We love author events. It’s incredibly fun to meet the person that wrote the book you love, and it’s beyond exciting to see our customers meet their favorite authors. And we love local authors. They’re the ones telling the stories of the area and the people around us, and we love that. But our store is small, and there are over 100,000 books published every year. We simply don’t have room for all of them.

Throwing an event is an unbelievable amount of time and attention, and in order for us to get our bills paid and keep the bookstore open, author events need to be profitable for us to spend time on them, and books we stock in the store need to sell. So if your book is self-published, or published by a non-traditional publisher and we aren’t going to come across your book through traditional channels, we need to talk before you come in the shop with your book in your hand.

First, please don’t come in the shop without an appointment and expect us to drop everything. You will leave disappointed, and it marks you as unprofessional. Second, as booksellers we work by seasons, and we’re usually working 2 seasons ahead. We’ve got stacks of catalogs and a million meetings with sales reps, huge stacks of advance copies to read, and thousands of books to get through. We plan events months ahead of time, and we read books months before they hit the front tables. When you bring us your book, expect a long wait time before we can get to you. It’s not personal, it’s like this for every book.

Third, a traditional publisher has highly qualified and experienced editors, marketers, publicists, sales reps and accountants to keep track of it all. They invite John Stewart to parties and they beg NPR to talk about their books. And still, sometimes their books don’t sell. We cannot be expected to take on the editing, marketing, publicity and distribution for your book.  It simply requires more work than we can afford to do ourselves.

Fourth, we will never carry your book if it’s priced improperly. A paperback should cost around $15, and a hardcover should cost around $25. Any more than that, and people won’t buy it.  We will never carry your book if it has more than 1 grammatical error. We won’t carry your book if the cover is unattractive, boring, or poorly executed.

We don’t want to hurt your feelings, or blow your expectations, or kill your dream. But we’re not your mom, and we have to run a sustainable business. This is a huge reason why agents and editors and publicists and copy editors and sales reps are so important – they manage your expectations, keep your feet in reality, and make your book better. Circumventing that entire process means we have to be the ones to break the bad news, and we hate doing that.

If you think your book would be a good fit for our shop, please email, and we’ll get to it as soon as we can.