PALIN: Rails against taxpayer-financed bailouts, which she attributes to Obama. She recounts telling daughter Bristol that to succeed in business, “you’ll have to be brave enough to fail.”

THE FACTS: Palin is blurring the lines between Obama’s stimulus plan — a $787 billion package of tax cuts, state aid, social programs and government contracts — and the federal bailout that Republican presidential candidate John McCain voted for and President George W. Bush signed.

Palin’s views on bailouts appeared to evolve as McCain’s vice presidential running mate. In September 2008, she said “taxpayers cannot be looked to as the bailout, as the solution, to the problems on Wall Street.” A week later, she said “ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy.”

During the vice presidential debate in October, Palin praised McCain for being “instrumental in bringing folks together” to pass the $700 billion bailout. After that, she said “it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in.”

And other leftist web sites have received cease-and-desist orders from Harper Colling, demanding that they remove scanned excerpts… while pro Sarah bloggers apparently have not (Note: I am not suggesting HP shouldn’t issue C&Ds to those they feel are breaking their copyright… but they should do it equally and fairly to all publishers that are doing so, not just the ones they have reason not to like.)

So, all of this is interesting to me in that it sort of paints a picture of Harper Collins… one that I don’t really like. Memoirs that play loose with the facts are nothing knew (ask Oprah about that.) But they have eventually been outed and the careers of the writers pretty much ruined.

This thing is looking fakey before it’s even launched. But Harper Collins put it out anyway. They’ll sell a million copies, no matter what. But if many of her claims in the book are demonstrably false… do they not bear responsibility for publishing it?

You can write whatever you want. Even bold broad lies. And if you can fool your publisher into believing it, more power to you… until you get caught. But when you are writing about verifiable and objective facts and your publisher doesn’t call you on them then isn’t it the publisher’s bad?

And then, on top of that, to selectively suppress use and release of scanned excerpts… if that’s really going on… that seems like a pretty shady tactic. Or, great PR. Not that the two are often mutually exclusive.

But nevertheless, Harper Collin’s motives are pretty clear – despite what damage such sorts of lies could do to our already divided political culture, not to mention free speech – they just want the easy bucks. They will put out whatever crap they have to to get them, and use whatever means necessary to protect that crap.

VoxPop, Sander and Me — Chapter 3

“Fifty thousand in cash! Fifty thousand in cash to launch your new indie bookstore! Get your free fifty thousand!” I was passing out translucent envelopes containing banknotes, stickers and silver coins to attendees strolling the aisles of Book Expo America, in the cavernous halls of the Javits Center, New York, June 2005. Two professional women approached the Vox Pop booth and accepted the packets.

I continued, “Yes, it’s fifty thousand in real money, actually more–let’s see–you’ve got a fifty thousand lira coin–that’s from Turkey, plus a one thousand cruzado banknote from Brazil. On the front is Antonio de Machado, the father of Brazilian literature. You can afford to open a nice bookstore with this fifty-one thousand in capital. Now all you need is my book.” I handed them each the review copies I’d had printed back in Amherst–there were only thirty, which I’d have to hoard and distribute carefully. “I’m afraid I can’t give you those, but the actual book ships in August. You can order it from SCB Distributors.” I gestured at the main area of our group of small press booths, where the marketer of us all was headquartered.

The women examined their books. One read the title aloud to the other. Rebel Bookseller: How To Improvise Your Own Indie Store And Beat Back The Chains. She looked back at me and asked, “So, how do you do that?”

I answered, “Well, you have the capital I just gave you, so that will help.”

They looked at each other. I continued, “No–the book is designed to convince chainstore employees to quit and open their own independent bookstores. I tell about how thousands of us chain bookstore employees of the 80s did that, and it damaged Dalton, Walden and Crown. I’m saying it could happen again, and we could destabilize Barnes & Noble and Borders.” They were looking at me and nodding and smiling. They handed me the books back and drifted away chatting. They had lost interest, lost focus, and probably not even realized they were being rude.

I began calling out again, “Fifty thousand in cash, fifty thousand, free, in capital to underwrite your new indie store,” brandishing my envelopes, leaning forward to press these into the hands of glaze-eyed, slack-jawed passers-by.

This was my industry?

I had attended the old American Booksellers Association trade show for most of the years between 1985 and 1997 when my Chicago bookstores were actively engaged in industry affairs, back when I was looking to buy remainders, sell advertising in my catalog, line up author visits, and build relationships. For eight years since, though, I had been in self-imposed exile. I’d dropped out of ABA in 1998. I had barely noticed the ABA lawsuits against Barnes & Noble and Borders. When the ABA school program and education department had been dismantled, I hadn’t cared. Maybe closing The Children’s Bookstore had sapped my political energy. Maybe I didn’t have time for volunteering once our store at Chicago Children’s Museum had hits its crazy stride: eighty hour workweeks don’t leave much time for industry politics.

In 2003 though, after moving to Amherst to launch Eric Carle Museum’s bookstore, I’d started writing about my 1980s period immersed in ABA committee work. The process of telling this tale had helped me front my opinions and notice the overarching patterns I’d been living inside. My research began to teach me about the world I’d gained and lost since my first job at B. Dalton Bookseller in 1979.

In 1959, the year I was born, there were ten thousand independent bookstores selling new trade books. By 1979, with the growth of the chains, this number had dropped to two thousand. Yet by 1991, there were over five thousand indies nationwide. I realized that I had played a part in this renaissance, as an innovative marketer and then as a writer and educator. I’d assisted in the destruction of that era’s chainstore corporations.

Hence, Rebel Bookseller’s focus: to revive the revolution for the next generation.

But was it too late? Here at Book Expo America, the ABA Convention’s successor tradeshow, not many blue-badged booksellers were in evidence. Rather the majority of attendees had yellow or red badges: they worked for publishing houses large and small, or support industries. They were authors, agents, librarians or members of the media. The fact that only sixteen hundred independent bookstores remained in the entire country dramatically changed the mood of the show. All these publishers, with all their books, and few bookstore-owners to sell to!

This was my first time manning a publisher’s booth. The book industry tradeshow from this fixed-in-place perspective was repetitive and boring. Keeping up appearances was the issue. Making sure my pitch to passers-by sounded enthusiastic was critical. Somehow, I needed to sell–and no-one, not even those occasional booksellers, was placing any orders.

I’d started the show elated, because The Wall Street Journal had printed a front-page article using my arguments, theories and proofs about how superstore chains’ excessive ordering and returning were forcing prices up, depressing book sales. I’d first spoken to the WSJ book industry reporter in January 2005, after reading his article documenting the steady book price inflation of recent decades. That article offered no explanation for the phenomenon. When I’d emailed him with my assertion that superstore returns practices were responsible for the inflation, he’d challenged me to prove it. I’d done a round of research and sent him PDFs of Publishers Weekly articles from years past. I’d demonstrated how in the 90s, leading industry players had fretted that this very thing was happening. So, one could assume that the current high prices were the predicted and predictable outcome of the returns crisis of the 90s.

I’d also showed him Rebel Bookseller’s “9th Rant,” called “Publish, Perish,” about a fictionalized book whose bad timing resulted in being shipped and returned, shipped and returned, ultimately to be remaindered and put out of print.

Most importantly, I’d warned him that when he wrote the story, he should seriously consider leaving any mention of me and my book out. I expected Barnes & Noble to hate me for doing Rebel Bookseller, and I knew the company could be extremely hostile and vindictive toward critics. I told him about his predecessor at WSJ, Meg Cox, who he said he didn’t know (he’d been on the book industry beat there for eighteen months, he said).

I’d spoken with Meg Cox in 2003. I’d wanted to know if Wall Street Journal had stood up for her during the 1992 spat over her article “Risky Plot: Barnes & Noble’s Boss Has Big Growth Plans That Booksellers Fear,” about B&N CEO Len Riggio. She’d told me Wall Street Journal hadn’t caved in. They’d refused to apologize to Riggio for the “tone” of her article. They’d treated Meg fairly. But her work definitely got harder because for the rest of her time in the job, Len Riggio refused to give her an interview. Writing on the book industry for Wall Street Journal and never having access to the boss of Barnes & Noble was tricky.

On June 3, 2005, the Friday of the BEA show, when WSJ’s article “An Industry Gone Mad” appeared–all about the returns crisis and its impact driving book prices up, including the tale of a single title being shipped back and forth across the country only to end up remaindered–of course I read it fast to see if Rebel Bookseller or I were credited. We were not. Still
, I bought five copies of the newspaper, and showed them around all weekend.

I brought a copy to the Publishers Weekly booth and pitched my old friend Dick Donahue on reviewing Rebel Bookseller. “Look, the Journal’s book reporter talked with me in January and he’s assembled all this quantitative research confirming my book’s central thesis. Superstores are hurting book sales growth.”

Dick wasn’t very surprised, or aroused.

In fact, industry people–longtimers, insiders–none of them were surprised or aroused by me, by Rebel Bookseller, or by the conclusions in The Wall Street Journal. They liked Barnes & Noble. Anyway, Barnes & Noble was a fact of life. The old publishing gang looked beaten down and past their prime.

I figured it out. Back in the day, tons of ABA show attendees were independent business people. They owned their own operations, and their presence at the show was exciting and risky for them. They’d come in from all over the country at great personal expense, and they were placing orders, getting specials deals, collecting free swag galore, scouting new opportunities, taking classes, and participating in lively roundtables. But now, in 2005, most of these BEA attendees were working for large corporations. Only a small proportion owned their own businesses–and indeed plenty of these business owners weren’t booksellers, but rather small press people who were suffering from the fact of having paid for an expensive booth only to experience the same absence of buyers for bookstores that I was dealing with myself.

I’d started the day telling anyone and everyone that they should quit their jobs and open bookstores to sell all the books everyone at this show was pitching. But by the end of the first day I was pretty tired of giving my handouts to publishing employees. No one took me seriously. They knew you should never open an independent bookstore. I was a lunatic.

A team from CSPAN-2’s show Book TV was prowling the aisles. They stopped and asked,

“What’s your book about?”

“I tell how the chains destroyed the book-reading culture in this country, and how we can destroy the chains by working together.”

They asked, “But if the chains are so bad, why did customers choose them over other bookstores?”

“Customers didn’t decide. It was all a hoax played on Wall Street investors. Len Riggio noticed that private stores are capitalized at about five times earnings. But publicly held companies can be valued at ten or even thirty times earnings. So–if you’ve got an operation big enough to go public, and you can pitch the promise of unending sales growth, you can get access to enough capital to over-buy unsustainably on buildout and fixturing. It’s true the customers were entranced by the superstores’ buildouts and fixturing. But they didn’t buy enough for all the superstores to be really profitable on a year-after-year basis. The company shares’ inflated price-to-earning ratio would only hold up while the company was putting on a fancy show, building lots of new superstores every year— and that couldn’t go on forever. Bookstores aren’t a good sector to invest in, compared to other industries. Bookstore companies shouldn’t be listed on Wall Street.”

They asked, “Then why are you trying to get people to open their own bookstore if they’re not a good place to invest?”

“Because when people like me tie up our personal capital in a bookstore we realize additional intangible benefits. Our lives become more important–we sacrifice some opportunities of potential financial return on investment, but we are more satisfied with our lives as community members.”

“Any last thoughts?”

“Yes. Barnes & Noble is going down!”

The Sagging: Spirits & Skin sings eloquent tales of loss and the big truths that are learned within small pieces of emptiness. Through these poems, Fisk lurks like a quiet voyeur into the dirt-smeared windows of a embattled collection of naked and lonely souls. There is much within these pages that will haunt you.

–Marc Beaudin

Find this and other chapbooks at alt-current.com

Marc Beaudin is the poetry editor of CounterPunch and the author of The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds. More information can be found at CrowVoice.com.

A Solution for Capital-Starved Independent Bookstores

The following is a proposal made by Jack McKeown, former president and CEO of the Perseus Books Group and former president and publisher of the Adult Trade Group at HarperCollins. Currently he is director of business development for Verso Digital, the first vertical ad network for book publishers, and is president of Conemarra Partners, a media consultancy.

Last week brought the depressing news that Seattle’s Elliott Bay bookstore is in financial distress and may be forced to relocate from its Pioneer Square home of the last 36 years. Facing an expiring lease and a maxed-out credit line, owner Peter Aaron said, “Finding a lender to keep us liquid is an ongoing battle.” This has become an all-too-familiar story, of course. Securing adequate investment and working capital, never an easy task for independent bookstores, has been elevated to crisis proportions by the current recession. Is there a solution–one that could help independent bookstores maintain their local competitive advantage and even promote their expansion for years to come?
The Background

From my many years as a publishing executive, I always have believed that turbulent times in our industry foster opportunity as well as dislocation. The concept that I am floating is not especially complicated, but it does require a leap of imagination and strong leadership at the national level.

A thriving neighborhood bookstore is recognized as a key element in the social, cultural and economic fabric of any community. This is an opinion widely shared by urban planners, government planning boards, Smart Growth advocates and real-estate developers around the country. They will tell you that a bookstore offers a tremendous public amenity that should be built into the master plan of any new development or neighborhood revitalization. Primarily it has been the national chains that have been the beneficiaries of this perception, and their superior access to capital is a fundamental reason why.

But with the recession, chain-store expansion has ground to a halt and a period of contraction almost certainly will follow. (Barnes & Noble COO Mitch Klipper confirmed as much in an investor presentation last week.) This is part of a larger, radical reshaping of America’s retail landscape. More than 400 of the 2,000 largest U.S. malls have closed in the past two years and data suggest that at least another 1,000 are in distress. This represents an acceleration of a trend already underway before the recession took root. Main Street retail was decimated when the malls exploded decades ago, but may well rebound with a tidal wave of mall closures. “One of the biggest consequences of mall closings is the loss of a sense of community, a place where people gather and socialize,” said David Birnbey of the Shopping Center Group, as quoted in “The Vanishing Shopping Mall.” Can independent bookstores be positioned to help fill the vacuum as commercial real estate markets begin their gradual recovery?

The Concept

Essentially, my concept advances a sustainability and neighborhood redevelopment argument, with the independent bookstore at its center. I would like to propose the creation of a Neighborhood Bookstore Development Bank (NBDB). It is inspired by such special-purpose investment vehicles as the Fresh Food Financing Initiative (FFFI)–a successful five-year-old loan program for independent, neighborhood grocery stores. It also incorporates some of the mechanisms behind the proposed National Infrastructure Bank, as described by Felix Rohatyn and Everett Ehrlich in their October 2008 article for the New York Review of Books (“A New Bank to Save Our Infrastructure”).

The NBDB would be structured as a private investment bank, i.e., as an entity that evaluates project proposals and assembles a portfolio of investments to fund them. It would look to a prominent trade organization, such as the American Booksellers Association, to provide leadership in the form of a mission charter and board memberships, but otherwise would operate at arms-length. At the heart of the concept is a NBDB Commission, a committee of experts who would evaluate proposals to provide loans to existing or start-up bookstores on a case-by-case basis. The ABA would assist individual bookstores in assembling their business plans, but the bank’s Commission would operate independently and with the highest transparency, in order to attract capital and maintain the bank on a sound economic foundation.

Mission of the NBDB

The NBDB’s core mission would be to promote the expansion of healthy independent bookstores and to provide start-up funds to new bookseller entrepreneurs, while simultaneously generating acceptable returns to the bank’s investors. Among its specific goals would be the following:

Support capital improvements and expansion of established bookstores
Assist established bookstores in converting from commercial rental to ownership of their storefronts
Promote the creation of new bookstores in underserved markets or as part of new real-estate developments
Convert buildings to bookstores through adaptive reuse of historic structures, acquisitions of distressed properties or by foreclosure sales
Support established bookstores in upgrading their systems and websites, and in creating or expanding their e-commerce capabilities
Finance the establishment of print-on-demand centers (e.g., Espresso Book Machines) within local bookstores to generate new revenue streams
A recommended balance of investments between existing and new stores would be 60/40–a conservative approach meant to mitigate some of the risk of a portfolio too heavily weighted toward start-ups.

Financing

The NBDB would be capitalized through an initial round of paid-in equity and then leveraged at a suggested conservative ratio of 3:1. So, for instance, $2.5 million in minimum seed capital would be leveraged to $10 million at the outset. The pool of initial investors could include the ABA itself, along with such interested players as the national wholesalers (e.g., Ingram and Baker & Taylor). These parties would stand to earn meaningful annual dividends as well as long-term appreciation on their investments.

All the while they would be supporting the growth of a core customer segment.

Additional seed capital could be secured from REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) and private equity companies, perhaps as part of larger real-estate development financings. Capital would be callable beyond the seed round, with the ultimate objective of achieving a ratio of $10 million: $40 million by year three. These sums may strike some observers as modest indeed, but their impact on creating a base of larger and healthier independent bookstores would be dramatic, considering the under-capitalized state of the business now.

Ultimately the bank’s loans would be packaged and sold in the secondary capital markets, timed to take advantage of the recovery. The NBDB also would tap into the federal government’s interest in stimulating capital investment in local, community-based development projects and in promoting sustainability. Government grants and guarantees could be part of the solution to jump-start the effort, as has been the case with the FFFI. In addition, the NBDB could provide an engine for private-public partnerships at the local level, including community-owned bookstore retail via chartered stock companies.

In conclusion, the NBDB could play a major role in changing the narrative on independent bookstores from one of decline to rebound. For an industry preoccupied with
the discussion surrounding e-books and e-readers, it may seem like a counterintuitive strategy. But that could well prove its strength. It would play into larger demographic patterns, such as the imminent retirement of 78 million baby boomers, the urban migration of younger age groups and the contraction of America’s malls. These trends point to the development of better bricks-and-mortar, neighborhood-centered retail. With adequate capital at their disposal, and equipped with strong business plans that meet the NBDB’s test, independent booksellers could reposition themselves for a brighter future.

Here is the response I sent to Shelf Awareness (it wasn’t published by them, however):

Jack McKeown’s proposal to establish a Neighborhood Bookstore Development Bank (NBDB) is very welcome, and his analysis of the exciting prospects for our industry is superb.

As Shorebank and Calvert Foundation have shown in their decades of work with Community Development Finance Institutions worldwide, socially motivated investors can shift economic landscapes while earning solid returns. Calvert’s “Community Investment Notes” have in fact performed better during this recession than most other financial instruments. Jack’s proposed NBDB would among other beneficial effects, assist CDFIs and other potential partner institutions to evaluate and supervise bookstore loans they could make on their own to our critical but poorly understood sector of the American economy.

I would recommend, however, that Jack’s banking concept be supplemented with a coordinated apprenticeship initiative modeled on Grameen Bank’s Grameen Trust Replication Program, that has helped seed the world with hundreds of self-sustaining microfinance institutions (MFIs) over the past two decades.

MFIs specialize in making very tiny loans to very poor families, using loan-interest to fund operations expense. Grameen Trust Replication Program invites prospective MFI founders (microlenders) to spend significant time observing and participating in the operation of Grameen Bank, in Bangladesh. These prospective microlenders are then invited to apply for grant/loan combination packages. Upon approval of start-up funding, the new microlenders become part of a loose, international Grameen support network. Taking a similar “apprenticeship plus capital” approach to stimulating the growth of U.S. independent bookselling could help ensure that individuals wishing to launch new independent bookstores obtain a salutary mix of investment capital, debt, education and ongoing professional support.

Andy Laties, author, “Rebel Bookseller: How To Improvise Your Own Indie Store And Beat Back The Chains”

The end of books? Thesis: “Publishers are facing a new kind of reader, one who absorbs information from multiple sources simultaneously. As we move from the ‘don’t bother me, I’m reading the newspaper’ generation to the ‘yeah, got it’ sound-bite generation, publishers will have to adapt to a multimedia culture bombarded with information but lacking in knowledge….As empowered members of an increasingly multitasking interactive generation that lives in electronic communities, audiences are expecting unprecedented form and delivery of content and services. Only time will tell if the traditional publishing companies are up to the challenge.”—Chuck Martin, “The Nine Dynamics of Future Publishing,” Blueprint to the Digital Economy: Creating Wealth in the Era of E-Business, Edited by Don Tapscott, Alex Lowy and David Ticoll (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998): 154-155.

The end of books? Antithesis: “It is interesting to note how often a technological development—such as Gutenberg’s—promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede, making us aware of old-fashioned virtues we might otherwise have either overlooked or dismissed as of negligible importance. In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected—as far as statistics show—the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form. Those who see computer development as the devil incarnate (as Sven Birkerts portrays it in his dramatically titled Gutenberg Elegies) allow nostalgia to hold sway over experience. For example, 359,437 new books (not counting pamphlets, magazines and periodicals), were added in 1995 to the already vast collections of the Library of Congress.”—Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1996): 135.

The end of books? Synthesis (and new Thesis): “In The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, Sven Birkerts warns that increasing multimedia experiences at the expense of written text risks ‘language erosion,’ decline of analytic and logical thought, ‘flattening of historical perspectives,’ and ‘the waning of the private self.’ Texts viewed as ‘difficult,’ predicts Birkerts, will increasingly be glossed over (which is, in fact, happening as students are both unwilling and unable to grasp the more subtle meanings or attend long enough to read them). As we forget or ignore the complexities of history’s lessons, a bland ‘electronic collectivization’ will render us ripe for political totalitarianism.”—Jane M. Healy, Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds—and What We Can Do About It (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998): 150. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994): 128-130.

New Antithesis: “In his book The Religion of Technology, [science historian David] Noble traces the interweaving of the technical arts with the millenarian spirit and shows that from the twelfth century on, technology has been perceived as a tool for precipitating the promised time of perfection. On the eve of the scientific revolution, Johann Andreae, Tommaso Campanella, Francis Bacon, and Thomas More each envisioned a man-made New Jerusalem—a fictitious city in which technology would play a key role. Andreae’s Christianopolis [1619], Campanella’s City of the Sun [1602], Bacon’s New Atlantis [1626], and More’s Utopia [1516] were all versions of idealized Christian communities notable for their use of technology. Today too, champions of cyberspace suggest that their technology will create a new utopia—a better, brighter, more ‘heavenly’ world for all. With contemporary cyber-utopianism, the…technology is digital rather than mechanical, but the dream remains the same.”—Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (New York: Norton, 1999): 42-43. David Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Knopf, 1997): 5.

All these, trumped by NEW SYNTHESIS: “Of man only the brain would remain, beautifully encased in a duroplast: a globe equipped with sockets, plugs and clasps….The brain case could be connected to any number of appendages, apparatuses, machines, vehicles….Then…transcepting would do away with crowds and congestion, the consequence of overpopulation. Channels of interbrain communication, whether by cable or radio, would make pointless all gatherings and get-togethers, excursions and journeys to attend conferences, and therefore all personal locomotion to whatever location, for every living being could avail itself of sensors and scanners situated over the whole expanse of human habitation….At this point I stopped and remarked that the authors of these papers were surely deranged. Trottelreiner replied coldly that I was a bit hasty in my judgments…the criterion of common sense was never applicable to the history of the human race.”—Stanislaw Lem, The Futurological Congress, Translated by Michael Kandel ([1971] New York: Continuum, 1974): 135-136.

Vox Pop, Sander, and Me

Chapter One

By Andrew Laties

“Who will screw the chains? How will they screw the chains? When will they screw the chains?”

The entire email response to my book query for Screw The Chains: A Free-Jazz Improvising Radical Children’s Bookseller Gets Chewed Up And Spat Out Of Sweet Home Superstore Hell, Chicago. Featuring Dada Buddha’s Guide To Theatrical Bookselling.

This response seemed to show that its writer hadn’t read my query.

So, why was he responding?

And yet, his response was the most positive I’d received in months. So many editors, agents, publishers, former colleagues, book industry acquaintances had received my manuscript. So few had acknowledged the huge package. And here’s this guy responding.

I’d found him using a technique I’d read about in Writer’s Market. Find a book that’s similar to the book you’ve written. Search the acknowledgements page for the name of an agent or editor. Write to this person that you have done a book similar to one they’ve worked on, and would they look at your book, too?

In the case of Sander Hicks, his name showed up on the Internet as publisher of a book I’d found at Broadside Bookshop by Bertell Ollman called Ballbuster? True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman. That sounded like me.

I answered Hicks: “Chain-store employees will quit and open their own stores. They will overwhelm the market and crowd the big stores out of business. In the next ten years.”

Thus began our dialogue of mutual action. Our unspoken pact was to each pretend that whatever we said would happen, and when things didn’t turn out right, we’d cover for each other.

That is, we had in common a theatrical bent. We’d both been successful in the past through assertion, demanding reality play the part we’d written. Failures were written off to a recalcitrance of the real. Fake it till you make it. Keep the faith.

My book was about refusing to accept the judgment of the world. Neglecting to accept that things had gone wrong. Keeping with it after everyone else had given up. Perseverance to the point of perseveration. The beating-a-dead-horse-till-it-leaps-to-life approach to business.

Hicks was early in a venture capital fundraising campaign. He was launching a national chain. Four hundred muckraking media production offices doubling as coffee shops. These gonzo micro-publishing centers—staffed by journalist/baristas and activist café customers—would feed their best locally-distributed works onward to an over-arching media company for national distribution. That Hicks would consider publishing a book attacking chain-stores while striving mightily to launch a chain himself might have been some sort of tipoff to me.

But I refused to be tipped off. I wanted a publisher, and my chosen one, 81-year-old Lyle Stuart—publisher of Anarchist Cookbook—had already said no. So I needed Hicks: he was the younger generation’s Lyle Stuart. Fearless founder of Soft Skull Press, publisher of Fortunate Son, featured star in Horns & Halos movie—Hicks was my last chance, shy of taking Daniel Pinkwater’s advice and publishing myself.

When I told Sander I’d earned a $200,000 salary out of a $900,000 per year store, he bit. He’d publish my book….would I help him re-write his business plan?

I sent my manuscript by mail, and read his emailed plan. Starbucks was huge, why shouldn’t there be a unionized anti-Starbucks? The plan talked up religion and social justice while promising huge profits. It was light on techniques and budgets. No proprietary systems or technology. Rewriting would be work. But I needed additional income, and came up with a proposal. What if these coffee-shop-cum-publishing-centers had bookstores inside, and I became the national buyer? I’d work from home in Amherst.

The answer was yes. Since Hicks was arranging meetings with venture capitalists—in particular a left-wing heavyweight who’d made money with George Soros in currency trading—I busied myself conceptualizing bookstores inside alternative coffeehouses. I spent eight weeks poring over publisher catalogs and websites. I reviewed hundreds of thousands of titles, as I’d recently done while developing my store at Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. I created twenty-five categories that matched the themes of Sander’s coffeehouses. Every book would be unusual and amazing. A thousand title inventory was perfect.

I peppered Hicks with emails. We should buy the recently released Instabook machine for each location so our plan had technology. We should produce lots of literary events. Café-tables should have built-in book displays so coffee drinkers would find themselves looking at books to buy. A TV channel, a music booking agency, a dog-and-pony show.

Sometimes Hicks answered, sometimes he didn’t. No comment on my book. But we scheduled a phone call and talked about the business plan and how to raise five million dollars.

I got worried in May when he stopped responding to email. For five weeks I heard nothing and I concluded reluctantly that I’d made another of my idiotic misjudgments and my book didn’t have a publisher. My café-bookstore inventory list had been an excuse to pretend I was opening another store of my own. I had to start looking for a publisher again. I was depressed.

He finally wrote back. He and coffee-shop-expert partner Holley Anderson had been driving cross-country. Five times. It would be a national chain; they were laying groundwork. They’d been trying to meet with venture capitalists, assessing locations for future coffeeshops, beating the bushes. He hadn’t had a chance to read my book, but we needed to rewrite the business plan. They were moving to New York in July and the first store would be there, maybe Brooklyn.

My wife was the voice of doubt. Sander Hicks would not publish my book. No-one would because it was self-congratulatory and uninteresting. She’d forbidden me to include her in it, and (luckily) she refused to read it or have passages read aloud.

Things had turned out badly. We’d lost a valuable business, lost our friends, traded our townhouse on the Near North Side of Chicago for a ranch house in the suburbs of Amherst, blown through our retirement savings (with penalty for early withdrawal), ruined our credit, taken a seventy-five percent pay cut. The kids seemed to have adjusted ok, but that was the best that could be said. At least by her to me.

I knew that couples whose businesses went south often ended up divorced, and I didn’t want that. My plan was to write a bestseller, make a bunch of money, restore my status, and extract us from our ignominious situation.

So, landing on Hicks as my only possible publisher was an ominous turn of events. Sure, he’d published some hot-selling books, but he’d recently lost his company just like I’d lost mine, in turmoil and recrimination. Would this new company, crazily called Drench Kiss Media Corporation, be a success? My wife’s assessment couldn’t be dismissed. Most likely I was wasting time. My book and Sander’s company would fail to materialize. My distractedness during my first year at Eric Carle Museum might even get me fired.

Luckily, my wife’s was not the only voice on the subject of my book. Eric Carle—the most successful children’s book writer alive—offered to write me a blurb. Norton Juster—another of the most successful children’s authors—told me which were his favorite chapters. Daniel Pinkwater—leading author and National Public Radio star—had written that normally he couldn’t make it past a few pages when someone sent him a manuscript, but with mine he’d been unable to put it down, and
on flipping the pages, no matter where he stopped, he enjoyed what he was reading. None of these men had any idea how I would get my book published, though, since in it I attacked Len Riggio, owner of Barnes & Noble—America’s most popular corporation—accusing him of damaging the culture of reading and driving book prices sky high.

Which, again, brought me, inevitably, to this man Sander Hicks. He’d published the biography of George W. Bush that told of a 1972 arrest for cocaine use while driving—an arrest all record of which was quashed and expunged by father George H.W. Bush. The book, Fortunate Son, written by James Hatfield, was first printed in a seventy-five thousand copy print-run, then recalled and incinerated by its publisher. Hicks’s company Soft Skull Press had obtained the rights after this recall, and republished the book, surviving lawsuits and publicity debacles in order to see the information distributed. (The key anecdote’s source turned out to be close Bush friend Karl Rove who’d told Jim Hatfield the story personally, and never denied having done so. However Hatfield ended up a suicide.)

If anyone was qualified to handle my book, it was surely this man who’d seen an unpublishable book into print, even though he’d lost control of his company while doing so. My wife’s skepticism didn’t jibe with the facts. I was certain that if I remained focused on it, Sander would indeed publish my book, and his coffee-shops, to be called Vox Pop, would come into being as well.

[Andy Laties’s book—Rebel Bookseller: How To Improvise Your Own Indie Store And Beat Back The Chains—was published by Vox Pop in 2005 and won the 2006 Independent Publisher Award for Best Book on the Subject of Writing and Publishing.]

The books are printed. The holiday season approaches. Then, at the last possible moment, Barnes & Noble cancels the order.

Author and publisher are appalled. No explanation from B&N is forthcoming. Those extra copies will have no chance of selling at full price; they will be recycled for scrap, or dumped at a loss into the international discount book market. When they sell, the author will receive no royalties from these “remaindered” copies.

The frustrated author decides to go sleuthing. In the midst of the holiday season he visits several Barnes & Nobles. Displayed front and center in every store is a fancy gift edition of that very Victorian classic. The competing book’s design appears to closely mimic that of the scholarly version our author had spent years preparing. Yet on close inspection, the “winning” version here stacked high is an ordinary reprint, with no thorough and scholarly apparatus, no elegantly researched and elaborately captioned illustrations. Not a better book.

Who could be the victorious publisher of this hack stand-in for our acclaimed scholar’s outstanding edition? Who but Barnes & Noble itself!

Why was the excellent edition displaced by the mediocre? Because Barnes & Noble corporation wished to ensure that no superior, competing version of this holiday classic should “steal” sales from the inferior, in-house edition which their own publishing arm was releasing that very season.

Did you know that Barnes & Noble robbed excellent, contemporary authors of about $20 million in royalties last year? That’s because over 10% of the books Barnes & Noble now sells are B&N-published titles. Between 2002 and today, Barnes & Noble achieved the striking goal of sharply increasing the percentage of “self-published” titles they sell from a mere 3% all the way up to today’s more than 10%. Many of these B&N-published books are reprints of classics, and feature inferior scholarship. Worse, a large number of B&N-produced books are dated nonfiction titles that went out of print long ago. Frequently, these newly republished out-of-print books weren’t good enough to survive in the marketplace of ideas as the years went by. More accurate books are in print today. These new, excellent books should be granted shelf space at Barnes & Noble. Instead, many are not even stocked.

Why does Barnes & Noble prefer to sell outdated books? The authors of those outdated reprints have been offered and have accepted one-time lump sum fees in republication deals with B&N. These writers of yesterday’s books won’t get paid per copy sold now, no matter how many copies of their old books Barnes & Noble pushes into readers’ hands. Flat-fee contracts give B&N a strong incentive to move as many copies of these outdated nonfiction books as possible, since no matter how many B&N sells, the flat fee has been paid. No need to keep paying the authors any royalties per copy sold. Flat-fees mean great profits for Barnes & Noble.

By contrast, ordinary royalty deals are more expensive because the author gets paid and paid and paid. Royalty deals are also fairer to authors who have spent years creating their books and haven’t been paid for their efforts all that time. New authors, whose better, current books can’t make it onto B&N’s shelves, have been robbed of the approximately $20 million in royalties they would have received if B&N were stocking these modern authors’ better, newer books.

To defeat the royalty-paying titles published by competing publishers, B&N prominently displays its older, flat-fee titles as if they were terrific, hot titles. These old books get placement at the front of the B&N bookstores, sporting fancy new dust jackets, and stickers that read: “Special Price!” The only thing special about these obsolete, reprinted flat-fee books is that they’re a gravy train for the B&N corporation since their authors won’t see royalties when you or I buy a copy.

Big investors on Wall Street love this B&N practice of republishing out-of-date nonfiction books and mediocre editions of classics in exchange for one-time flat fees to the authors and designers. Too bad for contemporary authors. Because B&N controls twenty-five percent of the bookstore marketplace, authors whose fresh books come from major publishing companies or small presses cannot easily get their books into that twenty-five percent of the market. Barnes & Noble shelves are instead increasingly filling up with books from their flat-fee, out-of-print republication program. Shoppers in B&N stores do not get a chance to see lots of the great new books by contemporary authors. Shoppers see those old, republished flat-fee books instead.

But Barnes & Noble is cutting its own throat. By flooding its stores’ shelves with inferior books, B&N is providing an opportunity for independent booksellers to better serve the public, through superior book selection. More importantly, independent bookstores are devoted to selling books that pay authors their due royalties for each copy sold. If independent bookstores recaptured the market share that was taken by Barnes & Noble in the 90s, authors would earn tens of millions of dollars more in royalties every year.

It’s going to happen. Over one hundred new indie bookstores opened nationwide last year. Hundreds more are in the planning stages.