Bookshop Expands Into Publishing

JONATHAN VATNER

Last fall, Lydia Davis’s agent, Denise Shannon, approached Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of the online bookseller Bookshop, with a question: Would any publisher be willing and able to exclude Amazon from its distribution channels? Davis opposes the mega-retailer and has not purchased anything on Amazon in many years. “It seemed completely unreasonable that I was still allowing them to sell my own books,” Davis wrote in a subsequent message to Hunter. Every press Shannon had approached with the same question—including Davis’s longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux—told her it was impossible to avoid Amazon because it is the industry’s largest retail channel, by some estimates commanding more than half of U.S. book sales. Hunter, an experienced publisher who oversaw the independent press Catapult until last year, took Shannon’s query…

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Poets & Writers (Digital) - 1 Issue, September/October 2023

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