Has Borders given up on fiction completely? Orders from their corporate office make it look that way.
So, maybe I shouldn’t have been standing so close to the employee break area. And I should have moved on when they were talking about their marketing.
But I just couldn’t make my feet move when I heard the general manager of my local Borders tell his employees that the new plan for the store was to lump all genre books together. So, Westerns, Romance, Thriller, Mystery, Chick Lit, Science Fiction, and Fantasy will all be mixed together and sorted by author alone.
When the manager emerged and found me in the hall with my mouth agape, I asked him about the plan. I told me it was an order from corporate headquarters. I asked if there was anyone at corporate who actually read books. He was unable to comment.
I told this story to my husband. I think he figured out their strategy. They’re doing it for spite. When Barnes and Noble takes over their stores, they’ll have to sort out the whole mess.
This is the equivalent of seeing someone out in public in his or her sweats. It says, “I’ve just plain given up.” They don’t really want to sell books anymore.
I know that the literary market is in trouble. I get it. But this is market censorship to the extreme. It means that no new authors can come into the mass-market bookstore. The reader needs to know the author they want, before they step inside the store. The reader will never get the chance to pick up a new author’s book. As older authors write less, and new writers are excluded, this is a recipe for stagnation and it can’t be sustained.