Interview: Fisher the Bookseller Explains How Bookstores Decide Which Books to Sell

The ins and outs of how books are bought and sold in bookstores

I often publish interviews with authors here at Counter Craft but I’ve been meaning to expand the series to talk to other agents, editors, and others in the publishing world. This week I’m excited to publish an interview with Fisher the Bookseller who both works as a book buyer for an independent bookstore and writes an excellent and illuminating Substack of the same name.

If you aren’t aware, a book buyer is the person who chooses what books—out of the tens of thousands published each year—a bookstore will put on its shelves. I often think that book buyers (and booksellers) are overlooked in literary discourse. There are plenty of articles about the state of literary fiction, the role of MFA programs, or the problems of big publishing. There is much less about how books are actually sold to customers. Even in the Amazon age, many people still browse and shop at bookstores. What books are stocked in stores plays a large role in publishing. (Before Amazon’s ascendance, the book buyers at Barnes & Noble were considered some of the most powerful people in publishing whose decisions could make or break careers.) So, I really appreciated Fisher the Bookseller’s in-depth article “Who decides what goes on bookstore shelves?” Anyone interested in that question should give the article a read.

Fisher was also kind enough to answer questions for me about book buying, bookselling, and the hidden factors that go into both.

Maybe we could start with you telling a bit about yourself and how you became a bookseller? Whatever you’re comfortable sharing.

I worked for years at a corporate insurance job. I wouldn’t consider it immoral so much as amoral. It was soulless. After I lost that job (not to be all Nabokov, but: lawsuit, settlement), I wanted to do something I was actually excited about. I started working at the bookstore in the fall of 2020, which was kind of a wild time to work in bookselling. But I knew it was where I wanted to stay from my very first shift. I had been a regular customer for years, so much so that full-time staff knew me by my esoteric (and prolific) special orders. Then a little over a year ago, I became the full-time buyer. I am not exactly sure how it happened, other than that the store owners knew I read a lot and really liked data. When they asked me if I was interested in buying, I believe my very chill words were “Oh my god that’s my dream job yes absolutely.” I didn’t even ask if I’d get a raise. (I did. They are very good employers).

As a buyer for your store, how much of your time is spent on decisions about what books to stock versus other tasks?

I work from home three days a week and on the sales floor two days a week. On those work-from-home days, I spend about 75% of that time doing buying-specific tasks, and the rest doing things like running reports, writing our store newsletter, and taking care of administrative tasks like email.

But buying is seasonal. I spend about three months on buying, three times a year. So, when my last appointment for the season wraps up, I will have about five weeks through the end of the year when I don’t have any buying decisions to make at all. During those weeks I will work extra in the store doing other things like returns and reporting. A different buyer in the store manages reordering, so he, like everyone else in retail, will be at his busiest while I will enjoy a bit of a lighter holiday workload.

I contacted you after reading your excellent article “Who decides what goes on bookstore shelves?” that, as the title suggests, explains the factors that go into what books are sold in stores. Writers sometimes overlook the central role of booksellers in conversations about how publishing works. Books don’t magically appear on shelves. Bookstores pick and choose the books to stock. From the perspective of an independent bookstore, can you summarize how a bookstore decides what books to shelve?

Each independent store is different, with its own ethos about how to stock their books. I was lucky to inherit a role that had a curation policy in place that I fully believed in: stock widely, across multiple publishers, for a diverse array of titles you won’t see at Target or Barnes & Noble. We still stock the bestsellers and big books, but we also stock as many small and university press titles as we can. I look at catalogs from all the big five publishers as well as catalogs from small distribution platforms (like Consortium), Ingram Publishing Services, and small self-distributed presses. I meet with sales representatives every season to review my buys and make adjustments based on their recommendations.

One thing your article points out is the sheer numbers involved. You say, “There are over 14K individual titles in these [publisher] catalogs combined. I’ll see similar numbers when I buy for the summer, and a bit more when I buy for fall, meaning I see between 40 and 50K individual book titles every year.” This is obviously an impossible number for any person or even a team of people to read. Meaning, bookstores will often rely on factors like “track” (aka sales of past books) and “comp titles” (aka sales of allegedly similar books). What other factors influence what books are stocked?

I go into detail about a lot of those factors in my piece, but they include cover design, print runs, author location, staff interest, and a host of other little things.

One of the things I didn’t mention in detail is the limitations of our physical space: we only have so much square footage and only so many bookshelves. I can’t get everything that gets released, even if I wanted to. Even Barnes & Noble, which I would posit has an anti-curation philosophy, can’t stock everything.

My own taste is a factor, even though I try to keep it in check. I’m a sucker for a small press that prints “rediscovered” classics. NYRB books are my catnip (Stoner discourse aside, haha), but also McNally Editions and Smith and Taylor Classics. I tend to care about literary fiction and science fiction more than other genres, so I spend a bit more time on those sections for the sheer joy of it. I also like to make sure my own ignorance doesn’t get me into trouble. I have less knowledge about music and comic books, so sometimes I ask a bookseller on staff that I know has deep knowledge of those sections about a title I’m waffling on.

Another factor I didn’t discuss in my piece is individual customer taste. I saw another bookseller mention this somewhere else, and it is true: I frequently have literal customers in my head for some of my book choices. We have a few academics who shop with us who love Ancient Greek and Roman histories. That esoteric book on the Ancient Roman Fulvia? There’s a retired cardiologist I got that one for. Thrice Married to a Salted Fish, a Chinese danmei light novel? I brought that one in for a regular who wears a beret. I just talked to her last night and showed her a particular section of a catalog and asked what she was excited about. She literally jumped up and down with excitement, it was lovely. That institutional customer knowledge really matters.

How far in advance of publication are bookstores typically making their buying decisions? And what pre-publication factors might change a bookstore’s initial order? (E.g., I imagine that if a not-yet-published book is picked as a National Book Award finalist, that might change an order.)

I make my buying decisions anywhere from 2 to 8 months before a book is published. That means right now I am buying books that are being released January through May. There are three publishing seasons. The lore I heard was that there were originally two publishing seasons, spring and fall, because shipping routes were impacted by frozen waterways in the winter. So, bookstores put in their book orders in the spring and the fall, with the fall season being when stores really stocked up on books before winter. Then later, sometime in the past century when delivery logistics changed, publishers added in a third season. So right now, for example, I am working “overtime” building my orders for the season that some publishers call winter and others call spring. Starting in January through March I will buy books being released in the summer, then May through August I will be buying fall books.

Some books are “crashed” into the catalog at the last minute for various reasons. Like that Facebook tell-all memoir, Careless People. A lot of political books get crashed to limit the pre-publication chatter and media leaks. The marketing strategy there seems to be to curtail the amount of juicy stuff in the press so people still have a motivation to buy the book. (People are not buying political books because of the beautiful prose.) In other cases, like with Careless People, publishers are hoping to get books out before lawyers get involved.

Some pre-publication factors that change our orders are things like large numbers of preorders or an event getting added to the bookstore’s schedule. Book awards can be a factor, but most of the time those happen after a book is released. But in the case of things like the Booker shortlist, where some of the books haven’t yet been published in the US, I am definitely buying more of those books than I otherwise might have.

After a bookstore decides what books to buy, you have to decide what books are placed face-up on tables or face-out in the windows. How important is that placement for sales? And how do you decide which books get that treatment?

I would like to believe that faced-out books sell more copies, but I don’t know if the sales are due to the book being faced out or due to publisher marketing and other factors like name recognition or being a major book club pick. Our customers spend a LOT of time browsing the shelves. I can see them lingering over the spines and pulling out the single copy of a book we have and reading the back, seriously considering it. Customers are probably more likely to see a book that’s on a table in a big stack. But does that mean it will sell? Yes, sometimes, but not always. I have definitely brought in a stack of books (four or more copies gets the face-out or display table treatment) and I watch them sit front and center on the display table for three months, doing absolutely nothing.

I didn’t mention it in my article, but publishers sometimes offer (slightly) larger discounts for particular titles if we buy the title in bigger quantities. Think: “Buy five, get an extra three percent off!” Most of the time this means that the publisher is putting their own money on the line because of their belief in this book, so I do pay attention to these incentives. That being said, I don’t take every book that gets dangled in front of me like ripe fruit. It still has to meet that “it” factor for our store.

Most of the time, if I choose to purchase a “display quantity” of books, I am buying based on the author’s sales track in our store. If the author is a big deal in our store, we display their books. Sometimes that’s a local author with strong community ties who wrote an obscure history book, sometimes that’s a more regional author with a strong sales track record in the entire state or geographical area, and sometimes it’s just Emily Henry, because her books fly off the shelves whether we display them or not, so they might as well be easily accessible. I have leeway with unknowns and debuts, and in those cases I rely heavily on my gut instinct and the sales rep’s confidence in the book. Our store owners fully trust my instincts and don’t look over my shoulder at every buy I make, which means if I have a feeling about a debut, I can stock it in display quantity. I got display quantities of that new Helen Dewitt/Ilya Gridneff book Your Name Here because I think it looks super cool, and even though it’s kind of esoteric and strange, I think it will appeal to our snobbier customers. I was one of those snobby customers once.

Your article describes how bookstore buying decisions are almost entirely made through Edelweiss software that shows you the publisher catalog, your individual store’s sales for past titles, and the confidential “markups” written by a publisher’s sales team. As an author, I know most of that is beyond my control, which makes me curious if there are any factors authors can control that book buyers might look at. For example, is having a “platform” like a podcast or, well, a Substack something that might help an author’s chances of being stocked?

This is a great question that hits on something I didn’t cover before now. Having a platform does make a difference, and all that information is available to buyers in Edelweiss. There’s a section for each book listing called Marketing Plans. I usually don’t look at these for my obvious buys or obvious skips, but when I hesitate, I open them up. The Marketing Plans include information about what marketing is being done for the book: online advertising campaigns, social media promotions on publisher specific Instagram pages, influencer outreach, ARC mailings, inclusion in newsletters, etc. It also includes the author’s own platform subscriber counts if they are significant. Significance depends on the author and their book, but a poet with a 5K subscriber count is significant, while for a YouTube cook that would be insignificant. The YouTube chef cookbooks I see are legion. Their counts are in the millions. It’s wild. How much do people watch cooking on YouTube? It’s clearly more than I would have guessed. But I digress. Yes, author platforms and online reach get featured for the buyer, sometimes in the markup, but usually in the Marketing Plans section.

There is another useful section called Quotes that includes blurbs for the book. Those are especially helpful for me with nonfiction titles where I am not an expert. I may not recognize a particular science writer’s name, but I know that a Neil DeGrasse Tyson blurb means they have connections.

Something that unpublished writers might not realize is that it is increasingly common for booksellers to offer praise—essentially blurbs—for forthcoming novels. As a book reviewer, I will often receive review copies with sheets of praise from booksellers. Do you participate in this? Do you see the importance of bookseller recommendations growing as book review space shrinks?

I do participate in this! Booksellers, especially from well-known or established bookstores, probably get more advanced reader copies than almost anyone else in the industry. We get so many that we don’t even take them all home, and they are free! We encourage our staff to submit reviews on Edelweiss for every ARC that they read and would recommend. Edelweiss is where publishers get a lot of those reviews, but I also sometimes email a review directly to a publisher. Prolific reviewers are more likely to get more ARCs, therefore the cycle continues. I organize my ARCs at home by their publication dates, so that I can read them in time to submit reviews for key dates. One of those key dates is the cutoff for nomination in the Indie Next newsletter, which is about three months before a book releases. The Indie Next newsletter is a glossy pamphlet mailed out by the ABA (American Booksellers Association) to independent bookstores all over the country every month and put out for free for customers. It contains books nominated by indie booksellers and curated by the ABA. Getting into the Indie Next newsletter can bring really unique and important visibility to a debut novel. The booksellers’ motivation to read and nominate is the thrill of having your blurb chosen to represent a book everywhere. It’s the tiniest amount of fame, but it’s fun.

Some of our booksellers have even had their blurbs featured in actual finished copies of books, which is a rare thing. The creme de la creme of bookseller blurbs would be from Paul Yamazaki, the buyer for the last fifty years for City Lights Books in San Francisco. He’s an industry legend. His blurb appears on an inside page of praise for Karen Tei Yamashita’s book I Hotel.

I have a lot of feelings about book review space shrinking, and I think there’s space for booksellers to fill it–but that comes with a big caveat: our job is to sell books, not critique them. I know how to write a blurb to sell a book to the right reader, but that doesn’t mean that the book is getting the critical treatment it deserves. This maybe is worthy of an entirely different essay.

But as far as bookseller blurbs being great selling tools, I am a true believer. Handselling books is an art that really does work. Customers ask me for recommendations all the time, and I am ready with whatever is my favorite book of the moment. If you can get a good bookseller to champion your book, you may not sell a million copies, but your sales will be weirdly high in those stores compared to everywhere else. I have a coworker who has kept her shelf talker on display for a paperback book called Motherthing by Ainsley Hogarth since 2022. We’ve sold 130 copies. The Pulitzer Prize winner the year before was Louise Erdrich’s Night Watchman. We have sold 155 copies of that in paperback. So, a single bookseller at our store has slightly less sway over the course of three years than the Pulitzer Prize. I know that’s anecdotal, but it’s compelling. I can look at the numbers for every book that has a shelf talker and see that they do move, on average, more units than books that did not get a staff’s recommendation via shelf talker.

In your article, you say that the biggest problem in publishing from your perspective is “glut.” “Fifty thousand new books a year in the United States alone? It sounds extreme, but I think that number should be halved.” I hear similar sentiments—mostly in private—from agents, editors, and even authors. If everyone involved agrees too many books are published, why doesn’t it ever happen?

That statement–that the number should be halved–is definitely inflammatory. I certainly don’t want half the people in publishing to lose their jobs, or for good books not to get published. It’s the kind of overstatement I’m very comfortable making, but have no real concrete steps for how it would work in reality.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. My last post was a more personal exploration of how overwhelmed I get by the number of books always increasing. My dark metaphor was that I felt like a farmer being smothered to death by his crops in a grain silo. I stand by that metaphor. I love books. I spend most of my life reading them, talking about them, buying them, thinking about them, selling them. I care about the industry, the writers, the publishers, the stores. I care about all of it. But the numbers are staggering and unprecedented. They’ve only increased over time. The numbers I see are just traditionally published books, which doesn’t account for indie-published books or whatever people are putting out on Kindle Direct. I think part of this is a good thing. The democratization of the internet means that a kid in rural Indiana can create an online platform talking about how he does his makeup and dismisses homophobes, go viral, and get a book deal for his memoir. It means that micro-communities can find niche books that represent them and tell their stories. But at some point the acceleration has to reach a stopping point. Infinite growth isn’t sustainable.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any kind of answer for this, and I don’t think anyone in publishing does.

Lastly, many writers feel shy about engaging with bookstore employees to, say, offer to sign copies on the shelves or talk about their books. Should writers feel that way? What advice would you give writers to engage (respectfully and usefully) with bookstores?

I get this feeling. There’s something embarrassing about tooting your own horn. It goes against the puritan ethic that most of us probably have somewhere in our ancestry. I would keep these four things in mind and you will endear yourself to whoever is behind the counter. Also, hopefully, you will keep your inner critic at bay. Be aware, be friendly, be direct, and be curious.

Be Aware: Look around before you approach. How busy is the store? Are there people waiting in line with only one harried looking 22 year old at the counter? Maybe take a beat before you approach. Also, don’t come in during December, and if you do, be aware that the bookseller may not have more than a few minutes to spend talking to you. My best advice for authors is to come to the store during a weekday morning before lunch time. That time is usually the quietest. Check the store’s website out before you go and make sure you won’t be interrupting anything like a kids story time. This is half the battle. Everything else is easy if you walk into a quiet store where the bookseller isn’t being pulled into fifteen different directions.

Be Friendly: If you see that a bookseller is available and the store isn’t overly busy, approach the bookseller with kindness and introduce yourself. Don’t make assumptions. That 22 year old? He looks young, but he’s a full-time employee with four years of experience who might handle the consignment decisions. He could also be the owner’s son. Bookstores are filled with weird interconnected webs of people.

Be Direct: Booksellers are usually pretty busy, and used to being approached with weird questions or comments: where is the bathroom, do you have a trash can, what book do you think my soon-to-be mother-in-law will like, I just got out of rehab do you have the blue book, fine if I can’t use the bathroom I’ll just go right here, where do you keep your Robert Greene, do you have James, what do you think about this situation in the Middle East, and so on. I’m spicing it up a bit, but all of these are real questions or comments I’ve gotten on the sales floor, down to the guy who whipped it out and peed on our carpeted floor. So, your greeting should get to the point. “Hi, I’m Fisher. I really like your store. I wrote a book that you guys stock, would you mind if I signed the copies you have? If you are okay with it I can post pictures on my social media and tag your store account to let my fans know where to buy signed copies.”

Be Curious: If you don’t have a direct request, (like “can I sign my books”) ask your questions with open-minded curiosity. If you’re an indie author, maybe you want to know how they stock indie-published books. If you’re a traditionally published author and your book hasn’t come out yet, maybe you want to ask about how the store handles events or preorder campaigns. Sharing the vulnerability of ignorance is actually a really nice thing to do, especially when every bookstore operates uniquely. It lets the bookseller feel like an expert in their own job, which is a great feeling! You’re in good company with a bunch of nerds like you.

Also, remember that the bookseller you talk to may be new or (hopefully this is rare) confused. If the bookseller doesn’t know, ask if there is someone you can email for information. Email is king, and it does not mean you’re being dismissed. A call is forgettable, a message can be misplaced, but an email needs to be dealt with. Whoever manages the email inbox will not be confused, and they will know the answers to your questions.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to try again, or try again at a different indie store. Maybe you came in and the bookseller on duty was having a massively bad day. They are human. These things happen. Maybe someone was rude or dismissive. Chances are, it really wasn’t about you. Most booksellers really do get excited to meet authors, even if they haven’t read your specific book. Let me tell you, I still haven’t read your book, Lincoln, though it is sitting on my shelf, waiting for the right moment. But if you walked into the store and said hello, I would be really stoked. I would make you sign every copy on the shelf and then I would make you take a cheesy picture, which I would forward to the girl who does our social media. I would tell you about our scifi reader J, who has read your books, and it’s too bad he isn’t here because he would have been excited to see you. I would tell you that I did read that book you co-edited a few years ago, Tiny Nightmares, and how it made me order the companion book Tiny Crimes, which I never read because time got in the way. And then I would worry that I was talking too much and I would shut up and let you browse the store. If I felt especially brave, I would try to handsell you some esoteric science fiction title, or maybe Schattenfroh, which I haven’t read, but dang, isn’t it a freaking BRICK? And you would walk out of that conversation hopefully a little proud, maybe a little confused, but definitely not worried that you were the weird one.

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My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.