“Oh, my goodness!” the bookseller, Nina Wilkins, said, perhaps not entirely joyfully. “Oh, my goodness!”
“Nice and busy in the morning, isn’t it?” Daunt said. “And the shop’s looking lovely.”
Wilkins said, recovering, “Shall I call my manager, Steph?”
As Daunt waited, he checked the pyramids. Early on at Daunt Books, he and Wolstencroft found that, if they placed unknown début-fiction titles on their own, people shied away, but, if they interposed known books of a similar flavor, customers bought both. Presenting the new in the context of the old allowed readers to orient themselves.
The manager, Steph Burridge, appeared, her blond hair half gathered into a top bun. “Congratulations,” Daunt, who congratulates everyone, said.
“We pick a book, and it just flies,” Burridge said.
“I always say that, in small shops, you can be talking to somebody and selling the book to three other people,” Daunt said. He paused. “Anything for me while I’m here?”
“I think the shop should have an awning,” Burridge said. “I mentioned it, and I just got completely—”
“Would you e-mail me?” Daunt said. “You don’t need to say, ‘Hi, James, the weather’s lovely, blah blah blah.’ Just write an e-mail that says—”
“Awning,” Burridge guessed.
“Awning,” Daunt said, with a smile.
For most of us, ideas about the state of literature are the result of a cohort experience. Reading is private—or has been since at least the sixth century, before which the Western habit was to read everything aloud. But conversing about reading is a social activity. If you were of a certain cohort in a certain time, you might remember everybody talking about “Primary Colors,” or “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” or “White Teeth.” To be ensconced within a reading cohort is bliss, and falling off the cart can be demoralizing. “Within the industry, we’re very used to there being a golden age and it being just over,” one publisher told me dryly. “The moment of decline usually depends on the age of the person telling the story.”
It is also true that cohorts used to be mostly local, made up of people you could meet for lunch. Now they are, like everything, atomized and diffuse. “Readers are connecting with each other in small communities scattered all over the internet,” Kris Austin, the C.E.O. of the self-publishing platform Draft2Digital, which serves more than three hundred thousand authors, told me recently. “The big gatekeepers are less major players than they used to be, and authors are finding readers directly—or readers find them, and tell each other on social media.” It is easy to be snide about the way that taste hierarchies flatten on social media, but any writer who genuinely connects with readers isn’t working in vain. “A romance author might be able to release a book a month, and, if they have a thousand people who will buy all of their books, they’re making a good living,” Austin said. Rarely, somebody breaks out and gets picked up by a publisher, as with the best-selling romance writer Colleen Hoover. But a lot of reading today happens in diverse pods below the publishing industry’s waves.
These reading habits often reach booksellers through BookTok—an ecosystem of literary influencers across social media. Barnes & Noble shops sometimes include BookTok recommendations on dedicated tables, which have helped move books; TikTok has translated into fifty million book sales across Europe, according to Nielsen. Still, these displays are not universally adored. (“I think it’s lazy bookselling,” Victoria Harty, the chain’s New York retail manager, told me.) Most BookTokers are young, and appeal to readers in the eighteen-to-forty age range. “I think people much older than me maybe wouldn’t see that their tastes align with mine,” Jack Edwards, a twenty-seven-year-old BookToker with four million followers, said.
