"Why isn't my book in this bookstore?”

A brief explainer on how bookstores stock their shelves — and why they might not sell your book.

Many years ago, I found myself perplexed in a bookstore.

I was looking for a client’s newest book, the latest in a string of NYT bestsellers.

It had just come out. The city where I happened to be traveling on a work trip had three separate famously well-curated indie bookstores downtown. The client was—is—an indie darling.¹

My client’s book was not in the first bookstore. It was not in the second. It was nowhere to be found—nowhere in the entire city.

Mind you, this was not a “crazed fan bulk bought every copy in a ten-mile radius” scenario. A bookseller confirmed it for me: the city’s legendary downtown bookstores just weren’t selling my client’s books.

…WTF?

Why? I had no idea. The bookseller couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me.

Being me, I immediately became obsessed—obsessed!!—with this mystery.

If you’re a published author, I bet you know exactly how I felt.

I am guessing about 99.999% of you have gone through a version of this yourselves, or you will someday.

Seriously: 99.999% of you. I’m talking about Big 5 authors, bestselling authors—all of you.

Perhaps you’ll walk into your favorite local indie bookstore, and your book won’t be in there. Perhaps it won’t be in stock at Barnes and Noble. Perhaps it’ll be out of stock online: a surprise “typically ships in 1 to 3 weeks 👹” notice on Amazon or Bookshop.

It’s usually not all of the above; it’s usually just one of them. But one of the above will happen to you at some point, somewhere.

When it happens—when—will it matter for your book’s overall sales? Almost certainly not. Not in any meaningful way. Not unless we’re talking about Amazon and it’s out of stock for WEEKS, but that particular circumstance is exceedingly rare.

Will you lose your marbles anyway? You probably will.

Wait, why will I lose my marbles if some random store isn’t carrying my book?

In general, authors struggle with imposter syndrome. This doesn’t help.

Post-publication depression is a real thing. Writing a book requires a gut-gouging quantity of emotional vulnerability, isolation, and uncertainty. Most people are exhausted by the time they cross the finish line. Most people are not even positive when they can stop running. This doesn’t help.

Finally: nothing unhinges a human psyche quite like the dissolution of a survival fantasy. Many authors survive the agony of the prepublication years by telling themselves, When I stroll into Barnes and Noble and see this baby on the shelves, it’ll all be worth it.

Then the book comes out, and they stroll into Barnes and Noble and don’t see it on the shelves, and kablamo. They go home, burst into tears, and take to bed for days. They explode or implode. They feel like existential failures.

Such reactions might sound extreme, but honestly…have you read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning? Or—failing that—are you familiar with the saga of Taylor Swift and Matty Healy in The Tortured Poets Department?

If so, you’ll know how hard it is to deal with this specific type of disillusionment—the dissipating mirage—even when it’s over something “unimportant.” That mirage was your fucking lighthouse!!

Agents feel a version of this, too.

Hence the reason I became so obsessed with solving the mystery of my client’s absentee bestsellers.

Do you want to know what happened there?

::chuckles:: I did eventually solve the mystery. The answer was not at all what I’d anticipated.

I’m not going to tell you what it was yet. (Sorry, free subscribers — muahahahaha.) Rather, I’m going to give you the thrill of trying to figure it out yourself. Aren’t I fun?

I’m going to do that by explaining the entire process of how bookstores stock their shelves. As you read, see if you can guess what happened.