Secret Life of an Author Bookseller, Part 1 – How does your book end up on the shelf?

For a little over a year now I have worked as a bookseller. I’d never actually planned to work in a bookshop, but when my circumstances changed dramatically in early ‘22, I found myself fronting up to the high street with a deep love of books and writing and a very dusty CV (my last retail work experience was so very last century).

Twelve months on, I am of the opinion that every writer, given the chance, should work in a bookshop. It’s like being handed the keys to a secret backroom society, and the things you learn from one end of the publishing industry can only help your endeavours at the other.

While most Australian writers would be familiar with the names Allen and Unwin, Penguin Random House, Affirm Press, Hachette, Pan Macmillan, Ventura Press, Fremantle Press, Harper Collins, Scribe, UWA Press, Hardie Grant, Black Inc, Pantera Press, Walker Books, and Simon and Schuster, according to Books and Publishing, there are in fact over 4,000 publishing entities in Australia publishing over 20,000 titles a year.

To a writer, those numbers can sound pretty promising, until you break it down. Remember, these figures include vanity and self-publishers, the micropublishers who produce less than 5 titles a year, those who don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts, not to mention those who only publish in specific genres or are for academic texts only. Even the 20,000 titles include eBooks as well as print, and republished titles as well as new. Suddenly the pool of opportunities is significantly smaller.

What I didn’t really think about until starting as a bookseller, was that being published did not automatically mean your book would end up on the shelf of every bookshop.

Whoever coined the phrase ‘available at good bookshops everywhere’ is doing good bookshops a disservice, because even the biggest and best bookshop cannot possibly stock 10,000 new titles every year.

So how do bookshops pick and choose from the thousands of books that are published every year? How come the titles you see on the shelf of your local indie bookshop vary so wildly from the big department stores (not to mention the prices), and even between Dymocks to Dymocks?

That role, for a large part, I discovered is filled by the publishing reps.

Every week there would be a steady stream of people into the boss’s office, reps from publishing houses and distributors. As I filled trolleys with books and sorted overstocks, I would overhear snippets of conversation, as the reps went through their monthly lists of new releases, and they discussed which ones the bookshop might wish to order.

Sometimes the reps would have physical copies of a book by a big-name author or a title that the publisher was planning on selling hard, other times it might only be a black-and-white image of the cover in a catalogue. Sometimes, the book didn’t yet exist when the reps were selling them to bookshops.

In the time it would take me to pack a few dozen books into the trolley, the rep might have pitched four or five books. A few minutes per book, a sobering thought to a writer who might spend two or three (or ten) years writing it.

As a writer myself, I was so curious about what went on behind the office doors, and how the decisions were made. Over time I got to know some of the reps better and my boss was always generous in answering my endless questions. He’d show me the stack of catalogues each month from the various distributors and publishing houses, the thousands of titles he’d need to choose from. I couldn’t imagine the pressure of making that sort of decision on a regular basis, and it also explained why sometimes we’d receive only two or three copies of a new release. There is literally not enough space for all the new books.

Every book – even a prize winner – is competing against so many things. It’s competing against its stable mates; a debut author may be unlucky enough to have their book released the same month as a well-established author and publishers only have a limited marketing budget. It’s competing against time, and how well it can be pitched in the minute or two allocated to it – not only in how the publisher sells it to the sales reps, but then how the reps sell it to the booksellers. It’s competing for limited space on the shelves. Only the lucky few will be granted face-outs in prime positions, and if the numbers are small, most new titles will bypass the New Release wall and go straight onto the shelf.

From there, that new book might have only six months to prove itself as a sale-worthy title before it faces the possibility of being part of a Return. But that’s another story.

Coming up next, I speak with two publishing reps to find out more about their role in pitching books to booksellers.