Emily Books: An Indi(E) Bookstore Enters the Online Jungle
What had been your experience in publishing up until the point you started Emily Books?
Ruth and I met working for Hyperion, a big commercial publishing house, in the early 00s. She later went on to work on the agency side, and currently works in the contracts department of a university press. She’s an expert on rights and contracts, as well as the tech side of our business, not to mention the accounting side. She’s also a very talented writer — she wrote an essay for our site that I absolutely love, about our pick Glory Goes and Gets Some.
How do you feel supported by the Brooklyn lit community? (both the people who work in lit and the people who participate as consumers)
WORD bookstore in Greenpoint has been wonderful about hosting some of our best events — I made a joke at the last one, our 1-year anniversary party, that it’s nice of them to host us considering that we’re the competition! And it actually is really generous of them. I personally buy paper and electronic editions of most books that I love, so I don’t think it’s really an either-or proposition.
We do have a lot of Brooklyn based customers, but we also have customers from all over the country and all over the world, which surprised me at first. But people in Brooklyn are kind of overwhelmed by books and culture, and they maybe don’t need us in the same way that someone who lives in, say, Virginia Beach needs us.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of running Emily Books?
I really look forward to the moment at the end of each quarter when we send the checks to the small publishers and authors we work with. It’s amazing to be able to send a letter to a writer you admire that says “We are pleased to inform you that we sold X copies of your book, and here’s a check.” It’s a really good way of writing fan mail. I recommend it to everyone.
What have some of your favorite titles been? How do you choose the monthly books?
We keep a running list of books that have been recommended to us and we go through catalogues and used bookstores, and we also have had a few intial readers — Kaitlin Phillips and Alex Ronan have both been enormously helpful — who give us a heads-up when they encounter something great. We also get recommendations from authors we admire, which is hugely useful. Chris Kraus, Minna Proctor, Curtis Sittenfeld and Elisa Albert have all recommended books that we either have featured or will feature in the future.
Re: favorite it’s really hard to pick. Two of our bestselling books are Glory Goes and Gets Some by Emily Carter and Making Scenes by Adrienne Eisen, which is the pen name of a blogger called Penelope Trunk. Those are the books I have the hardest time describing. They are both completely sui generis, miracle books. They’re also both autobiographical fiction, which is a genre I’ve always been drawn to. It’s weird, for a while people wrote fiction because memoirs were considered less saleable, and even though that’s obviously not the case anymore there’s still a taint associated with memoir, especially by women. I won’t stay on my soapbox about this for very long, but you still often see reviews that say, essentially, “What important thing has happened to her? What could she possibly have to say?” It’s strange how many people who profess to love books and reading don’t seem to understand that the entire point of reading is to inhabit someone else’s subjectivity, and that the entire point of writing is to allow other people to inhabit yours. First-person writing is one of the simplest and best tools we have for this, and it continually amazes me when people think writing “I” stories or books is self-centered. It can actually be one of the most generous ways of writing.
Where do you see the company heading in the next few years?
We are very, very close to launching our app, which will allow readers access to our books and the associated content available on our blog in-app on their iPads and iPhones. Since I love reading on my phone this is a really exciting thing for me personally! I hope other people will love it too.
In the next few years … it’s funny, as recently as a few months ago I was so worried that we would run out of books. But I’ve read so many great books in the last two — just in the last couple of weeks, I’ve read three absolutely amazing books. Now I don’t feel like we’ll ever run out of books, which is great, because we plan to keep this up forever.
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