Problem Supporting Indie Bookstores When Supporting Indie Books

I decided a couple of years back to try to support independent bookstores as much as I could over Amazon or the like. I also try to pay as much attention as I can to books coming out of the independent presses. However, I’ve been having a problem as of late.

A lot of independent presses these days do their printing through CreateSpace. That means that the book is available through Amazon, but may not be available elsewhere. The presses have to go through a lot of work to have individual bookstores carry their books, or work with other distributors. Many independent presses are not able to handle this, either from a cost or a time perspective.

Thus, I sometimes find myself having to choose between supporting indie bookstores or indie presses. I want to support both, but there are a lot of times where I can’t get an indie book through any independent I can find. I have to go to amazon, or at least when I buy the book. Sometimes it will be available through an indie retailer much later, but I don’t know if that will happen and when.

We won’t even talk about how important Amazon rankings can be to indie books. Amazon has a huge portion of the market and if my purchase doesn’t help the Amazon ranking then other purchasers might not see the book on Amazon.

What to do? It’s a weird situation when you have to choose between supporting indie booksellers and indie books. Course, I buy a lot either way. Maybe it all evens out.