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Saturday, July 4th, 2009
6:35 pm	Warning to New Bookstore Owners: Embezzlement is Real Amazingly I am now in contact with two readers of Rebel Bookseller who are in the process of opening new bookstores. When I think about the various risks and dangers they will be facing, I remember the chapter I cut from R.B. on the subject of internal theft. The idea of publishing this chapter made me queasy because it seems to imply that your employees are people you should be suspecting of wishing you harm. I didn't want that message in R.B. But -- I do think that bookstore owners need to be warned to keep an eye out for this kind of thing, because it does happen to so many owners. So, here's the chapter on Embezzlement (written in mid-2002). Good Luck, Andy Chapter 21 – Embezzling Andy Backroom On Monday, August 4th, 1998 I was visiting Rochester with Sam and Sarah when my Mom called me to the phone. It was Chris, in Chicago. “We’ve been robbed.” “When? Was there a gun? Is everyone OK?” “Nobody saw it happen – someone got into the back room and took Sunday’s deposit from the safe.” This was really bad news – Summer weekends were very busy. “How much did they get?” She hesitated. “It was about a $4000 day. I’d picked up Friday and Saturday when I was working there yesterday, but I didn’t work last night and I didn’t make it back down today. I’m sorry – I meant to go, but there were four people staffed already so I knew they didn’t really need me.” “OK – wait a minute. Half that money must have been in charges, right? So that’s all right anyway – we’ll get that money electronically. Probably they got $2000 in cash and a couple of hundred dollars worth of checks or something. The main thing is the staff is OK. We’ve got to make it clear to them that we don’t suspect them – that’s what will be freaking them out right now. When did it happen?” She said, “About half an hour ago.” It was early evening in Rochester – so the theft had happened about 5pm in Chicago. “What? So we had four people there and someone ran a back-room theft right when the museum was closing, and none of our people saw it?” “I know. They can’t figure it out. Jen said she had just gone to the bathroom, and when she came back she stopped in the office and the safe door was open – the register reads were on the ground.” There wasn’t anything we could do. “Did they file a police report?” “Nikki called security, and the police came over. So, yes. Oh, they also took Leslie’s wallet out of her purse. She’s kind of upset.” Leslie was the daughter of Alice Gueno, one of our Sunday crew who’d been an independent bookseller herself -- her store Adventures In Reading had closed a few years before. Since Leslie was a teenager, I thought she must not have had too much in the purse. But it would still have been upsetting. “Well, don’t worry about it. I’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll try to sort through things then. Can you go down tonight and pick up the deposit right when we close, though?” Detectives We returned on the plane next morning. I felt helpless – when I talked with the staff they had no more information than what they’d told Chris. The theft was impossible. Nikki said, “You should talk with Don. He knows an awful lot about this sort of thing.” Don Bennett was Nikki Buckman’s boyfriend. He was a well-known, outstanding jazz pianist – a musician’s musician, like Jimmy Rowles or Howard Levy. But he was making his living now as an expert in Security. Don and Nikki had lived together in Amsterdam for a couple of years. Nikki had given up her decades-long career as a leading bookstore manager – most recently she’d been running the huge new Borders Books & Music in Deerfield -- to help Don jump-start his jazz career in Europe. They hadn’t been able to make enough money for both of them to stay in Europe though – so she’d come back to Chicago back in 1996, which was the first time she’d worked for us. She’d been one of the managers who hadn’t survived our first year of arguments and infighting, but I’d hired her back in 1998. Don had followed her back, and was once again working Security jobs -- playing jazz in nightclubs on the side. “What do you think Don could tell me that you already haven’t?” “I don’t know – but he has a really good eye. You’ve got to talk with him about this.” I agreed, and Nikki arranged for Don to come over on Thursday. The first thing Don said when he looked into our tiny back room and considered the concealed location of the safe was, “This was an inside job.” “What are you talking about? Even if one of my people did it, why would they have stolen this money in this way? They could have easily done it more discretely.” Don was walking back and forth. “Look at where that safe is. Tucked underneath the table – no one who didn’t know it was there would even see it. How did they open it?” I was sheepish. “The lock was broken. It’s been broken for a year. I never fixed it because when you close the safe door it sort of seals like a vacuum – so you’d have to know the lock was broken to even try to pry the door open.” He was staring at me. “Andy, you better buy a new safe, right?” “Yeah, OK.” “Well – so whoever stole the money knew to pry the door open, right?” I could see he was right. It had to be someone who knew not only the location of the safe, but also that you wouldn’t have to fiddle around with a combination. Just a quick in and out. “Say – why don’t you just look at the video?” He was staring up at the video camera above the front gate. “That’s not our camera – it’s part of the museum’s system.” “Well – look at the tape.” I said, “I’m not even sure it’s hooked up. Chris did get a tour of their security system back in 1995 – and they said back then that it worked – but I’ve never even been up there. Do you really think it works?” “Does your staff think it works?” he asked. I considered this. “No. I think I’ve told everyone that I think it’s just a dummy camera.” “Andy, go and find out if it’s hooked up. It looks live to me.” I called upstairs to the museum’s building supervisor. “Hey, Ron, we’ve had a robbery a few days ago – I was wondering if the video camera in our store would have maybe captured it.” “Sure thing, Andy. What day was it? When would you like to look?” I was startled. “So – you have it?” “Yeah, sure. When did it happen?” “Monday the 4th – right around 5 o’clock, just when the museum was closing.” Since Nikki was working the register, I thanked Don and went right upstairs. Ron had tapes going back a long way – he found the right tape, and popped it into a VCR player. There were video cameras for lots of different areas of the museum – and the tape alternated among the various cameras. There was our store – running in a quadrant of the screen alongside three other areas of the museum – hallways, the admissions desk, back rooms. Then every couple of minutes the screen jumped to four other areas, then back to the screen with our store. I fast-forwarded and backtracked the tape for quite a while – there was a clock-timer along the bottom of the screen, so I could see which scenes corresponded with what time of day. It was a strange movie – no plot really – just people drifting around through the field of view of the camera. The wide angle made it possible to see most of the store, but everyone looked very small. As I watched the same footage over and over though, I gradually understood that this teeny person was browsing this section, and this teeny person was Leslie and that one was Rebecca, and that one was Nikki, and that one was Jen. I saw that Leslie had gone into the back room and then left the store, exiting underneath the camera mounted high above the front gate. Then, Jen had left, going up into the museum – I picked her up on a museum hallway camera. She’d gone to the bathroom inside the museum. Right at about 5, only Rebecca and Nikki had been in the store. They were both behind the cash register. There was a guy and his wife and their two children at the register – and then Rebecca had come out from behind the register and gone into the adjacent museum gallery. A case of sculptures from Oaxaca we were responsible for selling on behalf of the museum was in that gallery. The man went with her. He seemed to be trying to decide which sculpture to buy. His wife was talking with Nikki at the register. I kept rewinding the tape and looking at it over and over, trying to construct a plotline. OK – only two employees in the store – one’s distracted over in the gallery, another’s distracted talking with the guy’s wife. What’s happening by the office door? The door was visible. Nothing seemed to be happening there. There was a problem with the tape – the scenes with our store vanished and were replaced with the alternate four scenes inside the museum during a crucial minute. I had to look more closely at the second right before the video cut out. Some kind of movement had happened then. The VCR had a freeze frame function. I kept freezing the frame at the wrong moment. But I was gradually realizing that someone was browsing at a bookcase right next to the back office door, and then in the next frame this person was gone. Then I realized that there was another person, at another bookcase on the opposite side of the office door. I found a frame where the two of them had moved from their separate locations and could be seen, in this one frame to be crowding through the office door together. Right at a moment Rebecca was selling a sculpture in the next door gallery, and Nikki was talking to the woman. At that moment, both the man and the woman were facing the office door, while both Nikki and Rebecca had their backs to the office door. I realized this had been a big operation – requiring all four of those people. And the kids – though I guessed the kids hadn’t known what was being done. Because the video cut away from our store at this moment, there was no frame of the two people coming out of the back office. But now that I knew which two teeny figures were the thieves, I started backtracking to see if I could see them enter the store. I found this – they appeared right underneath the camera, together, veered rapidly together all the way behind the cash desk, around to the back of the store, positioned themselves on either side of the office door, and then went in. Now I fast-forwarded to the point where the video came back to our store. A few seconds afterward, two people came back around that same far side of the cash desk, and exited directly beneath the video camera. Their faces were fully visible. They were both wearing bulging fanny packs. A woman and a man. I knew the woman. She was my former bookkeeper’s sister in law. Motive My bookkeeper had embezzled $22,000 during the Summer of 1997. I had been working so much and so hard that when strange things started happening with our bank account I hadn’t taken the time to figure them out. Our bank statements had started looking messed up. I’d asked the bookkeeper about this, and she’d come up with all sorts of odd ideas – bank policy changes, perhaps? I’d come up with some of my own explanations. Perhaps the bank was now crediting checks and cash as separate discrete deposits on our statements? It wasn’t until October – when a huge tax check had bounced -- that I had actually taken the time to gather up the paperwork at the office on Armitage, and figure out what had happened. The bookkeeper had been taking cash all Summer, and making false entries into the computer bookkeeping system. She knew I wasn’t keeping up with reconciling the bank statements, but was relying for my information on our internal systems. When I figured out what had happened, I called our lawyer, who walked me through the steps I needed to take to avoid being sued by her – which was the main risk. Being charged with slander if I couldn’t prove what had happened. Chris and I did a meeting with the bookkeeper where she’d told us she was just borrowing. My analysis of the pattern of her theft had indeed shown that she’d taken $35,000 by the end of August, but had actually returned $13,000 during September – so her “borrowing” explanation showed that she had been lying to herself about what she was really doing. She requested that we allow her to use her salary earnings over the next four years to pay us back. Luckily this was impossible for us even to discuss because we were under supervision by the Small Business Administration. Making such a loan to an employee would have violated the terms of our SBA Loan. We had refused. She’d signed a confession, and agreed to a rapid payback schedule. She’d defaulted, and we’d gone to the police in December. The State’s Attorney had gotten a Felony Conviction against her, and she was put on probation, sentenced to pay us back. I’d spoken with her probation officer who’d assured me that we’d get the money back, even if it took ten years. August 1st was the date for her first payment. Clearly the backroom theft by her family – I’d realized the fat man and woman were also her relatives – I’d met the whole family two years before at a Christmas party at her apartment – was in retaliation for the conviction. Jen and Nikki had both told me they’d received phone calls from the bookkeeper out of the blue in which she’d told them I’d fired her without cause – she’d told them I’d gotten angry at her for a buying decision she’d made. Similarly she must have lied to her family about her theft and her conviction, and brought them into this back-room robbery scheme to attack me. The man had even, for the sculpture purchase that he made while keeping Rebecca busy, chosen a Wasp. To symbolize Stinging, of course. And, a few days later, the post office had called Leslie – her wallet had been tossed into a mailbox, intact – even with the money in it. Pure revenge against me was the only motive. They’d actually made an effort not to hurt Leslie. It was probably the Man who’d been with the Sister-In-Law who’d taken Leslie’s wallet out of instinct. He would have just been some professional small-time sleazeball brought in to help out on the big heist. I brought the police up to Ron’s VCR in the museum’s back room and showed them the tape. They said they couldn’t make a still photo from it, because they didn’t have the right equipment – so I found a video outfit that could. I brought the still photos -- clearly showing the Sister-In-Law’s face -- to the police detective I’d been assigned. I visited him repeatedly over a period of months. He found a number of people with her name – a common name -- but none of them seemed like the right person to me. The buyer of the Wasp had left his name and address to have the Wasp shipped to him, but his direct involvement was clearly harder to demonstrate – I didn’t want to try going after him. Finally, I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with my bookkeeper’s probation officer – she knew I was looking for a lead to this Sister-in-Law woman. My bookkeeper had casually mentioned to the probation officer the name of her brother’s sports bar. I told the detective, and he drove out there, and left his card. But the probation officer had also told me something that led me to abandon the inquiry and prosecution. If we followed up any further, and if this went to court, my bookkeeper would definitely be found in violation of her probation agreement. She would absolutely go to jail for ten years. The probation officer pointed out that in this case, my bookkeeper wouldn’t be able to pay me back. And, while I found my bookkeeper’s actions to be reprehensible, I didn’t want her in jail for ten years. In addition, I felt some responsibility for the embezzlement because I really hadn’t been paying close enough attention to her activity in the Summer of 1997. I’d first noticed peculiarities in the bank statement in May, and hadn’t acted until October. If I’d intervened earlier, the bookkeeper wouldn’t have had an opportunity to steal during the extremely busy months of July and August. Also, 1997 had been an extremely good year for us, and I’d taken the theft as a tax loss. If I’d actually pocketed the amount she stole as profit, I would have had to pay 43% of it in Federal and State taxes. So – it wasn’t as large a loss to me as it looked. The cash loss from the back-room theft in August of 1998 was $3,000. The bookkeeper was supposed to be repaying me at the rate of $500 per month. If the probation officer kept her at that schedule – the cash impact wouldn’t be too bad for the year. I understood she’d been trying to save face with her family. I didn’t want the whole family dragged down because my bookkeeper had lied to them about her embezzlement. Who knows what she’d told them? Surely something like I’d stolen money and made her take the blame and she’d selflessly done so. I was really extremely fortunate she’d left such an elaborate paper trail of her theft. I’m sure the State’s Attorney wouldn’t have gotten the conviction if there hadn’t been so much, clear, elaborate documentation, assembled by her, while she was taking the money. Bank deposit slips, hand-written records, bank records, computer records. As I write this – it’s only four and a half years since the backroom theft. The statute of limitations runs out after six years. We received two checks from the bookkeeper for $500 total last month. She’s got about $8,000 of the original $22,000 left to repay. I’m not going to go after this close-knit, perverse family for conspiracy and theft. Belief in money does strange things to people – and to our society. I’m part of this picture. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
11:19 pm	Bill Ayers And Me There's a smear campaign targeting Barack Obama by attempting to link him with the "terrorist" Bill Ayers. But the real smear is against Bill himself. Since I've known Bill for 17 years, and since he encouraged me to write "Rebel Bookseller" and gave me editorial advice, I thought I would post this piece, below. It's a chapter that I cut from the final book. It tells the story of Bill's appearance at the bookstore of my bookselling hero, David Schwartz, in Milwaukee, a week after the 9/11 attacks. 9-11 In mid-September 2001 Chris and I drove to Milwaukee to see David Schwartz and Carol Grossmeyer again – to provide moral support against the terrified media and citizenry who were demanding that the Harry W. Schwartz bookstore cancel its author autographing event for Bill Ayers. Bill had the misfortune of receiving a full-page hatchet-job review of his memoir, “Fugitive Days” printed in the New York Times on September 11th – the very morning of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The Times reporter had taken passages from his book completely out of context to try to show Bill was still a violent revolutionary bent on bombing government buildings – when in fact what Bill had written were energetic statements opposed to the U.S. bombing of Vietnam, striving to recapture the emotion and flavor of the 60s antiwar movement. While Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn had in fact been the leaders of the Weather Underground movement in the early 70s, they had both long-since turned to mainstream social activism. I’d known Bill for ten years as Distinguished Professor of Education at University of Illinois. He’d brought his graduate students to The Children’s Bookstore and The Children’s Museum Store every year so I could talk with them about the history of children’s literature, and advise them on using books with groups of children. When I opened the New York Times to the article about Bill, on September 11th, I immediately recognized the reporter had misrepresented him because I’d experienced this sort of misrepresentation myself in the New York Times several years before – as had a number of my friends. That Times reporter had called me to “find out” my opinion of bibliotherapy books – that is, didactic books written specifically for use by children’s therapists. I’d made it quite clear that I thought high-quality children’s literature written by excellent authors was more appropriate for helping children cope with their fears and worries. But the reporter hadn’t been satisfied with this response – I could tell that I hadn’t said what she wanted me to say for her article. She’d pressed me repeatedly on whether I thought bibliotherapy books had any merit at all. I’d finally conceded that they weren’t all that bad, and might have some merits. When the article had actually appeared in the Times I was dismayed to see that I’d been “quoted” in a way suggesting I endorsed bibliotherapy books as useful and good. What’s more, four other people in the children’s book field were also “quoted” in the article – and they just happened to all be people I knew pretty well. None of the “quotes” sounded at all like things that these friends of mine believed! The negative coverage Bill received in the Times caused a stunning and disgusting backlash against him – it was as if, in the absence of anyone to blame locally for the September 11th attacks, the media decided that Bill would be the ideal whipping boy. Newspaper editorials and radio commentary excoriated him. Clearly none of the reporters had even bothered to read his thoughtful reflection on the origin, nature and long-term meaning of his and his friends’ frantic and passionate efforts to end the Vietnam War. Now this backlash against Bill was threatening David Schwartz. We’d heard there was a street protest planned, designed to stop David from hosting Bill’s author event. Although we’d already attended Bill’s presentation at Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago, we decided a second helping would be just fine – and certainly it seemed that David and Carol might need as many pro-Free-Speech bodies in attendance as they could get. We arrived at 7pm – a few minutes before Bill’s event started. David told us he’d received dozens of angry calls and radio commentators were demanding a boycott of his stores. He was being accused of being a profiteer – only out to make money by selling Bill’s book! There was no street protest, thank goodness, and the sixty people who came to the event had ALL, just like us, come in support of David’s decision not to back down in the face of the angry Bill-banners. As a prelude to Bill’s reading, David gave an impassioned defense of the importance of free speech in a democratic society. He said that even though he personally had worked against the Vietnam War, he’d been opposed to the actions of the Weather Underground, and had never met Bill Ayers before. But even so, no matter what Bill might have done or written, he stood by every author’s right to speak, and would never bow to demands that he cancel a duly scheduled and publicized author autograph event merely because the author had suddenly become unpopular. He was especially upset at being called a profiteer, emphasizing the challenge his stores had been facing down during the super-storing of Milwaukee, and stating that he’d never brought more than 2% of the gross to the bottom line as net profit. Bill’s talk focused initially on clarifying exactly how the New York Times had misquoted and misrepresented him. The article had led with a quote from Bill’s book about how from a distance, a bomber aircraft releasing a bomb over the jungle in Vietnam appeared graceful and elegant – and that only by really seeing the effect of the bomb could the horrific reality be understood. But the reporter had made it seem as if Bill thought bombs were beautiful – and had straightforwardly implied that Bill was now in favor of bombing things. As I’ve said before, the media needs nice clear stories to tell. In choosing to give major coverage to Bill Ayers in 2001, the Times had decided to demonize him. When he turned out to be not a demon, but a brilliant, courageous social activist who is dedicating his life to helping young people become highly motivated and effective teachers in urban public schools – the Times just went ahead and made up its own demon. And the readers believed. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
1:11 pm	The whole truth and nothing but Here's an early draft of a chapter that all my friends told me I'd better not publish!  But, what's the internet for??  This is a picture of me at age 42 channelling me at age 25. Andy   Inversions   Despite the outward success, Chris and I were increasingly isolated personally.  While we were surrounded by new customers and new employees, we had lost our privacy.  We’d both had very small circles of long-time friends, and we had no time to see them.  Instead we spent all our time keeping up a front.    Our first newspaper interview was with Sarah Zesmer, who wrote about us for the Chicago Reader.  We were completely honest with her about the way we’d stumbled into children’s bookselling – and when she reported what we’d said in print, it looked awful.  We shaped up fast, and started telling people a story that went something like: “Take one tablespoon of Chris’s bookstore experience and one tablespoon of Andy’s children’s theatre background, and poof, The Children’s Bookstore appeared.”  Everyone loved this fairy tale.  It matched the apparent existence of the store as an entity.    I never really perceived the store as an entity.  When I looked around the space, all I saw was a million independent decisions, many of them somewhat erroneous, all of them arbitrary.  But customers were constantly asking, “Is this a chain?  Where are the other stores?”  If I said, “My wife and I own this store.”  They’d say, “You OWN this?  Did you buy it?”  If I said, “We opened it,” they’d say, “You OPENED it?  Is it a franchise?”   Every few weeks someone would ask us to tell them how to open their own children’s bookstore.  Again, we had to learn how to answer this question, since it made so much less sense that the questioners could possibly understand.  Typically, such a query came from someone who’d never even worked in a bookstore.  When we started saying, “First thing, get a job in a bookstore to see if you like working in a bookstore,” they’d say, “Oh, I don’t want to WORK in a bookstore.  I want to OWN a bookstore.”  If we’d ask why they were thinking about opening a children’s bookstore, they’d say, “I just love children’s books and I’d like to have my own store so I can just read the books all day.”   In fact, there was no time to read, once we’d opened.  The number of piddling little tasks was astonishing.  People were slobs.  You could make a swell display, and it would be a wreck in ten minutes.  You could alphabetize a section, and in a day the titles would all be subtly re-arranged.    And the PAPERWORK!  I spent the first Fall on the sales floor non-stop, while Chris and Sharon Martin, a former assistant manager of Chris’s from our B. Dalton days, worked downstairs – Chris managing staffing and systems and business operations, and Sharon recording invoices in a manual book-keeping register.  On December 31 we had over $50,000 in the bank – pretty exciting!  Somehow we imagined it was profit.    In January I happened to open a desk drawer filled with invoices.  Neatly filed.  All unpaid.  $39,000 of them.   Then we discovered that WOOPS we hadn’t filed any Sales Tax forms – and when we went back to calculate we discovered we had $12,000 in back Sales taxes.   Creditors were calling non-stop demanding money.    We brought in a professional inventory team and they discovered that WOOPS a lot of books just weren’t there.  When we started doing our own book-by-book inventory we realized that there had been THEFT.  A lot of those wonderful customers had been helping themselves while I had been recommending books to their friends.  Cassettes, science toys, baby books, stuffed animals had just walked out the door, hidden in peoples’ coats.   Of course we’d been worried about theft – but there’s only so much you can get done when you’re overwhelmed with customers.  You’ve got to sell, sell, sell, right?  Who would have thought that so MUCH would be stolen?!  It was disgusting and depressing.   (I STILL believe that Property Is Theft – mind you.  I’ve never stopped believing it.  I told you -- I’m a philosophical anarchist.  But in a store, those books don’t belong to the store operator.  They’re just a figment of the world’s economic imagination.  If I can’t pay my debt to the company that sent me those books, using the transfer of those books from my hands to yours to enact this fancy numerical footwork, I have to close the store – and then YOU LOSE A BOOKSTORE IN YOUR WORLD.  If you do not want this bookstore to exist, then fine, steal from it.  If you WANT this bookstore to exist, don’t steal from it.  You decide.)   Our plan had been for Chris and me to launch the store together, and then for me to gradually pull back out and go into children’s theatre again, or possible pursue an inter-disciplinary degree in History of Jazz and History of Religion.  I would work part-time at the store.    This clearly would not be happening.  Things were way over the top.    There was no time to reflect.  Every minute the phone was ringing.  Customers – demanding, demanding, demanding.  Look up this book to see if it’s in print.  Thanks, good bye.  How can I get in contact with an author for my school?  How much should I pay?  Oh, thanks – bye.   We had become a fantastic community resource, and we were losing a huge amount of money.  How were we supposed to make it all work?  The American Booksellers Association materials had told us what a stable bookstore was like, during normal operating circumstances.  But we were riding a runaway train.  Zena Sutherland was right – there were a lot of people who wanted the services we were offering them, and no-one wanted to PAY for those services.  They took everything they could get for free.  And even though we were selling a ton of books, the cost of processing those books, of staffing the store, and of absorbing the cost of theft, meant there was very little margin for error.    And, evidently, we were making plenty of errors.  In 1985, from September through December, we did $150,000 in business, and when we finally got our bookkeeping done for that year we figured out that our wholesale cost – including in-bound freight costs and theft, was $121,000.   That left only $29,000 for all other expenses – and we’d had a lot of staff, and then there was the cost of Chris and me, living our lives.  Shopping bags, printed bookmarks, newsletters plus postage, newspaper ads, rent, yellow pages, heat….    Terrible.   We booked a big loss.   These kinds of “business problems” or “start-up expenses” are standard, right?  Everyone has them, right?    Wrong – not us.  We weren’t business majors.  We hadn’t made this life decision in order to be wrapped up in cash flow management and budgetary fine-tuning.    That’s why people loved our store!  Because Who We Were was written all over it.  Not business people – rather, arts and culture people, with a full-scale social agenda.   I got mad at Chris.  Chris got mad at me.  We traded places.  Chris started supervising management, operations, staff, merchandising, and the sales floor.  I moved downstairs and became the business manager.  I’d gone through calculus in high school.  I hadn’t taken a math course in 8 years – but I knew I’d have an easier time swimming in the numbers than Chris had.  After all I’d been the one who’d been studying the ABA financial materials anyway, and I’d been the one who’d constructed the original financial plans two years before.        The other plus for me of moving downstairs was that I’d developed a loathing for our customers.  They didn’t know this of course.  They thought I loved them.  I was courteous, upbeat, knowledgeable, friendly, witty, on my toes, eager to please.  My Customers Were Always Right, I always Gave The Lady What She Wanted.    But I couldn’t stand it.  Why?  Consider, here I am, a guy who loved working with children, and I’m stuck working with their parents!  These people were of absolutely no interest to me.  Where were their kids?  They came to The Children’s Bookstore and left their kids at home!  Then they’d ask, “What can you recommend for a three-year-old?”  Give me a break.  There were literally thousands of terrific books for three-year-olds in that store.  Why couldn’t people make their own decisions?    I was just shocked at how poorly read people were.  And these were people who THOUGHT to enter a children’s bookstore!  Imagine all those people in the world who wouldn’t even consider stepping into such a place.  I’d read the statistics of course – each year, only 27% of Americans bought at least ONE BOOK.  So, 73% of Americans did not buy even one book in a year.  But what I didn’t know was that of the 27%, so many were so totally clueless.  And I was stuck helping them.  They had no powers of judgment.  They honestly didn’t know whether a book was appropriate for their very own child.   I used to tell people that they didn’t need to buy Goodnight Moon – all they had to do was pick up the telephone book, and read out the names and numbers in a rhythmic, reassuring, musical way, and their baby would love it.  It took me a while to learn not to say stuff like that.   Books were completely unnecessary -- so you could buy ANY book!  Besides, why didn’t people make up their own stories?!  Why didn’t they read aloud from the newspaper?  Or the labels on cans?  Babies loved to hear their parents declaim any old thing!  What was the big deal with dumb old Mother Goose?  That was just a bunch of raggedy leftovers – fodder for cultural historians, sure, but for 6-month-olds it was only as beautiful as any other nonsensical text.    Read the Bible!  Read the Koran!  Sing tunes from old television commercials!   Just SHARE YOUR VOICE WITH THE KID!  MAKE YOURSELF THEIRS!  GIVE YOURSELF AWAY, LOCK, STOCK AND BARREL!   No.  The customers at The Children’s Bookstore were fixated on purchasing The Correct Children’s Book, with The Most Beautiful Art, that had won The Fanciest Award, with The Nicest Gold Sticker.  They were buying from us because we were the highly publicized, newly touted, well-praised, endorsed-by-the-fashionable-neighbor The Children’s Bookstore.  We had classy bookcases, a pretty awning, Full Service.    How could I respect adults who hadn’t made the kinds of insistent demands of themselves I’d made of myself?    At that point in my life – aged 25 -- I could list, and I mean this, LIST several hundred bookstores I had personally visited and browsed in.  I had read thousands of books – of all sorts.   And here I was talking with parents who couldn’t decide between Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny for their baby.   Everything had to pass the one big test in order to be purchased:  Was It CUTE?   The exclamations:  “It’s SOO CUUUUTE!”   Over and over and over – revolving among customers as they showed each other some ordinary object.    Perhaps you think I was alone in this sort of total irritation with the people in a store.  Not at all.  Every retailer, every restauranteur, every salesperson HATES THE CUSTOMER.  That’s why there are signs posted in every back-room that say things like: “Remember – Without Our Customers, We’re Out Of Business, And You’re Out Of A Job.”  Or some such gobbledygook.  It’s brutally difficult to be nice to those god-damned customers.  So stupid.  So simpering.  So ecstatic.  So proud of themselves for having found This Store.  So whiny to have missed That Special Sale by just one day.  So flaunting of Their Famous Acquaintance.    Now – mind you, after work, each night, closing at 10pm, exhausted after a roaring day of business, Chris and I would head off down the street to the fabulous restaurant Fricano’s, and eat, and drink wine, and have dessert – and I didn’t give a hoot what the waiter or the cook or the hostess or the bus-boy or the guy who cleaned the toilets or Mr. Fricano Himself secretly thought of ME!  All I wanted was the great food and the great atmosphere and the great service.   To paraphrase Pogo – “We have met the Customer, and he is Us.”   Hy-po-cri-ti-cal.   But what I hadn’t understood in advance of opening the bookstore was exactly what it would feel like to have a Private Self of the kind that emerged inside me, and how far divorced that version of me would be from the Public Self I’d be enacting for the Customers.    I was lucky in one aspect of my preparation, though.  I was a theatre person.  I knew how to act.  I knew how to improvise.  I knew how to construct a character.  I knew the difference between the character you play for an audience, and the actor, underneath, constructing the character.    Being the owner of The Children’s Bookstore, though, was a matter of playing this character I came up with for ten to twelve hours every day.   At night, it was hard to come down.  Every night, I would smoke cigarettes, drink beer, get stoned.  I couldn’t get to sleep before 1am.  I didn’t want to get up in the morning.    Chris and I would argue in the car going to work.  Fierce arguments, mostly about our employees.  Then – Boom – there they were -- our employees.  How we hated them.  But we couldn’t run the place without them.    And then, the phone.  Customers through the door.  Suddenly, we’re Cheerful Me and Cheerful You and Let’s All Be Happy Here.   Chris and I each took steps to salvage our precarious sanity:  Chris escaped into creating systems, designing beautiful displays, supervising operations.  I fled into programming, publicity and performance.  We dealt with the day-to-day customers by hiring that great staff.  We spent little enough time actually working with customers that by the end of 1986 lots of people didn’t know we were the owners – they thought Kathy Larkin was.  Chris and I were hiding out in the basement.   And, even there we hadn’t really escaped, because we had employees down there with us, helping with operations – opening boxes, recording data in computers – and gossiping, chatting, complaining, needing, needing, needing.   So we still didn’t have our hour-to-hour privacy once we’d found a strong sales staff -- but being able to escape from the sales floor did allow us to feel a bit more in control.    Since the store was open 12 hours a day, seven days a week, the truth was we were each on the sales floor about 30 hours every week – evenings and weekends.    At least we had daytimes away from the most annoying customers, though – the unaccompanied mothers whose kids were in school, the ones who would go on and on about how Gifted their child was, and how far above grade level they were reading.   I do apologize my dear lady.  I read “The Autobiography Of Malcolm X” when I was 10.   You put your child in the Best Private Preschool so they could get into the Best Private Elementary School so they could get into the Best Private High School so they could go to Yale?  Well I went to a public school, K-12, and I went to Yale, and I DROPPED OUT, SO THERE WITH YOUR GOD-DAMNED IVY LEAGUE FUTURE FOR YOUR KID!    SET YOUR CAPTIVE FREE!!!   No men on weekday afternoons.  No African-Americans on weekday afternoons.  Just upper-middle-class unemployed White Women.    And the complaints.  My husband blah, blah, blah.  My son’s teacher blah, blah, blah…   I needed her money though, I tell you.  When she actually spent $100 for a stack of hardcover books, I was glad she’d done it.  She’d call me by name – she KNEW my name.  And I could never for the life of me remember hers.  Thousands of such customers, and I couldn’t remember a single name.    Because it wasn’t ME they were talking to.  Their relationship wasn’t with ME.  They were so convinced they knew who they were chatting with.  They were so comfortable.  Couldn’t they see through the house of cards Chris and I had so elaborately constructed?  Couldn’t they grasp how increasingly exposed to disaster we were as each day went by?  Couldn’t they understand what it feels like to know that every tenth person you talk with is in the active process of taking books from you, stuffed in their coat?   No, they couldn’t.  Their lives were dreams, as mine had been when I was a Yale student – lives built of lies.  We must have been ciphers to them.  Did they envy us our freedom?   And those sad, sad employees.  I dreamt of a collectivist work-life, like the Yale Children’s Theatre.  But the people we hired were so ruined already – gossipy, whiny, chirpy one minute and growling the next.  WITH EXCEPTIONS I must say here, with some real honest exceptions.  A few sturdy, marvelous individuals came into our lives, who enacted their roles as employees in The Children’s Bookstore with wry humor, while remaining their own, committed individual, artistic, socially-critical selves.  Not enough of them.    Out of the 300 or so employees we had over the 11 years – what, 60 people fell into that category?  80% of the people who worked for us at The Children’s Bookstore were pinned inside of Smaller Selves.   Did we pin them there?  Were we bad employers?  Sure.  Terrible.  We didn’t give people job descriptions.  We had no employee handbook.  We didn’t tell them what to do every second.  They didn’t have official titles.  They were on their own.  Most couldn’t handle this.  They flipped out.   It seems like I met everyone in Chicago and lots of people from around the country -- from all walks of life.  My absolute knowledge that there will be no beautiful, sharing and caring, imaginatively ecstatic anarchist transformation for our society was certainly confirmed by meeting those frightfully deadly repetitively same millions.  Only thousands of possible people among millions of bodies.  Why don’t people try to invent their own special lives?  Why is everyone so desperately trying to be the same as everyone else?    I became positively misanthropic.    In private.  In private.   In public, I was a Boy Wonder, a Whirlwind.  I was Famous.  I was On Top.   People used to say, “You must be making So Much Money!”  No – LOSING So Much Money you FOOL.   People used to say, “You must just love working in such a wonderful place.”  Yes – that’s true – but it would be a lot better without any grown-ups like you to be weirdly jealous of what you don’t know, saying stuff like this that is so dumb.   Because I didn’t Love Working There the way they thought.    First -- I wasn’t Working.  I was doing it because it was Real.  It had Happenned.  It was Fate.  It was My Path.    All I had it in my power to do was make art out of whatever Self Sacrifice I was capable of enacting -- and it just happened that I had, collaboratively with Chris, created THIS particular Pyre Of Art, which we were moment by moment keeping lit feeding flammable books to flaming children.   Sound sick?  All art is Sick – to those who don’t live to make art.  Do you live to make Art?  Then you know how absurd it is to Give Yourself Up Completely for those total imbeciles who can only Clap and Clap and say “How Wonderful” when they don’t have a CLUE what the cost is and how all you want is to escape the confines of reality and even that desire subverts the dream.   Second – the subject of this Art Act, and its object too, was Anarchist Direct Action for Social Transformation and Personal Liberation.    My inspiration was William Godwin the utopian anarchist bookseller and novelist, husband of Mary Woolstonecraft who wrote “A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women” -- father of Mary Woolstonecraft Shelley who wrote “Frankenstein.”    William Godwin, the brilliant philosophical theorist who ran an important and popular bookstore, and, of course, as a necessary corollary, was chronically in debt, even dying with creditors at the door.  As Rembrandt died a pauper.  As Daniel Defoe died in a back alley fleeing creditors.  As open-handed Alexandre Dumas died mired in debt.    You can take your Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous.  I say the exceeding wealth our society worships is a signal of lives lived uselessly, lives of decay, lives debauched, lives of destruction.    Humanity gains in creative freedom from generation to generation only through the lives and actions of those who despise the accumulation of wealth.     But no-one who sacrifices his or her life for society’s transformation escapes their society’s most characteristic punishment – and in the Modern West, this is financial castration to ensure impotence.      To maintain indefinite suppression of their creative acts, society reserves even worse treatment for These Spirited Lives after physical death, when Horrible Hagiography is used to freeze the seed.    Sainthood -- a more deviously hypocritical punishment even than life’s Debtor’s Prison.   Sainthood for the Noble Dead Artist, attracting Disciples of Death, chasing away the Free Spirited, hopelessly encrypting That Life’s meaning.    Except for those who live to pierce these Social Veils and see, still energetically active and smiling, completely intact and steadily at work (although definitely physically dead), the Absolute, Everyday, Person of the Past, patiently weighed down beneath the crushingly iconic weight of Honor, Fame, and History, but nevertheless, projecting for all who visit them, through all human time, a straightforward welcoming, open-hearted Wish that All Humanity Join The Enterprise Of Becoming Fully, Creatively, Imaginatively, Collaboratively, Individually Human.   Come One, Come All, Past, Present, Future, Now Certifiably Living, Putatively Dead, And With A Special Invitation To The Potentially Incipient, Uncontrollably Unconditioned, Dodeca-dodeca-dodeca-decillions Of Possible Babies-To-Be.   That is -- I had discovered, that of all professions, this one -- unsanctioned, uncertified, unavailable only to those who did not freely claim it – the Profession of Bookseller -- most leant itself to the collectivist ethos – since in this alone of all the world’s free and fetid mulching marketplaces – the bookstore -- could be nurtured and dispersed the emergent, organic turmoil of arts and ideas escaping uncontrollably from bodies of books to minds and lives of readers who themselves helplessly passed these forward to root, regenerate, and decay, enriching forever the social soil for future Realizing Selves.    But I also knew -- significantly, powerfully, secretly -- that children – those most uninhibited, uninhibitable members of society -- were the true chokepoints for social transformation, generation to generation.    I knew there was no position of greater influence than that of Children’s Culture Worker -- I had discovered this as an undergraduate at Yale, immersed in wildly imaginative free-form drama workshops for 8-year-olds inside decrepit New Haven housing projects.   Once in the middle of a drama game with a group of children at Quinnapiac Valley Housing Project, in 1978, an 8-year-old unexpectedly pulled a large knife from his pocket.  Another boy countered with his own – the two began circling rapidly.  I leapt between them and, continuing the drama game, nudged their characters toward a resolution they improvised – a plotline that credibly permitted them to put knives away and shake hands.  Then I shifted the group smoothly to another game (I did insist they hand me their knives before continuing, which they both did voluntarily).   As a self-proclaimed Professional Children’s Bookseller, I knew every time I sold a copy of Goodnight Moon – written by Margaret Wise Brown whose mother was a Theosophical follower of Hermeticism -- I was handing that book’s one-year-old reader a Power-Packed Manual Of Magical Spells empowering this Baby Hermes Trismegistus to Take Command of the Cosmos – Going Not Gentle Into That Good Night.   Crying Out:  “Goodnight Moon!!!!”  Asserting Power over the World’s Night Light – the Face of the Universe – the Center of the Sky – Oh Moon O’ Mine.    “Goodnight Room!!!”  Relaxing back the walls of the Great Green Room to reveal the Truly Roomy Universe.    “Goodnight Bears and Goodnight Chairs!!!”  Exorcising the Ownership-Power of those hoarding Three Bears, asserting the Goldilocks-squatter’s Fair Use claim over unused Chairs.    “Goodnight Comb and Goodnight Brush!!!” Discarding concern for Social Nicety, Ending presentation of self to world, attaining Invisibility.   “Goodnight Nobody!!!”  Emptying the restless subconscious of unformed images that otherwise might rise to embody obsessive fears, compulsive guilts, addictive shames.    “Goodnight Mush!!!”  Disdaining external nourishment, Freeing self-nourishing Mind from external dependency and the false constriction of Physical Embodiment.   “Goodnight to the Old Lady Whispering Hush!!!!”  Banishing the all-controlling Mother, smashing her Power by rendering her unconscious, deflecting the Witch’s Spell of Hushing to strengthen the outward Rushing of Hyperbolically expansive macrocosmic Baby Mind.    “Goodnight Stars!!!”  Eyes tight shut spark infinite stars in dark – the Universe taken in no longer existing without – “The Brain Is Wider Than The Sky.”    “Goodnight Air!!!”  Rhythmically Inhaling/Exhaling Night, transmuting the Texture of Spacetime to a substance engulfed and extruded by Creator Baby’s Body.    “Goodnight Noises Everywhere!!!”  Extending Ultimate Authority over All Event, All Sensation, All Action, All Consequence.  “The Brain is just the weight of God/For heft them, pound by pound/And they will differ, if they do/As syllable from sound.”   You see, though repelled by those all-consuming customers-cum-parents, I did take enormous pleasure and pride acting the Agent of that Secret Society of revolutionaries – the authors and illustrators of our era’s incendiary children’s literature – propagandizing subversion of pea-brained parental authority by deceptively shipping those unwitting “grown-ups” back to their children’s nurseries nursing the very Fuel I knew would burn bright to incite the macrocosmic minds of those recklessly romantic babies to rip-roaring rebellion.  Which fuel was: “Where The Wild Things Are,” “Madeline,” “Alice Through The Looking Glass,” “Peter Rabbit,” “Yertle The Turtle,” “The Phantom Tollbooth,” “Curious George,” “Charlotte’s Web,” “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”   (2 Comments |Comment on this)
12:57 pm	The writing of "Rebel Bookseller" I wrote this essay for my University Without Walls B.A. degree last year. Thought I should post it here too. Here's the story: six years ago, while working at the cash register of my store at Chicago Children's Museum, I took a call from the museum's former visitor services manager. She and the former publicity director had both been fired shortly after the arrival of the new museum president. The two former employees were considering opening a toystore further down the Navy Pier shopping mall from where the museum (and my store) were located. Because after seven years running my store on the Pier I was obviously quite knowledgeable about retailing there, the former museum managers were hoping I could advise them. I wasn't worried about new competition. I was however quite concerned that since neither had run a retail store before, they could lose a lot of money. I agreed to discuss their plan with them. A week later, we went out for coffee. I talked with them for two hours. Since I had spent ten years, on and off, teaching store management, I was able to take their pulse rapidly. They were completely unprepared. They didn't appear to have enough money, certainly not enough expertise, and no desire to be frontline retailers (they imagined they could use employees to run their store). I must have been very discouraging, because a week later I received a letter thanking me for my time, and telling me they'd decided that instead of opening a store, they would launch a publicity firm together. I was surprised to find myself feeling disturbed and queasy. While for many years I had been routinely advising aspiring bookstore and toystore owners of the difficulty and likely failure their fantasized career direction would hold in store, I had never before felt sad to have interrupted an entrepreneur's trajectory. I realized that I had developed a sort of litmus test, unconsciously: I always provided lots of information, much of it in the form of worst case scenarios, and what I was secretly hoping was that people would ignore all my nay-saying. I wanted people to think that I was just trying to keep them away from my market share. I wanted them to decide I was biased, and unreliable – that I was trying to discourage them for my own selfish reasons. I wanted them to open their stores, despite my advice to the contrary. And this indeed was what had happened repeatedly between 1985 and 1992. I had often been asked for advice, I had always been discouraging, and the people I'd spoken with had often ignored me and opened a store. But I realized, after my meeting with the former museum employees, that things had changed so much – that the market was now seen as so forbidding due to the rise of the corporate bookstore and toystore chains – that for several years, no-one who'd asked my advice had proceeded to ignore me. They were listening. They weren't opening stores. I wanted to do something about this. I needed a new way to communicate with aspiring bookstore and toystore owners. I needed to make the back-handed cynicism of my approach to retailing somehow more encouraging. I started to write a book, on my laptop computer, while sitting at the cash register of my store. Because I was then reading for the first time a remarkable book which I had sought out with great difficulty – one of the seminal works of world religious literature, The Sutra Of The Lotus Blossom Of Fine Dharma, also called The Lotus Blossom Sutra – I modeled my own book on this Sutra. That is: I began to write a sort of textbook for how to open and run a children's bookstore, and I modeled the textbook, and its principles, on the doctrines and formal organization of The Lotus Blossom Sutra. Without any difficulty, in about four days I wrote the book. I called it The Sutra Of The Children's Bookstore Of Fine Dharma or The Children's Bookstore Sutra. Unfortunately, as I understood of course (I am a bookseller!), my book was so peculiar that no one would want to read it. In particular, it was infused with Buddhism of the most esoteric sort. More than that though, it argued against all traditional business mechanisms, attacking ordinary bookstore management systems and proposing methods for defying these. It drew on the most disturbing and erratic and aberrant aspects of my own complex career as a bookseller for its most critical insights. What would I do with this book? There was nothing I could do with it. Instead, I made a list of what kinds of people might actually want to read a different book that I might be capable of writing, and I made yet another list of books that I could in fact myself write. I began to simultaneously write several different books. I wrote a book called “Need To Know” on the subject of mentorship. I wrote the first half of a straightforward narrative autobiography. I wrote a book that traced the interface of the history of scepticism and my own life as the son of a leading behaviorist psychologist. I wrote a fifty page essay about the children's book “Goodnight Moon.” Much of this writing I did on the laptop, while at the cash register, during late nights at Navy Pier. And then what had happened to the two museum managers happened to me. As part of the general effort to transform the museum, the new director attacked my store, telling me that if I didn't walk away from my contract, the museum would sue me so as to hand the contract over to one of the most wealthy men in the country – the founder of Clear Channel Communications, who had personally telephoned the museum and asked to take over this storefront, something for which his new museum-store chain corporation would pay handsomely. It was eight months later, after quite a lot of personal turmoil, that I finally resumed work on my book. I was living in Amherst, Massachusetts by then, working as the manager of the new store at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. My boss, Eric Carle, had personally suggested that I write a book. So I pulled all my old manuscripts together, and started wrestling with them. The book got longer and longer. At its longest, a few months later, it was 250,000 words. I began printing it out and sending it to friends, editors, agents, authors, industry acquaintances, relatives, other booksellers, marketing directors. I sent out probably a hundred different drafts. I went through Writers Marketplace, and sent out chapters to “Harpers Magazine” and the radio show “This American Life.” I continued to revise and cut and add and rewrite. While many people did not respond to my packages, a fair number did send me one- or two-page critiques. Some called me up and told me they'd loved it. Some told me that it could never be published because it attacked chain-store companies. Some warned me I could get sued. Some told me that no-one would be interested. A few however became enormously responsive and involved, and when I bombarded them via email with version after version, would tell me that I should try this organizational strategy, or that editorial approach. One friend from my high school underground newspaper days advised me to take the original Children's Bookstore Sutra, which I had substantially retained as an appendix, and integrate it, in alternating chapters, thoughout the book. This turned out to be the key piece of advice I received. I ultimately edited all the rest of the book's narrative material to match the thematic thrust of the alternating chapters of the Sutra. The final round of serious editing happened after I'd found a radical publisher. He felt I was being too nice, and too evasive. He wanted me to make my attacks sharper and more direct. He wanted me to stop beating around the bush and come out and make myself crystal clear. He wasn't scared of being sued, or of seeing the book banned. I was quite surprised, during the process of responding to his requests, that I had in fact been playing nice the whole time. The book was ready to publish. However at this point my sister, who is an editor herself, insisted that I write footnotes and prepare a bibliography and index, so as to heighten my credibility. She said that if I didn't do this, my statements could easily be dismissed as mere opinion. So I spent five months, with her assistance, developing 50,000 words in footnotes. (We ultimately cut them to 30,000 words – by then the body of the book itself was only 45,000 words.) When the book came out, I received a starred review from Publisher Weekly that informed readers: “Laties is a bitter, bitter man” -- and went on say the book was a “must-read.” A year later I won the 2006 Independent Publisher Award for Best Book on the subject of Writing and Publishing. So far it's sold 2800 copies, and sales are steady at about 60 copies per month. We're going back to press for another thousand copies now. Not huge numbers, but then it doesn't need to reach huge numbers of people to achieve its objective, which is to encourage prospective booksellers to actually open bookstores. It is the only book of its kind. It talks about subjects that are taboo, because the book industry does not talk about itself. I've received quite a few emails from people who say it has inspired them to open a bookstore. I feel that I've made it up to those two former museum employees to whom I was so discouraging. I didn't mean to stifle their creativity. But I hadn't found the right voice with which to speak. Now, after several years of effort, I've done it: I've invented the right way to talk to people who need to learn what I have to teach. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 28th, 2007
8:42 pm	Barnes & Noble Rip-Off: The Same Old Story Ok -- here's a revised version of the story for the New York Megaphone. Is this better? Barnes & Noble Rip-Off: The Same Old Story A prominent scholar spends years researching and editing a scholarly gift edition of a Victorian classic. The independent publishing house which over the course of decades has sold hundreds of thousands of this author's elegant and popular books presents this forthcoming title to Barnes & Noble's buyers. Barnes & Noble places an order for 15,000 copies. The outstanding book will be prominently displayed in superstores nationwide upon release. Delighted, the publisher increases the initial print run: these 15,000 extra copies constitute nearly double the original sales estimate. The author's income from years of labor will be quite a bit higher than expected, since his standard, royalty-based contract promises him payment tied directly to the number of copies sold. The books are printed. The holiday season approaches. Then, at the last possible moment, Barnes & Noble cancels the order. Author and publisher are appalled. No explanation from B&N is forthcoming. Those extra copies will have no chance of selling at full price; they will be recycled for scrap, or dumped at a loss into the international discount book market. When they sell, the author will receive no royalties from these “remaindered” copies. The frustrated author decides to go sleuthing. In the midst of the holiday season he visits several Barnes & Nobles. Displayed front and center in every store is a fancy gift edition of that very Victorian classic. The competing book's design appears to closely mimic that of the scholarly version our author had spent years preparing. Yet on close inspection, the “winning” version here stacked high is an ordinary reprint, with no thorough and scholarly apparatus, no elegantly researched and elaborately captioned illustrations. Not a better book. Who could be the victorious publisher of this hack stand-in for our acclaimed scholar's outstanding edition? Who but Barnes & Noble itself! Why was the excellent edition displaced by the mediocre? Because Barnes & Noble corporation wished to ensure that no superior, competing version of this holiday classic should “steal” sales from the inferior, in-house edition which their own publishing arm was releasing that very season. Did you know that Barnes & Noble robbed excellent, contemporary authors of about $20 million in royalties last year? That’s because almost 10% of the books Barnes & Noble now sells are B&N-published titles. Between 2002 and 2006, Barnes & Noble achieved the striking goal of sharply increasing the percentage of “self-published” titles they sell from a mere 3% all the way up to today's 10%. Many of these B&N-published books are reprints of classics, and feature inferior scholarship. Worse, a large number of B&N-produced books are dated nonfiction titles that went out of print long ago. Frequently, these newly republished out-of-print books weren’t good enough to survive in the marketplace of ideas as the years went by. More accurate books are in print today. These new, excellent books should be granted shelf space at Barnes & Noble. Instead, many are not even stocked. Why does Barnes & Noble prefer to sell outdated books? The authors of those outdated reprints have been offered and have accepted one-time lump sum fees in republication deals with B&N. These writers of yesterday's books won’t get paid per copy sold now, no matter how many copies of their old books Barnes & Noble pushes into readers' hands. Flat-fee contracts give B&N a strong incentive to move as many copies of these outdated nonfiction books as possible, since no matter how many B&N sells, the flat fee has been paid. No need to keep paying the authors any royalties per copy sold. Flat-fees mean great profits for Barnes & Noble. By contrast, ordinary royalty deals are more expensive because the author gets paid and paid and paid. Royalty deals are also fairer to authors who have spent years creating their books and haven't been paid for their efforts all that time. New authors, whose better, current books can't make it onto B&N's shelves, have been robbed of the approximately $20 million in royalties they would have received if B&N were stocking these modern authors' better, newer books. To defeat the royalty-paying titles published by competing publishers, B&N prominently displays its older, flat-fee titles as if they were terrific, hot titles. These old books get placement at the front of the B&N bookstores, sporting fancy new dust jackets, and stickers that read: “Special Price!” The only thing special about these obsolete, reprinted flat-fee books is that they’re a gravy train for the B&N corporation since their authors won’t see royalties when you or I buy a copy. Big investors on Wall Street love this B&N practice of republishing out-of-date nonfiction books and mediocre editions of classics in exchange for one-time flat fees to the authors and designers. Too bad for contemporary authors. Because B&N controls twenty-five percent of the bookstore marketplace, authors whose fresh books come from major publishing companies or small presses cannot easily get their books into that twenty-five percent of the market. Barnes & Noble shelves are instead increasingly filling up with books from their flat-fee, out-of-print republication program. Shoppers in B&N stores do not get a chance to see lots of the great new books by contemporary authors. Shoppers see those old, republished flat-fee books instead. But Barnes & Noble is cutting its own throat. By flooding its stores’ shelves with inferior books, B&N is providing an opportunity for independent booksellers to better serve the public, through superior book selection. More importantly, independent bookstores are devoted to selling books that pay authors their due royalties for each copy sold. If independent bookstores recaptured the market share that was taken by Barnes & Noble in the 90s, authors would earn tens of millions of dollars more in royalties every year. It’s going to happen. Over one hundred new indie bookstores opened nationwide last year. Hundreds more are in the planning stages. At Vox Pop, we do not pretend to be a full-service independent bookstore. Instead, we look for ways to play our role as part of a community of creative thinkers striving to take back our culture from the greedy mega-corporations. This summer though, in keeping with our role as a center for readers and writers, we are redeveloping the bookselling business in our café. In particular, we’ll be adding a full selection of Zines, which earn their authors half or more of the (inexpensive) cover prices--for every Zine sold. Hey, Barnes & Noble: Vox Pop dares you to pay your authors fifty percent royalties! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 22nd, 2007
8:23 pm	Attacking Barnes & Noble's impact on authors Vox Pop is about to publish the sixth edition of its alternative indie newspaper, The New York Megaphone. I'm going to start writing a column about the book industry for this paper -- which we're distributing 40,000 copies of, free, throughout the NYC area. I'll be attacking Barnes & Noble on various fronts -- trying to break the blackout they've successfully implemented throughout the media. It's amazing that they have such a terrific rep with the public, although they share many of the characteristics of major retail chains like Wal-Mart that have seen a downturn in public image. Here's a draft of the first column (any suggestions for title??) Did you know that Barnes & Noble robbed contemporary authors of about $20 million in royalties last year? That’s because almost ten percent of the books Barnes & Noble sells are B&N-published flat-fee titles. These are often older nonfiction books that went out of print long ago. Frequently, these formerly out-of-print books just weren’t good enough to stay in print originally. Better informational books out-competed them, and better books are in the market today. But now the authors of these outdated books have accepted moderate one-time fees in republication deals with B&N; these authors won’t get paid per copy sold, no matter how many copies Barnes & Noble pumps into the market. Of course this kind of contract gives B&N an incentive to sell as many of these mediocre books as possible, so these titles are often placed at the front of B&N bookstores, with stickers on them that say: “Special Price!” The only thing special about these books is that they’re a gravy train for the B&N corporation since their authors won’t see any money each time you buy a copy. Big investors on Wall Street love this B&N practice of republishing out-of-date nonfiction books in exchange for one-time flat fees to the authors: it means great profits for Barnes & Noble. Unfortunately for contemporary authors though, because B&N controls twenty-five percent of the bookstore marketplace, these new authors whose fresh books come from major publishing companies or from small presses cannot easily get their books into that twenty-five percent of the bookstore marketplace. Barnes & Noble shelves are increasingly filled with books from their flat-fee, out-of-print republication program. Shoppers in B&N stores do not get the chance to see lots of the great new books by contemporary authors. Shoppers see old, republished flat-fee books instead. Barnes & Noble is cutting its own throat. By flooding its stores’ shelves with mediocre books, B&N is providing an opportunity for independent booksellers to better serve the public, through superior book selection. More importantly, independent bookstores are devoted to selling books that pay authors’ their due royalties for each copy sold. If independent bookstores recaptured the twenty percent of the market that was taken by Barnes & Noble in the 90s, authors would earn tens of millions of dollars more in royalties every year. It’s going to happen. Over one hundred new indie bookstores opened nationwide last year. Hundreds more are in their planning stages. At Vox Pop, we do not pretend to be a full-service independent bookstore. Instead, we look for ways to play our role as part of a community of creative thinkers striving to take back our culture from the greedy mega-corporations. This summer though, in keeping with our role as a center for readers and writers, we are redeveloping the bookselling business in our café. In particular, we’ll be adding a full selection of Zines, which earn their authors half or more of the (inexpensive!) cover prices--for every Zine sold! Hey, Barnes & Noble: Vox Pop dares you to pay YOUR authors fifty percent royalties! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 26th, 2007
10:03 am	Rebel Bookseller and Vox Pop on Book TV The C-Span BookTV Bus visited Vox Pop, the bookstore/coffeehouse/performance space operated by my publisher, Sander Hicks (I'm a co-owner/operator of Vox Pop too).  Here's the segment that BookTV broadcast: it features Sander talking about his political/social motivations, and his tactical approach to the Vox Pop project; he also  talks about the way that publishing "Rebel Bookseller" has shaped his own work as a bookseller.  And, there's great footage of the scene inside Vox Pop. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmenvC9QVmE (Comment on this)
Monday, May 14th, 2007
9:30 am	Dust-Up on the Well Read Book Blog I seem to have gotten into a rather lively debate about my comments on page 96 of "Rebel Bookseller" regarding chainstore employee theft and the resale of these stolen books on Amazon. The string of comments starts with my response to a critical review of "Rebel Bookseller," which appears on the front page of Kristen Guin-Grosse's blog, attached to her bookstore's website. Her store's name is: "The Well Read Book". Here's the blog URL. http://wellreadbook.blogspot.com/ Kristen herself responded quite graciously, and then a couple of her readers chimed in with rather sharper critiques. A very entertaining exchange. Too bad these online booksellers don't have storefronts where their neighbors could strike up conversations with them about any old thing. Instead we have an era when used book dealers have been driven from the public arena into the privacy of their offices because online bookselling is so forceful at destroying storefront used bookselling. I find it rather surprising that these booksellers seem disturbed that I'm proposing illicit and illegal direct action by chainstore employees! One would think that a reading of Labor History would provide countless examples of illegal worker action that was entirely justified by social conditions. Ah well. I guess we workers in the Fields Of Literacy are above such miscreant behavior. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 10th, 2007
2:05 pm	Authors On Amazon I contributed this comment to a discussion about authors use of Amazon's promotional mechanisms, over on the Fusenumber8.blogspot.com blog today:   I am an active user of Amazon.com's author-promotion mechanisms. I have an author-blog on my book's Amazon page, I submitted my book so it's searchable on Amazon, I have submitted a review written by an independent reviewer for display on my book's Amazon page. So far so good. However: the book I'm pitching is among other things an attack on Amazon.com. Amazon.com is the last resort for authors who cannot manage to get their books into bookstores. To pretend that it's a GOOD place to sell books is to ignore the words of its founder, Jeff Bezos, who recently PERSONALLY told the biggest Amazon booster that Amazon actually sells a far smaller percentage of "little" books than was being touted. Specifically, Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson wrote a book called "The Long Tail" in which he said that books below the 100,000 rank on Amazon.com's bestseller list account for 57% of all Amazon sales. He extended this statement to suggest that since presumably the top 100,000 sellers were the same as the 100,000 titles carried nationally by the big box book superstores, that therefore Amazon could essentially take credit for being the key distribution channel for millions of "little" books that couldn't get into bookstores around the country. Such a statement would naturally make many frustrated authors feel that they should use all possible means to ensure they benefitted from Amazon's fabulous sales mechanisms. But Jeff Bezos personally told Chris Anderson that this statement in the book was wrong. Bezos says that it's PROBABLY 20%-25% of all Amazon sales that are going to books ranked below 100,000 in their bestseller list. http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/10/objection_1.html There are 4 million books listed on Amazon.com. Therefore, 3.9 million books are accounting for 25% of the booksales on Amazon. Amazon is a LOUSY place to sell books. For most authors. You can use all their promo systems. I do. But this won't help you very much. You have to be above (better than) the 100,000 bestseller-rank level to be seeing perhaps sales of 100 books per year on Amazon. It won't generally be worth much work-time to achieve this mediocre status! If you're above (better than) 100,000 in their bestseller list, then, according to Chris Anderson, this means you should be among the favored books that are already represented in big box superstores anyway!! So, why would you be working so hard on your Amazon sales. Look -- 3,000 brick-and-mortar bookstores in this country (chain and indie). If you're falling back on struggling to sell a hundred copies annually on Amazon, then are you sure you shouldn't be struggling to get your titles onto the shelves of bookstores instead/also/more-so? Are you finding that impossible? How about linking on your book's website to your local independent bookstore, via their Booksense.com affiliate mechanism (which does pay you a royalty). Or, even better, TELL your local bookseller who is not stocking your book on her shelves that YOU ARE SENDING HER CUSTOMERS. Have your friends place special orders for your books through that local indie bookstore! Make the bookstore understand that you're pitching all your hand-built traffic and sales to them. Make your local bookseller love you. Get their support by providing them with your support. Your local bookstore is starving; You are starving. You can help one another! Amazon is a huckster. Like The Music Man. Authors gain traction in this society through personal buzz. Word of mouth. But online is a mythological environment. You're up one day and forgotten the next. If you get out into the real world, shake hands, make phone calls, offer assistance to booksellers and trade favors with them, you're creating much more authentic relationships. This is the best use of your time, to further your career as an author. Amazon does not love any author. Your local bookseller can LEARN to love you as an individual, and to promote you, and to tout your books to other booksellers. It is a slow process, building a professional identity as a great author, among the crowd of authors. But it's worth it. It pays off in the long run. Make friends with as many individual, real-world, front-line booksellers as possible. This is how to build your sales. Sure, set your Amazon web-page up properly, set up a nice website -- run a Google ad-words campaign -- SURE do those things. But much more important is to establish life-long relationships with professional booksellers. They'll stick by you over the years. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 2nd, 2007
8:28 am	Barnes & Noble the publishing company I have been engaging in an increasingly feisy exchange on the subject of Barnes & Noble's publishing subsidiaries, over on the blog of Roger Sutton, the editor of Horn Book Magazine, who is a longtime acquaintance/colleague from Chicago days. http://www.hbook.com/blog/2007/02/if-they-could-turn-back-time.html (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 24th, 2007
8:04 pm	Attacking vs. Being Attacked, and The Causes Of Reading's Decline One of my essays from a previous post on this blog has been placed on the Fall of Autumn website, garnering a great critical response. Here's my original essay, and the response (written by Aaron): http://fallofautumn.com/community/showthread.php?p=1943#post1943 And here, below is my (new) response and clarification to my own previous essay -- on the subject of the possible relationship between chainstores and independent operators, past, present and future. I also respond (newly) to Aaron's comment/query about possible relations between the national decline of reading and the decline in indie bookselling. Aaron, Thanks for this careful response. You're right that any independent business can be attacked and destroyed. The attacker simply has to gain an understanding of the customers. You describe the customers, and how the previously successful independents who served them have now lost these customers because of the new practices being enacted by the new corporations. My argument -- which I probably do not make clearly enough -- is that the lost customers can be captured back from the big corporations. It may be -- and it IS -- depressing that the "indigenous" independent restaurants or other local businesses -- the longtime existent family firms -- do get smashed, in marketplace after marketplace. It's horrible. But this does NOT prove that the trend toward concentration is irreversible. It simply means that it is the task of another generation to recapture the market from the imperial corporations. I use the word "imperial" in order to highlight the analogy between colonization and chainstore growth. Decolonization DOES happen. Local autonomy CAN be restored. It's a historical process. It's called revolution, or, rebellion -- and this stream of action is celebrated in one part of the American psyche (however institutionalized the official storyline of the American Revolution has become, the powers that now rule can NOT escape the fact that it was a revolution. Of some sort. (I know all the caveats about white upperclass planters etc.)) Ho Chi Minh approached the Americans in the 1940s for help against the French colonists in Vietnam because he'd studied the American Revolution while he lived in Paris and he figured that a country that had been launched with a revolution would help him! So -- we Americans at least as schoolchildren are as conditioned by the mythologizing of the American Revolution as was Ho Chi Minh. We do believe in revolution. We are taught in school at an early age that revolution is a good thing. Later, we're repressed, we're squelched, we're round pegs forced into square holes, yes, but somewhere inside we retain that mythos of Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party and Valley Forge. The Sons of Liberty (who met in secret in a Boston bookstore). This is why YES independent stores do get destroyed when a big corporation comes along and tells the people "Starbucks has REVOLUTIONIZED coffee!" and "Barnes & Noble has REVOLUTIONIZED the bookshopping experience" -- but in fact these same customers are still, always, looking for another revolution. They can be captured for another round of new businesses. Local businesses that utilize a rhetoric of rebellion and revolution against the hegemony of the so-called revolutionary chainstores. It's a dialectic. The chainstores have won a round. That isn't informative about the future. As to your other question about whether there's a link between the decline in reading and the rise of chainstore bookselling (with decline of indie bookselling) -- yes. There's a link. This article by Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi demonstrates that book sales spiked at the number of indie bookstores was spiking in the late 80s and early 90s, and dropped as indie bookstores failed in the mid and late 90s. The more doors there are around the country through which people can walk, and find books, the more people will read. Chain bookstores put 3500 indie storefronts out of business. Chains closed 700 B. Dalton chain locations, and 300 Walden chain locations, and 250 Crown locations during the same timeframe. Thats 4750 storefronts nationwide that closed. They opened 600 Barnes & Noble superstores, 550 Borders superstores and 100 Books a Million superstores. That's 1250 storefronts that opened. A net loss of 3500 doors nationwide through which people could casually walk to buy books. Here's Richard's article: Independent Bookselling and True Market Expansion. http://www.bookweb.org/news/btw/1932.html (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
1:21 pm	Calling All Investigative Reporters Is anyone out there looking for an investigative reporting task?  There's a MASSIVE unbroken set of stories that is now getting older and older, regarding the illegal "diversion" of books sent by publishers for destruction to the big book shredding companies in the mid-Atlantic States.  While I believe the lawsuit between McGraw-Hill against Guaranteed Destruction in 1995 was the only time this practice erupted into the courts, I'm fairly interested in the question of whether it's JUST POSSIBLY the way that Barnes & Noble amassed its excellent cash position during the 70s and early 80s.  I have no proof though -- only trails of inference.  And there were multiple middle-men involved.  There is deniability. This is sometimes called the "hurts" business.  Books that are supposed to be destroyed are instead sold at a very low price right back into the book-distribution stream.  (That would be called "stealing" I do believe...)   It's an Ida Tarbell kind of expose that needs to be written about Barnes & Noble in my opinion.  Probably the person who writes it will, in the short term, be perceived as destroying his career, but in the long run it could win her/him a Pulitzer..... http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-17020503.html   http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D01E7DD1739F936A25751C1A963958260   This is the very very tippy top of the iceberg I was referring to -- and marks probably the very death throes of this practice of decades of diversion (the lawsuits were in 1994/95). (In the articles referenced, you should know that Missouri Book Company and MBS Textbooks -- which were ultimate recipients of some of the "diverted" books, are companies controlled by Len Riggio, founder of Barnes & Noble College Stores and of the Barnes & Noble superstore chainstore company.)   Like the proverb says: "Behind every great fortune there is a great crime."  (THE FACT THAT I'M USING THIS PROVERB IS NOT SLANDEROUS OR LIBELOUS.  IT'S ONLY A PROBERB. I DON'T KNOW NOTHIN'.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
12:48 pm	How I Feel About Barnes & Noble and Amazon I responded to an additional question from the reporter:   1. Would you have, or did you, consider selling your own book at a retail chain or through amazon.com? Would this in any way have compromised your principles?   While none of the chains have ordered my book at the national level, both have taken special orders from customers for it, and have sold a couple of copies that way in the past 18 months.  However: both chains do allow local store managers varying degrees of local autonomy and local buying authority -- this has ranged over the years from substantial to insignificant.  I do know that at least the local managers of the Barnes & Noble closest to me, in Hadley, Mass, have been stocking my book.  I was shocked when I went in there a few months after my book came out to see four copies, faced out, in the Featured Books area of the business section.  Because I knew that the corporation hadn't placed an order for the book from my distributor, I picked up a copy off the shelf and brought it to the information desk, where two employees greeted me.  I showed them the book and explained that it's a rather fierce attack on their employer, Barnes & Noble, and that I knew the national buyer of B&N personally and she'd been quite angry with me for publishing the book -- I knew that she hadn't bought any of it for the chain.  So I asked how it had come to be there.  They said, "Someone at this store must have gotten it from a distributor."  I said to them, "You know, Publishers Weekly's review said about me 'Laties is a bitter, bitter man'."  And one of them laughed, reached for the book, looked at it, showed it to the other, and responded, "Oh, well, we're bitter bitter employees." http://rebelbookseller.livejournal.com/17276.html This is the blog entry where I first reported about seeing my book for sale at B&N.   Also, you asked about it being for sale on Amazon.  Yes, I'm selling a lot of copies on Amazon.  It's turned out, amusingly enough, to be a very important outlet for me.  I do not mind using one of my adversaries to advance my efforts to hurt this adversary.   Also, I have posted the entire text of the book on books.google.com -- you can read the book 100% for free.  This is because I'm more interested in the ideas being propagated than I am in actually selling those ideas and collecting a fee.   I am by no means in any way opposed to the internet, or with book distribution on the internet!!  My issue honestly is with the chainstores.  Barnes & Noble in particular developed -- in my opinion an experience and inside knowledge -- through a highly targeted growth spurt that specifically aimed to destroy particular leading independent bookstores.  The process was appalling and absolutely unnecessary, and B&N hurt lots of towns and cities and the people living there.  I believe this to be true.  I watched the consequences, locale by locale.  I found their strategic growth approach to be despicable -- and also, unsustainable.  I am happy that Amazon has made life very difficult for Barnes & Noble in terms of B&N implementing their unbridled growth ambitions (they announced upon opening their 500th superstore that they would reach 1000 stores in a couple of years!  Happily they were wrong!  It is Amazon I have to thank for this, as well as Wal-Mart!).  Of course, I do dislike a lot about Amazon (and a LOT about Wal-Mart).  But in a battle of any kind -- well, you end up with strange bedfellows!  The enemy of my enemy may be my friend.   I find Amazon's approach to manipulating its used-bookseller affiliates to be repellant.  Their dominance in the used-book business is terribly problematic for real-world storefront used-booksellers.  I want to use my new company, BiblioExpeditions, to try to counter this impact, however, and I think that this can be enacted successfully.   (Comment on this)
Monday, February 19th, 2007
9:47 pm	Interview: Independent Bookselling -- The Meaning and Prospects A newspaper reporter submitted some questions for use in an article he's writing about indie bookselling. Here are his questions and my responses: 1.How much of voice does the independent book store still have nowadays, given the proliferation of the big chain stores and online book oulets - or do you believe the perception of the retail chain's popularity is simply buoyed by the big publisher-retail chain relationship? My answer: There's no such thing as “the independent bookstore” which is why people are constantly saying that “the independent bookstore is dying”. That is: generalizing isn't really appropriate. People who decide to open independent bookstores come from such a range of backgrounds, and proceed in such a wide variety of manners that their resulting companies simply cannot be lumped together into a useful single category. And yet we do lump them together. Our task is to notice the fallacy. As a contrasting example, when we talk about the restaurant industry, we will generally not speak about Independent Restaurants versus Chain Restaurants, because we know that there is no logical reason to say that the existence of McDonalds has an impact on business at Le Cirque. A fancy, exclusive restaurant in Manhattan is not affected by the existence of massive restaurant corporations. And, many restaurants all over the country – restaurants with amazing cuisines, unusual decor, creative niches – that is, independent restaurants – are unaffected by growth in generic chain restaurant activity. So, therefore, any given independent bookstore will have a loud voice if it, alone, develops a loud voice. If it's unique and the public loves that uniqueness. Let's see if we can think of specific independent bookstores with “loud voices”. City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco – founded in the early 50s by Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- published Allen Ginsberg's poem “Howl”. Last year was the 50th anniversary of that poem's publication. There was major coverage of City Lights Bookstore in a wide variety of media. Ferlinghetti was honored, “Howl” was celebrated, the landmark obscenity trial was remembered. In short – an independent bookstore had a loud voice. Now: this big media year for a single bookstore didn't mean that “independent bookstores” as a GROUP did or didn't have a loud voice last year. But it means that ANY one independent bookstore can have a loud voice, in the past, in the present, in the future. Another example. My book Rebel Bookseller was published by a bookstore that I helped launch, in Brooklyn: Vox Pop. We've sold 2,200 copies of my book. I've gotten lots of feedback from people who've read my book: people who say I have helped give them courage to open an indie bookstore. Again: Vox Pop is a bookstore that publishes, and it is this activity as a publisher that helps to give the bookstore an unusually loud voice. Most bookstores do not publish, but any bookstore can. That is: the loud voice of any given bookstore depends on the actions of that bookstore. Now, certainly the chain bookstores' enormous sales are very impressive, but in an important sense they do NOT have a loud voice, because they must strive to avert controversy in order not to alienate customers. No chainstore corporation would have published either “Howl” or “Rebel Bookseller”. Neither would a major publishing house. In fact, although the chains and the major publishers do handle lots of Yesterday's Controversial Books – if you look carefully at the publishing history of most important books, you'll find that many emerged from small presses, and were originally trumpeted by small bookstores. How about “Ulysses” by James Joyce, published by a bookstore, in Paris, in 1922 – Shakespeare & Company – that was owned by the American, Sylvia Beach? It was only after being in print for 10 years with Beach that the book was published in the U.S., by Random House – following victory in an obscenity trial. So – independent booksellers and independent publishers are the culture's key “loud voices” because they are each, alone, able and willing to act to say things which large corporations daren't say. Large bookstores and large corporations then will try to make money using the ideas and work done by these brave independents. Thus, “Ulysses'” copyright went from Sylvia Beach, to Random House, to Random House's current owner, Bertelsmann. And we should NOT give any credit to Bertelsmann, or to the big chain stores that currently stock “Ulysses” for publishing or selling that book. These huge corporations don't deserve any credit. They didn't write that book, they didn't take the risk to publish it. The loudest voices emerge from the smallest mouths. 2.If independent book stores need strength in numbers to survive in a world of retail book stores, is the reputation of the giant retail outlets almost too much to overcome to encourage someone to open an indie book store? My answer: The giant retail outlets are extremely vulnerable. If you look at the history of retail corporations over the past hundred years you find quite a lot of turnover. For instance, major department stores in urban centers used to be the very largest, most powerful of retail corporations. But now they've all been going bankrupt and merging – struggling to survive. And -- look at Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck, the huge mail-order merchants from the turn of the last century! Wards is gone. Sears is a unit of K-Mart, which itself has been going through great turmoil. So, being large tells nothing about your company's future viability. Therefore we can be sure that the existing giant retail outlets are UNQUESTIONABLY doomed to future failure. We do not know the exact manner in which they will be displaced, of course. But we can take it as part of our task to help destroy them. How? By contesting their control of the market, niche by niche, location by location. Since the big bookstore corporations are doing a TERRIBLE job of selling books – for instance bookstore sales were down 2.9% last year, while total retail was up I believe 6%! -- therefore we know that the public is not satisfied with the performance of the chain bookstore companies. We individual booklover-entrepreneurs can therefore kill the big corporations: the reading public wants someone to dispense with the chain stores and replace them with something much better. We can see that this public responds favorably to the opening of a new independent bookstore: we have to simply make every effort to satisfy this public. Our stores only have to be more satisfying to readers than the chainstores are. We can do that. We're able to be uniquely creative. As individual owners. We don't need strength in numbers to make our unique stores successful. We only DO need strength in numbers if we wish to actually succeed in achieving the much larger goal of truly aggressively bankrupting the chains in short order. I don't know if we'll succeed in forcing this particular business eventuality, in any shortterm timeframe. But it's not important. They will die of their own accord, or they'll be killed by being squeezed between Wal-Mart and Amazon – and we indie operators will be left free to jump back in and collect all the abandoned local market share. 3. What, in your opinion, is the business model for a successful independent bookstore today? Is it simply a matter of "opening where they ain't?" Is it giving the impression that it's not an antique store? My answer: Booklovers like it when bookstores open close together. So, I recommend opening close to chainstores. As close as possible. And, close to other independent bookstores. As close as possible. Beyond this, it is critical to own your own building. Bookselling is actually a form of real estate investment – that's the way booksellers make the most money – by causing their own buildings to increase in value; by causing neighboring buildings to increase in value. Barnes & Noble execs say that if B&N closed its bookstores down nationwide tomorrow the company would still be in terrific shape because they own so much excellent real estate. Small business owners need to own their own real estate too. We can give the public any genre of impression at all, thematically (antique store is fine) as long as it's a VIBRANT impression, an impression that compels people to enter and part with their cash. There are a lot of ways to engage people with books, and to engage with the experience of vital connection with neighbors and with the wider world. The best ideas for bookstores emerge from the personalities of owners. I tell everyone considering the launch of a new bookstore that they have got to be prepared to become a Personality Bookseller and to launch a Personality Bookstore. That is, the store should be perceived by customers as an extension of the owner's persona. That's the ultimate in uniqueness. Of course, as new owners, we may have to reach way down into ourselves to find the versions of our personalities we intend to serve up for our new publics that will achieve greatest success in terms of popular patronage. (22 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 15th, 2007
9:19 am	Author Appearances; Book Returns An author emailed me this comment, below, and I responded with the email following (this should serve as a warning to readers of this blog that a short email to me can provoke a rather overblown response...) The author wrote: "I have never been paid for [appearing at] a bookstore. But, schools pay me. The bookstore is making money by me being there and the school is not... now how is this fair? I don't know." I responded: Yes, if bookstores paid for author appearances they'd do a better job of ensuring attendance too. Nothing that's free is properly valued by the recipient. This is related to the fact that books are returnable by booksellers to publishers. The returnability of books to publishers makes them less valuable to booksellers, and renders the publishers (and authors) more liable to abuse by booksellers. Publishing is a business that is beholden to booksellers. I talk about this in my book. People who work in publishing companies are trained to be professionally self-destructive. Authors -- most of them anyway -- are forced to act as a form of contract employee to their publishing houses. This wouldn't be so bad if the publishing houses were run like decent businesses. But they're not. Look: one great way to maintain control is to keep your opponents or your associates weak. You keep these others weak by ensuring that they remain fragmented or divided. In any contest over "who gets the money" it is smart to desire to have a position of strength from which to negotiate. So -- keep the opposing party weak. When is the field of bookselling weak? When it is composed of a large number of tiny, independently owned companies. And, when these little companies are run by people who are by personality type inclined to go it alone. When is the field of bookselling strong? When it is composed of a small number of large corporations that are motivated by bottom line considerations and not by quirks of personality. It is in the interest of publishers -- and, by extension, authors -- to keep the field of bookselling "weak" so that the publishers and authors can keep a larger percentage of the pie from the sale of books. A small bookstore cannot control the relationship with publisher and author. A thousand small bookstores -- weakly organized -- likewise. But a huge bookselling corporation can dictate terms. Can collect extra payments, extract extra discount, force higher preprinted retail prices...can cause the editorial favoring of certain categories (self-help), of certain types of authors (movie stars, etc)... So, publishers should work to ensure that there are a large number of tiny bookstores, not that there are a small number of giant bookselling corporations. They should eliminate the returnability of books by bookstores to publishers, thereby denying the massive defacto credit lines they are now providing to the ENTIRE BOOKSELLING INDUSTRY -- this would disproportionately damage the largest companies, because these are publicly traded, and the extra interest cost they'd incur from having to finance their own inventories would hurt profits, and knock share prices down. It would hurt independent bookstores MUCH less. Indies return about 15% of what they buy, but the chains return 40% of what they buy. (Amazon.com in particular should not be permitted/assisted by publishers to engage in their appalling consignment method of bookselling, whereby they hold publisher-owned books in their warehouses without any obligation to pay the publisher until as much as 30 days after the book is sold.) And the publishers should stop paying ad money to bookstores for shelf-placement or inclusion in bookseller advertising, and should not provide ANY free marketing services to bookstores. Bookstores should have to pay publishers for all marketing collaborations -- as they'd pay an advertising agency or publicity firm. If an author is to be presented, the bookstore -- ALL BOOKSTORES -- should EQUALLY have to PAY the author a decent speaker's fee. Booksellers would then learn to do a good job at promoting books and authors, just as any event promoter learns to do a good job at promoting the talent off which they're making their living. Booksellers would know that they had to REALLY SELL all the books they ordered from the publisher for the author visit, and they'd make sure they accomplished this sales objective, or they'd go bankrupt. (Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon.com would all go bankrupt if publishers implemented these ideas, and 10,000 new indie bookstores would open.) Publishers could spend their promotional dollars on direct advertising, targeting consumers, instead of handing most of their promo budgets directly to the big bookselling corporations. (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 10th, 2007
4:09 pm	Public Forms; Strategic Functions I received an email from a prospective bookseller full of exciting ideas about the look and feel of an innovative bookstore, and asking me if I thought it could succeed. I responded with this email: Well the trick is somehow hacking an authentic revenue model. I mean -- what you DON'T want is to become a fabulous mecca that is also defacto a non-profit! This is always the risk for us, since people are so ready to take advantage of our fabulous energies and then woops, neglect to pay us. The customers will take everything for free! And we go broke. So -- now this can be solved in many many many ways -- but, it does have to be solved. My partner (I'm VERY much a minority partner) at Vox Pop in Brookyn has been trying to solve this problem by configuring a certain number of his book programs as "ticketed" -- that is, he's charging $30 for an event including author/dinner/the-book. Here's an event listing from last night. http://www.voxpopnet.net/deephop.html Actually I think my partner has been doing a lot of things really right, however he isn't making much money yet, after more than two years. I have my own opinions for why this is so -- principally, that although he's a master visonary -- he's got the "look and feel" down -- there are still problems with the nuts and bolts of retail: full-scale product selection. He wants to sell political books, and out-there left books, and so this is his product mix, but his heart doesn't really seem to be in retail: it's in the politics, and the publishing he's doing (he published my book, which is why I own part of this store!). Well -- retail CAN be crass! But it really depends on what you personally can -- what -- force yourself to be interested in? I mean -- look, you wrote me an email about a concept for a fabulous gathering place you can create. I agree -- this is a -- performance/coffee-house site? (That's why you should look carefully at the Vox Pop website www.voxpopnet.net -- which although strongly politically themed has structural similarities to your idea) You can get people to come. But then, overlaid on that -- IF you're talking about selling books and I mean really having some serious book business happening -- has to be a full-on bookselling company. Or -- selling some other product or service that has a mark-up that people will PAY for without whining about the price, etc. There are LOTS of ways to get people to do this. But it generally involves some -- repositioning of their understandings or expectations. The risk is that people will say: "I don't need to pay this much" or "I don't have enough money for this" or "I'll wait and get this later". So -- integrated into this idea for an incredible PLACE which you've sent me has to be an idea for an incredible RETAIL FORMULA -- a sort of -- abstract machine. A -- logic. From the moment people get the impulse to visit your place, there's this awareness inside them, a sort of compulsion, to enact some kind of ritual that you have invented that results, when they LEAVE in an exchange of money where you get left with more than it cost you to deliver the experience. Whether it's a "two-book cover charge" at the door, or a ticket price to enter, or a product display and marketing approach that is simply -- IRRESISTABLE -- Or terrifically artistic sales-people who seduce people into buying books -- mmmm The short answer would be: Of course it can work. Yes. This answer just leads to thousands more question. And also, INEVITABLY -- YES it can work -- today, this month -- but it can also COLLAPSE -- two years from now -- for a thousand reasons. Alternately, it can not work for three YEARS and suddenly, unaccountable, POP and really start working. It has a life-cycle. You have to think about how it can transmute YOU into someone else with another future. et cetera... Andy (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 3rd, 2007
11:38 am	Now Launching: BiblioExpeditions! Well, "Rebel Bookseller" is well and truly launched and in the world: over two thousand copies sold, and I've started regularly hearing from people who have read it during the process of launching their own stores. I cannot describe the rush. But -- I'm restless, and am now in the process of creating yet another company. Read all about it on my new blog, at http://biblioexpeditions.blogspot.com. (Also accessible by going to the URL www.biblioexpeditions.com) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 9th, 2006
3:39 pm	Rebel Bookseller hits Wall Street Journal's website, StartupJournal.com From the article "How Some Bookworms Turn Pages Into Profits": "Andy Laties has started several bookstores since 1985, including his current venture running the Eric Carle Museum Shop in Amherst, Mass., and wrote "Rebel Bookseller: How to Improvise Your Own Indie Store and Beat Back the Chains" a how-to published through Vox Pop, a Brooklyn bookstore and micro-publisher he co-founded. Successful independents make their stores stand out, Mr. Laties says." "If you open a store that's straight up the middle, it's really difficult to defend it because the marketplace is quite competitive," he says. Vox Pop, he says, differentiates itself by selling beer and wine, hosting musical events and poetry readings and offering an instant publishing service that turns customers' manuscripts into books on the spot." http://www.startupjournal.com/columnists/startuplifestyle/20060518-lifestyle.html (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006
4:41 pm	Trash-talking the independent bookseller Jessica Stockton at the blog "Written Nerd" has been inviting commentary on the subject of the future of independent bookselling. http://writtennerd.blogspot.com/2006/06/comment-future-of-bookselling-this-i.html I contributed this comment--below--on the subject of the media's obsession with the question of whether indie bookselling has a future at all (some recent media commentary has collapsed this question into a larger assertion that physical books themselves will soon be eclipsed by digital media.) The amazingly optimistic feelings among a large sector of the public in the late 80s about the likely success of any given brand new independent bookstore turned out to be disastrous for a group of major corporations. This upstart can-do mentality dramatically destabilized the publishing and bookselling businesses. It was imperative to not only tamp down the growth of indie bookselling, but also to ensure that never again would thousands of people open their own indie bookstores all at once, and never again would the general public view new indie bookstores as inherently superior to the corporate-controlled outlets. Why? Big publishers wanted sales outlets they could control, in terms of what books these outlets would purchase and promote. Predictability is perceived by managers at publishing houses as enormously desirable. They can get a measure of predictability from chain retail outlets who will guarantee shelf-space in exchange for ad-payments. Indie booksellers generally refuse to promote "just any" book a publisher desperately wishes to promote. So -- let's look at all this incredible trash-talking regarding the impossibility of independent bookselling, the inevitable doom of independent bookselling, etc. Who benefits from this nonsense?? A sudden reprise of the 80s boom in entrepreneurialism among book-lovers, resulting in a dramatic upsurge in storefront openings will hurt: 1) Current chainstores, 2) Current indie bookstores (many of them do believe), 3) Corporate publishers Also: Amazon, Google -- any online booksellers -- anyone who's trying to stake a claim as the Inevitable Victor. So I'd argue that there is in effect a disinformation campaign being waged by publicity firms and publicity departments and that this is being parroted and amplified by ignorant or pliant media voices. A few thousand of the 200,000 people now employed in the book industry, if they act in a roughly simultaneous fashion, drawing on their terrific skills, working together to launch lots of indie bookstores, will silence all these foolish words about the death of independent bookselling. No: It's the death of big-box bookselling, the weakening of corporate-conglomerate publishing, the weakening of online-exclusive booksellers (online bookselling will become a subsector of bricks-and-mortar bookselling) -- THAT'S what's in the wind. Trash talk. Trying to scare us. Andy Laties (Comment on this)
Friday, June 2nd, 2006
9:36 am	The Future Of Bookselling: Blog commentaries I've contributed recent comments about the Future Of Indie Bookselling to discussions on two different blogs -- one American, one British. On Jessica Stockton's blog, Written Nerd: http://writtennerd.blogspot.com/2006/05/copout-question.html My comment: The dedicated customer-base will always want to work with the expert bookseller. The greater the bookseller's expertise, the more devoted the specialty customer will be. As to the general interest walk-in trade, the biggest question looming is whether Barnes & Noble will attempt to acquire Borders soon, and whether George W. Bush's antitrust enforcement will respond favorably to American Booksellers Association efforts to prevent such a merger. Certainly today's announcement that in England, Waterstones will indeed take over Ottakar's provides no helpful precendent for keeping the industry at least a LITTLE bit decentralized on this side of the Atlantic. Especially with the rise of online bookselling, the Federal Trade Commission might rule that in the U.S. as in England, B&N and Borders as a combination will not be a monopoly (as they would surely have been judged as recently as the late 90s before Amazon and the other online sellers got as large as they are today.) On Iain Dale's blog, on The Guardian: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/iain_dale/2006/06/the_end_of_the_bookshop_is_nig.html My comment: Not to worry: the independent bookstore will never disappear, any more than will the independent restaurant. Creative individuals will always find new ways to attract people out to their sparkling and daring storefronts. During the Chicago Bookstore War of the mid-90s I had to close my previously successful independent bookstore: perhaps forty of us Chicago indies closed under the assault from the newstyle corporate bookstores. In all, about 3500 U.S. independent bookstores closed in the mid-90s. But since 2002 the number of indie bookstores has stabilized at about 1700 nationwide -- about 175 close each year, and 175 open. The rate of new openings has grown, and the stores that close these days are often doing so because their owners have had a 30 year run and are retiring. The worm is turning. In my own case, I did lose a store, which was expensive and made me miserable, but I promptly opened another one: more specialized, with more nonbook high-markup sidelines, with a program that discounted books for members of the museum with which I had affiliated myself (they generated huge traffic flow for me). My new store at Chicago Children's Museum sold tons of books and was profitable. Now I've got yet another bookstore in another museum: The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Again, a highly protected location and a membership discount program and an alliance with a nonprofit institution that benefits from the profits my work generates for them. Customers know that if they buy a book in my museum shop, the museum benefits from their decision to shop with me. Yes, I lost a store. I had to learn how to create successful indie bookstores once again. What's wrong with the market changing? This only forces booksellers to become extremely creative. To invent new forms of "positioning". The founders of Amazon, Waterstones, Ottakar's were very creative. That was then. Anyone else can be creative too. One day, today's big stores will be old news. The owners of small stores that will go out of business in Britain will be faced with a personal choice. They can get out of the book business altogether. Or they can pick themselves up and think up a brand new, killer business concept that takes advantage of unique business alliances, practices, inventories, buying mechanisms. I read Frank Mumby's book about British bookselling -- a classic. The history of British bookselling is full of battles and wars and fights between today's insiders and yesterday's insiders. You can't keep the next generation down. Andy Laties www.rebelbookseller.com (8 Comments |Comment on this)