Lord Tophet as a box of pricey cornflakes
This is a squeal of indignation, uttered on behalf of my friend Greg Frost, whose newest rave review about his newest novel we've recently been offered a chance to read at http://calico-reaction.livejournal.com/tag/gregory+frost.

Greg hasn't noised abroad (but I hereby noise it for him) the news that Borders has decided not to order Lord Tophet for their stores. That's ANY of the stores in the Borders chain. Their "explanation" being that Shadowbridge didn't sell as well as they thought it needed to, in order to justify making the sequel available to shoppers. It didn't say how many copies of Shadowbridge they bought, or how many of those went out the door how quickly. Thus does one discover the meaning of "self-fulfilling prophecy," also that a book in a big chain bookstore is like a box of cornflakes in a supermarket: what gets restocked is what sells best. Not pretty damn decently, but best.

I can't tell you how many supermarket products, that I used to like and buy, have disappeared from the shelves because not enough other people liked them as well as similar, probably cheaper, and (in my view, inferior) products. The policy now is not to offer a broad range of products and give customers a wide choice, but to offer a narrow range of only the best-selling products. Nothing matters but how fast they fly off the shelves, i.e. the bottom line. When the product is not cornflakes but art, the implications are very, very scary; and the principle applies not just at the level of bookstores but all the way back up to publishers and the editors who work for them, and behind both of those to the stockholders of their respective corporations.

It would be wonderful to get both rave reviews and brisk sales, both award nominations and print run after print run, and a few happy/lucky writers do possess that double gift; but most fall nearer one end or the other of a range defined by, say, Dan Brown on one end and Marcel Proust on the other. But we hold these truths to be self-evident, don't we, that best-selling writers are not the only ones worth reading--when they are worth reading at all--and that phenomenal success in the marketplace is no measure of artistic merit.

I realize I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'm frustrated and pissed about this, and also deeply worried. What happens to art when the business of the bookselling and -publishing industries is all but entirely business?

If we needed another reason to support the independent bookstores and shun the chains, here it is. Go buy Lord Tophet from a store where the owners love books, in addition to caring--as they must too, of course--about the bottom line.