As a independent bookstore employee of fourteen years’ experience, and as an occasional dealer on my own stick, I’ll tell you from that experience that the B&N empire (which includes Bookstop and, I believe, Crown), Borders, Dalton, and who-have-you are rather less likely than an indie to want to fiddle with single-copy orders, because it’s high-labor and low-discount. An independent can most certainly order single copies of anything that’s in print, from any publisher, and they will—because they can’t afford to do a W. C. Fields act with “Go ’way, kid, ya botherin’ me.” Hand-selling books and providing services that the chains won’t bother with are two of the ways we try to find a niche market in which we can survive. All you need do is tell the person at the store you want to do a STOP order—it stands for Single Title Order Plan, and is the standardized mechanism that the American Booksellers’ Association helped to establish for dealing with it. STOPs may well cost you more than simply pulling something off the shelf at Borders; as I said, it’s high-labor and the discounts are nowhere near as good. A seasonal frontlist order is generally discounted 40% to 45%; STOPs are discounted 30% or 20% or, sometimes, not at all. Each publisher has its own set of rules. That’s why you’ll probably pay full list price, and maybe get surcharged a little, if you do single-copy orders, but you will get your book, as long as it’s still in print.
As for suppliers, it simply isn’t true that the indies don’t have the supply lines. Nearly everybody in the industry, B&N and Co. included, buys either from Ingram in Nashville or Baker & Taylor in Georgia and Nevada, or from both. The difference is that your independent bookdealer isn’t forced to carry hundred-copy dumps of each of the NY Times list, because his purchasing decisions ain’t being made by some corporate buyer in Chicago or Seattle or wherever. He picks his stock off the publishers’ seasonal lists himself, and if he wants to order one or two copies each of a bunch of mid-list titles which will probably have to be hand-sold, he can. The economic problem arises because publishers’ discounts are based on quantity, so where we might get 43% on our total order of a couple hundred copies from the fall Simon & Schuster list, B&N can order 10,000 copies in a single order and they get 48% or 50%—which is why they can discount everything twenty to forty percent and get away with it. They sell on a razor-thin margin and make it up on the volume. In the meantime, book buyers are looking only at the state of their wallets, and going where they can get the lowest price. It’s understandable, it’s reasonable—and it’s killing off the independents.
Those of us who have survived so far are doing so either because the economics haven’t caught up with us yet, or we’ve managed to find a niche market. I’m realistically expecting that our store, which is general-interest, will have to close and I’ll be out of a job by next year, barring some sort of miracle. If and when that happens—well, I haven’t decided what I’ll do. I might go to some of the other dealers in town and see if anybody wants to hire an experienced O/P booksearcher with a certain amount of name recognition, or whether I walk away from the trade.
