Beyond stocking titles, there’s also the question of how much to promote books that already are in-store.
“We have the books in sections and we have easels where we ‘face-out’ books, we call it. It’s amazing how if you put a book on an easel, it sells faster than when it’s lined up on a shelf. We wouldn’t necessarily put a Neil Gaiman out on an easel or build any kind of display,” said West. She added that Valley Bookseller clerks have obviously heard the news about Gaiman, Munro and others and it’s up to them to choose whether to recommend those titles.
At Subtext Books in St. Paul, store manager Patrick Nathan echoes Dederer’s argument that sometimes a reader’s appreciation for an author can overcome bad behavior; sometimes it can’t.
“I may not hand sell these authors, nor put them in a newsletter roundup, but I’m not going to pretend their books don’t exist. We have a lot of people who come in and have no idea what these authors have been accused of — it’s just not part of certain readers’ media diets to know these things,” said Nathan, a novelist whose “The Future Was Color” was published last year. “It’s not my place, I don’t think, to deflate their love for these works by sharing unwanted information about the author.”
All the booksellers say their decisions are made by listening to customers. Maybe those customers are already speaking. At Valley Bookseller, for instance, West said they have one Gaiman book, a copy of his popular “American Gods.” It’s been on the shelf since December. So far, no takers.
