What Independent Bookshops Really Sell

They’re a haven from soulless corporations. But are they also insular communities?

(Photo by Liao Pan/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images.)

America’s independent bookstores may look like the tattered, provincial shops of a bygone era—holding onto their existence by the slimmest thread. And booksellers may appear genial and absent-minded, like characters out of Dickens. But in reality, they’re the marketing geniuses of our time.

For 30 years, independent bookstores have been battling Amazon, a monster online retailer that sells the exact same products for 20-50% less.

“In 1994, there were over 7,000 independent bookstores in the United States,” says Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association (ABA). “By 2009 that number had dropped to 1,651.”

But after the initial bloodbath, in which there were many casualties, independent bookstores found their footing. And in large urban centers, they’re winning the war.

“The good news is that the number of indie bookstores has been growing each year since then,” says Hill. “The Buy Local Movement, the ABA’s independent bookstore marketing campaigns, and consumers’ growing desire for non-corporate, authentic, and socially responsible options, is driving that growth.”

Then she adds, “The bad news is that there are still only around 2,500 indie bookstores in the U.S.—64% fewer than before Amazon’s anticompetitive practices cast a shadow on the book industry landscape.”

Those 2,500 locations are, however, doing big numbers in sales. In August of last year Publishers Weekly reported, “Bookstore sales finished the first half of 2023 up 6.9% over the comparable period in 2022.” In fact, independent bookstore sales outpaced most other publishing industry metrics in 2023, growing faster than overall unit sales of print books. This is unprecedented.

Booksellers have bent the rules of the free market. For the first time in history, a significant chunk of the buying public are voluntarily paying almost double—and going out of their way—to buy exactly the same product they can get cheaper and often faster somewhere else. And it’s all due to that ABA message: “non-corporate, authentic, and socially responsible.”

Yes, you can get the brand new hardcover from your favorite author at $15.99 with a click of a link in the middle of the night and have it delivered to your door. But don’t. Get in your car, drive to your local bookshop during regular business hours, and pay $27—IF the book is in stock. If it is not, please order it from us and return to pick it up. Do this because it’s the right thing to do, because we will not survive if you don’t, and because you’re just not the sort of person who buys books online.

What no one says is that the bargain works both ways. If book buyers must behave virtuously and tithe an additional $11 a book, then booksellers must uphold the community’s doctrines. They’re locked in the moral contract, too.

---

In 1994 Jeff Bezos and his then-wife Mackenzie Scott launched Amazon in a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington. Their first product: books.

“The decision to sell books wasn’t out of some special affection for literature,” says Alec MacGillis, author of “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America,” a history and analysis of Amazon’s effect on the U.S. economy. “It was because books were very well suited to e-commerce. You have this infinite number of titles and if you’re selling online from a massive warehouse you can compete against a bookstore with a limited amount of space.”

At the time, small booksellers were distracted by another enemy: the mega-chains—Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, Borders and Barnes & Noble—that had spread throughout the country. These stores tended to be in malls, with high foot traffic and discounts of 10-20%. Small booksellers claimed the megastores had an unfair advantage with publishers; they received early galleys and their bulk orders could have an outsized influence on a book’s success.

The 1998 rom-com “You’ve Got Mail”—starring Tom Hanks as a mega-books retailer and Meg Ryan as a cozy bookshop owner—zoomed in on this tension. The ending (spoiler) could never hold today. After secretly advising her through AOL hookup, then regretfully forcing the closure of her tiny twee store, Tom reveals himself to Meg and they fall in love. Literary folks are still angry about this. But insofar as the big corporation beat the indie bookshop, the plot line was true to life.

Independent bookstores were fighting for their survival, first against the chains, then against Amazon. The ABA complained; they criticized; they sued. To no avail. Then, in the mid-aughts, the little trade organization founded in 1900 created that magic word-of-mouth campaign: “non-corporate, authentic, and socially responsible.” Each bookstore said it a little differently but they all repeated this core message in one unified voice.

While Amazon devoured all but one of the chains (only Barnes & Noble is still standing), this mantra would elevate small bookshops to some Valhalla of retail—selling righteousness, rather than just books.

This strategy doesn’t work at scale for any other business. When Costco arrived in big cities, offering bulk quantities of upscale foods at cheaper prices, shoppers switched in droves from buying expensive cuts of beef at local butcher shops. Hardware stores price match because consumers won’t pay an additional $300 for a major appliance and lug it home; they’ll order it with free delivery online.

But books are different. They signal something about readers’ intelligence, identity, and closely held ideas. Books confer status—especially among the highly educated. The people who sell them know this and they used it to make their case.

Ordering discounted books from Amazon was short-sighted and problematic because it would result in the loss of local bookshops plus the general dumbing down of society. Buying those same books—at full price—from an independent bookseller was civic-minded and enlightened. It would preserve bookshops and the intellectual haven they provide.

---

My second novel came out in 2012, when independent bookstores were asking for writers’ unflagging support.

I was expected to market my novel on social media with instructions that people buy it only from their local bookseller. This made me uncomfortable. My cousin who worked as an aide in a nursing home, my neighbor whose husband had just lost his job, my childhood friend who was bipolar and lived in a rented room—I was supposed to demand that each of these people spend an additional 10 bucks on my book, to uphold a value that meant far more in my community than theirs?

Also, there were shenanigans behind the scenes. Authors would champion the independents, while ordering cartons of their own books from Amazon to hand sell at readings for the jacket price. This paid off financially and helped bump up the book’s Amazon ranking, a number that (paradoxically) still mattered for a writer’s career.

And there were rumors circulating that just weren’t true. For instance, the wildfire online claim that authors were paid less in royalties for books sold on Amazon? False.

When my third novel came out in spring of 2015, my local bookshop—an institution in Minneapolis—declined to stock it, though I’d moderated a panel for them just a few months before. There are many reasons they might have made this decision. The book’s themes of personal responsibility and absolution did, perhaps, lean right wing. But also, I had a flailing small publisher, mixed reviews, and a history of chiding wealthy inner-circle writers. Bottom line: My city friends were flummoxed. They were loath to order a title their local bookseller disapproved of, but they refused to buy it any other way.

This was the same year legendary sci-fi and fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin captured the spirit of the book world with a blog post titled “Why I keep Asking You Not to Buy Books from Amazon.”

“If you like to buy household goods or whatever through Amazon, that’s totally fine with me,” Le Guin wrote. “If you think Amazon is a great place to self-publish your book, I may have a question or two in mind, but still, it’s fine with me, and none of my business anyhow. My only quarrel with Amazon is when it comes to how they market books and how they use their success in marketing to control not only bookselling, but book publication: what we write and what we read.”

Le Guin’s message—repeated by myriad other bestselling authors including Stephen King and Ann Patchett—convinced their many millions of readers to order online from local independent bookstores, at full price, when they couldn’t visit in person. Writers were encouraged to use the bookstore finder IndieBound on their websites and in press materials, but never Amazon.

Their argument was powerful. Do we want Amazon controlling the titles we have access to, or the options we see when we search their catalog? Clearly not. There’s a genuine threat to the free exchange of ideas if we allow a tech company to arbitrate which books are published or sold. And yet… the downstream effect has been to locate more control with booksellers and their patrons, whose politics and preferences drive decidedly left.

Like any other for-profit enterprise—which is what bookshops are, no matter what their PR—the independents must provide the service their customers want, or they’ll go out of business. The people who responded to the ABA’s anti-Amazon pleas—mostly educated, higher income, and progressive—want books that reflect their values and they need to believe those books are better quality choices. They won’t visit a store that platforms “deplorable” thinkers. All that makes sense.

But as division between red and blue America grows, so does the boldness of the lines that booksellers can’t cross.

I spoke to two authors whose books were banished from prominent independent bookstores. One gave me background only, off the record—saying it was “too traumatic” to relive the furor over their pandemic-era book.

The other talked to me for two hours and gave me permission to write about their debut novel, which was review-bombed prior to publication—by activists who had not read it but objected to its premise—then delayed by the publisher and their book tour canceled by a number of indie bookstores. I had just put the closing lines on that story when the author contacted me and retracted, saying it was too risky to speak up.

Many small booksellers are walking the same delicate line. They can’t afford to alienate their base with titles that offend or annoy. Curating the indie tone means mixing literary award winners with appropriate themed displays (Black History Month, eco-thrillers) and still-approved classics, such as “The Phantom Tollbooth.” When a book hits big across demographics—be it “Fifty Shades of Grey” or 2022’s mammoth bestseller “Lessons in Chemistry”—doling out piles of them will keep a little bookshop humming for months.

Bookstore owners avoid controversy for obvious reasons. They also develop a sense, intuitively, of what is coded conservative or right-wing and they tend to avoid these books. This is partly out of personal preference—but also because if you want people to pay full price for books because doing so reinforces their core values, you must provide an environment free of ideas or opinions that contradict those, and all other, associated beliefs.

I visited or called five mid-size independents to ask for a variety of well-publicized conservative or heterodox titles, including those by Brad Wilcox, Rob Henderson, and Abigail Shrier. One store bordering a conservative area had a single copy of Rob Henderson’s “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class;” another had a copy of Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” in their used section. Otherwise, the books were not on their shelves.

Every store, however, had scores of copies of Brooklynite Molly Roden Winter’s New York-magazine featured polyamory tale “More: A Memoir of Open Marriage” and Leslie Jamison’s memoir “Splinters,” about her divorce.

“Most independent bookstores have succeeded because they’ve responded to the needs of their community,” says Jan Weissmiller, co-owner of Iowa City’s Prairie Lights since 2008. “If they’re in a part of the country where people are asking for a certain kind of book, that’s what they have on the shelf. Because they’re a business.”

Prairie Lights is one of the largest, most varied, and consistently top-rated bookstores in the country. Iowa City, home to the writer’s workshop, was the first U.S. city to receive the UNESCO City of Literature designation—and it serves as a sanctuary for political authors from around the world. It’s a town where “everyone is aware of great writing,” Weissmiller says.

It’s an unusual spot for an independent bookseller; Prairie Lights is so essential to the city, it isn’t at risk the way other independents are. So part of their mission is to stock books across the spectrum of thought. When “Irreversible Damage” came out in 2020, they had it on their shelves (selling just two copies). And when Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s “The Real Anthony Fauci” appeared the following year, they stocked that, too—selling more than 130 copies—despite the fact that most in their community disdained the book.

“The whole shame and problem with our politics right now is that we don’t talk to each other,” says Weissmiller. “Bookstores are a place where we hope those conversations happen among us.”

---

The last store I visited was a Barnes & Noble. In many ways, it is the book industry’s chimera, combining the online catalog and corporate power of a mini-Amazon with the in-your-neighborhood quality of the independents.

B&N had a shaky revenue-declining decade in the 2010s, when it looked like they could get neither side of the bookselling equation right. In 2019 an investment firm bought B&N and took their holdings private under the direction of CEO James Daunt, founder of Daunt Books in London.

Daunt revamped the old B&N locations, doing away with the ‘90s-era green striped walls. He described himself to The New York Times last year as “an independent bookseller in background and ethos,” saying that the company is learning from the indie movement how to romance customers back into their stores.

I dropped into my local B&N on a Saturday afternoon and the place was mobbed: teenagers walking hand in hand, kids running through the stacks, Starbucks cups spilling from every trash receptacle. Lanyard-wearing staff were plentiful and easy to spot, helpful and friendly. The heat was set a touch too high, making me worry for the books.

Did it feel rarefied and erudite? Sadly, no. There was a huge Taylor Swift endcap (who knew there were so many books written about her?) and the smell of old Sbarro wafted in through the mall doors. The ambiance was approximately 100 times less pleasing than any of the independents I’d seen.

But when I checked for the five books, from Wilcox to Jamison, they were all there—stacked on the shelves in an ordinary way. In the “New in Nonfiction” section Ted Cruz’s “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America” was next to Cenk Uygur’s “Justice is Coming: How Progressives Are Going to Take Over the Country and America Is Going to Love It.” There was a table for Black History Month, much like the ones I’d seen at the independents. After that was a table of lurid true-crime thrillers. Then suddenly I was on a grimy escalator, descending into puzzles and games.

Democracy isn’t charming. When everyone’s tastes are included, things get big, messy, chaotic, and kind of rank. And I guess I’ll take it. Seeing Ted and Cenk shelved together made me happy, though I have no impulse to read either one.

But what I really want is a store where all the ideas are on display—the socialist, capitalist, monogamous, polyamorous, urban, rural, popular, and reviled—that also has the homely sacrosanct quality of one of Hemingway’s coffee-and-absinthe bars. With great music, please—and no puppets, or cheap pizza.

In other words, I’m headed down to Iowa City to buy some books.

Ann Bauer is an essayist and novelist. Follow her on X at @annbauerwriter.

---

Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below: