Bookshop

At the end of another successful Independent Bookshop week, indie author Mo Fanning questions how he can help booksellers sell more copies than the online giants

James Daunt, the man who will soon try to revive Barnes & Noble, once spent weeks in a noisy, arm-waving debate about the ideal angle of tilt for bookstore shelving. His opponent was an Italian showroom designer who argued, in a series of otherwise congenial meals in some of London's best restaurants, that the shelf should be tilted four degrees.  Read more

Online stores are the most common venues for indie authors to sell their books, whether in digital or print format. And while digital publishing gives authors access to readers around the world, many self-published writers are also eager to get their books into neighborhood bookstores.  Read more

We're going to go out on a limb here and make a sweeping prediction, one that hopefully will be ridiculed in fifty years: consumers do not buy books directly from the publisher. Why not? Because in most cases, they don't know who the publisher is. In even more dire news for publishers, consumers also don't care who the publisher is.

I often dream I am in a bookstore or in a library. Then I wake up and I am in Queens, the largest of the five boroughs in New York City, the most diverse place imaginable, and where there are currently two Barnes & Noble and one independent book seller and a few places to buy used books. But given the size and density of this borough, this borough truly lacks bookstores.  Read more