The Business of Bookselling

A podcast about bookselling for book sellers by book people.

Episode 203: Working with Publishers: Where to Find Titles + How to Order Them

Intro: So far this season, we’ve discussed how to open publisher accounts for ordering directly and the terms and conditions that come with that, and I laid out a typical yearly cycle for placing orders, plus three things you can do to ensure you’re not overwhelming your cashflow by going order crazy – as much as we may want to order all our favorite backlist books and the exciting new frontlist titles coming out soon. 

You may now think you’re ready to start placing orders, and if that’s all you want to know about, I’d skip ahead to the next episode. 

In this episode, I’m going to be covering two more big buying questions that we haven’t discussed yet: 

  1. “How do I find out about upcoming titles?” and 
  2. “How do I decide what to order?”

Welcome to the Business of Bookselling!

Transcript (there may be slight differences between the text posted here and the audio recording):

Maybe it’s just because I’ve always had the pleasure of being a reader – no really, family lore goes that I taught myself how to read at around the age of three because my parents, both of whom worked, couldn’t spend enough time reading to me during the day and would often fall asleep while reading to me at bedtime (I totally get that now, by the way, Mom & Dad.), but apparently I found this so frustrating that I solved the problem by simply teaching myself to read. Considering the fact that we were living in Japan at the time and I was attending Japanese school, but my parents would read to me in English at home, this meant that by the age of five, I spoke and read Japanese but could only read English and barely spoke it, and so when I did start learning English when we moved to the States, I mostly spoke college professor/classic British literature English pronounced in very unique ways and heavily accented, so you can imagine how much fun public grade school in America taking ESL classes in the 90s was for me. Especially considering the bowl cut I had at the time. But I digress.

My point it is, I’ve always been a reader. And I’ve always known my own mind, formed opinions quickly, and rarely have any trouble making decisions. And so in all honesty, the first time I was asked these questions – how do I find out about upcoming titles, and how do I decide what to order – I was really thrown. I thought, if you didn’t know where to find out about books and you didn’t know what books you wanted to order, what were you doing opening an independent bookstore? 

But then I checked that judgy-as-fuck opinion and realized that a) there are many many reasons for people to open community spaces that carry books, and that may not be because they have all the answers to all the details involved, and b) not everyone has been immersed in the book world for what feels like their entire lives, even if they love reading at this particular moment in their lives so much that they want to share it with other people by opening a bookstore. 

Some people didn’t spend lunch breaks in the library in high school and close down the library at 2 am for fun in college. Some people also really struggle to make concrete decisions by their very nature. And some people are very sensitive to wanting to serve their communities and agonize about having the right mix of stories represented on their shelves. Some bookstores are generalist bookstores that want to have a little something for everyone who walks through their doors, and some bookstores have a niche and an “if you build it, they will come” mentality, hoping their audience of readers finds them. 

In that second case scenario, where people are trying to serve specific communities and order certain types of books – whether that’s genre or children’s-only bookstores, or offering books written by queer authors and featuring only queer characters, or written by BIPOC authors and featuring only BIPOC characters, or whether that’s trying to find books in the US that are written in languages other than American English, or whether that’s a vegan bookstores – yes I know of one that exists, they’re called The Locals’ Bookshop and are based in the northeast, and I’m not going to lie, I don’t know all the ins and outs of their business model, but I imagine that there are some specifics like how a book is made in addition to the content of the book that they are going to concern themselves with – all of these types of stores are doing an extra level of curation on their books that generalist bookstores are not doing to the same extent. 

So I’m being vulnerable here and admitting to you all that I was 100% wrong in my thinking the first time I was asked that question. I’m also rarely that judgemental and so my very strong judgment took me by surprise. I had to take a moment to check myself and really think about how to answer. That gave me such an unexpected opportunity to reflect on exactly where we get information about books, and that led to a reflection on what books and authors we’re not hearing about. And I realized, thanks to these very basic and honest questions people have the courage to ask when they’re starting out in this business, that it led me to a greater understanding of the gatekeeping that happens in traditional publishing, a greater awareness of the stories we don’t have widespread access to, and it made me start to go search those out more so that I could actually be more thoughtful about what books I was choosing to read and sell. And this entire experience made me realize that there are two very distinct ways of buying books as a bookseller to resell to their customers. 

One isn’t better than the other, and they can often work hand-in-hand together, but there’s the generalist, more mainstream way I already mentioned, where a store tries to have a little bit of everything or at the very least a little something to offer everyone who visits their store, and there’s the extensively curated, focusing on a specific genre or serving a specific population way.

If you are crunched for time and simply want to start discovering books available for you to sell, open up a web browser, type in Edelweiss+ – that’s literally e-d-e-l-w-e-i-s-s-dot-or-period-p-l-u-s – make a free account, and start exploring this incredibly helpful but admittedly somewhere overwhelming and possibly intimidating book platform that lists publisher catalogs, frontlist and backlist titles, now has general reader communities that create community-sourced booklists for specific topics and genres, and all sorts of other helpful information and resources in a one-stop-shop. 

Edelweiss took the place of physical catalogs for booksellers and librarians about 15/16 years ago. It first appeared a little earlier, but more widespread adoption by publishers and booksellers really started taking place around 2010. When I first started out as a buyer in this industry, pre-2010, my favorite way to prepare for rep appointments would be to take a stack of catalogs and a box of sharpies to a wine and cheese bar or a wine and coffee shop (you may be sensing  a theme) and sit with a glass of wine and some snacks and spend a very pleasant and long evening reviewing catalogs. I would put the quantity of each title I wanted to order next to each listed book, whether I wanted that book for an event or book club or other type of program, the point-of-sale system code that corresponded to the section I wanted to shelve it in (and I did have around 300 of those memorized at one point), and any other notes I needed to make about it, such as local author, or a certain type of representation, or if I wanted it for a holiday or other type of display inclusion I wanted to make sure to flag. 

If I was buying in a larger store, I would then leave the catalogs out for other staff members to look through so that they could add post-it notes of what they were interested in, and then I would go through all of that in 2-to-6 hour appointments per publisher with my publisher reps. Once I had had that appointment, I would then manually add the notes and system codes into the spreadsheet the rep would send me confirming the quantity of books I’d actually ordered, and that whole thing would be uploaded into our point-of-sale inventory management system. 

While I appreciate that Edelweiss has definitely saved time and saved trees – we no longer have all those physically printed catalogs anymore – both of which are great industry updates, I’m not going to lie – I miss the analog catalog method as I simply spend too much time on a screen these days. You can, of course, take your tablet or phone to a wine bar or coffee shop and have a similar experience, but I do warn you that Edelweiss isn’t the most mobile-friendly platform I’ve ever worked with, and also there’s just a different level of color-coding satisfaction that I got from using different colored sharpies and post-it notes that I just don’t get with the online platform these days. BUT those caveats aside, Edelweiss is currently the best, single-location tool for learning about books and creating orders, if you take the time to learn it, so go ahead and get started if that’s all you’re looking for.

And now, if you want to dive deeper into how to find out about and how to choose the right books for your store, keep listening.

First, let me contradict myself by acknowledging that all bookstores, to some extent, do curate the books on their shelves. That’s just simple logic. If you’re a city block size space like Powell’s in Oregon you’re going to have a lot more room for a wide breadth and depth of books than a 180 square foot microstore that simply does not have the room to have on their shelves. And even Powell’s has buyers who curate their selection because we have so many new books from so many publishers coming out every year, and we have backlist books that we’ll want to keep on our shelves year-round, and we’ll have seasonal titles we need to order in for the appropriate holidays and seasonal displays every year. We have book club titles, special program titles, author event books, etc. that we need to order in, and people always want some obscure book from 20 years ago that’s probably out of print but we’ll try to find it for them anyway. Those are the usual things buyers do regardless of what size store you have. But what I mean by mainstream ordering is that there are certain books, thanks to marketing budgets at publishers, that are going to be represented in the general zeitgeist of books.

Books are everywhere these days and that’s honestly wonderful to see! I’m old enough that the two national/celebrity-esque book clubs I remember from my early bookselling days are Oprah’s and Book of the Month. We didn’t have Reese’s and Jenna’s and Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert (RIP to his show) and magazines like Cosmo all highlighting and supporting books. Books weren’t being turned into movies nearly as often, and more mainstream platforms like Wattpad didn’t exist – only LiveJournal, the blogosphere, and fanfic sites, for the average human who thought they had something to say and wanted to share that something with other people who wanted to read it were around when I started selling.

All of this is to say that even in a time when up to 27% of adult Americans read zero books a year and the majority of adult Americans read between 4-to-12 books a year, according to polls by Gallup and Pew Research Center, and despite the very real book bannings and censorship that is happening right now (in 2026 when this is being recorded) books are experiencing a renaissance in popular culture, especially with the rise of the open romance reader, and with the shows to match! As an OG romance reader myself, I can tell you we’re now publishing romance novel content into mainstream traditional publishing that is hitting New York Times bestseller lists that I used to read behind a paywall in the early 2000s. If you know, you know. 😉

Where I’m going with all of this is that while the type of books – more genre fiction – and representation in books – more queer and BIPOC authors and disabled authors and content – has definitely changed and increased – definitely for the better! – there are still lists of books in various ways that are part of the book establishment, and those are the best places to start for considering what books to bring into your shop, simply because you know readers are going to be asking for them!

On a week-by-week basis, national and regional bestseller lists exist to let you and everyone else know what the general reader is buying these days. The New York Times and USA Today are the major national lists, currently, that are supposed to represent all reported books sold across almost all sales channels. The New York Times has a special secret algorithm they use to make their list, while the USA Today list is supposed to be a straight by-the-numbers list reporting. Publishers Weekly also publishes national bestseller lists, and independent bookstores have their own bestseller lists, too, put together by the ABA. The ABA list is made also of a special secret algorithm that weighs different stores in different regions, well, differently, and they also include Bookshop.org sales as one additional number that they add to their algorithm to spit out the bestseller list nationally. They also report weekly regional bestseller lists, and what’s cool about the LA Times bestseller list is that it’s compiled in conjunction with CALIBA, the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, showing just how important indie bookstores’ sales really can be! 

The ABA bestseller lists are made up of ABA member stores self-reporting their sales to the ABA, which is why it’s so important that all member stores do this – if we want that list to be accurate, it’s on us as independent bookstores to report our sales. The ABA does report sales as an aggregate number to the New York Times, but many independent bookstores report their sales to them directly; some independent bookstores also report their sales directly to USA Today, and I believe the ABA may also report aggregate indie sales to USA Today now as well, but that’s changed over the years, so I would double-check that if it’s important to you for some reason. I’ll talk more about why reporting is different and how that impacts a store’s working relationship with publishers at another time, but for now, just know that it’s incredibly important, and in my personal opinion, I consider that one of our business responsibilities. But back to where to find out about books. 

The Wall Street Journal used to have a book bestseller list, believe it or not, but that ended a few years ago; they do, however, still post book reviews in their newspaper and online, and so, of course, do the New York Times with their and USA Today. Some stores do displays that showcase different bestseller lists every week; some stores do displays for books that have received starred or featured reviews in various publications. Book reviews may seem like a dime-a-dozen with every Storygraph and bookstagram/TikToker reviewer out there, but there are some industry publication tastemakers whose reviews are given greater weight in the book community. The big publications I already mentioned top the list, of course, along book industry-facing publications like Publishers Weekly and ShelfAwareness, consumer-facing publications like the LA Review of Books and the Sunday Times Culture Section, but there’s also NPR Book Reviews (NPR also has a yearly Books We Love round-up of, like 350 or more titles during the holiday season every year), the New York Review of Books (which is not the same as book reviews from the New York Times), The New Yorker and The Atlantic, Library Journal and School Library Journal, Kirkus Book Reviews, Booklist, the Horn Book Magazine, Foreword Reviews, and, most important for indie booksellers, there’s our very own industry Indie Next List!

The Indie Next List comes out monthly for adult recommendations and bi-monthly for kids recommendations. They used to have a seasonal book club recommendation list, but that’s stopping in 2026, and they also have a holiday season gift guide. These lists are curated, nominated lists of newly-releasing – so frontlist – titles that have been selected by independent booksellers, covering all genres for adults and picture books through YA for kids. Many stores have an Indie Next List showcase shelf, often right near the staff picks.

In addition to bestseller lists and book reviews – and look, nothing I said earlier was entirely comprehensive, and I hope most of these are still around when you listen to this episode, but you know how things are going in 2026 – but these can be incredibly overwhelming, so I’m giving a taste of where you can go to start finding out about these things – and of course the celebrity book clubs, so many pop-culture sites and publications like People Magazine and Cosmo are increasing their book review sections, so if you’re a pop culture fiend, there are books being recommended to you through those sources.

In addition to all of that, there are also the book award lists. There are, roughly, a trillion book awards out there. Some come, some go. And some are more important than others. But there’s definitely a list of pretty big ones that readers who care about such things pay attention to every year, such as the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, the National Book Awards, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for general categories; the Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards, Edgar Awards, Bram Stoker Awards, and Lambda Literary Awards for genre and queer works. And there are all kinds of specialty prizes for fiction, nonfiction, and/or poetry for adult works: 

For children’s awards, the American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards are the primary awards people pay attention to, such as the Newbery for writing, the Caldecott for illustrations, the Coretta Scott King celebrating African American creators, the Printz for YA, the Pura Belpre Award celebrating Latine creators, the Schneider Award for disability representation, the Stonewall Book Award for queer representation, and the Sydney Taylor Book Award for Jewish representation (and many many more).

  • Stonewall Book Award: Children’s and Young Adult literature of exceptional merit relating to the LGBTQIA+ experience.
  • Sydney Taylor Book Award: Outstanding books for children and teens that portray the Jewish experience.

Bestseller lists, reviews in newspapers, magazines, and on websites, book award lists, and celebrity book awards – or celebrity favorite lists, such as former President Barack Obama’s yearly favorite reads – are the top suggestions for where to get started for finding out about books that the average reader may be looking for from your bookstore. 

Before I move on, I also want to give major props to the teachers, librarians, other booksellers, nonprofit organizations, and other individuals out there who provide lists of topic-specific recommended titles for all kinds that are diverse, global, inclusive, and representative. Check out the organization We Need Diverse Books, the podcast Minorities in Publishing, the organization and community A Mighty Girl, the organization and community Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, and Reading Rainbow to name a few, and don’t be afraid to check out your fellow indie booksellers’ themed lists on Bookshop.org, and find social media content creators whose book lists you trust. There is no shame in making use of booklists other people have already put together! Work smarter, not harder.

Now, especially for those of you that are looking for more niche or hyper specific types of books, this is where working with publishers is incredibly important! A publisher rep’s job is to sell you as many of their publishers’ books as possible, of course, but a good publisher rep’s job is to tell you as many books as possible that work for your store. This means it’s up to you to tell your publisher rep what you’re looking for. Your publisher rep should be able to provide you with a list of backlist titles from their publisher that fit your niche; they should also be able to point out the books on each season’s frontlist that work best for your store. Also, if you’re opening a store that has a specific focus, whether that’s a type of identity representation or genre, I have to assume that you’re reading some of those types of books yourself, so take a look at the publisher of those books and go to their website and start poking around. OR – this is where you can now go to Edelweiss yourself and start taking a look at publisher catalogs. 

Most publishers on Edelweiss have more than just one catalog listed. They usually have the upcoming season, current season, and perhaps the last season or two, but they also usually have themed catalogs that, for instance, have all the works in translation or all Spanish language titles or all titles by Black creators, along with title lists for specific holidays, including Chanukah and Ramadan – and if they don’t, ask your rep for them!

While the major publishers are going to be the easiest ones for a lot of people to start with, if you’re looking for a more intensely curated selection and to have an increased representation of books, take a look at the publishers that are part of the Independent Publishers Caucus. This is a group of small and independent presses that are often publishing genre, identity representative, and more politically-minded books. Just remember, some of these presses don’t do their own fulfillment and distribution, so there are is a chance that some of those bigger presses, like Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and HarperCollins, will distribute the titles of these smaller and independent presses, so make sure to take a look at the distribution client catalogs on Edelweiss. Also take a look at the list of publishers distributed by Consortium, when searching for books that are more representative, and don’t forget to look at your state or region’s historical presses as well, depending on what type of niche representation you’re going for.

A quick aside here on what could be a much longer conversation at some point – newer booksellers often wonder how they could possibly order in and recommend books to their customers that they haven’t read, and at some point, I’ll probably do an episode on handselling basics – handselling being the art of recommending specific titles to specific customers, or literally selling books by putting them into customer hands with a personalized recommendation. But since that’s not what this episode is about, I will give you a little bit of advice and then one resource. The advice is this – let it go. My apologies if you now have the song from “Frozen” stuck in your head, but there is absolutely no way that you’re going to have time to read everything you sell. You’ll start to develop a feel, an instinct, for what authors sell well in your store, what imprints sell well in your store, what genres or plot themes sell well in your store, but that does all take time. You’ll also start to perfect your own art of handselling, whether that’s quickly scanning the back of the book, or absorbing a recommendation from a co-worker, or seeing that a different favorite author has recommended that particular book and so you can make that connection for the reader. That said, one of my biggest pet peeves is when a customer says, “I’m looking for a birthday present,” and the first follow-up question is, “Is it for a boy or a girl?” The follow up questions should never be about the child’s gender. They should be about interests and reading level! “How old is the child going to be? What does the child like to do for fun? Do you know any other books the child has been reading lately? Do you know if they have a favorite bedtime book? Do they play a sport or an instrument; what are their hobbies; do you know what grade they’re in?” These are all questions you can ask even if someone starts off by saying, “I’m looking for a book for an 8-year-old boy.” I did say this wasn’t an episode about handselling, but I couldn’t help myself there. 

Anyway, while you’re developing that instinct for buying and perfecting the art of handselling, in the meantime, ask your publisher rep for their Edelweiss catalog mark-ups. Mark-ups are basically the personalized, editorialized version of the frontlist catalog for that season that is full of the rep’s own notes about what makes a title special (or not special) and why you should (or shouldn’t) pay attention to it; those are going to be key for making those buying decisions and they often provide nuggets of background and behind-the-scenes information that are handselling gold. You’re going to read the book description, read the catalog mark-up notes, and go with your gut. If your gut is occasionally wrong, that’s a learning moment for next time. While catalog mark-ups are certainly a resource, they’re not the resource I meant earlier.

The resource I want to recommend to you now is for all those booksellers thinking, “I don’t know enough about children’s books. How do I know if I’m bringing in the right books or recommending age-appropriate reading material to my customers?” First, I want to say that at the end of the day, it is up to the child and the parent or guardian of that child to make a decision about what they’re reading. That’s not on you. So while it’s important to have books labeled by section, such as beginning readers, early chapter books, middle grade, and young adult, there’s no need to gatekeep, police, or otherwise censor what a customer of any age has picked up off your shelf. IF a customer comes to you with a question about content or age-appropriate reading level and you don’t know the answer off-hand, the resource I wanted to recommend is called Common Sense Media. This is a nonprofit organization that maintains a website that provides ratings and reviews of media of all kinds geared toward children and families. If you want to know if a book has violent or overt sexual content, swear words, etc., this is a good place to go for that information. 

If I haven’t mentioned this enough, I completely understand how overwhelming this all sounds, and to be honest, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a very real chance that by giving you all of this information, I’ve made decision paralysis worse and not better. I’m going to say something else now that I promise is meant to be encouraging, despite how it might sound at first – it’s really important to remember that your store IS a business and it is in competition with not only other independent bookstores but also all the other retail locations both physically open and online who are selling books to the general consumer. So with that in mind, what’s setting your business apart? 

There’s no wrong answer here, by the way. For some, it may be having shelves that display all the titles reviewed in the establishment review sources such as the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, LA Times, etc. For some, it may be the exact opposite and displaying books that will rarely or never appear in such publications. But owning a bookstore and buying for your bookstore is a constant conversation between the books you want to sell and the books your customers are looking for. It’s something that’s constantly evolving, and you can either build the type of community that engages with you while looking for what you’re offering or you can listen to what your community is asking for and bring in more of their requests. Or both, of course, but the point is, because this is your bookstore, start from a place of what you want to read. Expand upon that by deciding which are your trusted sources for book suggestions that you are going to, well, trust, when adding books to your inventory. Add to that your favorite publishers and look through their frontlist and old backlist catalogs to choose books that fit the mission of your store. Incorporate recommendations and suggestions from your customers. And over time, you’re going to discover newly formed and new-to-you resources for book discovery that will impact your book buying habits. Underlying all of that is the mission of your bookstore and trusting yourself to make book buying decisions based on your own expertise. I can’t wait to hear what inspiring books you’re going to order for your store.

If you have any questions about resources or something I discussed in this episode or something you’d like me to explore in another episode, you can send me an email at hello@businessofbookselling.com. Happy bookselling!

The Business of Bookselling with BrocheAroe

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