John Green Praises Booksellers
Recalling his first author tour 10 years ago for his debut novel, Looking for Alaska, John Green insisted that everything he learned about the publishing industry he learned from independent booksellers. Booksellers, he said he quickly realized, are ‘really, really well-informed and knowledgeable,’ even though, he added, bookselling is the ‘saddest, most pessimistic business I have ever known.’ Booksellers, he explained, complain every decade that the previous decade was the golden age of YA publishing and that it has ended…’Long live your pessimism. Long live your refusal to give in to it,’ Green in conclusion. ‘Long live the great American bookstore!’ (Publishers Weekly)
