Ann Patchett, the bestselling author turned bookseller, began her talk to the booksellers in attendance by saying, "There is nothing I can tell you about bookselling. I want to get that off the table right now. It's ridiculous that I, who have been in business only since November, have anything to tell you. But I'm a good storyteller."
True to her word, for nearly an hour she was a great storyteller, telling an entertaining, thoughtful tale of how she learned the value of booksellers and became a bookseller herself.
Her first book tour, in 1992, which had a budget of $3,000, took her to nearly 30 cities and involved a lot of driving and changing in McDonald's before appearances ("even though I'm a vegetarian, they have the best bathrooms"). She drew few people, and her publicists told her that the point of the tour was to meet booksellers. Her two big goals were to sign stock and "to make nice with the girl behind the cash register. If I made nice to her, then she would read my book and handsell it." Many of those booksellers were either about to get married or wanted to get married, so Patchett, then a contributing editor at Bridal Guide, would "spend two hours discussing wedding plans or wishes with these women." And, in fact, they got to like her, "and they did read the book and handsold it."
By the time she went on the road for the paperback edition of Bel Canto, her tour was different: the book sold and people came to her events. "What a revelation it was to see human beings come into bookstores to buy my books!" she said.
When the two major bookstores in Nashville, Tenn., closed "through no fault of their own," suddenly, Patchett said, "I was living in a city without a bookstore." As meetings and conversations were held about opening a new store to replace the departed Borders and Davis-Kidd, she sat back and waited for someone to open a bookstore but nothing happened. She talked with a friend who founded the Dollar Store about possibly opening a bookstore herself, but he discouraged her, comparing her with a brilliant cook who thinks he or she can open a restaurant. "There's no correlation," he said.
But still no store opened, and later she talked with Michael Zibart, owner of BookPage, who introduced her to Karen Hayes, her eventual bookstore partner. Patchett and Hayes had lunch with a mutual friend, Mary Grey James. The three decided that the idea was good, but the impetus to move forward came from Patchett's book tour for State of Wonder, which was starting two weeks after the fateful lunch. If they were going to open a store, it would be a perfect thing for Patchett to promote--along with her book. They decided that even though they didn't have a plan--or even a name--Patchett would announce the opening of a new indie for Nashville.
During her many interviews on her tour, "I would say we were opening," Patchett remembered. "But I was faking it at every conceivable level." Imitating herself responding to questions, she said, "Yes, we're opening a bookstore... soon. You'll be able to come there and buy a book... soon."
She called the reaction to her announcement "incredible. From the start there was was a huge swell of excitement." The resulting publicity, too, was completely unexpected. "If I sat down with group of the most high-powered consultants in the world," she said, and asked them how to get her "onto the front page of the New York Times," they might have suggested being involved in a murder or transporting drugs. "What about opening a 2,500-sq.-ft. bookstore? Would they have advised that?"
Part of the interest came from journalists who were as sick "as we are at the barrage that books are dead, that it's all over, ebooks are taking over, let's close libraries."
"I never thought any of it through, not the good parts, not the bad parts," she continued. She knew something about bookselling from touring, but she had one quality that turned out to be a valuable skill: "I've read everything, and all my life I've been forcing books on my family and friends." Now, she said, her potential audience for recommending books is "limitless. The thrill of forcing people to read the books that I like is reason enough for me to have opened the store." One example is The All of It by Jeannette Haien, which she stacks by the cash register.
Patchett emphasized, too, that she is one of many people who doesn't use Facebook or Twitter, has never blogged or read a blog and uses a cell phone only when she travels. There are still, like her, "a lot of other people who want a book and want to talk about it" and want to go to stores that are "loving and comforting and warm and allow talk with smart people about books."
Patchett said also that she "can hardly tell what it means to me to be a spokesperson for all these people who have helped keep me in this life. I feel so evangelical about this." In fact, she continued, it's almost a relief for someone with 12 years of Catholic school education, for whom promoting one's own work is "excruciating."
Local independent bookselling is the big trend, she said. "This is where the nation is going. If you keep saying it's true, it keeps happening." She offered to help any booksellers who needed it, and said that authors are "spoiled and should do more to keep the team going."
At the end, she received a standing ovation from her fellow booksellers. --John Mutter
