Why the Collapse of Chain Bookstores is a Good Thing for Books. Part 3

Over the last two days, we looked at bookselling in the 1990’s. A period that saw the rise of a war between independently owned and operated bookstores and the corporate chain bookstores such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, the sinister successors of Crown Books, which had attempted and failed to crush indie bookstores in the 80’s. By the time we hit 2000, the chain stores were all well established, and the e-sellers such as Amazon had also made a name for themselves. Moving towards the new millennium, it started to look like the indie bookstore was dead…

Life during Wartime (2000-2007)
by Andrew Gifford

It’s sad, looking back, to see how booksellers and publishers became enemies when once, long ago, they had been the best of friends.

I often hear stories of late publisher extraordinaire Seymour “Sam” Lawrence. Lawrence discovered and fought for authors such as Jayne Anne Phillips, Susan Minot, Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, Katherine Anne Porter, William Saroyan, Frank Conroy, Miguel Angel Asturias, Tom McGuane, Tom Drury, Richard Currey, and Pablo Neruda. It’s fair to say that not a single one of those names would be familiar if not for Lawrence. He would fill his car with their books and handsell them to bookstores across the country, glad-handing indie store owners and extolling the virtues of his chosen authors. A grassroots approach where bookseller and book industry met face to face. Lawrence is the most notable of this breed of publisher (and unofficial agent), but there were many who did the same. Direct marketing to the indie bookstores from publishers and agents who loved the business, and who loved the books. What Lawrence demonstrated, over and over, was that fine literature could succeed if positioned and promoted well.

You could argue that throwing money at the chain bookstores for paid placements is the same principle, updated for the new era. Just another version of Lawrence plowing dramatically through your doors with this offbeat weirdo sci-fi from some crazy author named Vonnegut.

But, of course, the differences are obvious. Marketing books became a million dollar business, and a cold one orchestrated from glimmering Manhattan offices. Book PR came in from the Wild West, put on a nice suit, and turned into something Machiavellian. Instead of peddling copies to indie booksellers, who may only buy a few, the name of the game became mass sales to chain stores. The craft of writing was no longer important. Publishing became, brutally, a bottom line industry.

This further isolated the indies. Why bother pandering to a few hundred stores who’ll only be good for one or two sales each when you can get in bed with the super-chain who’ll buy several thousand in one go?

From the indie bookstore perspective, the publishers had now betrayed them. By the time the calendars turned to 2001, the indies had declared war and assumed an unforgiving stance. The indie stores, forever inflexible, always the underdog, failed to realize that publishers were, at that point, just starting to see that the other shoe was about to drop. With the brief economic bump in the road after September 11th, there was a moment where the man behind the curtain at the mega-chains was visible. Borders and Barnes & Noble, like Crown Books before them, could not hold the center.

By 2003, the publishing industry’s avarice-addled approach to sales allowed Borders to mastermind a scheme where they were basically running their company off of an endless line of credit. Something that they would ride out until their total collapse at the end of the decade. Barnes & Noble engaged in a similar scheme. With the good graces bought by early successes, the chains would buy up huge numbers of books and then return them, keeping a steady rotation of books moving through the warehouse with only a small percentage actually making it onto the shelves. Publishers found themselves strapped with return fees and merchandise hitting their inventory again long after the money from the sale had been devoted elsewhere. By the latter half of the 2000’s, many publishers could expect a total return rate of 33% for each book title and, as the chain stores foundered, distributors took a casual hand with those returns. Damaged items were accepted, returns were allowed for several years after the original invoice date instead of just six or twelve months. As Borders, especially, parlayed book returns into a lifeboat, they began to destroy small and medium-range independent presses. In 2009, most publishers had cut the chain stores off and prepared to write off unpaid invoices. The death throes had begun.

Many folks saw it coming early on. When the chain stores panicked in the downturn of 2002, they immediately turned on the publishers. The days of fun were over, and never really returned.

Indie bookstores could have turned this to their advantage. With chinks in the armor of the chain stores showing, the indie stores could have appealed to the hearts and loyalty of the publishers. Certainly, they could have won over the small and independent-minded presses who could not afford to play the marketing game at the Harry Potter level. From 2002 onwards, small presses were being slowly driven out of business by the chain model. Each returned book is not only money subtracted from the profits, but also incurs a returns fee that’s anywhere from 10-15% of the net price. When a print run of 1000 copies sees roughly 300 (largely unsalable) returns with a 10% fee attached to each one, then the ship is starting to take on water.

I blame the indie bookstores for dropping the ball at this point. Publishing has always been a scatter-brained business. An old boys network that expects things to be a certain way even after the waiter and the bartender at the gentlemen’s club have died after 50 years of service. Even on the wild and crazy micro-press level – especially on that level – there’s a feeling of isolationism.

Book promotion, on the micro-press level, is roughly like begging for enough money to buy a shotgun and two shells, then going to a place where all the potential bookbuyers are in a dark room, kicking the door open, closing your eyes, and letting both barrels go. Maybe you’ll get lucky and hit something – the most famous example being Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star, my favorite rags to riches small press story. Here’s this weird book about Custer written by some guy who wasn’t really a biographer and it meekly sells here and there for a few years, and then it hits this weird groove five years after release and crash-lands on the bestseller list.

The big chains, as soon as they began their quick-return scheme, shook small presses out of their near-solipsistic dysfunction and brought them together. If not in direct confederation with each other, than at least in thought. These big boys ain’t no friends of ours.

So why didn’t indie bookstores and small presses form a united front in the early 2000’s? How did these two potential allies miss each other at such a crucial moment? How did the indie bookstores drop the ball?

Why the Collapse of Chain Bookstores is a Good Thing for Books. Part 2

In yesterday’s post, we moved through the 1990’s where, as a dumb high school kid, I took a job at a small independent bookstore in 1991. A decade of transition and despair for indie bookstores in America, the 90’s saw the rise of the giants of bookselling – Amazon.com, Borders, and Barnes & Noble. Indie bookstores fell under siege, and victory was hopeless. But what are the origins of the big box, chain bookstores? How’d bookselling move from the strange little independently owned stores and fall into the laps of cold-blooded corporations? The intimate process of literature and creation was ripped from the community and homogenized in a fashion reminiscent of a fast food chain. The first shot in this war over bookselling was fired by billionaire Robert Haft.
by Andrew Gifford

Crown Books, Borders, and Barnes & Noble were all members of what some people call the “77 club.” Crown Books was founded in 1977. Borders, founded in 1971, had just begun, around 1977, to consolidate into “Borders Books and Music,” feeding off of a sister company that specialized in wholesale (they wouldn’t become the beast we know today until a 1992 buyout from Kmart). Barnes & Noble, founded a hundred years earlier, was finally hitting the skids with their handful of discount bookstores. Bought by financier Len Riggio in 1971, a prototype version of their chain discount stores appeared on the scene in 76-77. The 77 Club each independently saw the opportunity to hone and corporatize the super-bookstore idea, and they set out on a few different versions of this path in the carefree days of the 80’s.

Barnes & Noble slowly, with an almost saurian single-mindedness, began to devour the minor chains that had been struggling along in the nation’s shopping malls, while Borders, pursuing a similar path, also dominated the catalog sales, riding the coattails of their wholesale distribution house. Crown Books, however, launched immediately into a poorly-planned, hegemonic chain-store bonanza, opening hundreds of stores across the country. Robert Haft, the founder of Crown Books, casually declared war on indie bookstores, summoning shades of early fast food and hotel chain advertisements. He said he was creating something standardized and reliable, no matter where you washed up. If you wanted a book at a discount, then a Crown Bookstore was waiting for you. As we see today in airports and train stations, the idea was to create brand loyalty to the bookstore without actually caring about the books inside. The chain becomes ubiquitous and, therefore, trusted by consumers. Haft, infamously, would position Crown stores in areas dominated by indie bookstores, using the Haft family fortune to fatally undermine his indie competitors.

Indie bookstores fought valiantly, but only a few could stand against the onslaught. A whole generation died in the 80’s under the withering fire from Crown Books.

But then the Crown Empire ate itself from within. The Haft family splintered over internal politics and, by 1993, Crown Books was no more. A decade-long battle over the Crown fortune tainted every aspect of the empire and, from 1990 onwards, the Crown stores vanished, slowly, one by one. The few holdouts not worth mentioning or visiting.

The indie bookstores enjoyed a brief victory. The foolish belief that a national chain of bookstores couldn’t really hold on outside of soulless shopping malls was held by many, and was something I heard often in the back office at my little shop. Crown Books had imploded because the center cannot hold. Focus was, instead, turned to the coming Internet Menace.

The indies reacted to the hubris and bravado of Haft and his Crown Empire like the fractured, confederate force they were and are today. Thankfully, they still possessed some sense of unity. They came together, appealed to their communities, and joined organizations like the ABA, which saw its largest membership in the late 80’s and early 90’s. A membership that, as of 1992, in the wake of Crown’s demise, started to plummet.

With the indie bookstore guard down, the vacuum left by Crown Books was quietly filled by the much more thought-out and corporate-minded Borders and Barnes & Noble. Amazon, a simply demonic presence in the minds of indie bookstores, ascended the throne of darkness so slowly, it almost acted as more of a feint in the battle between the chains and the indies. The e-sellers wouldn’t really come into their own until 2000. But from 1995 onwards, they were seen, incorrectly, as Public Enemy #1.


Borders and Barnes & Noble, taking advantage of hubris now on the part of the indies, didn’t declare war as Robert Haft did. They painted themselves more as Young Turks, and they knew how to play the game. Unlike Crown Books, they’d taken the time to study the audience. They knew that the bookstore is actually about community. An idea that many indie bookstores had left behind in the 60’s and 70’s. The model for the new chains of the mid to late 1990’s saw the introduction of coffee shops, playrooms, music stations, seats and tables, places where customers could go and get lost in the stacks and read. Where they could fold themselves in a corner and enjoy their book unmolested by staff. Though indie bookstores had, at one time, pioneered this community-oriented model, they found themselves, by the mid to late 90’s, unable to afford to resurrect it. A cold war had begun, and the casualties were starting to mount.

By the end of the 90’s, every indie bookstore was on the defensive against the chains and the e-sellers. It was starting to become clear that the brittle structure of the little neighborhood indie bookstore could not hold on.

From the publishing perspective, sales seemed better than ever. The chains allowed for the creation of the “fad book.” Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael was an early hit, also see The Life of Pi, and the wunderkinds Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code. All books that were catapulted to international phenomena not by readership but through the mechanizations of marketing departments. With the chains in place, publishers rightly saw that a few bucks here, and a few bucks there, could translate into a pyramid of books just inside the door of every Barnes & Noble and Borders. Customers, in their Romero-esque zombie states, would have to crawl over these pyramids to get to their new bookstore communities of quiet corners, caffeinated beverages, and sweet rolls. By the very nature of a chain bookstore, just a handful of copies for the shelves of each store would guarantee thousands of sales in one shot.
The Da Vinci Code is, in my opinion, the most successful “fad book.” A well-placed check paid to A Major Bookstore Chain resulted in the chain buying out the first printing and displaying the books front and center. If the customer was waiting in line – any line – in the store, then Dan Brown would be right in front of their noses. (Of course, this was combined with an equally stunning and expensive blitzkrieg on talk shows and elsewhere.)

With chain stores, it became possible for wealthy publishers to simply buy their way onto the bestseller lists. “Staff picks,” “featured titles,” those books piled up by the door, and even the “what’s new” shelves and tables were all paid placements. The chains were making money and so were the big publishers.

The indie stores didn’t have a chance.