Where Do You Shelve a Ghost?

In Print, In Stores, and -- Already -- in Trouble!

October 1, 2002: My Father's Ghost is now officially published. I'm done writing it, and you can read it.

I am proud. I am relieved. I am anxious. I am committed to several bookstore appearances in support of the book during the coming month. And I am just about to go out and spend an hour wandering through the local antique mall poring over other people's junk, to disconnect my mind from the hamster-wheel of nervousness that the final step always produces: will it be well reviewed, will it sell well, will lots of readers like it, will it do good work in the world?

I am also concerned that a glitch has appeared in the works, and I must appeal to you, the visitor, to help out if you can.

On Saturday I went to a book signing for a group of local authors at our most centrally located Barnes and Noble, and I wandered by the information desk while I was there (as authors are wont to do) and asked whether they had my new book in yet. The staff people, all cheerful, casual young folks with what appeared to be only the most tangential connection to books or book selling, told me that according to their computer records, they had four copies in the store already, and that these were to be found shelved in the "Biography" section.

Well, they weren't -- probably not actually in the store yet whatever the computer said -- but the point is:

I went home and composed this note and sent it out to every independent bookstore whose e-mail address I could find on the net. I urge you, should you drop in at one of your own local stores in the near future, to please pass on the gist of my message to the store manager (and this is more important with the big chain stores, who are less likely to know anything about my book among so many, than with independents, who often know quite a bit about the books they carry):

Dear book folks,
Just in case my book shows up in your bookshop:
My new book has hit the stores, possibly including your store, and I'm finding that there's often some confusion about where to shelve it. The book is a memoir
called My Father's Ghost, the return of my old man and other second chances, from Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin Putnam (ISBN 1-58542-185-5, October 2002).
The name "Suzy McKee Charnas" may be familiar to you as that of an author of fantasy and SF. But My Father's Ghost is not fantasy or SF, it's nonfiction aimed at a different readership from all my previous work. It is a literary memoir of the last two decades of my father's life, which he lived next door to me after many years of separation.
On the SF shelves at my local Barnes & Noble, I found My Father's Ghost among the biographies (and local independents seem to be having the same response to this book). Since this is a personal memoir about a failed artist whose name nobody knows, it is bound to be lost and neglected on shelves organized by the names of biographical subjects. For the browser among biographies or the history buff, "Robinson McKee" just doesn't have the ring of, say, "Napoleon
Bonaparte". If, like many stores, you have no separate section for literary memoir as a genre, may I suggest some alternative placements for My Father's Ghost where its intended audience might more easily come across it?
Best bets would be wherever you shelve your nonfiction books on family life, intergenerational relations, caring for elderly parents, or autobiography.
Where do you shelve Studs Terkel's Coming Of Age, Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie, David Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs or Joanna Harris' Coastal People? My Father's Ghost (once it moves from your "brand-new nonfiction" display space) would fit comfortably next to any of these.

I wrote this book; seems to me it's up to me to help you sell it if I can. Thanks for
your time and attention,
Suzy M Charnas http://www.suzymckeecharnas.com/

P.S. I sent a copy of this note to the corporate hq of Barnes & Noble, and lo, I got a phone call from the person there who is the buyer for memoirs and biographies. We had a long talk about where Ghost belonged, and his take was that while the book can be cross-categorized in several ways in Barnes & Noble's on-line catalog, in brick and mortar stores it will indeed do best in the biographies section, once it comes off the "new non-fiction" storefront tables. Real stores have real space-limitations with regard to shelving a book, and this being so, he said, we are better off with the broadest available classification (biography) as opposed to any of the narrower ones -- which tend to draw only buyers with very specific wants in mind (death and dying, family relationships, medical, inspirational, and so forth).

But he suggested that we revisit the situation in light of sales figures after a month or two, when we may be able to make a more informed judgment about the success (or lack of same) of marketing the book as biography. Of course, how the heck we can measure those sales stats -- we'll have no control figures to stand them against for comparison -- I don't know. Yet another example of the very stringent, scientific nature of book marketing.

However that phone call strikes me as significant in several ways: first, it reminds me that the people in charge of selling books, even in the mighty chain-store empires, really are anxious to sell your book, and will take some trouble to try to do it well if you ask them to; second, the author may not always be right about marketing strategies (he may be right about biography as the best solution for this book, and I may be wrong); third, marketing questions are always more complex than you think (in bookstores in the southwest, for example, Ghost might do better on the "regional" or "local" authors shelf); and fourthly, just as I've been saying all along, the author's job most definitely does not end with the page proofs these days.

I love being right; I just wish I weren't so damn right about this. I'd love to get back to writing fiction full-time again, but so far, in the light of all the work needed to give Ghost its best chance of success against various inimical tides, that isn't an option.