New Podcast Episode: The Resurgence of Indie Bookstores with Bookshop.org’s Steph Opitz

What is Bookshop.org?

Bookshop.org is an ecommerce space that helps independent bookstores compete against Amazon. We work with a bunch of different bookstores, over 2k throughout the country, but we also work with individuals, book influencers, and affiliates of all kinds. We really help support authors selling their books online and get people away from buying habits that are detrimental to the industry.

We launched Bookshop.org in 2020, and of course, the world shut down in March 2020. A lot of small businesses who couldn’t compete online and didn’t have people coming in their doors anymore were in a precarious spot, so they joined bookshop.org. We hear from bookstores every time we physically walk into one or go to a conference that we kept them afloat at that time when their doors were closed and that we were giving them a way to stay open by virtue of being on the Internet.

Why you think that indies became popular again?

I’ll say that indies were always cool, and readers have always been cool. But I do feel like because we were home during the pandemic and we were largely building communities and talking to each other on the Internet, people were using books to feel connected, educate themselves, talk about, and create empathy and understanding. 

Since our whole ethos is, “Shop indie first,” we’re your backup. If you can go to your local indie, do that. If you can’t, we’re available to help you shop with them anyways. That made it possible for bookstores to feel like we were really representing their interests.

Why is it important to not have a monopoly in the book space?

If you asked a bunch of different people, they’d have a bunch of different answers to that. One of the arguments that I tend to make is that if people are shopping exclusively on Amazon, and Amazon’s cutting the prices for books, that means that publishers are making less money, authors are making less money. That’s just baseline. But then publishers, because they’re not making as much money on these books, are lowering advances. And when advances are lowered, particularly with nonfiction books, it becomes a real problem, because then folks aren’t able to publish, possibly for financial reasons. Then you see like a decline in the quality of books that are able to come out because of the people who are able to write books and have the resources to not be paid as much to write books. It’s a real trickle-down system where if you’re buying books cheaply, you’re going to create an industry in which they’re cheaply written. 

Buying independent not only supports community, but it also supports non-algorithmic curation. It supports risk. It supports underserved communities.

What are some ways that authors can support indie bookstores and indie readers?

Step number one, shop at your local indie, especially if you’re an author, because they are your advocates. They love being able to talk about local authors. A lot of people who come into the stores are asking for local authors. So be a friend and not just like a person who asks for things like events. Be a person who participates in that community. 

You could be an affiliate on our site too. Anyone can be an affiliate and what that means is that you sign up for an account and you personally get 10% of every sale from a book on your page and 10% still goes to independent bookstores. So you’re still supporting independent bookstores, but you’re also doing the thing that I think is so hard for so many writers: making a little extra money on your work. This doesn’t impact your royalties. This is just something that you can do like a vendor. Not only are you supporting indies, but you’re also supporting your own career. It’s a win-win.

 

 

Steph Opitz (she/her) is the Director of Bookstore Partnerships at Bookshop.org. Formerly, she was the founding director of Wordplay at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and a visiting instructor at the University of Minnesota. She serves on committees for the National Book Foundation, the Authors Guild, PEN America, and LitNet. She has curated literary events and festivals around the country—as the literary director of the Texas Book Festival, the fiction co-chair of the Brooklyn Book Festival, and on the programs team for the PEN World Voices Festival— and was the books reviewer for Marie Claire magazine.