Bookseller as Resurrection Professional

Raising Tracy Manaster's 2016 novel, The Done Thing, from the backlist

A while ago, I came across an exceedingly negative review written by one of my MFA teachers. One who is no longer gracing the vaunted corridors of Angell Hall and is somewhere in Pacific Northwest writing “every book that won a PNBA Award sucks” pieces for a tiny local paper I’d not heard of until I ran into it during some mindless internet surfing one bright afternoon.

After reading this former teacher’s needless takedowns, and not being surprised by them at all, as they kind of added up to “none of these books are structured in the 20th century-style white male way of writing a novel, therefore they are bad,” I wanted to tell him, “Hey, my dude. The last people you want to fuck with are your local independent booksellers. We can revive your goddamn deep-in-the-backlist book from the GRAVE, so maybe don’t attack local authors AND the work of a group of volunteer booksellers who gave up reading whatever they wanted for a year to give out this award to drum up book sales! I saved Latin. What did YOU ever do?”

The PNBA is the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, our little professional org out here in the woody northwest. They run a modest regional awards program for local authors. There’s no money to win, just glory, and maybe some hugs. And the winning books get to be on a special shelf at my store. Do we need to shit on that? No, we don’t.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my decree, though. Can I, a single bookseller, revive a deep-in-the-backlist book from the grave? The metaphorical grave? How about a really amazing book that got jack diddly squat publicity that I think everyone should know about, eight years after it was published? Can I, just little old slightly overbearing me, really get people to buy and maybe even read a book that I adored when it came out that didn’t get the massive attention it deserved?

Well, I’m going to try. Friends of the Book: please help me bring back to public consciousness THE DONE THING by Tracy Manaster!

THE DONE THING! Read it!

First things first: this is pure nepotism. Tracy was my first Portland writer friend when I first moved here ten years ago. She and I have been in writing groups together ever since. We were friend-matched by none other than award-winning author and international sweetheart Sugi Ganeshananthan, who was Tracy’s classmate at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Tracy is a solid citizen, a talented writer, mom to my favorite twins, and an excellent baker of cakes.

Despite the fact that I love Tracy and she’s a bomb-ass friend, I really, sincerely love The Done Thing and would even if I didn’t know Tracy. It’s got some aspects to it that publishing doesn’t seem to know what to do with, like an older, prickly female protagonist. Lida Stearl isn’t a nice person, and in retirement has a lot of time on her hands to get herself into trouble. I would compare it to Olive Kitteridge, and I also wouldn’t compare it to Olive Kitteridge. While Strout is all about point of view, Manaster is really about character deep-dives. Olive is held at a narrative distance; Lida is not. If you, like me, want to wave your middle finger at all of the conversations around “likable characters,” which are always female characters, you will love this novel.

Tracy reminded me over Vietnamese food recently that she had the unfortunate pub date of November 4, 2016, which you may remember as the day of a presidential election that didn’t go so hot. Why any publisher would subject their authors to the cruelty of an election day pub date is beyond me, but IT HAPPENED TO TRACY! For this reason only, she deserves a do-over.

Obviously people were not paying attention to books that month. The media…were busy.

But really, if you think about it, books have a long life. Big publishers give you a finite amount of time to make the $$$, and if you fail, then they blame the author for it and not, say, the events of November 4, 2016. But some books find their audiences later. Sometimes much later. Sometimes people get pub dates that are mowed down by history. Some books, like mine, get some good word of mouth years after they came out—I was fortunate to have none other than Patton Oswalt read and promote Every Anxious Wave on social media last summer (thank you, Patton and Alice!), resulting in a boost in sales seven years later.

So please join me in my backlist revival experiment and consider purchasing and reading The Done Thing this summer! My store will have some copies on hand if you’re in Portland, we ship nationwide, and you probably have a worthwhile independent bookstore in your town, village, or city that can get it for you. Plenty o’ copies in the Tennessee Ingram warehouse!

PLEASE DON’T SLEEP ON THE DONE THING!

And yes, that is my blurb on the cover. I’m hardcore about this book.

Currently reading: nothing. I need a break after All Fours.

Help a PNW Bookseller: Katherine Morgan is still fundraising to create a storefront for Grand Gesture Books, her romance bookstore! Building a bookstore from the ground up costs around $100K. If you can, please send some cash her way and help bring MORE ROMANCE TO PORTLAND. Because this town needs it. Trust me. Also, we love Katherine. Thank you.