Author News
Indie Booksellers, Authors Team Up
Retail
By Judith Rosen |
Dec 13, 2013
In many respects, booksellers’ wider embrace of indie authors reflects changes in the industry overall, as the number of self-published books skyrockets and sales continue to climb. In a panel on self-publishing at the New England Independent Booksellers Association conference earlier this fall, Tom Holbrook, president of RiverRun Bookstore in Nashua, N.H., and Kittery, Maine, said, “Self-publishing is going to be a substantial part of the business going forward. What happens when [authors] don’t want us to sell their books?” He and an increasing number of his indie colleagues are working to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Heather Lyon, who founded Lyon Books in Chico, Calif., a decade ago and recently moved her new and used bookstore to a larger, 3,200 sq. ft. location, has long been an advocate for self-published authors. “I believe that our close relationship with local writers, the majority of whom are self-published, is what has made it possible for us to compete with Barnes & Noble and Amazon,” she said. To show the difference self-publishing makes to her bottom line, Lyon points to two 2013 store bestsellers: Roger and Helen Ekins’s trail guide, The Flumes and Trails of Paradise, and pastor Jim Coons’s A Line in the Sand, about his fight with cancer. Sales for each are more than double those of Wild by Cheryl Strayed, the “nonlocal” bestseller.
Lyon stocks any independently published book whose author lives within a 60-mile radius of the store—about 250 authors, so far. She also holds monthly meetings at the store for the Chico Authors and Publishers Society, which she helped found, to give authors and publishers information on using CreateSpace and