self-published another; prefers Pumpkin and India Pale Ales, Buffalo Trace and Four Roses Bourbons, and Dona Paula Shiraz Malbec. He’s a devout Mets fan from the Bronx now living in New Jersey, and has a beautiful wife and two amazing kids.
44 Responses to Indie Bookstores. So What?
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A substitute, no. But Twitter can serve locally just fine. Folks use it here to report and monitor neighborhood crime, for example. A bookseller who reported that “the special-order copy of The Whale just came in” or “we've sold out of Finch” (as perhaps weak examples) isn't just informing individual customers, but is curating at the same time, showing off what's popular and order-worthy, to an extent.
We have a local record store that uses its Twitter feed to characterize itself and report on in-store events, and it does a good job of reminding us that the store is there and why we should be glad to have it.
Also, I guess I'd argue that if a store is going to be a physical space (since that's a choice), it should take advantage of that space to be somewhere you want to be in, either as a third place (which B&N, etc., pursue) or as an event space. But events worth Twittering don't have to be big — they can be great conversations, new pots of hot cider, or anything else that makes you wish you were a regular. Maybe.
Good examples, Will. The combination of third place and virtual community are the sweet spot, and I'm still looking for any examples of booksellers doing it well.
Mind sharing the the Twitter feeds of the bookseller and record store you referenced?
I should say “who reports” rather than “who reported,” as the bookseller I'm talking about doesn't exist. Not locally. I wish they did.
The record store, though, is @CriminalRecords.
Skylight books in Los Angeles has a friendly community-oriented website and sense of its presence.
http://www.powells.com
http://www.powells.com/blog
http://www.facebook.com/powellsbooks
http://www.twitter.com/powells
Word just unveiled a new Web site a few weeks ago to correspond with its new e-commerce. I think it's very user-friendly, though if you want to see more community engagement, scroll down to the basketball for an explanation of its literary league. The events, which are described in detail on the blog and on Facebook, are also community focused: this weekend the store hosted a gift-wrapping open house with authors whereby customers could wrap the books they just bought and had signed.
I'll have to talk to you offline regarding a clarification of what you're looking for on an independent business's Web site. I actually think it's good for indies' sites to be self-centered, since they by definition reflect their community. Regardless, the kind of customer service one gets — having someone sincerely welcome you, remembering your name, asking how your family's doing, and providing personalized recommendations — can't be replicated on the Internet.
http://www.powells.com
http://www.powells.com/blog
http://www.facebook.com/powellsbooks
http://www.twitter.com/powells
Skylight Books sounds like a great physical space; their site is solid and gets some of their personality across, though I wish their blog and Facebook page were better integrated to increase the engagement opportunities.
Yet another site that doesn't allow reviews, too.
http://www.skylightbooks.com/
http://www.skylightbooks.blogspot.com/
NOTE: They're Twitter link at the bottom of their blog is broken; it has an extra http in it.
Thanks!
I like WORD's new site a lot, and am impressed by what they've done on top of IndieBound's framework. I like that they have both their Twitter feed and Facebook page incorporated, and wish their blog was integrated, too. The inability to review books is a continuing disappointment, though.
By “self-centered”, I mean most sites lack any overt connection to their community — I'd love to see the equivalent of the in-store bulletin board where meetings and services are promoted; news about hyper-local issues of interest to residents, like school board meetings, city council votes, etc. There's the belief that indie bookstores should be one the hubs of a community, and some pull that off in the physical space, but I've yet to see any do it online.
The picture I used with this post includes a copy of my town's local paper in it for a reason.
Powell's is the most common example given of an indie doing well online, and they're a very good one, but many would argue that they're much closer to Amazon than they are to the average indie bookseller; more aspirational than practical.
How about Farley's Bookshop in New Hope, PA? (No personal connection, no longer even live in the area, but the store has always been one of my favorites, and their site looks good for community purposes, too… albeit not a lot of avenues for communicating TO them.)
Whoops — their store is here:
http://www.farleysbookshop.com/NASApp/store/Ind…
An author's presence on Twitter can help, too. I was standing in DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis last summer when Neil Gaiman twittered that he'd just finished signing a bunch of his books there. Within half an hour, someone comes in looking for signed Neil Gaiman books, having seen Neil's tweet. (The guy bought half a dozen, IIRC.)
Mind you, not all authors are as popular as Neil Gaiman, who has more followers on Twitter than @TheLordAlmighty (though not as many as, say, Sockington the cat). And not every indie bookstore can boast the sort of relationship that Neil has with DreamHaven. But it can't hurt to use all the tools available.
An author's presence on Twitter can help, too. I was standing in DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis last summer when Neil Gaiman twittered that he'd just finished signing a bunch of his books there. Within half an hour, someone comes in looking for signed Neil Gaiman books, having seen Neil's tweet. (The guy bought half a dozen, IIRC.)
Mind you, not all authors are as popular as Neil Gaiman, who has more followers on Twitter than @TheLordAlmighty (though not as many as, say, Sockington the cat). And not every indie bookstore can boast the sort of relationship that Neil has with DreamHaven. But it can't hurt to use all the tools available.
[...] Indie Bookstores. So What? | Guy LeCharles Gonzalez [...]
Guy, it's not just bookstores – I'm getting increasingly sick of a number of people on twitter whose attitude seems to be “I'm Indie, I deserve it”. I'm sorry, being Indie doesn't mean you deserve a thing. What matters is whether you're good. It just so happens that to be good in certain ways it helps if you're Indie. non-commercial experimental lit fic for example, or boundary-pushing ezines.
And you've put your finger on it with bookstores – expertise and knowledge (the kind of knowledge that doesn't just come from a cookie-based algorithm but from empathy, conversation, and a shared passion). I want to give a shout out to two places.
First up, the Albion Beatnik in Oxford – it's a shop that specialises in books about jazz and Beat Poetry.
Second, what promises to be a great new venture, To @Hell With Books in Woburn Walk, London
http://www.tohellwithpublishing.com/to-hell-wit…
- opening tomorrow. It's set up by the guys from To Hell With Publishing (see @tohellwithemma on twitter), who specialise in first novelists directly subbing literary fiction. The shop will be devoted to literary fiction, special editions, journals, novellas, and chapbooks – a shop to get SERIOOUSLY excited about.
Bodega as in Spanish wine house? I expect expert attention. Interestigly, I was thinking about bodegas earlier this week and just how extraordinary they can be after mentioning Frank Gehry on the “voice” post. Gehry designed the new bodega for Marues de Riscal, of course. Hmm, and Thomas Heatherwick (guy who designed the public art “The B of the Bang”) designed a store in NY for Longchamp – wouldn't it be cool to have a bookstore that was a design landmark?
LOL! No, bodega as in the corner store. Utilitarian, much less glamorous, though in some neighborhoods, they actually double as community hubs.
I like their local emphasis with pages on authors, books, and other businesses of interest, but the site design isn't very good and there's zero engagement happening there. Oddly, they DO have a blog, Facebook page and Twitter account, but you wouldn't know it from their website.
PS: I've copied your link here and deleted the second comment, and included their other links:
http://www.farleysbookshop.com/NASApp/store/Ind…
http://farleysbookshop.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Hope-PA/Farle…
http://twitter.com/Farleys
I saw the announcement of the To Hell With Books shop a week or two back and was intrigued. I vaguely recall one of the NYC indies had something similar in the 90s — Soft Skull or Akashic? — and it was a very curated selection.