Thursday, August 14, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

The Literary Issue: Fear and loathing in a chain bookstore

By Mike Prevatt

On June 21 of this year, I may have been the only unhappy bookseller in the world. While my retail and reading peers the world 'round were rubbing their hands together in glee for the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I was counting down the days where I'd never have to speak or hear Harry Potter's name again.

You see, the entire publishing industry was banking on the product affectionately referred to by booksellers as "HP5" to be a blockbuster. Book sales have been weak for some time--thanks to a downtrodden economy, a highly competitive industry that also includes e-commerce sites and independent businesses, and the popularity of other personal entertainments such as the Internet, DVD and video games--and HP5 was seen as not only a cash cow for a business desperately needing one, but a lure into bookstores where thousands of other titles were also available. As a result, the first five and a half months of the year were one big marketing build-up to HP5's release.

I worked for a bookstore chain from last fall to just shortly after HP5's release, as a way of supplementing my freelance journalism income. I worked four years at my college's general bookstore, where I enthusiastically offered under-the-radar recommendations without worrying about becoming a car salesman in the process. I figured my new position at the local mall's bookstore would be more of the same.

Wrong. Before I was even officially hired, I got my first whiff of just how foul the state of affairs for chain bookstores had become. No longer was looking out for the customer job one--you must look out for the company. It's more than just art vs. commerce--it's a soul-sucking job that reveals the homogeneity and desperation of the corporations that own these national chains.

Bookstores are no longer places of discovery, where one might sit down and read a whole book during an afternoon visit, and buy another one for home. They are retail outlets that now specialize in selling novelties other than books. They've got every Sue Grafton book ever published, but books like Greil Marcus' Mystery Train or James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake are returned to the publisher if they don't happen to sell regularly. Their booksellers must sell discount cards to encourage customer loyalty; if not enough cards are sold, employees are fired. And, predictably, these stores worship the bottom line, using tawdry marketing practices that hype the obvious (Danielle Steele, Stephen King, John Grisham) and undermine "quality" titles--underdogs that can become word of mouth sensations, the ideal blockbusters of any business (see Yann Martel's The Life of Pi or Noam Chomsky's 9-11).

My specialty as a bookseller has always been promoting such underdogs--cult favorites, new authors, alternative genres, critics' picks, controversial titles--to customers seeking something new. I eschew the bestseller namedropping, and instead hock books by William Gibson, J.T. Leroy, Joyce Carol Oates, Cornel West and Arianna Huffington.

I got away with this because for one, my store manager actually trusted me, and two, the rest of the store shoved the bestsellers and famous authors down patrons' throats. The latter phenomenon was manifested most once the reservation campaign for HP5 began, where every customer was reminded about it, eating into the cashiering time I might've used to recommend, say, Philip Roth.

And then there's Dan Brown's mega-hit, The Da Vinci Code. Before the book was even street dated, or released, we booksellers were constantly reminded of this supposedly amazing book, and how we needed to push it and make it huge. Once it came out, it got preferential placement in several different parts of the store--the front table, the new hardback wall, the "recommendation" shelf above the store's bestsellers, the front window display, the fiction section and the mystery section. (These practices were actually mirrored in our competitors' stores, as well, also before the book had attained any sales momentum.)

During its first week of release, the district manager--a man who only sees numbers in a business built on words--would ask for Code's daily sales figures. I could understand these same tactics for Harry Potter, but not for a lesser-known author like Dan Brown. I suspected publisher payola, as the same thing happened to Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada. Had these books not been so aggressively and shadily hyped by bookstores such as mine, they would have never been huge bestsellers.

As a result, I refused to recommend Code (or Prada) if I could help it, nor would I read it myself. I had also adopted the same principle with the Harry Potter books, and though it earned me eye-rolls and disapproving looks from some of the staff, I was encouraging enough people to buy books they couldn't find in supermarkets.

Even that task proved difficult, as the average mall bookstore shopper isn't looking for Dave Eggers or Barbara Ehrenreich, but Nora Roberts and Michael Connelly--two hack and suspiciously prolific writers also hyper-marketed because they appeal to the same people who follow cheesy soap operas, prefer dumbed-down Hollywood movies, and listen to AOR dogshit like Josh Groban and Céline Dion.

This was a personal dilemma to me. As a critic, I was to weed out the garbage and inform people about thoughtful, compelling and innovative works. As a bookseller, though, I was expected to peddle the former--which, ironically, was usually discounted anyway--and perhaps up-sell, or additionally suggest, the latter, unless the customer expressed discernible tastes. You won't be shocked to learn the same person who just came from the Gap wasn't usually looking for books by the Dalai Lama or Salman Rushdie.

As the release of HP5 neared, I became more and more sickened working for the store--literally. One Sunday, I called in sick, as I was fighting a bad cold. With no one to work my shift, I was forced to work anyway. Two days later, the manager had my resignation.

I worked for a few more weeks, including HP5 weekend. I suppose I can always say I was a part of the biggest day in publishing history--that is, until HP6 is released. I think I'll spend that day in the library.