Writer in the Wild: Holidays for Book Nerds

Me in one of my bookseller fits with some of my library

I got my dream job!

Well, at least as far as part-time, out-of-the-home dream jobs go, I got my dream job. I am a bookseller, which doesn’t sound totally magical to everyone, but book people read me loud and clear. I am working in a brick and mortar, independent, small bookstore. I knew I was going to have to start contributing financially to the household and I was ready to start looking in January. Where was I starting this search? Bookstores. And when the bookstore I have been dreaming of working at for more than two decades posted in December they were looking for someone… I tried not to get my hopes up, but my thirteen years of book blogging, my personal library of 2,311 books, my 80-100 book reads per year, and my life-long, insatiable interest in literature and the book world paid off.

The reason I am telling you this is because of what happened at (new) work yesterday. (I am still in training. And I’m sure I’ll have a million more things to share over the months and years because I am a bookseller. )

Onyx Storm dropped. If you don’t know what Onyx Storm is, well, I question your own insatiable interest in literature. It’s not going to win the Pulitzer, but people are reading it by the millions. Onyx Storm is the third book in a five-book series (so she says) by Rebecca Yarros called the Empyrean Series. The first book was Fourth Wing and that made the romantasy world sit up and pay attention. Then came Iron Flame. And now we have Onyx Storm.

Now, the bookstore where I work is in an academic and left-leaning community, so the books we stock reflect that (and other things about the community). The Empyrean series is—surprise!—not an academic work, nor is it literary fiction. I don’t know how many copies we had before yesterday (waiting in storage with a giant note not to even think about putting them out until January 21), but by the time I arrived for the afternoon shift, they were gone. There were, however, maybe eight of them still sitting on another shelf on hold for people who had preordered them through us. Right from the start of my shift, people started drifting in and calling. I would say at least once every ten to fifteen minutes we received a call or a customer smiling hopefully over the counter at us: “You don’t have any more copies of Onyx Storm, do you?” Okay, the truth is they didn’t look that hopeful. They had already figured out they were a little late up the swing.

Then: perfect storm. There was going to be snow. We were all going to be stuck in our houses—possibly—for days. The snow was set to start falling shortly after our closing time at 6:00 pm. People were getting desperate. (I mean, what a great way to spend a snow day.) They kept walking in and calling in and we started putting holds on our next order of copies until I realized that all the copies in our next order were accounted for. So none for the shelves. We notified the owner. He ordered more.

First of all, I find all of this very exciting and interesting just because it is book-related. It’s fun, like a literary holiday. But I also find it encouraging. Because based on anecdotal evidence and a slew of questions to other booksellers, I have been believing in a trend for the past two years that felt in full-swing yesterday, and that is this: people are reading. They’re reading books. They’re reading paper books and audio books and I suppose electronic books (though I don’t know as much about that last one). And—oh the promise!—young people are reading. This is especially true for girls, but young people of all stripes are putting down their devices and reading. (I think it has something to do with the trend toward clubs and community and other in-person things and I hope it continues, multiplies, balancing out some of the isolation and depression people have been struggling with.)

I also believe that it means bookstores are back. Sure, many small bookstores are still going to struggle and shut down, and giant online stores and bigger chains are going to reap most of the benefits of a reading public. But I have watched as new bookstores have come to my community and as old bookstores have started to do much better business. The book clubs I’m in have—every single one of them—grown noticeably in 2024 and those book clubs are full of people who purchase their book club books largely from the stores that host them. (They give a decent discount and/or really encourage it.)
I might be getting too excited about nothing, but in an industry that has seen the prediction of its demise a number of times in the past twenty years (online stores, POVs, e-books, a pandemic, inflation, addictive devices…), I am encouraged by what I see.

So keep showing up, readers, looking for the coolest new thing (Great Big Beautiful Life in April, anyone?), and keep showing up right there, standing at the counter of your local bookstore, asking if we have any copies of it. You know you love reading about bookstores, dreaming about them, finding the magic in them (The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Bookshops & Bone Dust…), so show up where we’ll be just as excited as you are about running your fingertips over the new fiction on the table up front, where it’s our dream job to slide a free bookmark into whatever book it is you want and hand it back to you with a “Hope to see you again soon.”