Dear Borders, I’m really rooting for you to stay in business. I love browsing your shelves, and although there are a number of independent bookstores near where I live, none of them carry romance. I’ve spent a ton of money on books in the last five years. And I know that some Borders stores are better than others–perhaps I’ve been spoiled since the Borders I knew and best loved was in Ann Arbor, and you don’t get much better than Borders #1.
But the store near my house right now radically sucks. It seems to me that if you want to stay in business, you have to sell books, and in order to do that, you have to have books and make them easy to buy. If I walk into a store looking for Madeline Hunter’s The Sins of Lord Easterbrook, or Connie Brockway’s So Enchanting, I want to buy them. I do not want to go over to the new paperback release table and find that all of the books on the table are Christmas books that came out in October. That is ridiculous. I do not want to head back to the romance section, only to find that the only Connie Brockway book you have is Skinny Dipping, and you have 10 copies of Lessons of Desire but not a single copy of The Sins of Lord Easterbrook. If I’m looking for a copy of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, I want to find it out in the new fiction hardback section–you might consider moving your copies of Santa Clawed from the front of the store, now that it’s February–and not secreted way back in the wrong section, filed in non-alphabetical order.
Someone should make sure that if Inkheart comes out as a movie, copies appear on the shelves. One shouldn’t find a bookshelf entirely devoid in the Funke department. And when I ask where Inkheart is–hoping, madly, that you’ve set up a special display somewhere because it is a movie–the employee should not tell me that you are out, and that over the last two weeks (!!) they’ve had twenty people ask for the book. How can you get twenty requests for a book and yet not make an effort to stock it?
And–oh pain, pain, pain–why oh why are you not carrying Bujold’s latest? Are you mad? It’s Bujold that will bring me into a bookstore on the release date, and I never walk out with just one book.
Local Borders, you were not always this bad. Even a year ago, you had books I wanted to buy on the shelf when I wanted to buy them. I spend a lot of money on books–close to $100 a month–and you are the reason why I am slowly moving entirely to purchases made from my Kindle. I hate to do it. I love books. I love browsing books. I love going to a random section of the store and picking something totally off the wall, and you can’t just browse with a Kindle, not the same way you can in a bookstore.
Borders, I feel like you are the friend that I want to see succeed–but I can’t do anything for you if you just sit in your mother’s basement and mope and play sad, solitary chords on your guitar. So get off your ass and start selling books.
Love,
Courtney
Why bookstores do not make a greater effort to have more romance novels on their shelves–considering the percentage they represent of the (selling) paperback market, I’ll never understand. Especially the general Indie bookstores. Sure, a Travel Bookstore probably won’t have romance… but my favorite bookstore in Spokane–for atmosphere, specifically–had maybe 100 romance novels on stock. *Maybe*.
Oy…
Well, it makes sense if you’re a small indie in a way–you want to specialize, rather than try to get a little bit of everything. Otherwise people won’t come to you. If you’re looking for the new JQ, you’re much more likely to hit up Borders/B&N, because they’ll have a big ol’ stack of 20.
The general indies . . . I think they just depend on the person who’s doing the stocking. If they don’t have a buyer who understands romance, they just might not understand that they need to keep Julia Quinn/Eloisa James/backlist in stock. They’ll probably understand they need a lotta Nora Roberts, but unless they’re really good and into romance, they’re not going to be making great shelving decisions. That’s one of the reasons why I would be so sad to see Borders go away–the Borders romance buys are usually really solid. I used to be able to count on going into a Borders, any Borders, and finding precisely what I wanted, both in backlist and in new books.
I’m hoping it’s just my local Borders that is getting so shoddy and not the chain in general.
The local Borders near me closed a couple of months ago, and I loved that store. There’s still a Barnes and Noble, but I miss Borders. My Borders, before it closed, did the same thing as yours is—fewer stacked books, hard to find new releases, etc. But maybe yours won’t close? I really don’t want Barnes and Noble to be the only massive selling bookstores out there. (I know there are others, but B&N and Borders were very well known).
It makes me wonder if your local Borders is slated to close, so they’re not bringing in new inventory…sigh.