I’ve worked here almost since the day it was open for business. At first, I was here just one day a week, so that Bill could have a day off – which he used to do bookkeeping at home. I remember their long dinning room table which was covered with pile after pile of paperwork. I don’t know where they ate dinner. Slowly, this place absorbed my life until my brain looked like Bill’s dining room table. In ’98, when he felt like stepping back from ownership, Bill offered to sell it to me but, happily, he kept working with us all. It has been a great honor to own the Seattle Mystery Bookshop since 1999. Sadly, that is now going to come to an end.
The Seattle Mystery Bookshop will close on Saturday, September 30th at the end of the day.
Why? There are so many reasons. Blame Amazon? Sure, that’s the easy thing to say but the massive changes in the world of bookselling are far larger than that. In fact, the changes in the over-all economy make it a much, much bigger story.
To be fair, you have to look back to the rise of mega-stores like Barnes & Noble. They were exciting but they began the phenomena of deeply discounting books. They wanted bodies in the stores, they wanted customers to buy books and CDs and calendars and to drink coffee and browse magazines and they were willing to use books as a loss leader to get you in there. And people went. There was no way for small independents to compete with what a large corporation could do, or what they demanded from the publishers. Publishers paid more attention to them because they had to. Publishers let them do things (claiming a certain percentage of damage from each shipment without detailing which and what; getting placement fees for putting books in prominent places; author events denied to small shops) not allowed to the small independents. That would come back to bite them when Borders collapsed and left a significant hole in the publishers’ business model.
The next blow to independent booksellers came from the rise of e-books and here, too, publishers made a terrible mistake. For decades, publishers released some books in hardcover and some as paperback originals – mass market paperbacks to be precise. In a year, the books in hardcover would usually be released in paperback. That way, those who could afford to buy hardcovers and who didn’t want or need to wait could get it when it was new. Those who couldn’t afford the hardcover price knew they could get it at the library or get it in paperback in a year. This was a model that allowed all budgets to get books - a true mass market for books.
Think of Hollywood. Movies would come out and play for weeks or months. You could go to it and pay full price at night, or go see a matinee for a bit less. If your city had them, you could wait to catch a movie you wanted at a second run theater, weeks after it premiered but months before it might, might, show up on cable. Again, it was a model that allowed for a mass audience. When movies on cassette became practical, think of what it would have done to the Hollywood model if movies could be rented at the same time they hit theaters allowing people to see a movie for far cheaper than going to a theater?
That’s what publishers did. They allowed a far less expensive version of their books to be available right away, undercutting the sale of hardcovers with the cheaper e-version. What they should’ve done was to give the hardcovers time to sell before releasing the e-book along with the mass market. But they didn’t. They way they did it took the legs out of the publishing of hardcovers. In reaction, in order to make up for dropping sales, they upped the price of all books, driving more of the market to the cheaper alternative of e-books. And they blew it with paperbacks, too. They said the marketplace was moving away from mass markets, that readers, and bookclubs, and booksellers wanted trade paperbacks at twice the price of the mass market. The mass market paperback was dead. If it was, they murdered it. The fallacy here is that trade paperbacks limit the number of books that someone with limited disposable income can buy AND those higher priced trade paperbacks were undercut by the e-book prices as well. (Now, it should be noted, that publishers are beginning to release titles that have been trade paperbacks as mass markets. We’d assume sales of the more expensive trade paperbacks have slowed and publishers are trying to lure readers back with the traditionally less expensive softcover. Yet now there are far fewer places to sell those cheaper editions. And now Hollywood allows you to rent movies at home so who needs to go to movie theaters any more!)
The American Booksellers Association moved to stem the tide of readers going to e-books by making it possible for independents to sell them too. But it was pointless. You can’t pay the rent and your employees with the sale of dirt cheap e-books. That’s a business model that cannot work unless you’re a huge outfit that also sells tires and tubesocks.
So, anyway, Big Box stores and on-line and e-book sales are a huge part of it but there are at least two other equal parts.
The second is the over-all economy. The Great Recession took away a lot of jobs and dislocated a ton of folks – especially in downtown Seattle, where we are. Suddenly, the disposable income that they’d used to buy books was greatly lowered, if there at all. And as the prices for everything increased so that sales and sales taxes could bring in something like what was needed to pay the city’s bills, there was much more competition for our fun money; gas was higher and parking cost more as the city tried to find new sources of funds since fewer people were employed… and the merry-go-round stopped spinning as it had. Those people who suddenly had less money to spend were heavily drawn to those inexpensive e-books, or to the library. All those new millionaires and billionaires might be good for investment bankers and real estate developers, but they can only buy and read so many books. The mass audience for books was sidelined after that crash. You still hear news stories about how “middle class” wages are stagnant, and that has a direct effect on sales for everyone.
Except at Amazon. Yes, they’re cooking along well, aren’t they? When people have less money to spend on fun stuff they go where they can get the most for their money – to places who discount heavily. And since people are stressed and lack the time to go out shopping, a place that is convenient and that discounts is a godsend, right? Amazon is poised to be the largest apparel seller in the country and Macy’s and Penny’s close stores. No mystery there.
The third part is generational. For the last decades, the entire publishing world – bookshops, publishers, authors – had been supported by huge post-WWII generations who moved up through their jobs and had the extra money to spoil themselves and their children, and to begin collecting books, collecting hardcovers. After all, there was no alternative to the printed book until books on tape in the late 80s. As their collections grew, they became more sophisticated in their collecting. They demanded first editions, preferably signed. They’d wait for them, not needing to read them when the book first came out, as long as they’d be able to add another signed copy to the shelves. They’d backfill too, searching for titles they’d missed from an author they’d only recently began to collect. Author tours became the thing and bestselling authors were created from huge lines of collectors and fans. Piles of books would evaporate during a signing and unknown writers quickly became bestsellers authors.
But now that generation of collectors has begun to retire from it. They’re downsizing from the homes in which they reared their children and are moving to smaller apartments or condos or retirement centers. They don’t have room for the collections they so lovingly built. They want them to go to others who will cherish them because their kids or grandkids don’t care. The problem is that every collection is made up of the same authors and the same titles because these authors were vastly popular to a mass audience and were printed in large numbers and now there’s not a generation of collectors coming up to soak up these books. They were reared on TV, they had the pleasure of reading beaten out of them in school, or they, too, have some of these books but don’t feel the need to fill in their collections – it just isn’t their thing. The great collector generation’s grandchildren don’t yet have the disposable income to buy books. They’re saddled with massive college debts, rents and mortgages are sky high, they’re starting their families and babies are expensive, everything’s expensive, they don’t have the disposable income their parents and grandparents had and, what the hell – it is just so easy and cheap to order on-line on their phones where the do most of their reading.
And here we are.
Those are the big reasons. There are many smaller ones, some unique to Seattle and Pioneer Square (unendingly difficult and expensive parking, street construction, the end of the Ride Free zone, viaduct removal, ball games, protests and marches), and some national (the increased use of credit cards and their transaction fees, higher international mail costs, vendors screwing down on payments).
Then, too, there was me. I don’t have the easiest personality and I rub some/many people the wrong way. I can be too impatient and prickly and more than a few people have referred to me as a curmudgeon. I am all of that. I have always known that I have been the shop’s greatest drawback and I know it contributed, in some way, to the fall in sales. If I caused you to shop here less, I apologize.
Just after the LA mystery bookshop closed in 2011, we had a major LA author in to sign. He was still furious that those owners had closed without saying anything – that they were in trouble and needed help. He asked “Why didn’t they ask for help?” That stuck with me. A few weeks later I composed a letter to that author as well as to two other international bestselling authors who had also been here to sign multiple times and laid out for them their sales with us over the years. I pointed out that sales with in-shop signings were far higher than with signed copies from another source. I asked them to use their influence with their publishers to ensure that small independent mystery shops were made a priority and were put on their tour schedules. I asked what they were prepared to do to help the small mystery bookshops who helped to launch their careers. I heard back from none of them.
We’ve fought with publicity departments for over two decades to be seen as a viable location for their Big Name authors. I’ve made the point that if they don’t send their Big Name authors to us we won’t be here to help their beginning authors get to be Big Names. I’ve beseeched authors we used to normally get for formal signings but who are now brought by only for stock signings that we need their help, that we need them to talk to their publicity departments. Most shrug it off, declining to get involved with tour schedules. Those who have benefited from the exposure and attention of little shops, who are so grateful for our help launching them into bestsellerdom suddenly do not wish to use their power and leverage to help those who gave them attention and benefits. “I contacted sales and all the tip-ins went to Barnes and Noble. I have no control over that…” Well who the hell has more control that a major bestselling author? We’ve done what that author said, we’ve repeatedly asked authors for help… and here we are.
I’m sure some will say we should’ve done more to ask for help, to make our situation clear. We have. We’re written many blog posts about the dangers of not supporting small businesses that will go away if you don’t. A few years ago we had to downsize to survive. That was a very clear indication that sales were not supporting what we were doing. Clue #1. That move was not enough so we held the Go Fund Me drive to pay off bills that were holding us back. Clue #2. That worked and bought us a year. We let the staff shrink because we couldn’t afford to have the staff we need. Clue #3. Lastly, we tried to sell the place. Clue #4. The clues were there. We’ve been playing fair all along.
At one time, when this shop was young, there were at least three dozen independent mystery bookshops around the globe. NYC had four. DC had three. Now there are but a handful. It isn’t just us. I am dead certain that none of those that closed wanted to, but, in the end, there was no choice.
We’re all heartbroken to close the shop. I personally feel as if I have failed Bill. But we all fought hard to keep it going for years but the sharp bottom line is people have not been buying enough books from us to keep it working for a long time. Time to say goodbye.
I want to thank all of those loyal customers who have been regulars over the years. It’s been a gas.
What happens next? It’s a mystery.
~ JB