Maybe it's because, on the good days as well as the bad, there's no other business, however flawed, that I can imagine being in. Whatever the reason, I always come away from our gatherings at Winter Institute or regional bookseller conferences or BookExpo with a healthy dose of exhaustion and exhilaration. No matter how hard the questions are that we face as an industry to get better at what we do; no matter how many times we fall short, I somehow, even as a card-carrying fatalist, find reason to have faith in book people.
This hit me once again on the final morning of Wi15 during the Publisher Rep Breakfast Presentations. I was sitting at a table with two former bookstore colleagues as well as three booksellers I'd just met in person, though I "knew" them through stories we'd written in Shelf Awareness. Our conversations marked the past and the present as well as the future.
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| Doug Seibold | |
Then the first presenter, Doug Seibold, founder and president of Agate Publishing, took the podium and joined the conversation. "I usually take a little bit of a different tack when I come up here and speak to you," he said, noting that for him the moment represented "an opportunity to talk about a very special, symbiotic relationship that I feel exists between independent publishers and independent bookstores.... A lot of you know that, but I do always feel the need to come up and reintroduce it to everybody."
Seibold noted that when he comes to Winter Institute, "I really like to focus very tightly on one book, and one aspect of what Agate does, where I feel like our alliance with indie stores is most important. And that's been our passion and our commitment to finding and creating opportunity for new voices, new writers, especially those from corners of society that haven't had much opportunity, historically, in our industry. That's always been the part of my work as a publisher where I knew I was in sync with indie stores, maybe more than with any other part of the book industry."
Displaying a visual of Agate titles--Jesmyn Ward's Where the Line Bleeds (2008), Long Division by Kiese Laymon (2013) and Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut by Derrick Barnes, illustrated by Gordon C. James (2013)--Seibold observed: "I'm sure most of you recognize these authors, if not these books. All of these folks have gone on to work with Big 5 presses in the years since little Agate gave them their first home. All of these books were successes for Agate thanks in huge part to all of you. I'm sure you're selling plenty of their newer books. But this connection that we have to finding and championing new voices, this connection I feel to all of you in this mission, I don't always feel that from other parts of our industry--big chains, big boxes, big media, big tech; it's not the same."
He also noted the role indie booksellers played in bringing Iliana Regan's voice "out into the world, an effort that's ongoing," with her 2019 memoir Burn the Place, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Regan, he said, was the one writer he was there to highlight this time. The paperback edition of Burn the Place will be out in June, and Agate is publishing Regan's memoir/narrative/handbook on foraging in the spring of 2021, as well as a cookbook and technique guide in the fall of 2022.
Agate's successful connection with indie booksellers "is an especially gratifying thing to be able to say when you're a small press that's become known for bringing out the first books of important writers," Seibold observed. "So thank you one last time for all that you do for Agate and all of the other publishers.... Thank you for making space for the new voices we bring you, and for helping us and our writers find a place in our industry."
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| Booksellers on the hunt for new voices in the galley room at Wi15 | |
For many reasons, making space for new voices was a dominant topic of discussions at Wi15 and led to many intense conversations, formally and informally, about the book trade's role and responsibility in the world. Those conversations, as subsequent headlines attest, continue and change daily.
In 2009, the fourth Winter Institute was held under the shadow of the Great Recession. "Considering that many of them have had recent sales declines of 10% and more, the hundreds of booksellers... were remarkably cheerful and energetic," Shelf Awareness reported. "As always at these events, participants enjoyed being together in a focused environment and talking shop for several days straight. The mood may also have stemmed from a streak of good-natured fatalism that has long existed among many independent booksellers. After all, in the last two decades, they've dealt with a range of bricks-and-mortar competition, the rise of online bookselling, uncertainty about new digital forms, a supposed decline in reading, storms, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes--and other recessions. So what's new? And unlike some other retailers, booksellers tend to be especially creative, intelligent people who rise to challenges like this and share camaraderie in good times and bad."
May our creative fatalism and our ongoing discussions continue as we do the hard work. --Robert Gray, contributing editor