THE
REAL REASONS WHY GAY BOOKSTORES CLOSEBy Patricia Nell Warren
In recent months, the GLBT book world staggered from a one-two punch of bookstore closings. First came the sad news about Creative Visions in New York City. Then the equally sad news of Glad Day Bookshop closing its doors in Toronto. I've been signing books at our stores for over 30 years now, starting at Oscar Wilde in Manhattan in 1974, so I've gotten a good closeup on the factors that drive this scary trend.
Wildcat Press, the publishing company that I co-own with Tyler St. Mark, has been updating its gay bookstore list for ten years, and it's always a somber moment when we hit the "delete" button. Overall, we've deleted around 35 percent of the stores that we started with.
But it isn't ALL bad news. New bookstores do start up, replacing some of the stores that close. The latest is Equal Writes in Long Beach. Owner: Daniel Wall, an experienced book professional. Just before the 2004 holidays, Equal Writes had an impressive launch, with several well-attended booksignings and news coverage in the Long Beach Press-Telegram. It's a beautiful store, well designed and well stocked, with enthusiastic staff and a special room for book events. Indeed, Long Beach has seen several GLBT bookstores come and go in the last decade, but there has always been a new one opening up.
And yes, independent bookstores do close because of direct competition from chain stores. In the Los Angeles area, where I live, the women's stores were hard hit by the chain-store phenomenon. We've lost Sisterhood in central L.A. and Bread and Roses in the Valley, to name a few.
But the problem is more complicated than just "big bad chain stores moving into the neighborhood."
Bad Business
Sad to say, some bookstores finally close because of their own mismanagement.
Unfortunately the gay media are not always aware of the real reasons why a bookstore might close, so they attribute all closings to chain-store competition. But we publishers and book-touring authors can always spot the stores that seem to be their own worst enemy.
There are certain tell-tale signs. Some stores don't know how to promote themselves, or run book events, or even display their product effectively. And they get upset if you try to help or make suggestions! Some stores lose sight of the importance of being a vital community institution. Other stores frighten away half of their potential customers because their owners are gay men who don't like lesbians, or cranky lesbians who don't like men.
Often authors and publishers make special efforts to support struggling stores and help them stay in business. When the end finally comes, we're sad but not surprised.
Now and then a store closes simply because of a bad business decision. This is what happened to the long-lived Different Drummer in Laguna Beach, which moved to a higher-rent location and closed its doors a few years later.
Today the GLBT bookstores that DO survive on a long-term basis are usually the ones run by folks who are business-savvy book professionals. The Open Book in Sacramento is a good example of a thriving long-lived store on the West Coast. In the Midwest, there is Left Bank Bookstore in St. Louis, which -- last time I heard -- was the only independent bookstore left in St. Louis.
A veteran East-Coast gay-owned chain that hangs in there through thick and thin is Lambda Rising, with stores in D.C., Norfolk, Baltimore, Rehoboth Beach and New York. Their most recent acquisition was the venerable Oscar Wilde in New York, which they bought to keep it from closing. Just before the 2004 holidays, I did a signing at Lambda Rising in D.C. This is a company that knows their stuff. The staff were great to deal with, the store was packed with people, the atmosphere was upbeat, and the event was successful.
Another way that GLBT bookstores survive today is by expanding into other products -- coffeehouses, gifts, jewelry, music, antiques, beauty products, and of course porn. When I was in Dallas recently, I visited Crossroads Market, and saw that the store has made a major expansion into the gift realm. In Phoenix, Unique on Central sells a whole lot of stuff
-- it's like a variety store -- but it still features books.
The Used-Book Threat
Another phenomenon that hurts the gay bookstore business is the "brave new world" in used book sales.
Decades ago, used books were no threat to new books. A tome stayed in somebody's personal library for 30 or 40 years; when the owner died, boxes of tomes quietly wended their way to a dingy used-book store or the local AIDS thrift shop. Used books were viewed as a backwater market. Today they are BIG BUSINESS. The soaring retail prices of new books drives many individuals to resell their books right after they've read them, either on eBay or to used-book dealers. People also save money by routinely buying used books, even for gifts, since these are usually cheaper than deep-discounted new books at chain stores.
Amazon.com and eBay both launched the trend in sophisticated online "pre-owned" book marketing. Amazon's venture is more a monopoly than a market, because they coordinate listings with all the big book-search outfits like Alibris, BookFinder, etc., as well as a whole raft of independent book dealers. Most new titles today turn up "used" on Amazon within a year of publication...some even in a few months.
Who gets hurt by the used-book market? Authors and publishers get hurt, because they don't collect a penny of royalties or sales proceeds from used books. Here at Wildcat Press, we have to watch Amazon.com selling used copies of our own new editions. Copies of our The Front Runner tradeback sell for as little as $3 used, compared to new copies discounted by Amazon at $10.17. We don't get a nickel from that $3 sale.
The competition is actually spurring many publishers to let titles go out of print after just a few years. This way, publishers don't have to compete long-term with used-book sales of their own titles. The result: backlist may become a thing of the past. And the waning of backlist be such an economic blow to the book industry that it may be compelled to address the used-book threat somehow, the way the film and music industries have been forced to deal with pirating.
Gay bookstores get hurt too. A lot of their erstwhile customers decide not to buy a new book at full retail. Instead they go buy used GLBT books from Amazon.com or eBay. As a result, some gay bookstores try to fight back by stocking one section with used books. But it's hard for them to compete with the vast selection at Amazon.
The GLBT book industry has tried -- and so far with only partial success -- to build a sense of loyalty and community with GLBT bookbuyers. We need to make a greater effort, so more people will go and buy new or used books at their local independent stores.
If there isn't a GLBT bookstore in their city, they don't have to go to Amazon. They can buy online at The Open Book at www.openbookltd.com/ , or Left Bank Books at http://www.left-bank.com/, or Lambda Rising at www.lambdarising.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp. For women's books, there's Star-Crossed Productions, a lesbian-owned online store at http://www.scp-inc.biz. For out of print GLBT books, they can contact:
Everglades Book Company
P.O. Box 2425
Bonita Springs, FL 34133
941-294-3931
In short, by working the above list of resources, gay people could get virtually any GLBT title that might also be offered on Amazon.com.
I understand the need to save a buck on bookbuying -- we're all concerned about economic survival. But if GLBT bookbuyers aren't willing to "buy rainbow" at least part of the time, then they shouldn't be astonished and upset when more bookstores close.
Censorship pressures
The case of Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto casts a different kind of shadow. This popular and long-lived store was recently forced to close down because of censorship prosecution. The Toronto Globe & Mail commented that Glad Day was "surrendering its role as champion of gay and lesbian rights in Canada." The closing leaves Canada's largest city, and its largest GLBT demographic, without a gay bookstore.
For many years, Canadian customs officials and police have been enforcing Canada's sweeping porno laws against certain types of sex-themed books, magazines and videos. They seize shipments at the border, or raid stores to grab items right off the shelf. Glad Day and Vancouver's Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium have fought hard for their right to import and sell titles like The Joy of Gay Sex.
Even though Glad Day won an appeal in their most recent case, the store finally ran out of resources. Owner John Scythes and manager Toshiya Kuwabara said that, over Glad Day's 30 years of litigation with police and film boards, the store had spent a million dollars on lawyer fees and court costs. Toronto attorney Clay Ruby of the PEN Club, who had joined the store in anti-censorship activism, said, "A dangerous lesson about democracy is that government can spend you into the ground."
In Vancouver, Little Sisters is continuing the fight.
Glad Day's battle in Canada is becoming our own battle in America, as the religious right and the Bush administration crank up their efforts to eliminate "sexual diversity" in U.S. life and culture.
There is already a potential threat to online selling of GLBT books, from the Child Online Protection Act, which the U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to strike down and sent back to a lower court for trial later this year. I'm an ACLU plaintiff in the case, so I'll be writing more about COPA for the Independent Gay Writer. COPA makes it a federal offense to sell anything online to a minor that can be deemed "harmful to minors."
If COPA is found constitutional and certain books are deemed a COPA violation, they will rapidly vanish not only from bookselling websites but from the shelves of brick and mortar bookstores as well. Why? Because many corporate book-selling entities sell in both kinds of venues. The book-distribution pipeline serves both online and offline retailers. Nobody will want to take the legal risk of selling a book to a 17-year-old across a physical counter that could cause their arrest if they sell it on the Web.
Chain stores have also been put on notice by the religious right -- a few years ago, Barnes & Noble was widely attacked for its Gay Pride Month displays, and for selling specific titles that some people found objectionable. Many gay bookstores in the U.S. have already been targets of vandalism and harassment by local bluenoses and law enforcement. Today the reactionary trends sparked by Bush's election are going to mean more of the same, and worse.
I'm will be writing more about censorship, because I'm deeply concerned. If we don't win the upcoming battles for free speech, we will see a rising tidal wave of Glad-Day type closings right in our own country. This police-driven tsunami has the power to sweep away not just our bookstores, but everything else that is familiar in our publishing landscape.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Patricia Nell Warren. All rights reserved.