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Why Bestselling Authors #ShopSmall at Independent Bookstores
Last Saturday, I shopped at an independent bookstore.
And you should too.
Unlike Amazon and big retailers, what’s on the shelf at an indie is chosen.
The selection is curated — by the taste of the staff, certainly, but also by what sells.
Small bookstores don’t have the luxury of treating books like soap dishes, sitting on a shelf in some big warehouse collecting dust for years until someone clicks and buys.
Your local store doesn’t use their inventory — or most of it anyway — as loss leaders hoping that you’ll come in for Michelle Obama’s Becoming but also buy paper towels and spring for new headphones because you’re there and it’s convenient.
Instead, local bookstores keep a small and ever-changing inventory of titles that their staff believes will appeal to readers who shop their store.
(And maybe passerby that need a book for the plane or as a last-minute gift.)
In these stores, the shelves for nonfiction are small.
Which, for aspiring authors, is AWESOME.
On Amazon, there are more than 50,000 titles on personal growth. But at Christopher’s Books in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco…
