I Miss the Booksellers

Author

Alyssa Lo
November 04, 2025

As a fan of the Halloween season, it seems appropriate that I am often haunted by nostalgia in October. The month marks the anniversary of my grandma’s passing, and this year was the tenth anniversary. When I moved to New York for college, October of the fall semester was when I first experienced any type of homesickness; since then, this feeling recurs each autumn.

October is also LGBTQ History Month and I’ve been thinking about Milo Todd’s debut The Lilac People. Released in May of this year, it’s a novel following a trans man’s journey in pre- and post-WWII Germany. Alongside Sarah Aziza’s stunning debut memoir The Hollow Half, it was one of the most meaningful books I had the privilege to work on. The author knows this, and you should, too, but I haven’t actually read The Lilac People. Specifically, I cannot get past the radio transmission that opens part one of the book without tearing up. Likewise, when I read one bookseller’s review of the book, I found myself crying in an empty office.

I’ve resisted writing this for a bit since it’s inevitably me waxing nostalgic about a former workplace, but I’d argue it’s also a means to discuss labor. A large portion of my previous job revolved around planning and preparing outreach to independent booksellers to send galleys and solicit feedback for the Indie Next List. On a monthly basis, the American Bookseller Association (ABA) puts out a list of titles nominated by booksellers at ABA-affiliated bookstores. Practically, this meant creating biannual emails coordinating galley requests; bimonthly bookseller eblasts; and assembling grids of Indie Next quotes. 

None of those emails were signed with my name, but I developed a one-sided fondness for many booksellers whose names I’d see again and again in quotes they submitted. In the periodic personalized outreach I’d do from my email—not the email management platform—I’d sign off requests for quotes with, “Thank you for your time and attention.” Repeatedly, I found myself moved by the care and time booksellers gave in their reading and reviewing of books. Although many romanticize working in a bookstore, it’s still that: Work. With some exceptions, bookselling is a retail job, one that often doesn’t come with benefits. As someone who isn’t a bookseller, I can only guess that one doesn’t get into the job without a prerequisite love of reading, but a love of something does not negate the labor of it.

The previous statement is one applicable to many industries, but I will speak to what I know: Publishing. At all levels of literary arts across the U.S., a worker’s passion for books is exploited. The practice of being overworked and underpaid is endemic in publishing, but we do it because we love what we do, right? A tension more present in my previous role was that many of the authors were debuts. If I was only beholden to increasing shareholder value, I probably would’ve cared far less, but I wanted to do right by these authors and help get their books in the hands of folks who would find the reading experience meaningful.

For a variety of reasons, my relationship to my current job looks vastly different. I’m still pretty green in the industry, but unfortunately more on the side of jaded. I brought a lot, too much, of myself to my last job, so I have much more of a worksona now—I highly recommend Jodi-Ann Burey’s Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work for more on this subject. Practically, the sheer size of the list I’m supporting is so much greater than the one I was previously working on, and being in audio marketing means I’m even further away from the creation of the work. None of this is to say that I don’t care, but the mechanisms of connection aren’t as present. I no longer do author or bookseller outreach, so I don’t see the impact of the work I’m doing in the same way. 

I didn’t expect this to turn into a newsletter about the labor of the literary industry, and this certainly isn’t the first or most cogent piece on the matter. But, I’d like to end this with gratitude to all the workers who turn years of work into paper and digital objects for readers to encounter; the money folks who ensure authors and workers alike get paid; and everyone involved in getting (audio)books into the hands of readers. To quote from the section of Patrick Nathan’s acknowledgements addressed to publishing workers in The Future Was Color: “Authors, readers, and the entire publishing industry couldn’t exist without you, and you all deserve a union and a lot more money.”

For your consideration