When Bookazine built a mezzanine in its warehouse earlier this year, it was with an eye to expanding its title base by 20,000 titles and going deeper into large publishers’ backlist and small press titles. After testing a program to promote small presses earlier this fall at three regional conferences—New England Independent Booksellers Association, the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, and the Southern Booksellers Alliance—the Bayonne, N.J.-based wholesaler is rolling out its Eclectic & Electric program.
Patterned after its other niche publishing programs like Popazine, which promotes pop culture titles and graphic novels, Eclectic & Electric is meant to showcase small press titles with strong writing and packaging that sometimes fly under the radar. “The response was really overwhelming,” said sales manager Ron Rice, who raffled a basket of small press titles at each of the shows. In fact the basket itself was so popular that several booksellers asked if they could buy them to sell in their stores alongside individual small press titles.
Among the books and publishers that Eclectic & Electric has singled out to date are: Emergency Press’s American Junkie by Tom Hansen, Open Letter Books’s translation of Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor from Gibraltar by Barbara Bray, and Two Dollar Radio’s The People Who Watch Her Pass By by Scott Bradford. In addition to alerting booksellers about their literary finds, Bookazine also facilitates getting reading copies and point-of-purchase materials into booksellers’ hands.
