Eight years ago. EIGHT. 8!!!

I wrote this: The Perfect Bookstore.

Six years ago, I wrote the followup: The Perfect Bookstore

Today, my good friend Nate Hoffelder, digital maven and my occasional partner in crime, pointed me to this:

Paris’s first on-demand-only bookshop.

Point-by-point similarities:

1. The concept itself
2. The coffee shop
3. Its location near a college

Best part?

Meriot said he needs to sell about 15 books daily to break even.

That’s a margin even I didn’t foresee.
 

The perfect bookstore has a name: Decadence.

This is not another one of my bookstore-of-the-future/how-to-save-brick-and-mortar-stores posts. This is about a bookstore I dreamed up while writing The Proviso four years ago, the one that spawned the previous bookstore posts. Specifically, it’s Giselle’s bookstore, which was torched, causing her to have to reboot her life at the grand ol’ age of 30 by going to law school. (Because that’s what everybody does when they have to reboot their lives, right? Right?)

This bookstore was in the River Market area of Kansas City, Missouri, and most closely resembles this building:

Giselle describes it this way:

I owned a bookstore for seven years [ … ] I shared space with a patisserie on one side of me and a confectionery on the other. Maisy and Coco weren’t my business partners, exactly; we just figured if we knocked down our walls and unified our décor, we’d all make more money and it worked. [ … ] Decadence wasn’t a bookstore with food. It was a destination. I stocked romance novels of all kinds. Couple that with Maisy’s gourmet chocolates and wine, and Coco’s pastries, the events we put on every weekend … I was doing very well; we all were. I was never going to be independently wealthy, but I made a lot of money doing something I loved.

I’ve been percolating this post for a long time, and after many, many Twitter discussions on the relationship between independent brick-and-mortar booksellers and the romance genre (not good) versus Borders’ and Barnes & Nobles’s willingness to step in where the independent booksellers won’t (but Borders, the more romance-friendly store, went bye-bye), I decided to do yet another perfect bookstore post.

Behold, my real idea of the perfect bookstore:

And I still think this combination of products and location would make some serious bank. (Add an Espresso machine in the basement … ) (A used books section on the second floor … ) (Events at lunch and on the weekends … )

UPDATE: August 18, 2015, over 4 years later …

I was re-inserting pictures that got lost in the move so a friend could link to them, so I figured I’d add a couple of notes.

1. Since YA has become a bigger part of the market now, that section would get expanded.
2. I’m re-editing The Proviso, and Giselle adds this to her description:
   

   “Wine, chocolate, sex. [ … ] We had PMS survival kits. Better than Midol. Men came in specifically for those.”

Trust me, I’d send my husband across the metro to Decadence to get me a PMS survival kit.

So what.

Here’s the thing: NetGalley charges what is, to me, a micropress, an astronomical amount of money to give away books. That’s right: I would be paying to give my product to people in exchange for … very little in the way of a quantifiable return.

NetGalley is not in business to lose money. It’s in business to make money by providing a publishers’ colony. However publishers decide to define their ROI (return on investment) is how NetGalley’s going to be bringing in the money.

Follow the money.

When all other explanations fail, just follow the money.

Go read this and all the comments, then come back. Now we’ll recap.

Footprint: A narrow storefront on the county square of a small midwestern city, with three floors. (I didn’t bother with the third floor sketch. Use your imagination.)

Complaint: It’s not a “real” bookstore.

Disclaimers: 1) I’m not an industrial designer so don’t ding me on scale, lack of bathrooms, and walking space, etc etc etc. 2) This is an IDEA. Don’t take me to task as if I’m on the cusp of taking over the world and implementing all these in a grand sweep tonight while you sleep.

Goal: To make the bookstore a destination, not a stop on your to-do list.

I. Print on Demand

This is the key to blending the Espresso and “real” books:

1. Do you know what it is? It’s a catalog holder, like the ones at auto parts stores, where you stand at the counter and find which part you need for your car. Only these won’t have catalogs. They’ll have cover flats, separated by genre, subdivided by subgenre.
2. You will sit at the counter and flip through them. You will have a little wifi gizmo tied to the store’s computers. You will enter your account number and you will order what you want by pointing the gizmo at the bar code. Your order will go downstairs to the Espresso machines.
3. If you want an electronic version, it can be wifi’d do your device and/or you can have a CD/DVD burned, and/or you can have a download link emailed to you.
4. If you have already ordered what you want from a home computer or smartphone or other device, it will be waiting for you at the customer service counter (“Espresso Order Counter”).
5. The store will have a website that functions like any other ebook third-party retailer.

II. eReading

You may purchase the most current electronic reading devices and be advised by someone who actually knows what they are, how they work, and can teach you. There will be workshops.

III. “Real” books

1. The store will have at least one copy of whatever the buyer knows his customers like. He won’t have to order more because he’ll “Espresso it.” That way, customers can browse actual books.
2. The third floor will be dedicated to art books, children’s books, collector’s editions, with plenty of comfortable chairs. Yes. You will have to climb stairs. Get over it.

IV. Sustenance

In the basement there will be a coffee/tea bar with pastries and chocolate, possibly a small deli. There will be ample room to hang out.

V. Extras

1. You can watch the Espresso machines through the glass window.
2. There will be book club nights.
3. The Espresso books will always be brought upstairs so you don’t have to go downstairs if you don’t want to.

There you go. Blast away.

Also known as the 80/20 rule, wherein 80% of sales are generated by 20% of the customers. When applied to the way publishing gambles on blockbusters to subsidize its titles that lose money, it might be more or less 20% of the authors make 80% of the sales.

Publishers look for and sign new authors in a neverending search for the next blockbuster book that will sustain the 20%. Very often a new author will be taken on in favor of renewing a current author’s second or third book if the sales don’t meet expectations (which could mean that it did, in fact, make money, but not enough to satisfy the bean counters).

Last month, I was involved in a rigorous discussion on Dear Author, wherein author Courtney Milan likened publishing’s ability to support this model to pooling risk or, more precisely, flood insurance. I found the flood insurance specificity to be flawed and said why, but really I found the whole “risk pooling” argument flawed, but couldn’t articulate it, so I remained agnostic on the subject for the moment.

Now, after having stewed on it for a while, the better (read: more polite) analogy would be research and development—except without so much the development part.

Recently, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Jonathan Galassi, wrote an extraordinarily unorganized, incohesive rant op ed piece in the New York Times concerning whose rights are whose once the publishing house has put its resources into a manuscript to make it a salable product. Quite frankly, other than the amusing fact that he (an editor) wrote an essay not worthy of a high school freshman learning the basics of English composition, I don’t give a shit about what he thinks the publishers’ value-added rights are.

It was his exemplar of an author long dead, into whom marketing resources were invested to make him that success, that struck me as disingenuous. And a non sequitur. Or ignernt. Dude. You do realize that very few new authors are given these kinds of resources, right? Publishers throw new authors at the wall to see who sticks. There is no “development” counterpart to “research.”

Given that, I’ve moved on from a publisher’s resource allocation to be “risk pooling,” to “research and development,” to “shotgun approach.”

Hang with me—I know I’m only about the 1,537th person to say this, but I do have a point.

So yesterday on Teleread, Rich Adin from An American Editor opined that the way to save publishing is to kill the paperback. When the usual suspects (me) broke out with the usual reaction (Are you out of your fucking mind?), he shot back with, “Well, do you have any better ideas?”

Never mind I have no interest one way or another whether publishing remains profitable, and it’s not my job to put little slips in the suggestion box that will be ignored, and people (readers) have been screaming their fool heads off about what they want which would keep publishing profitable and publishing’s just not paying attention, I will tell you how to keep publishing profitable:

Do less research.

Put a little more development into your research.

Quit getting caught up in auction fever.

Embrace the e-book and treat it as deferentially as you do your other formats and respect those people willing to pay for it. Court them. Cultivate them. They have money to spend on books. Really.

The point is to make every title profitable, or as close to it as you can get.

But I don’t really think you care.

1. Y’all know who Doc McGhee is, right? He was Mötley Crüe’s manager way back in the day and pretty much made them rich and famous.
2. In early November, Amazon “suck[ed] up to literary agents” in a bid to kill its monsterly image. Really? They need literary agents to kill its monsterly image? Who’d’a thunk it?
3. Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette all announced they would be holding off releasing ebooks of new (hardcover) titles by six months. The brilliance never ends.
4. Stephen Covey just told Simon & Schuster to fuck off.  Well. I’m pretty sure that’s not exactly what he said.
5. There is one thing an unknown or midlist self-published author can’t get that s/he needs most.
6. There is only one thing a bestselling name-brand author has but doesn’t need at all.

I’m not going to explain any of this stuff. The graphic should make it, well, graphically obvious. Take the above seemingly unrelated items, throw it in with this, and see what you come up with. Assume the writer has not himself arranged for the actual production of his manuscript into print and electronic:

Pop quiz: What word is nowhere to be found in the above flowchart?

I think there’s one agent out there who already knows all this and is slowly, steadily—over weeks, months, years—training his blog readers to start thinking this way.

The difference between how agents work now and how this could work is that a writer would interview agents and hire one (as s/he would an attorney or CPA), as opposed to becoming a supplicant for the agent’s approbation/validation. Agents who now work as if they’re doing writers a favor may not deal with this system well.

On the other hand, even though this is my own plan, I can see that it could land us right back where we are now if writers won’t let go of the thought that they’re powerless and/or only incidental to the book creation process.

Writers, listen up: You’re the creator. There’s power in being the originator of content. Use that power and take control of your own destiny. It’s your work. Take responsibility for its dissemination.

I’ve been to very few of the pingbacks, but of the ones I have, quite a few of them described the post as cheeky.¹ I like that. I like that they recognized that instead of presenting it like I was completely serious and the plan/design was complete. I have lots of ideas about a whole lot of things. Most of them are half-assed.

Finally!

After six months, unceasing wailing, and a solid refusal to censor myself, The Proviso was finally approved for sale as an application in the Apple iTunes store.

Go get it!

(Now I don’t feel hypocritical by naming iPhone names in Stay, because, you know, Eric would be on top of all manner of gadgetry.)

Accept that you will not be able to quit your day job.

Regardless how much weeping and wailing and gnashing of the teeth goes on around the web about monetizing art, if you’re a writer not already pulling income that allows writing to be your day job, just deal with the fact that you probably aren’t going to.

In my mind, making peace with the fact that you have to keep your day job is a lot easier than spending all your creative energy to resent it. Ask me how I know.

Today, right now, as I look over the fiction writer landscape on the web, I see lots of writers I can slot into roughly five categories:

1. The unpublished authors seeking publication via the normal route (query/reject/revise/repeat). They’re hustling to get an agent’s attention, and possibly spending money on ink/toner, paper, envelopes, and postage to do so. They aren’t earning any money.
2. The midlist authors having to prove their numbers in order to get their next book contract, which means they have to hustle and market and fight to make sure people know their books exist (especially if they aren’t in Wal-Mart or Target). They probably aren’t earning enough to write full time.
3. The self-published authors having to fight just to let people know they and their work exists. They probably aren’t earning enough to pay the cost of producing their book(s), much less earn a living.
4. The career category authors (Harlequin/Silhouette) and e-published romance authors (Samhain, LooseId, Ellora’s Cave), a good portion of whom can earn a fairly decent living cranking out the books, but there’s a catch: Putting out enough books to make that kind of living has to be grueling. At least, it would be for me. YMMV. The advantage to e-publishing over career category publishing, though, is that your titles never go out of print and you have A) time to build a backlist and B) your backlist is forever available to any late-night shoppers with a credit card.
5. The A- and B-list authors who have pressures of their own, I’m sure, to which I am not privy. This includes anyone who may (if they choose to) write only one book per year or fewer and earn a comfortable living doing so.

Now, I’m obviously #3, except that I’m doing okay: Not enough to quit doing my day job, but enough to bear out the investment of time and money. (See my Six-Year Plan.) However, my goal is the same as the e-published authors: Build the backlist and invest in the future.

I hate my day job. I really do. Yeah, it’s my own business but I hate the work, mostly because I’ve been doing it or something similar for years. It’s easier now that I have a couple of decent clients, but the work remains. I fight an uphill battle every day to Just Do It, but do it I must. Some days I’m more successful than others.

But the explosion of free versus paid writing that has kind of ballooned lately with Chris Anderson’s book Free, and Malcolm Gladwell’s review of that book in the New Yorker only reinforces the necessity of resigning myself to the fact that I must have a day job.

For now.

The fact of the matter is that I have better odds of doing so than unpublished authors who hold out hope that they’ll hit the lottery.

I also believe that I have better odds than those authors who have to prove every book via sales, even if all the stars are aligned against them (bad cover art, little marketing support, not being in Wal-Mart or Target); perhaps that myopic of me, but I’m hustling for 100% profit, while they’re hustling for 10% royalties and they’re locked into questionable digital contracts (amongst other things).

As for career category writing, I couldn’t do it (as stated above), especially within the restrictions of category. I know, because I tried, and missed the bullseye by half a hair every single time.

I also couldn’t do e-publishing because there isn’t one that would contract what I write, and I know that; I’d rather not waste their time or mine. Also, see above for the grind in order to make money.

Basically, what I have on my side is control and time. I’m going to write no matter what, and I’m going to write what the stories I have to tell. I’d rather put it out there for the opportunity to earn a little money than let it languish in the inboxes of agents who are also feeling the pinch.

Yeah, I think I’m in a really good position. I just can’t quit my day job.

Yet.

I’m slowly coming to terms with that.

Author Moriah Jovan had a book rejected last month on that basis (although the rejection didn’t mention the book’s more creative obscenities).

Let me be clear about one thing. My other obscenities are no more or less creative than the average steamyhawt romance novel. In my opinion. However, if the steamier novels could make the cut because of the absence of the F-bomb, then yet another level of hypocrisy will have been reached. (I’d be interested to know what, if any, romance novels get converted to apps and put in the store.)

The article talks about the difference between rejected apps that are NOT e-books because e-books do have an alternative method of distribution to iPhone. (Ahem, my book is available through the Smashwords/Stanza catalog.) Anyhoo, I’m hearing that there is absolutely NO organization to the iApp store, so maybe it doesn’t matter anyway.

Except, you know, my cover Bewbies are totally eye-catching, no?