Crossing Borders

by

Lev Raphael

I’ve been a Michigander since the early 1980s and I remember the old days at Borders in Ann Arbor when it was a hip, reader-friendly, deluxe-feeling book store. Big, but personable. I loved going there. It felt sophisticated—as Ann Arbor did in general compared to my own smaller town of East Lansing.

And then I watched Borders expand nationally like the stovetop pudding that Woody Allen can’t beat back in Sleeper. It seemed bizarre that a store I respected was becoming a juggernaut and driving independent book stores around the country out of business.

That felt worse since East Lansing had a lovely indie called Jocundry’s, and I was in there all the time, browsing, buying, meetings friends, going to readings or giving them. Eventually, it fell victim to a neighboring Barnes and Noble, not a Borders, but it was still destroyed by the same phenomenon.

The Borders’ bankruptcy and major cutbacks are tragic for all the employees, and a major blow for the publishers who Borders owes money to, some $242 million according to the New York Times. 

But is it a tragedy for readers? As e-book sales continue to grow, won’t we be seeing more people downloading books? And is it a tragedy for authors? Not for this one, certainly.

In the hundreds of readings I’ve done over the years, I’ve never had a really successful signing at a Borders store, or any chain for that matter. The best book stores readings have always been indies like the newish Everybody Reads in Lansing, where the owner did such amazing, energetic publicity for my reading that I did half a dozen radio shows beforehand and sixty-seven people came to my reading, buying  thirty-five books. The turnout was well above average, and in my experience, if even a third of the audience buys books, that’s a successful reading in terms of sales. This was half—and it was a hardcover.

But there’s a different consideration than sales when it comes to readings, for me at least. I’ve spent twenty years exploring networks where I could speak and see my books sell as well as or better than they would at any book store. So in the last two and a half years of readings and talks about my memoir My Germany, I’ve spoken at colleges and universities, churches and synagogues, public libraries and the Library of Congress, museums, book fairs. I’ve felt welcomed and sometimes even honored at these non-traditional venues, at home or abroad.  And sixty-seven at a venue like any of those is not unusual, it’s close to average.

When you speak at one of these kinds of venues you get treated very differently. I saw that across the U.S. and in Canada these past two years whether I spoke in Ft. Myers or Toronto, Houston or Chicago. In every place I got to spend time with my hosts and talk about books, the writing life and local concerns. We sampled local restaurants, saw the sights when possible, and each visit was an immersion, however brief, something that just doesn’t happen on a round of book store visits.  The business of the day wasn’t the book stores’ business of which I was a small part. The business of the day (or more) was my visit.

When I blogged about this question recently on The Huffington Post, an independent book store owner knocked me for criticizing stores like hers and asked where I thought the books were ordered through anyway at all my readings. In fact, at most of my readings, the books are ordered directly by the organization, and they are almost always offered at a significant discount so as to get more books into the hands of more people. 

But the larger question is this: as an author, you support the industry as much as you can in the ways that you can, but if it makes more sense and is more remunerative for you to pick venues other than book stores, that’s the path to choose, unapologetically.

That’s why I advise authors starting out to try to find or create their own networks outside the traditional book store world when it comes to promoting their work via readings and talks. One friend who wrote a book about his father’s experiences as a POW in World War Two took this to heart and spoke extensively to veteran’s groups.

Publishing and bookselling continue to change, authors need to change, too, and always remember that for our art to flourish, we need to understand the business side of what we do. It’s a border we have to cross, no matter how strange that new country might seem at first.

Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.