Struggle for Independents

In the face of a continuing onslaught by the nation’s leading book chains and online booksellers, two struggling West Hollywood bookstores, crime- and mystery-oriented Mysterious Books and gay-themed A Different Light, have launched radically different survival strategies, with the next several months likely to determine if either succeeds.

Sheldon McArthur, the 54-year-old manager of Mysterious Books, has seen sales plummet about 25% over the last few years, falling victim to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and the like. With New York owner Otto Penzler about to pull the plug on the 11-year-old Beverly Boulevard store, McArthur found himself at a life-defining crossroads.

He’d already cut his staff by half, leaving just himself and a part-time salesclerk. Should he now quietly retire? Or could he transform himself into an unlikely hero, the common man up against the mega-retailers, a man who might have stepped from the pages of one of his store’s 15,000 new, used and rare titles?

He chose to fight.

This much McArthur knew: Penzler was still relying largely on shrinking walk-in sales while largely ignoring the skyrocketing trend in Internet sales, which already make up about 5% of the bookselling business, according to independent estimates.

The problem, then, lay in how to position his small bookstore to grab a larger piece of that Internet pie. The unlikely hero thus launched a risky, $200,000 plan aimed at buying out Penzler.

“Except for the legalese,” McArthur says, he recently wrapped up negotiations, and plans to launch a Web site soon as well as to position himself on all the rare and used bookselling sites.

Meanwhile, the outlook at A Different Light has become increasingly grim, says manager Brad Craft, 36. The privately owned chain--with outlets in New York and San Francisco--was launched 21 years ago by Norman Laurila with a single store in Silver Lake, which was later moved to its current Santa Monica Boulevard location. Now, the West Hollywood store is “in a cloud of debt, and we can’t order new titles,” Craft says.

To cope, Craft has cut back the store’s hours, allowed some shelves to go bare and is publicizing the store’s plight in the gay media “because this isn’t just a bookstore with three locations, but a cultural institution. Absent A Different Light, nothing will take its place.”

Unlike Mysterious Books, which earns up to two-thirds of its sales from phone and e-mail inquiries, A Different Light is highly dependent on foot traffic, giving customers easy accessibility to non-mainstream gay titles.

For example, says Craft, although Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Hours” has been heavily promoted by mainstream chains, his three previous books are mostly unavailable at the big stores. All are carried by A Different Light. In addition, his store carries 30 titles dealing with transgender issues. “If you find five of those anywhere else, I’d be shocked,” Craft says.

What’s killing the store, he says, is that the mainstream chains are selling the most popular gay books at a discount, leaving A Different Light to pick up the slack with less popular titles. Often, he says, shoppers will browse his store, then buy elsewhere.

This falloff in customers is not unique to A Different Light and Mysterious Books. Oren Teicher, chief operations officer for the American Booksellers Assn., which represents the “overwhelming majority” of independent bookstores, points out that in the mid-’90s, the association had 5,300 members; now it has 3,500. Still, he says, after a precipitous decline from ’96 to ‘98, “membership has largely stabilized”--for now.

However, Teicher is not waiting for the other shoe to drop. Rather, the association is suing the major book chains and their online affiliates, alleging they have pursued unfair trade practices, including getting illegal discounts and kickbacks from publishers. That trial is slated to begin next April in a Northern California federal court.

(In a telephone interview, Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating would not comment further on the lawsuit, other than to call the charges “unfounded,” and to say that “we’re going to vigorously defend ourselves and are optimistic about the outcome.”)

In addition, the booksellers’ association plans to launch an e-commerce site for its members this fall. “We’re creating a shared back end for technology and credit-card processing,” says Teicher. Using this joint base, each store will be able to create its own “front,” suited to its individualized specialty.

But even as the independents fight back, their competition has grown more fierce.

New York-based Barnes & Noble, which opened its first Southland store in Costa Mesa a mere seven years ago, now has 50 Southland stores with 540 nationwide. In addition, says Doug Dutton, owner of Dutton’s Brentwood Books and an ABA activist, the reading public has not grown appreciably, even as competition for its free time has grown. So the independents are getting ever thinner slices of a static literary pie.

To keep his store above water, A Different Light’s Craft has for the past couple of years tried to lure in more customers by appealing to gay pride and staging more in-store author readings, although he’s had little response so far. Craft points out that should his store go under, he believes the only remaining Southland gay bookstore will be A Different Drummer in Long Beach.

At Mysterious Books, which McArthur just renamed the Mystery Bookstore, McArthur thinks he’s found a chink in the armor of the retail giants. Although the chains might sell more books at discounted prices, their salesclerks often possess only scant familiarity with their product, he says. And Amazon anonymously puts reading recommendations online for customers without really knowing them. But McArthur has steeped himself in mysteries over the years and knows which books complement others. He also enjoys chatting it up, getting to know a client’s tastes and recommending other books--often selling an additional book or two along the way.

One of McArthur’s steady customers is Ed Kaufman, senior partner at the L.A.-based law firm Irell & Manella, which specializes in corporate acquisitions. McArthur convinced Kaufman, who also owns a bookstore in Northern California, to “help out with the [legal] paperwork” for the buyout, says Kaufman, who then decided to invest his own money in the deal.

“As a collector, I’ve gotten to know Shelly, and think this is a good business. It ain’t going to rival the Internet, turning $50 into $50 million. But it can make money, especially because, unlike general readers, mystery readers tend to be addicts. So I wanted to give Shelly the resources to do this,” he says.

The Web site--tentatively to be called https://www.themysterybookstore.com--should be up in two months, and in addition to book sales will offer the schedule for “all our signings, recommendations on new and forthcoming mysteries, and a link to our used and rare collectible books,” says McArthur.

As for A Different Light, the dearth of gay book outlets has resulted in fewer non-mainstream titles, with one major publisher, New York-based Murrow, closing its largely gay imprint. Other publishers, who now sell half their titles through mainstream stores, have had to reorient the way they do business since the mid-’90s when there were nearly 300 gay and lesbian bookstores, says Dan Cullinane, spokesman for Hollywood-based Alyson Publications, the nation’s largest gay publisher. Only a third of those stores remain open today, he says.

The upshot, says L.A. author Felice Picano, one of the first gay authors to do signings at mainstream bookstores and a regular speaker at A Different Light, has been a brake on the diversification of gay literature. Through the late ‘70s, says Picano, “gay authors were nearly all white, middle-class males, and their writing reflected this. Now, we write in hip-hop as well as traditional English, and, increasingly, write to black and Latino readers.”

But the decline of gay book outlets threatens to cut off this diversity, Craft says. In addition, he says, for many, “entering a gay bookstore is the first time they’ve outed themselves. They come here because it is a step off the street, away from the bars and drinking and drugs.” As gay bookstores close, he says, “we lose the intellectual focus of our community”--a point that he is still trying to get across to his former patrons.

“Being gay is not solely about our [sexual] activities, but about how we communicate through stories, through talking back and forth, through our own literature. Absent that, we end up defined by others, often by people who hate us.”