I know there are still new books coming out, both debuts and continuing series, but it seems like the market here is shrinking—or at least the market space allotted for YA. Borders are gone, Angus & Robertson are gone—even places like Collins are hard to come by. I went looking for one I knew of yesterday and found a Supré in its spot instead.
In Queensland, we still have QBD, and nationally, there’s Dymocks, but their YA sections are usually only a wall a metre to two metres wide, unless in you’re in the city. If it was 2012, I’d say sure, these stores have a good selection of books—and compared to the department stores, they still do. But I look at the book hauls many US bloggers are posting pics of, and it’s usually the first I’m seeing of the book. Are these even getting published here? And if they are, where are they?
Over the past month, I’ve been holidaying, going both to Brisbane and down to Melbourne’s CBD, checking out every bookstore, and department store with book sections that I could find. Dymocks in Melbourne’s CBD was massive, though it’s YA section wasn’t quite as good as the Brisbane one. Brisbane’s beat it by an extra row. Just about everywhere else that I went, though, was a letdown. For the life of me, I couldn’t find Anna and the French Kiss anywhere.
I don’t know why I bother going to Target or Kmart anymore. I used to love poring through their shelves, snatching up heaps of YA books at low-for-Australia prices. But now it seems like only Harlequin/Mills and Boon have any sort of presence there. It’s basically just a romance section now. The more popular titles like John Green’s back catalogue, The Hunger Games and Divergent are usually there, but I want to be able to discover new books when I’m out shopping, not just the latest craze.
Big W isn’t too bad, but you need to keep checking back regularly. Books pop up, and then a week later they’ll all be gone and you’ll never see it again. It’s weird, because there are a heap of others that seem like they’ve been sitting there since the store first opened, or at least the past couple of years. It’s why I keep checking every Big W whenever I’m at a new shopping centre. Each one has its own vault of treasures that haven’t been sent back to the publishers, just accumulating in a disorganised pile, behind the newer books on the shelves—you just have to dig through to find them. Still, if you’re after a certain book, it’s usually only pure luck if you find it.
I’d really like to be able to support our local market, but it feels like there is no supply, or at least no consistent supply, to meet the demand. It’s so much easier to just open my laptop and type in the book. Sure, it takes a couple weeks to get to me, but it’s usually cheaper and a lot less trouble than trying to track something down from store to store.
What do you think of the current offerings at Aussie bookstores? Am I just not finding the right stores or this happening to you too?
UPDATED: More pictures. And yes, the Twilight books are sitting in New Releases.
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QBD (pictured below, on the left) beats all of my local bookstores, having a wider and more complete selection when it comes to stocking each book in a series. Though, it could do with some newer titles as most have been out for quite a while.
And what our shrinking YA sections seem to have made way for:
