Companies such as Doubleday and Scribner once led the way in combining bookselling and publishing. Now, a new generation of booksellers is getting in touch with its publishing side, including such booksellers-cum-publishers as Cleveland’s Guide to Kulchur, which publishes marginalized writers, and Las Vegas’s the Writer’s Block, which is about to launch a literary journal.
“Most bookstores do something else, greeting cards or a café,” said Tom Holbrook, owner of RiverRun Bookstore in New Hampshire, who launched Piscataqua Press out of the bookstore in the fall of 2012. At the time, the store had 200 books on consignment, most published through Amazon’s CreateSpace. “Many of these books looked terrible,” said Holbrook, whose goal is to make money and keep local authors from getting ripped off.