Thanks for sharing!

I know you have to have a certain amount of reviews for Bookbub to let you use their services.

I don’t know. I am glad you had a nice experience. Some of my best memories are of browsing/shopping B&N. They really lost me as a fan when they deliberately set up locations across from every indie bookstore with the purpose of driving the Mom and Pop under. They obliterated the indies in DFW much like Starbucks did to every small coffee shop.

A lot of the observations I make are from the publishing side of it.

New authors who need the discoverability are never going to get on those front tables unless they get an rocking agent. I get it. It’s business. But the way they really hurt authors is they won’t carry backlists in the store. Yes, they have lots of shelves with lots of variety and trust me I still shop there. But in order to do this, they can’t shelve the backlists that used to be the bread and butter of the author. Because of this many authors had their backlists shelved. I know this because when the paradigm shifted some of the NYTBSAs who first broke away self-published backlists NY didn’t want.

But the second they saw authors making money, they grabbed up all the rights…but then did nothing with perfectly good books (a lot of kerfluffle over this back in 2012).

Since B&N and Borders were the only game in town and didn’t want backlists for anyone other than mega authors? Sure, they will shelve a gazillion Stephen King books or Nora Roberts books (because of course those sell) but the mid list author? The one who really news those multiple title sales? Not so much.

I think it is a real mess. All of it. I wish B&N would have been happy with one or two stores and trusted that the comfy chairs and coffee would bring us. I resented a B&N every two miles down every major street. It was just greedy. That Mom & Pop wasn’t going to damage their sales, but those small stores really were helpful to writers.

I hope they retool and reinvigorate. I am not a fan of shopping solely on line. I still go in there and buy books and there is something to be said for the brick-and-mortar experience.

B&N sells very few books for big discounts, especially if they are new or are hot commodities. A small number of books are selected for discount promotion each month, usually the highly anticipated titles, but the discounts are modest and for limited amounts of time. B&N pushes its purchased membership program for customers who want discounts, with limited success.

Books that show up on the big discount aisles, less than $10 a book, are generally older titles of popular authors or are re-published public domain classics. As for what shows up front and center in the bookstore: yes, some space is bought by publishers, not by authors (as far as I know.) Again, the big titles or famous authors who make the bookstore run.

You are right that the café readers are a huge pain in the tush for stores but it has become part of the territory. Coffee shop/bookstore browse all you want as if you’re in the library. I’ll never forget the irate a-hole who demanded that we stay open past 11:00 PM so he could continue to drink the single latte he’d bought at 6 while he ruined books and magazines for hours.

B&N did not pulp books, ever, nor magazines. We did tear off covers of older issues of mags before returning them to the publisher, (who wants to buy a week old Time magazine?) but books were returned whole to the publishers. I suspect they would eventually go to the remainder shelves of other bookstores.

B&N tried for years to maintain large sections of the store devoted to every genre of literature you can name, and posted upholstered chairs where you could sit and read. And plenty of the store was dedicated to non-fiction and magazines and newspapers as well as to the children’s department (that remains intact in most of their stores today.) B&N had a section for first time publications and for the work of authors that B&N promoted as winners of their new authors’ program. Yes, it was a bit of self-promotion, but please don’t say that new authors didn’t have a chance.

Every store had its vagrant community who came in and spent the day staying warm in our aisles as well as parents who used the store as their babysitter, homework monitor, and free research center. The loss to the store because of damaged product and destroyed furniture was large though not matched by the amount of theft. We welcomed authors to launch at B&N, we invited all kinds of groups to come in and celebrate their reading specialty at the store. It’s where I began my now 12-year relationship with my critique group.

Yes, B&N overwhelmed the indie bookstores except of those who figured out how to focus on specialty sales departments. Many of the booksellers like me loved books, were trying to get our own work published, and gladly recommended all kinds of material to guests. We liked working at B&N.

What finally ruined B&N’s older come-in-and-stay-for-the-day model was in fact Amazon, where readers could buy books often at a discount and have them delivered free. Once Amazon introduced its Kindle e-reader, B&N realized more competition than it could absorb. Finally B&N gave in and turned over huge sections of the bookshelves to selling toys, games, movies, and home specialty home décor items as well as larger sections of novels for young adults and the emerging new adult genre as well as the cafe. And of course, for the Nook, B&N’s own e-reader. Many readers resisted e-readers for years preferring a hard copy. Now maybe half of those who read regularly, read on a device rather than an actual book in hand.

Where once B&N showcased multiple copies of many titles of an author, they were now down to one copy of the author’s most recent book unless that person was Rowling, King, or Patterson or a few of those other well known writers. I was there when we started the big changeover, and all of us felt an emotional punch at the loss of our book backlog.

I have enormous respect and affection for the indie and specialty bookstores, but when it comes to decency of the big bookstore business, B&N is up there. Plenty to bitch about, of course, but plenty to be pleased about. Like the store’s willingness to stock material for homeschooling parents and titles requested by the local schools. Yes, B&N is a business, not a charity, with stockholders and some rich CEO with his stinky feet propped on a desk in New York. (They just fired the guy for lackluster performance. I hope he put his shoes on before he left.)

B&N is today trying to figure out how to remain a solvent player in a market changing rapidly for many reasons. I don’t work there anymore but I wish it well. I want people to read, I want kids to read, I want writers to know that B&N is a good place to find their books. I believe in books and bookstores. I believe B&N wants to remain a viable store for people who like to read and for writers whose books should be on the shelves – it just has to figure out how to be that place in this decade and the next. I think you’re confusing the publication industry with the bookstore industry – they’re neighbors but not family.

I think you’ve been a bit unfair to the chain, so thank you for letting me tell you how the B&N Bookstore really is – from the perspective of a past employee who loved working there. Thanks, Kristen, for letting me “talk.”