Indie Bookstore Spotlight: Downbound Books in Cincinnati, Ohio

Authors, take note: It’s important to have a good relationship with your favorite local indie bookstore. Booksellers at local bookstores are my go-to resource for book recommendations, often offering hand-sells that tell me something about the store itself, what they like, how they see me, and what I can expect upon future book browsing.

In this indie bookstore spotlight, we take a closer look at this year’s Annual Conference official bookstore, Downbound Books.

Bookstore: Downbound Books
Owner and Operator: Greg Kornbluh
Downbound Open Date: October 25, 2019
Downbound As a Book Synopsis: On a quiet corner in a loud part of a midsize midwestern town lies a tiny bookshop. It chugs along, calmly selling books outside the limelight, day after day, season after season. But then one fateful year all of the writers in all of the land come to the town for their annual gathering, and the bookshop is invited to the ball. Will it finally meet its Prints Charming?

Find them at DownboundBooks.com or on Instagram.

I grew up here in Cincinnati in a neighborhood called Mt. Auburn and went to Cincinnati Public Schools, followed by a whole tri-state tour of colleges. I eventually ended up in the Boston area, where I got my start as a bookseller before spending a decade working in scholarly publishing. In my late 30s I reached a sort of transitional point on that career path and realized that if I were ever going to make good on the bookstore daydreams I’d been fostering for years and years, that was probably the moment to try. So, I came back home to Cincinnati to feel out the idea of doing it here, and ultimately decided to give it a shot.

Wellllllll, it’s all pretty challenging. Small businesses are uphill boulder treadmill death taxes hiccups headaches heartburn, etc. etc. etc.! But if I had to pick a most challenging part for us, I guess it’s probably just getting people in the door. I’m pretty averse to attention, and the shop, too, bears that cross by extension, so it’s just not in our nature to stand up and shout in the competition for eyeballs and dollars. These days it feels like every business has to be a marketing business, like you have to put your energy into creating videos or memes or content of a nature that often has nearly nothing to do with what your core business actually is, and—gah—I just have so little interest in that. But sitting here in our cute brick box hoping enough people find us on their own isn’t really the surest way to keep the lights on either. It’s a struggle.

Connecting with so many book people from all across the region has been really lovely, and I think the most rewarding thing has been having them come to trust our taste. At our scale we can get to know our customers and get a sense of their interests, and so we can steer people toward things we think they’ll like, and it’s always a delight when they come back to tell us we got it right. But what’s even more validating is when folks we don’t even remember having helped come in and say that we gave them some recommendations some time ago and they loved them and they’re back for another round. I think most booksellers would say that there’s not a better feeling in this business than putting a book in someone’s hands and then having them come back for more.

Well first, thank you for highlighting the need for decision! I think that’s one thing that a lot of folks don’t realize about independent bookstores, the fact that we’re actively sifting through the millions and millions of books out there and making an affirmative choice to carry every single thing we have; nothing just shows up. And the different ways of making those choices are what give indies their character.

For us, it’s a mix of paying attention to certain publishers and authors that we like, prioritizing voices that aren’t on every shelf in every shop, spending time with advance copies, watching out for what other booksellers are loving, and keeping an emphasis on our strengths—the kinds of books people expect to find here. What’s especially fun for us at Downbound is that one of those expectations is the unexpected; people come to shop with us because they know they’re going to find something they’ve never heard of but that grabs them and won’t let go. Part of that stems from our commitment to stocking small, independent presses whose books don’t have a lot of marketing muscle behind them, and part of it is our openness to oddballs, the strange or unique books that have a hard time gaining space in a lot of stores simply because there’s no obvious place to put them.

Right now, in this mid-August moment I’ve been enjoying putting Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter into people’s hands. An American western that’s fully Irish, with forbidden love, class conflict, desolation, violence, indelible language, short enough to gulp? A perfect little package.

I’ll admit that part of me is resistant to the very notion of a universally enjoyable book. People come to books seeking such different things! If a book really has something for everyone then it probably also doesn’t have enough of whatever it is that a given person’s seeking. Really the only times I find myself grasping for a book that anyone could enjoy are when someone’s come looking for a gift for a person they don’t know, and—more often than not—I’m going to send them out with Ross Gay’s Book of Delights.

Well, a big part of those commitments to small presses and unusual books that I mentioned earlier is an open-mindedness that can sort of preclude the element of surprise, right? If you don’t already have an opinion of a book, liking it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. So, I guess for me the books that can surprise me are the ones that do come with certain expectations, whether because of the profile of the author, or the positioning of the book by the marketplace.

So, that being said, the most pleasant kind of surprise for me is when a book that I’d initially not had much interest in becomes such a mega-bestseller that my curiosity and even sense of duty finally outweigh my indifference, I give it a read and find it perfectly delightful. The example coming immediately to mind is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which is one of the best things I’ve read about the work of friendship and the challenges of creative collaboration. Sometimes the market’s right.