Perhaps the key component of our word of mouth marketing strategy for Every Man Dies Alone has been outreach to indie booksellers. It has always been our belief that it would take a network of smaller champions across the nation for this book to really sink in — to penetrate the literary marketplace as fully as possible and ultimately enter the canon. Thus, from the outset, publishers Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians conducted a non-stop outreach to the people who’d always supported our not-so-obviously-commercial titles — the indies.

To charts the results of that effort, Melville House’s David Kinzer has been interviewing indie booksellers from across the country discussing what selling Every Man Dies Alone has been like for them, and what it represents about the brick and mortar bookselling scene today …. (You can read the entire series here.) …

Every Man Dies Alone on display in the Elliott Bay Book Co., with Peter Aaron's handwritten shelf-talker

For a self-proclaimed proponent of Every Man Dies Alone, Peter Aaron, the owner of Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, is surprisingly sure about the negative selling points of the novel. “This is not easy reading,” says Allen. “The times, the plot, the characters, on the surface they are not very uplifting. If a customer is looking for a light romp, it’s not what I’ll recommend.”

And yet the book has been experiencing “amazing sales” at the store since its release, he says.

Aaron credits Fallada’s “great writing” for making it a hit, but like a lot of great books, it needs a champion to bring that to people’s attention. Thus, much of the book’s success story at Elliott Bay lies with the store itself and its close relationship with its customers, which saved the book from initial disinterest. “It just sat on the shelf,” recalls Aaron. “Then it was read by someone on the staff — incidentally, me — and put on the recommendation shelf. That’s where a lot of our customers find our books.”

Aaron himself wrote the shelf-talker:

I bow to Primo Levi: “The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.” Based on a true story (with fascinating facsimiles of the Gestapo files in the afterword)– this is the saga of an unremarkable couple whose innate decency compels them to protest– hopelessly and courageously– against the insane brutality of the Reich. Triumphant, tragic, gripping– simply and beautifully narrated. The only book I’ve read that dares to take on the big question: not what created the monsters or the monstrosoties– that one is simple and gratuitous– but why the mass complicity? Dares– and succeeds.

Of course, enthusiastic handselling by the entire staff has also helped, but Aaron believes that some of the credit simply belongs to Elliot Bay’s status as an indie bookstore.

“It means being curious and wanting to see what’s out their on our own,” he explains. “And our customers are like that.”Aaron believes that indie booksellers are in a unique position of trust with consumers. “What is endorsed is there because there’s an individual in the store who has experienced it and loved it and wanted to bring it to the attentions of the customers, and the customers know that for no other reason is that there.”

So far, it seems that Elliot Bay’s customers have been rewarded for their trust. “Everybody’s loved it,” says Aaron. “I’ve heard nothing except inarticulate awe at having been moved by it.”

Perhaps the key component of our word of mouth marketing strategy for Every Man Dies Alone has been outreach to indie booksellers. It has always been our belief that it would take a network of smaller champions across the nation for this book to really sink in — to penetrate the literary marketplace as fully as possible and ultimately enter the canon. Thus, from the outset, publishers Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians conducted a non-stop outreach to the people who’d always supported our not-so-obviously-commercial titles — the indies.

To charts the results of that effort, Melville House’s David Kinzer has been interviewing indie booksellers from across the country discussing what selling Every Man Dies Alone has been like for them, and what it represents about the brick and mortar bookselling scene today. (You can read the entire series here.) …

Jeff Waxman in Chicago's 57th Street Books

After speaking with Nancy Olson at the Quail Ridge Bookstore for yesterday’s episode, the question arises: Should indie booksellers make it their duty to emphasize books from independent publishers?

It’s a good question to put to Jeff Waxman, a bookseller at Chicago’s 57^th Street Books, as well as “updater” of the store blog The Front Table, because his bookstore is a truly unique indie. It’s one of three shops (a college-campus store, a small shop at the Newberry Library, and 57th Street) all owned by a cooperative that operates under the rubric of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores. As such, they don’t even have an owner, let alone the stockholders of a chain — they have a huge co-op membership (”54,000 owners,” jokes Waxman) and a legendary general manager appointed by the co-op, Jack Cella.

And Waxman finds common ground with Olson in advancing the importance of a distinctive selection. “What makes any independent bookstore unique is the combination of the booksellers and their customers,” he says. “Bookstores are the products of their communities.”

He didn’t think Every Man Dies Alone, however, was the kind of book that necessarily needed extra-special emphasis to stand out from the crowd — he handsells it, apparently, out of sheer affection for the title, and goes out of his way to discuss the book’s universal appeal, rather than its offbeat elements. “It appeals to readers of German literature, people traveling to Berlin, readers of espionage novels, war novels,” he explains. “I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying this book.”

That universalism, he says, is the key to the book’s popularity at 57th Street, among both the staff and the customers: “Responses have been uniformly positive. With all of our sales [ed's note: in the huge Chicago market, 57th Street is outselling all other accounts on this title] no one’s ever returned it.”

For Waxman, that mass appeal renders moot the question of whether Every Man is more of an indie or a chain book. “I can’t see any bookseller not having success with this book,” he says. “But then again, I’ve never had anyone sell me a book at a chain store.”

Perhaps the key component of our word of mouth marketing strategy for Every Man Dies Alone has been outreach to indie booksellers. It has always been our belief that it would take a network of smaller champions across the nation for this book to really sink in — to penetrate the literary marketplace as fully as possible and ultimately enter the canon. Thus, from the outset, publishers Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians conducted a non-stop outreach to the people who’d always supported our not-so-obviously-commercial titles — the indies.

To charts the results of that effort, Melville House’s David Kinzer has been interviewing indie booksellers from across the country discussing what selling Every Man Dies Alone has been like for them, and what it represents about the brick and mortar bookselling scene today. (You can read the entire series here.) …

Nancy Olson

Quail Ridge Books & Music, in Raleigh, North Carolina, is a venerable institution in its hometown — in no small part because of its venerable owner, Nancy Olson. In fact, just last week the town named her the winner of the “Medal of Arts” — Raleigh’s highest cultural honor — in a press release that called her “a champion for many local causes, including hunger relief, AIDS and literacy, which include her ‘Books for Kids’ program.”

It’s easy to see why the citation called her a “champion” — she seems to relish being a champion of indie publishers, too. For example, she got one of the first ARCs of Every Man Dies Alone, and quickly surmised the difficult scenario it faced: dead author, translated text, small publisher, and a subject matter that some might see as dark. Her conclusion: “This is a book that requires handselling.” In other words, the book need a champion.

It’s the kind of challenge Olson seems to thrive on, since Quail Ridge explicitly sets out to publicize and make available indie and hard-to-find books. “We strive to offer a different selection, less commercial,” she says. It should be noted that Olson is a smart businesswoman (Publishers Weekly named her “Bookseller of the Year” in 2001) and this isn’t just idealism — it’s a way for Quail Ridge to differentiate itself from the 14 chain bookstores near-by. (And they say bookselling’s in trouble…)

And when she believes in something, she really believes in it. Like Bob Sommer of Changing Hands (see yesterday’s profile), she took her advocacy of Every Man beyond the boundaries of her store to nominate it for an Indie Next Pick, a suggested reading list put out monthly by the Association of American Publishers. “By turns horrifying and inspiring, Hans Fallada’s story of an ordinary German couple defying the Nazi’s inhumane brutality is authentic and informative — an admirable addition to German literature,” she wrote in her recommendation.

Now, she says, indie-consciousness has been part of what’s made Every Man Dies Alone a success at Quail Ridge. “I feel strongly that it is books like this that define the strengths of independent booksellers –- finding the quality, overlooked books and getting them into appreciative customers hands. It sets us apart from stores that feature more commercial books.”

Perhaps the key component of our word of mouth marketing strategy for Every Man Dies Alone has been outreach to indie booksellers. It has always been our belief that it would take a network of smaller champions across the nation for this book to really sink in — to penetrate the literary marketplace as fully as possible and ultimately enter the canon. Thus, from the outset, publishers Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians conducted a non-stop outreach to the people who’d always supported our not-so-obviously-commercial titles — the indies.

To charts the results of that effort, Melville House’s David Kinzer has been interviewing indie booksellers from across the country discussing what selling Every Man Dies Alone has been like for them, and what it represents about the brick and mortar bookselling scene today. (You can read the entire series here.) …

The shelf-talker for Every Man Dies Alone at Changing Hands Bookstore

Changing Hands, a Tempe, Arizona-based bookstore whose motto is “Independent Books for Independent Minds,” has always been somewhat of a hang-out for rebels. According to co-owner Bob Sommer, he and his partners Tom Brodersen and Gayle Shanks began the store as a worker-owned cooperative and were “very idealistic and dedicated to building a community and being of service to it.” Thirty-six years later, the store is a community to itself, with 35 employees and over 1500 square feet store space, and enough selling power to even bring rock stars in for signings. (This past Saturday Pat Benatar stopped in.)

Of course, because the store is being featured in this series, it should be no surprise that Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone has been a hit at Changing Hands. It was among the store’s top five new fiction paperback bestsellers this past spring, and was, notably, the only indie book on that list. It remains on display, months after release, with a shelf-talker written by Sommer himself. “There are plenty of readers who look for something of substance to go along with the escapist fiction by the pool,” he explains.

Changing Hands is no longer worker-owned (according to Sommer, it’s grown too large for that to be a feasible business plan), but it still manages to maintain its for-the-people integrity and scruffy ingenuity. Which may be why Every Man, the ultimate story of standing up to the man, has struck a chord with Sommer and worked so well at his store. In fact, Sommer likes it so much he has championed it beyond the boundaries of his store — the American Booksellers Association Summer 2010 Reading Group List included this moving encomium for Every Man, written by Sommer:

This is a tale written by a madman, about madmen and common folk in a time of terror, in a place of fear– and about those who resist their oppressors because in such situations someone must. Based on a true story, this bestseller from the ’40s has, to our good fortune, resurfaced to take its rightful place beside The Reader and All Quiet on the Western Front as yet another great anti-war novel by a brilliant German author.

Perhaps the key component of our word of mouth marketing strategy for Every Man Dies Alone has been outreach to indie booksellers. Not that chain retailers haven’t turned out to be equally important to the success of the book. Indeed, Borders was the first to order massive quantities of the paperback for display, and someone at Barnes & Noble has clearly fallen in love with the book, promoting it aggressively with non-stop, prime, in-store-location displays. That faith in the book has made B&N our sales leader — by far. And when the nation’s biggest retailer stands by a book like that, it makes everyone else take notice.

But it has always been our belief that it would take a network of smaller champions across the nation for this book to really sink in — to penetrate the literary marketplace as fully as possible and ultimately enter the canon. Thus, from the outset, publishers Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians conducted a non-stop outreach to the people who’d always supported our not-so-obviously-commercial titles — the indies.

Beginning today, Melville House’s David Kinzer charts the results of that effort via a series of interviews with five different indie booksellers from across the country discussing what selling Every Man Dies Alone has been like for them, and what it represents about the brick and mortar bookselling scene today. (You can read the entire series here.) ….

If I was to say ‘independent bookstore,” or perhaps simply “bookstore,” Green Apple Books is very nearly what you’d expect: an urban location (San Francisco, in fact), a knowledgeable and passionate staff, just a hint of dust dancing in a sunray, maybe a bearded man haggling over how much his underlined copy of The Prophet is worth, and most importantly of all, shelves upon towering shelves filled with books.

Green Apple is “a classic old bookstore,” said co-owner Kevin Ryan of the 43-year-old location. “It’s easy to get lost, and it’s a great place to lose yourself, especially if you’re open to the serendipity of finding something you weren’t expecting.” That susceptibility to the unexpected is exactly what indie publishers like your very own Melville House had been counting on to help sell unusual books, such as Every Man Dies Alone Our hope was for Every Man to find an audience in stores like Green Apple, where success is based on word-of mouth rather than a big-name or payola.

“I was the first person in the store to read [Every Man ] and I twisted a few colleague’s arms to read it after I did,” said Ryan. “It’s amazing to me that it could have been forgotten for fifty years.” Before long, the whole staff was aggressively handselling the Every Man hardcover. “It was one of the books that stayed on the hardback table right until the paperback came out,” said Ryan.

By then, Ryan developed a well-worn pitch for customers: “It’s a street-level view of life in a totalitarian regime. In this case it’s Hitler’s regime, but I think it’s equally appropriate for modern-day North Korea or Iran. Suspicion and backstabbing and betrayal.”

Ryan shrugged off the suggestion that the book could have trouble finding an audience. “I think it would sell anywhere,” he said. “It’s a piece of literature.”