Last week Gwenda linked to an article in Wild River Review by author Greg Frost on his discovery that Borders was refusing to carry his latest book, Lord Tophet. The whole piece is fascinating and rather bracing in its honesty but here's the bit that really caught my eye:

The reason Borders decided not to carry the new book is that, according to them, its predecessor didn't sell “as well as anticipated.� It sold; it just didn't sell enough for Borders. What's enough? I have absolutely no idea. Nobody else seems to, either.

Now, don’t worry. I’m not forgetting that Borders is a business. Far from it. All I’m saying is that Borders isn’t a book business. It pretends to be because it used to be. It began life as a bookstore, but it has now determined that the thing to restrict and reject in order to increase profits is…that’s right…books.

You might be inclined to shake your head and bemoan the current state of the literary world and feel badly for Frost for a moment or two but this whole thing actually demands more of your attention than that. It hit home for me especially as I just received my first negative response from an editor at a major publisher for The Map of My Dead Pilots. The reason - well here's the reason:

Colleen has some really interesting stories to tell, but I'm afraid the subject's perhaps a little too narrow to convince me that it could be a really breakout hit.

Now don't worry about me sinking into a depression over this - I've been in for the long haul from the very beginning and I know the book is unusual and will likely take a while to find a good home. But turning it down because it is "a little too narrow" and might not be a "breakout hit"? This is a book about commercial pilots in Alaska - that makes it very damn narrow, I know. But what makes a non- breakout? How can anyone know if any book is going to be a breakout? And this is how we really want to decide what to publish - on breakout status? (I know, I know - this is how it is, but don't expect me to like it.)

So the bookstore don't carry enough books to let a title be a big seller - and then refuse to carry future titles by an author because of this - and editors don't buy a book unless it guarantees high sales even though no one knows what it takes to make that guarantee. And writers wonder what they have done wrong or should have done right or somehow missed when it comes to increasing the sales of their books (or making a sale in the first place).

To say this whole this is frustrating would be an understatement.

More from Greg Frost:

When the million-copy bestseller is required every quarter, you have a business model doomed to failure — either you publish fewer titles, or fewer copies of those more complicated, subtle, and dare I say it, difficult books.

You can call this an elitist view if you like. But the simple fact is the more difficult or quiet a book is the more it asks of its reader, and the fewer readers it’s going to have. We do not train our children to think critically or about complexity any longer. We make them pass “No Child Left Behind� tests instead. What that means for publishers is, if you want to make money, publish more simple, easy, lowest-common-denominator books.

This is the part where I guess I should start hating Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts for stealing all the editors away and providing such huge sales that the rest of us, with our odd books about things like airplanes and men and impossibly high mountains, are left in the dust to ponder what might have been. But I can't hate them because at one time or another in my life I have read their books (and others like them) and enjoyed them. But I also read books by Samantha Power and Tim O'Brien and Andrea Barrett and I liked them as well. Truth be told, those are the books still on my shelf - the books I return to as Steel and Roberts have faded away. They are the books that have stayed with me and I like to think that one day my book might have the same place on the shelves of a lot of other people. How to make that happen at this point however becomes increasingly more difficult to figure out with each passing day.

It's especially tough to realize that when you finally do get a book published it could still go nowhere - just because someone at Borders, who likely never read a single one of your books in their life, could choose to ignore it. Careers are made and lost this way and it has nothing to do with good books; the irony is that it really has nothing to do with reading at all.

Mr. Frost's story is significant because it could happen to any of us and it will happen, unless we ask more of our bookstores and publishers and even - scary as it might seem - more of ourselves.

I'm sure this all ties back to the current presidential race but I'll let you follow those dots. Suffice to say, nodding your head about Alaska being close to Russia should not be how we respond to big important questions on foreign policy just like reaching for those same titles the bookstores shove in our path by the front door isn't the way to deep reading pleasure. We need to be smarter than all that, and we need to demand that everyone else around us take some time to get smarter too.

Oh - and we need to decide that smarter is a good thing to be (with the accepted caveat that a little Steel and Roberts on occasion is just fine).

Today starts another week - I'll keep you posted on the next editorial response.