FINALISTS
26 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ SEPTEMBER 9, 2019
Nicole Brinkley
Floor and digital manager
Oblong Books & Music, Rhinebeck, N.Y.B
rinkley has been touting books for years: she began
her career as a teen blogger, and now—as a grown-
up—her boundless enthusiasm for books and
bringing readers to them hasn’t waned. Jennifer
Laughran, an agent at the Andrea Brown Literary
Agency, describes her as “a tireless wearer of many
hats, from event coordination to merchandising
to handselling like a magician. Books she loves are guaran-
teed to be bestsellers at the store, regardless of their level of
obscurity otherwise. She is a true evangelist for great books,
she creates dedicated fandoms seemingly from ether, and she
helps kids and teenagers especially (but grown-ups, too)
foster a lifelong love of reading.”
Brinkley wouldn’t disagree with Laughran’s assessment.
“There’s something really special about being able to hear
what people want to be reading, and what they love, and to
be able to connect them to a book that they’re really excited
about. There’s nothing more magical then helping someone
find a book that they fall in love with.”
All that enthusiasm and bookselling was not initially what
Brinkley set out to do. While attending SUNY–New Paltz,
where she earned a BA in English and public relations, she
interned in Bloomsbury’s marketing department, as well as for
literary agent Brooks Sherman. For five years she ran a YA
website, so, she says, “I kind of had my finger in all the pies.”
Upon graduation, she was looking at jobs in traditional pub-
lishing in New York City, but, she explains, “I come from a
single-parent household. I earned my way through college onscholarships, so I didn’t have the money to move to New York
City, and I didn’t have the money to commute to New York
City while I was looking, so I needed something that wouldn’t
steal my soul and where I could make money.” That something,
she decided, was a job at Oblong. And in “the most magical of
circumstances,” she was hired on a part-time basis. After only
two or three weeks, Brinkley knew that the store was where
she wanted to be and stopped looking for publishing jobs.
In her official role as floor manager for the Rhinebeck store,
she is responsible for all of its physical displays; she is also the
digital manager for both the Rhinebeck and Millerton stores,
and she manages everything that happens in the digital space.
But that doesn’t begin to describe everything she does.
She handsells across the board. She has a lot of “regular
kiddos,” as she describes them, who have learned to trust her
opinion and look to her for new recommendations. But she
also has parents and other adults who come to talk to her
specifically about recommendations, “which is lovely,” she
says. “Handselling is my favorite part of my job.” And her
life. “What I fall in love with, I aggressively handsell in all
aspects of my life, even from my personal social media. A
bookseller is never off-duty.”
A middle grade book that benefited from her magic is The
Gauntlet by Karuna Riazi, the story of a girl whose little
brother gets sucked into a board game, and she and her two
friends have to play their way to save him. “Basically, it’s
about a young Muslim girl trying to save her brother in a
Pakistani world—a Pakistani reimagining of Jumanji. But
it is also a beautifully descriptive fantasy with descriptions
of food that will make you want to have snacks nearby.”
Brinkley brought The Gauntlet to the attention of Jennifer
Quinn-Carl, the librarian at Mill Road Elementary School,
to consider for the school’s annual author event. “The amount
of time and energy they put into the yearly event is bonkers,”
Brinkley says. All of the school’s hallways are decorated
along the book’s themes, and multiple activities around the
book happen ahead of the author’s visit, resulting in hun-
dreds of children getting very excited for it.
Quinn-Carl also loved the book and invited Riazi to be
the store’s author guest. “It was just so much fun to watch
literally 200 to 300 kids get excited about this book and hear
them ask detailed questions about worldbuilding and story-
telling, and being able to connect them to a culture (for
many) that was outside of their own,” Brinkley says.
Outside of her day job, Brinkley is cochair of the New
England Children’s Book Association, which is a unit of
NEIBA. She also offers free online informational classes
for authors that help them understand the publishing
process, stay on top of it, and maximize publicity. But
what she dreams about is being “the nice Gordon Ramsey
of bookselling, where I just get to travel from bookstore to
bookstore around the world and help them.”