Why Barnes & Noble's Comeback is Good for Authors

my hot take + recent reads ❄️

When I was an awkwardly tall teenager, I worked in the children’s section at Barnes and Noble. (I’ve written about this before.) People often ask if I loved it, all starry-eyed, because working in a bookstore conjures images of You’ve Got Mail and New York City in the fall.

Love is not the right word. I made seven bucks an hour, which was a lot back then. But I worked in a mall. I would get Crunchwrap supremes on my lunch break and bring a Baja blast back to the store. I staffed no-show author events, and helped tired moms find “that one yellow book?”, and alphabetized, alphabetized, alphabetized.

I got a sweet employee discount, though.

One part I particularly enjoyed was putting together the picture book wall. Every three weeks or so, I’d be handed a giant poster of what had to go where. I’d scan the ISBN numbers, haul the heavy boxes from the stockroom (the air-conditioned cardboard smell still comes back to me at weird places, like the egg section of the grocery store) and place books where I was told.

Those books were put there because publishers paid to put them there, and they were there in every Barnes and Noble across the country. In hundreds of stores in the United States, that particular Jan Brett picture book was going to be in the top left corner because Jan Brett’s marketing team handed over a lot of money for it to be in that corner. And when harried moms and frazzled dads came in to buy their child a book, there it would be, all Swedish and sweet. I was paid to push that particular book, and put these particular holiday books on this particular table set at this particular angle.

So, what changed?

In August 2019, James Daunt became the CEO of Barnes & Noble. Daunt was best known for being the founder of Daunt Books, a chain of bookstores across the ocean in Kate Middleton’s playground.

He saw what many other people saw: that Barnes and Noble had no home in a 2019 world, where Amazon could get you any book you wanted in shorter time than it takes you to sneeze and those who thought Jeff Bezos was a punk promoted indie, indie, indie. Daunt was the big bad Tom Hanks, and we were either Meg Ryan or the lurking unknown of technology. Barnes and Noble was on life support. In 2018, before Daunt came aboard, they laid off 1800 employees and shares were in free-fall.

What Daunt did was radical and effective: he gave each store the power to operate as an indie.

No more paid product placement. No more obligations to stock certain new books. No more branding requirements, even! The rules were gone, the managers had buying control, and there was no more micromanaging from the Big Bad Corporate Team.

Read more: Barnes & Noble Sets Itself Free

Now, the company is back to pre-pandemic levels and is opening fifty new stores this year.

Why are authors mad?

Well, look at it this way. Back in the day, if you could convince your publisher to spend the dough, you could get prime placement in the store. It was much easier to get books shelved and there was an assumption that every new book would be in stock.

That’s no longer, especially in the middle grade space, and people are ticked off.

I get it. As a Barnes & Noble fan, it was always a huge dream of mine to see my books on the shelves there—really and truly, I still remember the joy of going to see What Happens Next on shelves after the mall finally reopened in the summer of 2020. I think I cried? I definitely cried. And this policy of letting each store’s booksellers choose what’s on the shelves has affected me—What Happened to Rachel Riley was in limited stores¹, and Take it From the Top wasn’t in any. The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County was released as a paperback, one of the main purposes being a (successful!) attempt to get a large Barnes & Noble buy.

Working excruciatingly hard to write a book, only to not see it on shelves in a major chain, is disappointing. It’s emotional and hard and I get that—it has literally happened to me.

But.

I’m in the small minority of authors who thinks this is actually a really, really good decision.

If the Barnes & Noble experience improves, more people will shop there, more people will pour money into the bookish economy, and a rising tide lifts all boats.

Books are not a zero-sum game. People who buy books buy a lotta books. People who enjoy books of a particular author enjoy books with similar authors. People who peruse one bookshop will want to peruse another bookshop. Publishers making more money will only help authors in the long run (in! my! humble! opinion! that! could! be! wrong!)

I recently went into a Barnes and Noble. On my birthday each year, I like to treat myself to a pumpkin coffee and peruse the shelves for as long as I wish. This year, I had glanced at book on the front table about a dystopian boarding school. That’s not the kind of book I usually read but hey, the cover was intriguing and it was my Birthday Book Peruse.

“Oh, my gosh,” a tattoo-ed employee said. “You will love that.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“I read it in three days,” he told me excitedly.

Upstairs, I was doing that not-at-all-subtle hunt for my own books when an employee winced, going from a shelving-squat to a stand. It was a grunt-wince, a maybe-I-should-call-somebody wince.

“You okay?” I asked.

“My knees,” she said. “They always kill me when it rains. Is it still pouring?”

“Pretty bad, yeah,” I admitted.

“Perfect day to curl up with a book. I get off at two. I just got the newest Jodi Picoult,” she said happily. She was so content. She was so pleased with life, standing there talking to me about her knees!

I got up the courage to ask the guy at the info desk if I could sign my books. This is, to be frank, excruciating for me. But I love signed books, and I know other people love signed books, and I wanted to make a connection with the store.

“Oh, my gosh! Funeral Ladies! People love that book,” the guy said. He had on coke-bottle glasses. “Here! I’ll get you all set up, and then we’ll take a picture for Instagram. I’ll get ‘em stickered and put them right on the front table. Holidays are coming up, you know!”

It’s my personal belief that those interactions would not have happened in 2018. That the manager would not have been able to move my books to the front table, that knee-lady would have been miserable recommending books she was specifically told to recommend, and that Mr. Tattoos would not have had any say over whether or not that dystopian boarding school book was on that particular table.

I had such a joyful morning. I bought way more books than I should have. And I had moments of humanity, small interactions from one book lover to another that bolstered my spirit and strengthened my soul.

Isn’t that what all of this is about, at the end of the day?

Bookselling is not corporate, streamlined, efficient. It’s personal. If people want to get the latest New York Times bestseller, they can hop on Amazon and Jeff will beam it to them. If people want to interact with other humans and have an experience, they can go to a Barnes & Noble².

So, yes, I know it’s painful to not get your book stocked in Barnes & Noble. I know that firsthand. But the literary community is, to be blunt, wider than you. You can’t control whether or not Belinda the Store Manager picks your book, and she probably won’t. You know what you can do? Write the next book, make it incredible, and know that publishing careers are not born or murdered on a Barnes and Noble spreadsheet.

It’s been two months of Take it From the Top and I’m so grateful for all of your kind words about it. If you haven’t yet left an Amazon or GoodReads review, would you mind hopping over and sprinkling some stars its way? Thank you so, so much.

I’m finally knee-deep in edits for Each and Every Spark, my upcoming historical fiction middle grade novel. But for the past two months, I’ve mostly been twiddling my thumbs, getting ahead on admin work and waiting for that big ole edit letter.

What this time of No Immediate Assignments has done for my creativity has been nothing short of wondrous. To be brutally honest, as I’ve written about previously, Take it From the Top was my most difficult book to write to date. Each and Every Spark and Like a Mother (my next adult) weren’t much easier. I found myself pulling my hair out, re-reading the same sentence 18 times and plotting with post-it notes. Plotting! With color coordination!

I do not PLOT!

But the last month or so, it’s as if something that was sitting on my chest rolled off. I’m not sure if it’s the exercise routine I’ve picked up, the wonderful books I’ve stumbled upon, or simply the time and space to exhale. Likely all of the above. But I’ve begun dabbling in a project that I’m so over-the-moon excited about. It’s as if the main character is writing the story, not me. And as all writers know, that’s the sweet spot you’re always trying to get to.

And lastly, a book (or two) I’ve loved lately for…

Kids: Making a Friend by Tammi Sauer is just delightful. We loved the illustrations, the message, and the silly, wintery feel.

Middle graders: Alice Hoffman is probably one of the most formative writers of my life, and her middle grade novel of Anne Frank’s life, When We Flew Away, was beautiful. I will never, ever write like her (and honestly, I’m fine with that).

Adults: I read a ton in December—I think I finished four full books the week between Christmas and New Years, when my littles were way-laid with stomach bugs and Bluey played all hours of the day. Two radically opposed favorites were Christmas with the Queen by Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb (sweet, clean historical fiction—perfect for fans of The Crown) and No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (experimental, super weird—not even sure if I enjoyed it, but I can’t stop THINKING about this story of a social media addict whose niece suddenly receives a terminal diagnosis).

Thanks for reading along!

1. Now that Rachel Riley was such a success, the paperback version is in many Barnes & Nobles’, particularly in the midwest. The employee who told me this explained that she likes to wait and see what does well elsewhere in hardcover, then order the paperback since she has so much more of a budget if she buys a lot of paperbacks for the store. She actually gets to buy a wider variety that way. Fascinating!

2. Do I still prefer shopping indie? You know, I do. But I think there’s room for both. I love Barnes & Noble and always will—but I also want to support and bolster indies. I do not love Jeff, but he isn’t going anywhere and I’ve made peace with that. I’m thankful that anyone, anywhere, buys my books—no matter where they shop.