In celebration of bookstores

Why books - and the places we buy them - matter.

I’m writing this from the register of the independent bookstore my husband and I helped start earlier this year.

While we aren’t involved in the day-to-day operations of the bookstore itself - that’s my sister’s and her husband’s baby now - the four of us co-own the building, which we have plans to develop into a larger community hub with books at its center.

Kathreen and “her” Eric are at a wedding this weekend, so “my” Eric and I are holding down the fort here…and let me tell you, it’s not the worst way to spend a Saturday.

In the first hour at my post I rang up a stack of knitting books and several novels, helped a fourth-grader track down chapter-book titles on Greek mythology, and chatted with a grateful young woman whose toddler very much enjoyed coloring at that little table while the mother very much enjoyed browsing with her hands free.

Paper Mill Books is located in a small city in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a sprawling land mass with a small and scattered population of only 300,000 residents - in the entire peninsula. It may not seem like the likeliest place to locate a thriving bookstore, and we definitely had some doubters: after all, aren’t bookstores dying, they all said, and doesn’t everyone buy everything on Amazon these days anyway?

But it’s looking like the doubters were wrong. An indie bookstore may not be a huge profit-turner - at least not without adding the literary lubricants of caffeine and alcohol (in the works) - but the appreciation from the community was instant and intense.

People need books, it seems - and they crave an inviting place to discover them and talk about them.

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Last week I accepted a publishing offer for my next book. As most books, for most regular (read: not celebrity status) authors go, this one will be a labor of love. Advances for writers like me are typically modest, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever earn a dime beyond that. And I worked on my proposal for months - even before writing the actual book, which I still have yet to do. To be transparent, a few podcast sponsorships would be a far easier and more lucrative way to spend my time.

And yet, the allure of publishing a book, one that readers can hold in their hands, is alive for so many writers.

I was discussing the magic of a book with my brother-in-law Eric recently - just what makes it so different, so much more impactful, from the other ways you can read or consume content?

His theory is this: a book asks a lot of a reader. Whether it’s a nonfiction or fiction or memoir; whether it’s about knitting or Greek mythology or time travel, a book asks you to invest in an author’s viewpoint all the way to the end; to hear them all the way out as they argue their point or build their plot or explain how to do the thing.

There’s a purity to that commitment, it seems to me; a robustness that just feels different from the skimming, skipping, and scrolling it’s so easy to do on other forms of media. And in a bookstore, there are hundreds or thousands of those fully-formed viewpoints, some of them conflicting, on a vast array of topics and ideas, sitting side by side and asking you to consider them. Really, how wholesome is that?

A bookstore, where readers from widely different backgrounds and viewpoints gather to commit their full attention to works from authors who also come from different backgrounds and viewpoints, may just be the most egalitarian institution we’ve got left in this crowded and confusing, polarized and polarizing world.

As I start working in earnest on my book, I’m thinking a lot about bookstores and their new place in an author’s working life. Publishing has changed a lot in the twelve years since my last book came out - and particularly in the past three years. I know bookstore tours aren’t what they once were, and I expect I’ll face a lot of pressure to push pre-sales on Amazon and lean in hard on my social media audience to sell books, rather than individual signings. I also know from previous experience that even in the best of times, in-person author appearances can often be a lot of work for little reward.

But something is lost, I think, when books are removed from physical spaces, and when authors are removed from the places books and their readers meet. So I’m hoping for a revival of the in-person book tour before my book comes out, in summer of 2025.

Or if that hasn’t happened by then, maybe some fellow authors and I can band together and plan our own tour.

It just so happens, I know of a great spot where we can get started.