Guerrilla marketing: Authors behaving badly in bookstores

Few things are as thrilling for an author as seeing a stack of her very own books on a store shelf. If that shelf happens to be at floor level, however, she'll worry that the store's customers will never see her books--and she'll be tempted to scoop them up and relocate them to a spot where they will be more visible to casual browsers.

I understand the impulse. I've felt it myself. But acting on it is wrong.

My friends occasionally report having spotted my books in stores and moved them to better locations. Thinking they've done me a favor, they cheerfully announce that they put all of my books on eye-level shelves. Naturally, they first had to remove the books occupying those prime spots and stick them somewhere else. Although in one instance, a friend who seemed very pleased with herself told me that she had placed several of my books in front of books with "sleazy" covers.

I see two ethical problems with book-moving by authors and their friends: First, retailers own both the books and the display spaces. They shelve books where they think best (and often, where publishers have suggested or even contractually required). What right has anyone else to move them? Yes, it's possible that the retailers won't mind, but it's shockingly arrogant to assume that they won't--and nobody ever asks. The retailers might want or need to have the books shelved in a particular way, which means somebody will have to rearrange the books after the self-deputized helpers leave.

I mentioned two ethical problems, so here's the second: Placing a book in front of another or swapping books on a shelf is unfair to the authors and publishers of the displaced books. For every book that is "promoted" by these tactics, another book is shoved into obscurity. Anyone who tries to live by the Golden Rule must see the injustice of that. Yet it is authors who do most of the book-moving. I can't tell you how often this subject comes up when my writer friends get together at conferences or online. "I found six of your books at WalMart and moved them to the top shelf," one writer will tell another, and she will be warmly thanked for her consideration.

I have never heard any romance author deplore the practice. Everyone appears to view it as a legitimate form of book marketing. I am sorry to say that even my Christian author friends don't seem to have a problem with it. Everyone does it.

But as my mother used to say, that doesn't make it right.

I'd love to see some dialogue on this subject from the community of romance authors, but I'm not holding my breath. If anyone is aware of an article or a blog post on the ethics of interfering with the placement of books in stores, please drop a link in the Comments. And if anyone cares to copy this post to a writers' e-mail loop to spark some discussion, please go right ahead.

Are there too many romance novels being published these days?

Today at Romancing the Blog, Kassia Krozser writes that she is "terrified by the number of romance novels published each month." Yeah, I think she's indulging in a little hyperbole there; I really don't think she's that easy to frighten. But she writes:

The industry is burgeoning — new players every day. The industry is changing — new formats are ascending. The industry is morphing — new genres and sub-genres are emerging.

But are romance readers really being served? Are the books being published, sold, really the best of the best? Or, as I suspect, are we seeing an increase in quantity with a slackening of quality?

Yep, that's right: She'd like to see a limited selection of books on the shelves, and she'd like all of those books to be of high quality. She writes:

What if there were fewer books but the [reading] experience was more satisfying?

Kassia knows that I admire her and have been a faithful reader of her blog, Booksquare for several years. But every once in a while she writes something downright goofy, and here's a fine example of that. The problem with her suggestion that only "the best of the best" books should be published is that she would want to decide which books were worthy of shelf space. And since she and I have very different reading tastes, I'd worry that she would advocate trashing some of the books I consider treasures.

I happen to agree with Kassia that the romance sections of today's bookstores are mostly full of junk. But since Kassia and I--and the rest of you--will never agree on exactly which books deserve to be published and which don't, I think that broad selection is a very good thing for all of us.