TRENDS2008, the chain operated 726 stores
nationwide—and seen its stock price
plummet from $30 a share in 2006 to
just $4 a share before it was bought in
June by New York Cit y–based Elliott
Management.
But Madeline McIntosh, CEO
of Penguin Random House in the
United States, says she is heartened
that the chain will now be helmed by
Daunt, a former JP Morgan banker
who founded Daunt Books, a small
British bookstore chain, before tak-
ing over at Waterstones in 2011. “He
was an independent bookseller in the
U.K. and then became the head of
Waterstones, and I think that having
that depth of experience should give
us all a sense of optimism,” McIntosh
says.
Once pilloried for crowding out
quirky independent bookstores with
its mall-based superstores, Barnes
& Noble is now viewed by writers
and publishing industry experts as a
bulwark against Amazon, the online
behemoth that now claims more than
half of all sales of books in the United
States and has opened nearly twenty
brick-and-mortar stores in the past
four years. The survival of Barnes &
Noble is doubly important to authors
of l iter a r y novels a nd ch i ld ren’s book s,
whose success depends largely on the
k i nd of leis u rely brow si ng t hat is ha rd
to do on a screen.
Online platforms like Amazon,
where sales are largely driven by web
searches and by algorithms designed
to direct customers to books similar
to ones they’ve already bought, can
be hostile to debut fiction or creative
nonfiction, which often isn’t in any
obvious way similar to books a reader
has already purchased.
Novelist and journalist Douglas
Preston, president of the Authors
Guild, likens Amazon’s curation to
“a kind of censorship of the market”
that threatens to drown out unpopu-
lar opinions and underrepresented
voices. “You walk into a physical
bookstore, unlike Amazon, and you
see all these books together, some of
which you’re going to agree with andSEPT OCT 2019 18Small Press Points
As the founding editor of the Cincinnati Review, Nicola Mason has
a strong track record of spotting talented writers early in their careers. Under her
leadership the review published the early work of fiction writers Caitlin Horrocks and
Jamie Quatro and poets Jill Osier and Mai Der Vang. As
Mason explained to Cincinnati magazine in June, after
watching these writers and other contributors go on to
win prestigious prizes and publish books, she thought,
“We’re becoming talent scouts for everyone else; why
can’t we become talent scouts for ourselves?” So in 2017 Mason founded Acre Books
(acre-books.com), an imprint of the University of Cincinnati Press, where, along with
poetry series editor Lisa Ampleman, she publishes two poetry collections, two novels,
and two story collections each year. The press also welcomes hybrid forms. “I’ve always
felt the boundaries separating genres and disciplines to be artificial,” says Mason. “Why
shake one’s finger at innovation?” Mason also hopes to publish literary nonfiction but
hasn’t yet found a book that’s the right fit. “I find a lot of creative nonfiction has an ‘all
about me’ quality,” she says. “We want work that is grounded in self but that travels
beyond it.” In October, Acre will publish Faylita Hicks’s poetry debut, HoodWitch, which
Mason describes as “an absolute knockout full of power, pain, beauty, and magick.”
Submissions in all genres are open via the press’s website; writers should include a brief
description of the manuscript and ten sample pages. There is no reading fee.
Continued on page 20