In
previous life I worked for a trade association in the high-performance automotive
industry. I also used to speak to many a bicycle shop owner when I was writing
on the sport of bicycle racing. Both
groups of people would tell me the same
thing.
“We are enthusiasts who were forced to become businesspeople.”
One successful owner once told me, “If I knew then what I know now, I would have quit this business years ago. I was too stupid to quit. I would work twenty-four hours just to make twelve dollars.”
According to the Huffington Post, there are a lot of independent booksellers and bookstore owners out there who are experiencing the same sentiment. A decade ago the superstores, specifically Barnes & Noble and Borders, put everyone but the strong, the smart and the stupid out of business. Then e-books and self-publishing came along and put the super boys out of business, or on life support. Guess who is left? The strong, the smart and the stupid—along with a bunch of devoted readers who remain loyal to the hard copy book, and a lot of readers who got too close a look at a world without bookstores. Now they are coming back.
For the fourth year in a row membership has increased in the American bookseller association. Industry wags cite things such as younger owners taking over stores and the subsequent embrace of technology to help them market more efficiently and compete the e-books. Independents don’t have stockholders to keep happy, so they can experiment with open mic nights, readings and other promotions.
I should have seen this coming several years ago. Our critique group used to meet at Borders, but with their demise we moved to B&N. We got thrown out of there when B&N decided we took up too much floor space. “You weren’t buying enough books,” one employee told us. “Corporate said we had to make better use of the space.”
True, we didn’t buy a lot of books, but we sure spread the word that B&N threw us out. Why they didn’t see that one coming, I’ll never know.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Photo by Ian Muttoo from Mississauga, Canada (BOOKS Uploaded by Skeezix1000) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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