Like many booksellers, Kim Sutton, director of marketing for Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., is cautiously optimistic about sales in 2017. “We look forward to the strong list of titles to be published in the first quarter,” she said.
But one late addition to the Threshold Editions list, the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, is giving some indies pause. The imprint will be publishing Milo Yiannopoulos’s Dangerous on March 14. The editor at Breitbart and far-right pundit, who has been permanently banned from Twitter, received a $250,000 advance, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Although the book has quickly moved up the ranks at Amazon, where it’s firmly entrenched in the top 100, most independents are planning to special order the title. “We’ll get it for anybody who wants it,” said Mara Panich-Crouch, bookseller at Fact and Fiction in Missoula, Mont.
Even booksellers embedded in Trump country, where Bill O’Reilly’s books are particularly strong, are planning to carry Dangerous as a special-order item only. That’s the case for Caroline Chesser, owner of Bayou Book Co. in Niceville, Fla. “I would be shooting myself in the foot by staging some kind of protest,” she said, and special order seems like a compromise.
One exception is Greg Danz, co-owner of Zandbroz Variety in Fargo, N.Dak. “We will probably carry it,” he said. “If people will buy it, we will sell it to them.”
