The golden age of Barnes & Noble stocking indie horror is about to end

corporations care about one thing and it is not you

Hello and welcome to an unscheduled interruption. If you’re new here, my name is Max Booth III and this is my newsletter, The Ghoulish Times. Along with my wife, Lori Michelle, I have been operating a small press in San Antonio since 2012. We originally launched under the name Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing and have since rebranded as Ghoulish Books (PMMP remains the name of our umbrella company, while Ghoulish can be defined as our “horror imprint”). Under this company, we have also launched our own annual book festival (Ghoulish Book Festival) celebrating indie horror. Very recently, we opened our own indie horror bookstore also called Ghoulish Books.

I bring this up because indie literature—indie horror especially—means the world to me. It is more than just my job at this point. It is my entire life. So yes, it has pleased me immensely to see the rise of indie horror being stocked in bookstores. Both in independent bookstores and also huge chains like Barnes & Noble.

Over the last couple years, it’s been “the talk of the town” how suddenly B&N had started embracing something they’d previously shunned and ignored. It felt like a phenomenon that nobody could precisely explain.

I mean, holy shit, last year a B&N in Virginia hosted its very own horror festival.

Until around 2020, I don’t think most Barnes & Nobles even had a horror section.

So what changed?

I believe BookTok and the overall popularity of TikTok perhaps played a big part in this. There are no self-publishing or small press gatekeepers on TikTok. Anyone there can recommend the wildest, most deranged shit, and if the video goes viral there’s going to be demand for the book, even if the video is condemning the book.

But, most importantly, we cannot ignore the fact that we have been in a horror boom for a while now, and I think maybe B&N was a little slow to catch up on that. My personal theory is this current wave of energetic popularity first hit around 2016, with Stranger Things premiering on Netflix and also a straight-up motherfucking fascist getting elected president. Ask any historian of the genre and they will tell you the same thing: horror is never in more demand than during times of great political distress.

In a Wall Street Journal interview from 2020, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, James Daunt, announced a new strategy for selling books at their stores: “At the end of the day, I expect to give the booksellers complete freedom in all the things that I think should matter. Freedom to put the books wherever they like, display them however they like, arrange them however they like.”

The industry started seeing an increase in horror lit being stocked at Barnes & Noble. It felt almost like a dream. There are even several B&N employees (working at various locations in the United States) who have social media presences where they post fun images from recent shelves and displays they’ve curated. Not only have these stores been stocking horror, they’ve also allowed their employees to choose the selections. People who are actually fans of the genre and have their finger on what’s new and interesting. The kind of books you won’t see mentioned in prestigious newspapers or magazines. Finally, our books and so many other books were being stocked at the biggest bookstore in the country and it seemed like people actually gave a shit about what we were doing.

For the last couple years, it has been pretty great. Bookstore sales have been better than ever for the publishing company. Of course, these sales cannot only be credited to B&N. There are tons of great indie stores out there fighting the good fight—stores like Little Ghosts, Bucket O’Blood Books & Records, Whitty Books, Butcher Cabin Books, and countless others (including our own store!)—but I do think it’s probably fair to suspect a significant percentage of our bookstore sales have gone through B&N. And it’s been good. It’s been fucking fantastic.

Anyway, that’s all about to end.

But first, some context:

I have been involved in this industry for slightly over a decade, and just in that time I have witnessed certain stigmas and theories materialize and crumble. There was a time when everybody was convinced eBooks would wipe paperbacks out from existence. Yet our records show that every year our paperback sales continue to outshine our digital sales. The stigma of self-publishing is something thousands of writers have had to deal with, as well. When I first started writing, it was considered sad and pathetic to self-publish your work. It was seen as a sign of giving up. I think this mindset still exists, but it’s fortunately nowhere near as prominent as it used to be.

Related to self-publishing criticisms is something called print-on-demand (POD) publishing. Essentially, instead of printing hundreds or thousands of books up front and then selling a large stock taking up space in your kitchen/office/warehouse, POD allows the opportunity for authors and smaller publishers to print copies the exact moment an order is made. There are no minimum print orders like most standard printers would require. It is a simple transaction: customer buys book, book is printed, book is shipped.

Some POD companies are admittedly better than others. Amazon’s print-on-demand service KDP does not often print the best quality books, but their more concerning fault ties into a lack of distribution. Through my bookstore, I have witnessed personally the terrible discount Amazon offers their POD books and frankly it’s embarrassing. But it also makes sense to me, in a weird way, even if I don’t agree with it. Amazon obviously does not want readers buying books from bookstores. They want readers buying books from Amazon. How do they ensure this continues happening? By offering terrible discounts to bookstores and discouraging them from being stocked elsewhere. Thus, if you want a specific book and it was printed only through Amazon, you are not left with many other options but to buy it directly from them. It is no secret that Amazon is evil. That isn’t what this newsletter is about. I shouldn’t have to tell you to stop supporting Amazon. But seriously. Stop supporting Amazon.

We do not personally use Amazon’s KDP service for printing books. Instead we use a company called Lightning Source. We have stuck with them for a decade now (even before IngramSpark was a thing). For the most part, they are fair and reliable. Printing quality, in my opinion, is pretty good. I’m a big fan of their thin, groundwood eggshell paper option (check out any book we’ve published in the last 2 years or so if you need a reference). But most importantly, books printed through Lightning Source are distributed through Ingram, which means our inventory is available for bookstores to order with an agreeable discount—assuming the author or publisher select a high enough discount for stores, and also enable returns.

Enabling returns can be a huge decision for a small press. Most companies and single authors are hesitant to do it. To explain: every bookstore has the option to return book stock within a certain amount of time if they fail to sell the book. For many companies, getting hit with returns can destroy their business, so it’s definitely up to each publisher to make the decision of whether or not they are prepared to handle the potential consequences.

But, assuming you were a small press who a) set a high enough retail discount and b) enabled returns, for the last several years there would have been no problem with getting your inventory stocked in a place like Barnes & Noble.

This is going to change, if it hasn’t already.

Recently, I have communicated with several Barnes & Noble employees who wish to remain anonymous. My sources are very reliable, and collectively they have 13+ years of experience working for the book retailer. They’ve informed me of certain meetings and phone calls they have had with corporate, and…well, ghouls, it does not look great. B&N plans to start cracking down on stocking POD in their stores. It has been a rumor for a couple weeks now, and today I was told this from one of my sources (I have their permission to share here):

From the national call today, they’re really putting the stamp on killing POD.

Essentially it’s profit driven. We don’t make money off of POD books and they see it as a distraction from being focused on selling key titles like Monthly Picks and we should be focused on the core of books as opposed to the trend to sustain longer term growth.

It sounds like we are going to just have to shut it down, they called out horror and romance and big cats we order POD. While I understand what they are saying from a corporate standpoint I don’t agree with it at all and it’s a complete 180 from what we were told when I became an SM, basically they said on the call we need to let the book people at corporate decide what we carry in store.

The details that I got were, that as a company it is not our practice to order in POD books due to the restrictive profit margin that we make from them. We can absolutely still talk about and promote those titles and sell them and ship to home, and I would assume that in nature of holding events, keep leftover stock from those events in store. Lightning Source was the main target that they talked about and they were highly upset that it was in the top ten for publishers sales currently because they are not making any profit from Lightning Source.

They are focused on the sales of core titles and getting back to letting corporate dictate more of what the company buys and we as booksellers need to focus our energy on the titles we’re told to sell.

So even though I sold almost 100 copies of [indie horror book] and it’s had monthly sales ever since I took over [at my location], it’s not the type of title they want us putting our energy behind because they get no bigger cut of any money.

The above source is not the only B&N employee who has received a recent visit from someone in corporate. I am hearing that employees will now start getting “punished” if they continue stocking POD titles in their stores. Corporate has issued out vague explanations about losing money with the shipping costs, but when employees requested further information and resources to give small presses and help them stand a better chance of getting stocked, it seemed dubious that corporate was even interested in providing that kind of assistance. They do not want to stock small presses. They do not want us.

Even as far as two months ago, James Daunt was stressing the importance of employee curation. Take a look at this recent interview in The Guardian. The headline is literally “Amazon doesn’t care about books”—which is a headline I 100% agree with, Amazon is a monster company that should be catapulted into space—but I have to wonder, does Barnes & Noble care about books? Do they really? Because it sure sounds like they’ve decided to go back on their word, and return in the direction that will almost certainly make them obsolete.

B&N might claim publicly that they care and sympathize with independent authors and publishers, but that is far from the reality. In truth, Barnes & Noble is a large corporation, and corporations do not care about us. They do not care about you. They do not care about anything other than making the rich richer. Anything else is not even secondary—it’s nonexistent.

By the way, did I mention Barnes & Noble also has its own print-on-demand service? And not even books printed by Barnes & Noble are eligible to be stocked at their stores?

Does this sound like a company that actually gives a shit about literature?

So what can we do here, exactly? I’m not sure. You can let B&N how you feel about this, for one thing. You can demand a solution that doesn’t require complete banishment. But also? You can support bookstores that care about indie horror. You can buy direct from indie publishers. You can buy from authors via their websites or at book events.

You can show these corporations that we don’t need them, and we never did.

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Okay, that’s it for now. You can support us on Patreon, browse the books in our webstore, and follow us on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter (PMMP | Ghoulish Tales | Ghoulish podcast | Ghoulish Books | personal).

My new book, Abnormal Statistics, is out now through Apocalypse Party.

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See you next time, ghouls.