Do you know Kel? You should. Kel is an excitable bookseller who has captured the hearts of a lot of the author world online with her tales of working in book stores, promoting books, and generally just being great and excited about all things book. I saw her the other day doing an AMA (Ask me anything) on Twitter, but with Twitter being what it is these days, I don’t have a lot of faith that those sorts of things are getting seen the way they used to, and I thought…hey…I should ask her a bunch of questions. People interview authors all the time, but nobody interviews booksellers. So here we are. You can follow her on twitter here.

1. Welcome Kel. Let’s start out with the basics. Tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got to where you are today, both working as a bookseller and being a bit of a cult icon in the online writer world.

I’m Kel and I’m a bookseller. I’ve been in bookselling for going on eight years! I almost didn’t get hired at my local BN because I was “over-qualified.” Joke’s on them because I didn’t know what I was doing! I still mostly don’t. I just talk about the books I like and it goes from there. Nothing really secret about it. No special tricks (except maybe fae tricks – what’s your name again?).


2. You’ve famously sold tons of copies of some different fantasy books. Gideon, Iron Widow, Legends and Lattes are a few I know about. What is it that brings a book to your attention and makes you want to do that?

For Gideon, it was the cover. Tommy Arnold did the covers for all three in The Locked Tomb! I was like I HAVE TO READ IT. So I asked and was given the eARC and here we are. It was a weird and wonderful story with space necromancers and [redacted] and my favorite character from the series – CRUX. He’s a crotchety old man who’s just MEAN as salt and twice and salty. He’s a great character.

Iron Widow I just. I wanted to see a YA scifi title do really well. There really aren’t many. I can count the titles I can think of from memory on two hands. Max 10. I wanted this scifi Young Adult book with mecha and a badass main character who didn’t take shit from anyone to just FLY. Took me 5 months to sell 100.

Legends and Lattes? Also the cover. It reminded me of those old 1980s-90s fantasy covers, like Dragonlance and Magic of Recluse and stuff. Then I saw it was about an orc who retires from adventuring to open a coffee shop. I’ve worked coffee shops and stuff so I wanted to read it! Then Tor picked it up. Took me 4 months to sell 100 of LL before it even became a Tor Book! People like the cozy fantasy.

3. Those three books all had a bunch of hype from different sources. One thing I know that authors are going to want to hear about is how does a smaller book—one without a lot of support already—get your attention? (Either yours specifically, or booksellers in general)

I hate to say it, but covers. Covers do sell. They help or hinder a book, honestly. I saw LL cover and went yes. Gideon’s cover yes. Iron Widow’s cover yes. The average person will see a cover and say yes or no. I do it sometimes. I’m in the position where I can look up a book pretty extensively across several websites, but a cover that doesn’t really speak to the book will make it harder to sell unless the customer already knows they want it. I’m not the biggest fan of minimalist covers. Arms holding an object. An ankle with a dagger. That sort of thing isn’t my favorite if only because it’s REALLY hard to sell without someone comparing the cover composition to a certain vampire series from the early 2000s. Alas. It lingers, this trend. And I hate it if only because it’s REALLY HARD TO SELL.

I can say that all three of those books started out smaller. Gideon certainly didn’t have the cult following it does today. LL was indie published that just kinda took off because it found its readers. Iron Widow was turned down in a lot of US publishers – it was picked up by Penguin Teen Canada! It’s frustrating when the same people get the marketing over and over and over when they’re basically a household name. I, and other booksellers, are here to push through all that noise to hold up the mic to new voices. Debuts. Age-group-hoppers like MG to YA or YA to adult. Not many authors have the titanic popularity that those select few have. So these authors need loud booksellers to get them noticed. To get them up out of the mosh pit and up onto the stage. I’m holding the bullhorn so let’s go.

4. Are there any books you’ve loved lately and want to talk about? What are you pushing on unsuspecting book buyers these days? (And yes, I know this is a horrible question to ask a reader, because how do you pick? But people want to know.)

World Running Down, by Al Hess, is a really good seller! I just sold out (again) today. It’s actually bittersweet when that happens. YAY people are buying it! But OH NO I don’t have any for the weekend! World Running Down is full of trans joy and it’s such a beautifully gentle book. It has smaller conflicts that are resolved more quickly than most scifi novels. It also has an Artificial Intelligence love interest!

Bruising of Qilwa is a gorgeous fantasy novella about a nonbinary medical person! I remember I loved it so much that the author, Naseem Jamnia, sent the store some swag to include with purchase! I got to keep one of the pins.

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q Sutanto, isn’t one I’ve actually read yet? But I’m SO EXCITED ABOUT IT that I stuck a Staff Pick KEL sticker on it because I can. Because I adore Jesse Q Sutanto. She once sent me some fancy Oreos and I have never forgotten.

Fraud Squad, by Kyla Zhao, brings me back into the nostalgia of 13 Going On 30 (the film) so I shove that at as many people as I can.

Grounded for All Eternity, by Darcy Marks, is about a bunch of kids who literally live in Hell. There’s an ice cream place called Frozen Over! There’s a lot more to it, but I’m going for vibes.

There are so many books I suggest to people all day long. It’s hard to narrow it down!

5. You’ve worked at both a corporate store and an indie book store. For a local author who wants to approach the store about carrying their book—or maybe highlighting it, if they’re already carrying it—do you have any advice for how they should approach the corporate vs. the indie? Is there a difference?

PLEASE make sure you’re a patron of the bookstore. If this is the first time the owner/manager has ever seen you, it’s gonna look weird. It’s gonna look like we’re just another front to sell your stuff and that’s not cool. Get to know the store. Not every store is a good fit for every book. We have Sir Callie (Esme Symes-Smith), signed, but we also have The Biggest Gayest Table (ever)! So it’s a good fit for us!

Corporate bookstores don’t have a lot of say in what they carry, at least not when I left it. There were titles I’d been trying to get into the store for literally an entire year and it was just denied, denied, denied. I didn’t want a ton either – just one copy! Denied. Over and over again. So don’t be disheartened if your local corporate bookstore doesn’t have your book – it’s not so much the booksellers’ fault. It’s corporate. Some stuff they just won’t carry because it doesn’t make them as much money as some other authors do.

For indies, you’ll really want to make sure your book is available through Ingram. As a general rule, indies don’t really order from That One PlAce. I can get almost anything on Ingram. There are particulars and peculiarities on Ingram that you’ll wanna hash out with your bookseller friend, but it’s usually doable. You need to look at returnable or nonreturnable, the discount, and all that stuff. See if it’s worth it for a smaller store to get it, versus one that’s like Mysterious Galaxy that are HUGE and can maybe take more risks than what I can do.

If the store/s already carry it? If you have a friend at the corporate store, ask them if they can display it. If not, I wouldn’t bother. They don’t know you well and corporate still has displays that the stores have to have. It’s required. So they may not have room for a display of yours.

Same goes for indie. Just make friends! Then ask if they’ll put it somewhere prominent. Offer to sign their stock – even if it’s not a huge event. Sneakily signing stuff is how some authors did it when I worked corporate. There’s a local author here that sneakily signs stuff and disappears into the night. He writes horror, so the visual is apt!

6. Some new releases, most (or all) stores are going to carry. For a traditionally published book that might not be something universally picked up, what can authors do to make it more likely that theirs gets into stores? What can publishers do?

MARKETING. PUBLISHERS NEED MARKETING. There are some publishers that I didn’t find out they had a new book until I found it on a TABLE. I was like “oh hey this looks cool” and then I see the pub and go “ah yes. This publisher. I never see them advertise ANYTHING.” There are two publishers that do that, or maybe I’m just not following close enough?

Authors, I could say marketing but they already DO. They market all the time! They ask for Street Teams to help them promo their book months in advance. I’ve done a few Street Teams myself.

Booksellers are your best friends EVER. We like swag. We like ARCs. We like print ARCs and some of us like digital. We love enamel pins. Totes. Basically we can be bribed with shiny things. We’re bookwyrms, after all. I’ve been bribed with snacks (see Jesse    Q Sutanto, above) and candy. We also tend to like stickers, but please send 2 of the same kind so we can stick one and save the other.

7. What is something that you wish you could change about publishing or the book selling industry as a whole?
It’s really hard as a bookseller to sell stuff when there’s not much publisher support. They’re busy sinking all their money into already big names, and I’m over here floundering in the dust, trying to save these other books from dehydrating. And I know I’m not the only bookseller that feels that way.

It feels like, a lot of the time, some publishing people REALLY DO appreciate us. They adore us! But that’s where it stops. With them. It doesn’t often go up and up to the top where someone will actually listen. I really dislike following trends. Like with Hunger Games. Everyone wanted to write dystopian, right? So then it became saturated. It’s like that with every trend.

If someone in publishing would have told me or a few other booksellers that “hey there’s this YA scifi book and here’s what it’s about do you think…?” I would have said YES JUMP ON THAT RIGHT NOW. Do you know how many people ask me for YA scifi? More than you think. But no one ASKS A BOOKSELLER. We’re down here on the FLOOR. We’re not looking at algorithms or charts or whatever it is they look at to see what trends are going on right now. We’re there getting asked for stuff RIGHT NOW.

People want cozy scifi and fantasy. They want YA scifi. They want spooky MG like The Clackity. But no one asks. So we have to look back and back into catalogues and lists to see what might be similar to something this customer has loved recently.

Sadly, it isn’t always Gideon.

8. What’s something that I haven’t covered that you want authors to know?

Don’t undersell yourself. I know it’s fun to say “MY WRITING IS AWFUL WHY DO I DO THIS HOW DO I WORDS” and it’s great fun!

But believe in your writing.

If you can’t, find someone who can. A bookseller, a blogger, a good friend.

Booksellers are into backlist. We’re shoring up the walls with backlist. Gideon is technically backlist now. So is Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe (Alex White) and Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Becky Chambers). Books aren’t frontlist forever, so you really want to have a bookseller in your pocket making sure your book doesn’t fall off the cliff and into the pile at the bottom with other forgotten stories.

Not everyone is going to be rediscovered on the clock app.

9. To close us out, shout out your store. Where can we find them and how can we support?

Main Street Books! We do online orders and we ship in the continental US because shipping is expensive. THEY LET ME SIT DOWN. I’M ACTUALLY SITTING RIGHT NOW. Here’s the website: https://www.main-street-books.com

Thanks so much Kel!

While I’ve got you all here, I want to tell you about a writer’s conference I’m running. If you’ve enjoyed or benefited from my blog, I’m asking for a bit of help. I know you don’t owe me anything, but you can do this for free with just a few seconds time, so I don’t feel bad about asking.

I’m running a writer’s conference as part of Atomacon in Charleston in May. I get to work with developing writers, give them feedback, help them work on pitching, and just do all that cool stuff that comes from hanging with people who want to get better at this business. The conference is free with the purchase of a convention badge, which is $40.

We’re going to work in small groups on critique, we’re going to have panels with editors, authors, and an agent, and everyone who signs up will get professional feedback on their first ten pages at no extra cost.

So here’s where I need your help. I REALLY want to do this, but the only way we can make it work for the convention economically is if some people sign up. Hotel space costs money. So here’s my ask: help me get the word out. Please take this link and post it in your spaces where writers hang out. If you’re so inclined, maybe talk about how awesome I am. I’ll leave that part to you though.

Or sign up yourself if it’s within your means.

Just to lay out all the cards, I’m not being compensated for this in any way. This is my local con (Savannah doesn’t have a good one) and Covid really hit it hard, to the point where if we can’t turn around the attendance, it might not survive. I would really like to help fix that.

Thanks!