When Indie Publishing Meets Corporate Bookselling

In 2022 my first novel, Save the Village, found its home with Regal House, a mighty little woman-owned traditional independent publisher that prints all its books in the US and has a nonprofit division that works with underserved students around Raleigh, where they’re headquartered.

Regal House, which won Foreword’s 2021 Best Independent Publisher of the Year Award, has proved itself smart and energetic about a lot of things. They have a real copy editor. They reply quickly to my emails. They put out a remarkably comprehensive and frequented updated guide for us authors. They saw to it that Save the Village, the book and the Kindle edition, was available at Amazon and virtually every other online bookseller on the planet. In honor of their 10th anniversary this April, they’re getting a big spread in Publishers Weekly: cover, feature story, images of 45 Regal House book covers.

But because Regal House has a tiny staff, and because they’re focused, as they have to be, on each new season’s books, it’s been up to me to get my book into my local bookstores. I’m lucky that I live in the neighborhood where my book takes place. But still, this has sometimes been a time-consuming and dispiriting business.

Let me paint a few pictures for you. The first will be a purple one. The cover of Save the Village is a cityscape that prominently features Washington Square, where New York University long held its graduation and still holds considerable real estate. For this reason, though I have no NYU affiliation, the NYU bookstore is one of the local booksellers that I targeted.

The buyer was happy to stock my book. I bike over to the store periodically to check on things. Each time I open the door a vast array of NYU purple greets me—NYU sweatshirts and leggings and teddy bears and whiskey glasses and throw pillows as far as the eye can see in the warehouse-scaled space on a stretch of Broadway that’s seen better days, sandwiched between a McDonald’s and a T-Mobile store.

In the middle of this purple sea there lived a small island of New York books, with a few copies of Save the Village on it. When those sold and a new order came in, I would sign the books and proudly affix a gold sticker to show that Save the Village was finalist for the Eric Hoffer Prize for Independent Literature.

But we hit a snag just before the holidays: the buyer had sold out his small stash and the new order he had placed didn’t arrive. He put in a second order, hoping it would loosen up the logjam, but no books came in time for Christmas. Early in the new year, I went in to see if there had been any progress.

I was dismayed to find that the New York table had disappeared. There were now no books at all in the street-level front half of the store. I walked to the rear and up the steps that mark the end of the purple merch and the start of the actual bookstore. This is where the aforementioned buyer sits, in dark corner near the storeroom, at a desk with a plexiglass wall in front of it.

Why, you may wonder, did I go in person instead of picking up the phone? I had asked the buyer for his direct line. He said he didn’t have one anymore. The store is operated by Follett, he said, and I could try my luck with them. It turns out that Follett, a name I associate with textbooks and libraries, was a family-run business from its founding by a man named Barnes (yes, that Barnes) in 1873 until 2023. That’s when a pair of former executives, one from CVS and one from a software company, took over.

The company now runs more than a thousand college bookstores in North America, though the word is never mentioned on its website and the rectangular objects themselves are never shown among the glossy promotional photos. The word “retail,” however, features prominently. Same is true for Barnes & Noble’s campus store website: thousands of college and private high-school bookstores, but you’ll have to dig deep to find the word “book” or any book titles.

Back at NYU, when I called Follett to see about the order, I was put through to a customer service agent, who opened a “ticket” on my “case.” This went about as well as you’d expect. The highlight was when one of the three cheery Follett people who were bombarding me with email check-ins asked me for the NYU order number. I wrote back and reminded them that I’m an author, not an employee of the bookstore, and that I asked for their help because I had no way to call the store. This is what came back:

Hello!

Hope you are doing well!

Kindly let us know if the issue has been resolved or not, as we are the customer support team we only work upon the order number. As you do not have the order number we are not able to locate the order for you.

The next time I went in, shortly after the new year, an order had finally arrived. I signed the books, affixed my gold stickers and stuck the books on the demoted New York table, now at the top of the steps in the back.

Picture two. The big Barnes & Noble at Union Square. You know the type—dark-green signage, escalators, cafe, housed in a handsome repurposed 19th-century building. There, at the information desk, an assortment of friendly young staffers has always been receptive and helpful, happy to help a local author. Early on one of them did whatever was required to get my book into the warehouse, explaining that once it was in the system, more copies would automatically be delivered to the store when they ran out. Twice they even snapped a picture of me holding my novel to post on their social media.

And then one day one of them clicked a link and the website said the warehouse was empty, which meant the staffers had no way to order more. I talked to my publisher and learned that the snag was probably traceable to the wholesaler, Ingram, which places new orders only when they reach a certain threshold of demand, and only then once a week. This can be a source of tremendous frustration to independent publishers.

Luckily, she told me, there’s also the Independent Book Group (IPG), a distributor of independent presses with an increasing presence. B&N orders from them, as do Bookshop.org and many indie bookstores. I went back to B&N and told them this, but the store staffers said there was nothing they could do because of that empty-warehouse tab on the website.

I called Corporate and got passed around to various departments, and I don’t think I ever arrived at the right one, because the woman who was supposed to fix the problem kept asking me if my book had been published by B&N; she couldn’t seem to understand that I was an author advocating on my own behalf. Regal House and I are still trying to sort this one out.

Final picture: envision 18 miles of new and used books, two and a half million of them, not in a row but in a three-story store jam-packed with books and customers. This is the legendary Strand in the Village. It feels in every way like a giant mom and pop store. When I’m in need of a book myself—whether new, classic or obscure—the Strand almost always comes through. My book makes up not even one inch of their 18 miles, but bless them: they manage to keep Save the Village in stock just fine.