Flame wars.

Tuesday is new release day in the book world.

And yesterday was a doozy. 

There were at least four highly anticipated books coming out: In the kids world, the graphic novel adaptation of the monster series hit Keeper of the Lost Cities would be exciting in any normal week. (I bought three copies myself!)

Then you had Naomi Alderman, who wrote the national best seller turned Netflix show “The Power” FINALLY publishing her second book, "The Future." 

On top of that, you had the Barbra Streisand Memoir which was ten years in the making. 

AND THEN, you had “Iron Flame," which easily overshadowed all of them, combined.

“Iron Flame” is the much rushed out sequel to the gargantuan hit of the summer that broke social media: “Fourth Wing.”

“Fourth Wing” is a fantasy novel involving grown up girls and sh*tty moms and dragons and it's badass and fierce and has just enough romance, and it had sprayed edges that had dragons in them and it BROKE PUBLISHING MOMENTARILY last summer. 

Copies of “Fourth Wing” were going for more than $100 on eBay at one point. I was reading it (without sprayed edges) to try to understand, and I gave away multiple copies because people kept coming up to me and asking how I got one. That's never happened to me before as a bookseller or a reader.

So let’s talk about the release of “Iron Flame” because this is the sausage of publishing and bookselling and pricing and it’s fascinating. 

So, Macmillan is publishing it some six months earlier than planned. And we saw why book cycles take as long as they take because A LOT broke. 

There were allotments of sprayed edges for indie bookstores only. 

We actually bought ours from Ingram, a third party, because we have had a lot of issues with Macmillan. Our second highest selling book to date is a Macmillan book and two of our most popular authors are Macmillan authors. We sell more copies of some Macmillan titles than any other bookstore in America. 

And we have constant problems with them. (This is not normal.)

So we aren’t ordering directly with them at the moment, to make a point. 

Because we were early with Ingram, and lucky maybe, we got all the "Iron Flames" we wanted. There was supposed to be a lottery, but we got what we asked for so maybe we won?

MEANTIME, Macmillian monstrously screwed up the orders with a lot of bookstores. Many indie bookstores had planned midnight release parties with no books in hand. 

This is a book– a physical book– that was very important to fans to have DAY OF. 

This is disastrous for indie book sellers. 

Meantime, Target offers buy one get one on "Iron Flame" and Fourth Wing’s re-issue. 

They were sold out before noon, at many Targets (including the ones where we live because we were curious and went and looked!). 

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Ok, so let’s examine alllllll that. 

There's a Bloomberg hot take that this is just the fast fashion'ing of books. The article critiques the author for not understanding Gaelic culture, and sure, that's a conversation we can have.

But the click-bait headline doesn't hold up to basic logic. This isn't a book written by algorithm. She did write a spell-bindingly brilliant novel that spoke to people. There is nothing fast fashion about that. As an author, I can assure you at times it felt laborious to her.

The critique is likely more than a bit gendered based on who powers hits like these, and just shows more than anything that Bloomberg doesn't understand what is happening right now in publishing, social media, or youth culture.

Look, I think sprayed edges are kinda stupid. We joked about if we should spray paint the edges of Adam Grant's new book just to give my beloved business book section some TikTok gloss. But young people are clamoring to buy a book by the THOUSANDS in an era in which books are being banned. Trends like these are driving print book sales to new heights at the moment. That is not bad, y'all.

As for us, we got a very good allocation of copies for an individual bookstore, most of which were sold before publication day, but we still have a few. 

We could have sold out by noon, if we discounted. 

That might have made us feel cool, but we thought about: Who would that have served? 

Not the readers. Many of the people raiding Targets were buying in bulk to put the copies on eBay hoping the same thing happened as last time. Meantime, there are thousands, maybe millions of readers, who will not get this book on day one, when it matters because it will be ALL OVER TikTok and other social channels. 

The currency of this book day one, is huge for these fans. (I drove one out to Palm Desert, because a customer had a migraine and couldn’t come in the store.) 

But also, it wouldn’t have served us. WE WILL 1000% sell every copy we can get our hands on. (We almost have in a little more than 24 hours since it went up, largely because of pre-sales.) And we will do so at higher margins, with happier customers because we didn’t discount. 

And that also serves the author and publisher. Because the books are getting in the hands of the people who want to read, BookTok, Instagram, recommend and obsess over it, not eBay scalpers. 

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Here’s what I find FASCINATING about bookselling right now, in an age where physical books have huge and misunderstood (Hey, Bloomberg!) importance to fans. 

Discounting is a different game than it was. 

Deep discounting on a limited edition like this is a momentary race to the bottom that only serves big box retailers, because they know you’ll buy other stuff while you are in and books aren’t what they care about. 

But you have to think of the time and place when it makes sense: For you, for customers and the authors and publishers. There's a great game here for indie publishers, to use our advantages against those bigger players.

For instance, if you do a bulk buy, we absolutely discount it and we also give you white glove service Amazon can’t. We just had a 3,000 book buy this morning that we did at a steeper discount than anyone else, in part, because it’s all going to one place, and we can drop ship it. Any profit we make is profit for very little work. 

That helps the author because an individual conference or buyer can afford to get more copies. (And we are a NYT reporting physical bookstore, although even for us, bulk sales are counted differently to keep everyone honest.) That helps the publisher because there is a low priced, white glove service company they can call on. (Publishers recommend us all the time.) That also helps us because the more books we buy, the slightly better rates we can get and the more juice we get with publishers. 

It helps everyone. 

But in the case of a bespoke, for the fans item, like this book, deep discounting hurts more people than it helps. 

You know who gets the variability of discounting better than anyone, although they have different motives than we do? Amazon.

Here’s the tea: Amazon doesn’t really discount that much anymore, except on new releases. Booksellers have 50% margins, on average. That can depend on returnable vs unreturnable and other factors but not by a lot. Amazon is almost never selling anything to a point that neither they nor we would make money. And most books are not discounted. Amazon doesn’t do much of what Target did with this book anymore.

My Name is Barbra is a dramatic one: Down from a whopping $47 to $31

Iron Flame from $29 to $19.

The Future is from $28 to $20.

On backlist books, the discounts are a dollar or so if at all. Typically Amazon leads with Kindle as their first price, because it's where they have the most advantage and can "discount" against a hardcover the most.

Indie booksellers rage against Amazon and for good reason, I get it. But the truth is, it’s actually not hard to price match Amazon anymore, at least for us, and granted we are blessed with a market that LOVES BOOKS, and we do about double the revenue per square foot of an average bookstore so we can afford to play with margin. 

The hard one to match this time around, would have been Target, because Target is trying to compete with Amazon and Walmart and just get people in the store. It was effectively a two hour sugar high that mostly got people doing their regular shopping at Target, but mostly benefited eBay resellers. 

It was tempting to feel like success was a two hour sell out. But we decided to play a different game. We didn’t discount at all. Instead, we told people we had it and pushed out our text number for buying Iron Flame on social. It was all unpaid, we just told people they could text IRON to 1-877-822-1779. No shopping carts, no shipping costs, no BS. You’d get it day of. 

With a few days of organic social media, we mostly sold out at full price, to people all over the US who had never bought from us before. In fact, a few people tracked down our number and called because they were worried that the whole transaction had been so easy. 

On publication day, we were in dozens of people’s Instagram and TikTok stories as they sat at home, opening up their read, while others went to Target and came back empty handed. 

And on the morning of day two? Everyone was sold out, and we still had some. They weren't discounted, but they weren't $100 on eBay either. Double win.

There’s always a short game and a long game in bookselling. Sometimes you discount to help your short game, sometimes you hand deliver an Iron Flame to someone with a migraine to help your long game. 

The game will have different advantages based on what the retailer needs, and as I said, we are in a highly advantageous market.

But as we expand our digital operations globally, we are finding there are all those startup advantages to being the smaller, scrappier player who aims to delight the fan, not the eBay scalper who might also buy a hammer or some shampoo from you if you give away the book.