With Mercutio coming out in the UK in less than two weeks, I’ve been fielding questions from eager readers about when it will be available in their country, whether it’s hardcover or paperback, whether it will have a special edition, whether there’s an audiobook, how they can buy a signed or bookplated edition, whether it will be translated, and why the plans are what they are.

I’m always happy to do my best to answer those questions and any others, so do feel free to ask me any time (you can respond to my newsletter, or find me on social media.) Communication with readers is the main reason I try to be easy to find online, why I write this newsletter, and why I try to put as much information as I can on my website. I love to talk to readers, especially when they want to read my books!

(And I love to talk about my books; my publisher shared a video from me yesterday for Shakespeare’s birth-and-deathday. If you have a blog or podcast about Shakespeare, Dante, medieval / fairy / stories, writing or reading, I’d love to be a guest.)

But when the questions are about publication plans, I always feel a bit apologetic about the facts I can share, which sometimes aren’t what readers want to hear (or what I want to tell them). In traditional publishing, authors can do very little to affect things like publication dates and special editions, and sometimes we’re nearly the last to know about those kinds of plans.

Sometimes I wonder: if even a fraction of the questions I get went to bookstores instead, would the answers change?

The main mechanism affecting Mercutio’s fortunes at this point in its launch timeline is a number I don’t yet know, something the publishing industry calls “sell-in.” This means, basically, the number of copies that retailers and distributors have ordered from the publisher. Traditional publishing (especially the Big 5, of which my publisher is one) doesn’t sell to readers, in the main — it sells to bookstores. Bookstores order according to what they’ll be able to sell, and then to some (varying) extent, this can become a self-fulfilling cycle, as customers are more likely to buy a book with 40 copies on the front table than the one with a single copy squeezed onto a back shelf.

How do bookstore buyers decide how many copies to order? Well, this is arcane and specialized knowledge, and publishers’ marketing and sales departments work very hard to affect those numbers too. But there are two questions that are usually somewhere in the mix: How well do other books like this sell? And how well do other books by this author sell?

We midlist authors have learned to fear the “death spiral”, which goes basically like this: if any of our books doesn’t do well for any reason, bookstores will order fewer copies of our next one, which will then do even worse, and then they’ll order even fewer copies of the next one, and so on until we stop getting book deals altogether. Real career paths are more complicated, but track record is a real thing in publishing and it’s the source of a lot of anxiety.

But there is at least one other source of information bookstores have: their customers. That’s why I have that voice in my head wishing more readers were asking their bookstores when Mercutio’s coming out, rather than (or in addition to) me. I love to see the interest, but I can’t do anything about it.

People often tell me how much they appreciated the Waterstones, Forbidden Planet and Goldsboro Books special editions of The Embroidered Book. You’ll notice that all three of those are the names of booksellers. They believed it was worth the risk to order a batch of special editions and to promote them, because they believed they could sell them. (And they did, and I’m so grateful to all the readers who took a chance on that book and are still spreading the word about it.)

One of the great joys of my life as an author is that I’ve gotten to know booksellers, especially here in Ottawa. They’re essential to the life of our community. This week, I had a wonderful time as the host for a launch event the bookstore Perfect Books presented with The Other Hill, for the new collection (Seasons of Glass and Iron) by my friend Amal El-Mohtar. What would we do without independent bookstores? Horrible to contemplate!

Bookstores (especially smaller and independent stores) know their customers very well. More than once, I’ve chatted with a bookstore’s staff about an upcoming or new book by another author and heard them say something like “oh, there’s a lot of interest in that one.” And I’ve heard from them that whenever they get even a couple of pre-orders of a book that wasn’t really on their radar yet, that might change the way they approach that book and how many copies they order.

So if you do have a bookstore near you, one of the best ways you can help your favourite authors is to pop into one and chat with the staff. Don’t be a pest or a proselytizer, obviously, but let them know what you’re interested in. It’ll be helpful for the stores and for the authors you chat about — and it’s very likely the staff will introduce you to something you hadn’t heard of yet that’s just your kind of thing.

Tomorrow is Canadian Independent Bookstore Day! Here in Ottawa we have a fabulous group of indie bookstores that work together to present the Ottawa Indie Bookstore Crawl, and they’ll have events and promotions on all weekend. On Sunday, April 26, I’ll be signing at the wonderful Books on Beechwood from 10 am to 11:30. If you’re in Ottawa, I’d love to see you! And I promise to answer any questions. (Sorry, I don’t know whether there will ever be a movie…)