Between 2015 and 2021, I went on over one hundred dates with men I met on dating apps. I do not have an exact number, but I’m confident that it was over one hundred. It can be said that I am not a quitter, I guess.
Sometimes I liked them and they did not like me. Sometimes the opposite. Sometimes, it was a mutual nope and that was a relief.
But sometimes, either I or they, wanted to talk about why. And at the time, I guess, I thought it would bring me some closure. Or some reason to be mad at them for writing me off, because obviously I’m the full plate of enchiladas and they were just idiots.
Looking back on that, though, I wish I hadn’t asked, or they hadn’t asked. The reasons weren’t important, because “no” should be enough.
Whenever an author asks us point-blank if they can be on the Staff Favorites table, which is a rare event, I think about my dating history. Because I understand the ask and why you’d want your book to be there. You want your book to sell, and that is the numero uno spot in the store where product moves. It’s the first place customers browse. It’s the first place I go to look for a good suggestion. Most books there are outfitted with a little handwritten tag that tells you why this bookseller thought it was so great. Nothing on that table sucks. I will sell a book off of there and so will my coworkers.
Unfortunately, the ask is…awkward. For both sides.
So, please, if you feel moved to do this as an author who is doing a totally respectable hustle: don’t ask why if the answer is no.
Asking why we won’t put your book there just for asking is the same as asking someone why they don't want to date you. Or at least it feels that way. There's an obvious answer there. Do you really want to hear it? Or do you really want to put me in the position to have to give you a no?
For me to choose a book for one of my two spots on the table, it has to:
Appeal to me in some way. This is broad and hard to define. But there has to be something that catches my attention.
Be good enough for me to finish to the end. I don’t finish about half of what I pick up.
Be a book I think I can sell to our customers. Sometimes, being in paperback is enough to inspire me to put it on the table because that raises my chances of selling it.
Then there’s the cultural and professional expectations of my position. My job is customer service. I can certainly beat around the bush or come up with a non-committal non-answer to keep things upbeat and to keep you from walking away mad. But I can’t give you a straight-up no. The best I can do is something I learned from a woman I met years ago at a writing residency. She was a scion of one of the old American families of great wealth—think Rockefeller/Carnegie/Vanderbilt. If you made the error of asking her a direct question about her family, she would not only not respond, she would close her eyes, bow her head, and cross her hands in front of her heart. A very patrician way to tell someone to fuck off.
The truth is, I might read your book to the end and absolutely love it and not give it a spot on the table. I have a particular taste and my taste doesn’t always translate into what our customers want, so I have to find a sweet spot. I have done well selling my favorite book of 2023, Big Swiss, after it came out in paperback, but I wonder how much of that is me saying, “that was my FAVORITE BOOK OF 2023!” I’ve had Kevin Wilson and Marcy Dermansky’s latests on there, books I adored, with mid-to-low success. I’ve sold the heck out of Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, mostly as a Mother’s Day gift or to the recently divorced. Right now, I have Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar as my pick, which would do better in paperback, but alas, that does not exist yet.
Before you cry GATEKEEPER! Yes, it is gatekeeping. That table is a gate. We keep it.
I’m not going to debate whether any aspect of the publishing business, including what booksellers get up to, is fair, because it isn’t. And no one at our store is trying to make your book fail or make you look bad in any way. There are plenty of books published by Big Five houses with enormous marketing budgets that fall through our cracks, too. Or that we didn’t like or didn’t read or didn’t care about for any number of reason. We like what we like, and that’s about it.
Sometimes you connect with a book and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you fall in love and want to shout it from the rooftop, and other times you spend an hour trying to respond to a text with a polite way of saying “I don’t want to see you again.”
The Staff Favorites table and dating have a lot in common, is what I’m really saying here.
CURRENTLY READING The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, which spent some time on our Staff Favorites table, though not my pick.