Goodbye, Borders

Yesterday, my editor’s assistant emailed me with a draft of the back cover copy for The Icon Thief, asking if I had any comments. While I don’t think I can post it here yet—it’s only a preliminary version, and I’ve requested a number of small changes—I can say that it does a nice job of selling the novel, condensing a very complicated plot into a handful of punchy paragraphs. And after years of work, it’s immensely satisfying to see all the pieces start to come together. Between the cover art, the marketing copy, and not least the change of title, my publisher has turned an unformed stack of manuscript pages into an attractive object indeed, one that I hope will stand out on store shelves.

These days, of course, the idea of books being displayed on shelves at all is starting to seem obsolete. The bankruptcy and closure of Borders, especially, is a depressing story for readers and authors alike. (Even their liquidation sales are less attractive than they seem.) I’ve written before about how the decline of physical bookstores also heralds the end of browsing, that peculiar process in which you go to a bookstore looking for one thing, or even nothing in particular, and leave with a few titles that you never even knew you wanted. Online bookstores, though they’ve changed my life by giving me access to books I could never find elsewhere, aren’t built for those kinds of happy accidents. And for a novelist, the loss is even more troubling.

For most authors, a debut novel is less like the launch of a major Hollywood blockbuster than a direct to video release. You’re on a crowded shelf, competing with a lot of similar titles, with only your cover art, your title, and maybe a short description to help you stand out from the rest. It’s frightening, but exhilarating: this is survival of the fittest in literary form, and the major publishers are very good at creating packages for novels that push all the right buttons. Now, with the end of browsing, this expertise is being tested as never before, and while it’s already evolving into new, surprising shapes, a few things have remained constant. Even if it’s at Amazon instead of Borders, a great title and cover certainly can’t hurt a novel’s chances.

All the same, the downfall of Borders, which in many communities was the only physical bookstore in town, is a major loss. When I was growing up, it was a big deal to take a trip to Waldenbooks. It wasn’t a great bookstore, but I didn’t know that at the time, and I was happy to spend hours browsing among the glossy rows of paperbacks. Now Waldenbooks, a Borders subsidiary, is closing as well, which makes it all the less likely that a bright young teenager in a town I’ve never seen will pick up The Icon Thief by chance. In some ways, the fate of these stores was only a matter of time, and things could easily have been different. But I still can’t help wishing that they’d managed to hold out until March.