Saving The Non-Amazon

An interview with Andy Hunter, founder of Bookshop.org, book lover, and literary revolutionary.

To be a changemaker, it could be argued that you also need to be an outsider—someone who values what exists beyond mainstream culture. But not all outsiders have the drive to effect change. Andy Hunter, however, has managed to pull it off— multiple times.

A self-proclaimed awkward kid who evolved to embrace radical ideas and deviations from the norm, Hunter seems to have the Midas touch when it comes to revolutionizing literary culture. From spearheading counterculture magazines and industry-first online literary communities, to launching the only web retailer ever to have the mettle to challenge Amazon’s domination of online book sales, Hunter has set about creating innovative spaces to protect and preserve what he loves: the world of books.

If you’ve been even vaguely plugged into the book world during the past twelve months, you’ve likely heard of Bookshop.org—an online retailer that oxymoronically does not exist for profit; rather, it provides an alternative to Amazon for readers buying online, and passes on any profit to independent bookstores. The site has massively overshot its original sales targets, and has to date raised $13.5 million for local, independent bookstores—all because Andy Hunter had an idea that he hoped would help his beloved literary landscape.

As a kid, Hunter was firmly on the bookish side of the schoolyard divide. Coveting the paperbacks on the Scholastic catalog and gulping down library books, he read anything he could get his hands on.

“When I was eight years old, it was Judy Blume, The Great Brain, The Hardy Boys, Narnia… not all of the books were good—I just read everything,” Hunter says. A voracious reader who would get through a book a day, Hunter was always on the lookout for stuff to read, but didn’t get much literary direction at home.

When he was eleven years old, Hunter’s mother suffered what he calls a “psychic break,” and was in and out of hospitals. “She wasn’t really present in a way that would have encouraged me to read books,” Hunter says. “It was all pretty much self-guided.”

As a socially awkward kid dealing with a difficult home situation, Hunter says, books gave him freedom. “I just needed something to do, and I found myself connecting more with books and animals than with other human beings for a long time— probably until I was fourteen or fifteen.”

During that period, Hunter immersed himself in novels, moving from the early adolescent books like the works of Blume and contemporaries to more adult fare. “The first grown-up book that I read—or it was supposedly a grown-up book—was Richard Adams’ Watership Down,” he says. “That was a huge book for me. I carried it around everywhere when I was eleven. It was a gateway into books like Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, which really cemented me as a serious reader.”

Not surprisingly, it was also books that nudged Hunter toward the radical concepts that would shape his evolution—but that was kind of by accident.

“I went to Maine with my family when I was sixteen, and I didn’t bring any books,” he says. “We stayed in a cabin that had been owned by some ’60s radicals, so it was filled with ’60s radical books—like The Strawberry Statement, which is about student activism and Columbia University; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; books by people like Dick Gregory and Angie Bowie; The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, which was a really big feminist bestseller back in the ’70s. It was all subversive and countercultural. All that stuff just blew my mind, and really changed the way I thought about things. Reading Malcolm X radicalized me as much as a suburban white kid could be radicalized. It changed the way I thought about race in America. The Women’s Room changed the way I thought about feminist issues, too.

“When I think back on my evolution as a human being, and my understanding of the world and my place in it, I wouldn’t have sought out those books on my own. I was really lucky that there was nothing else to read, because nobody was telling me to read those kinds of books when I was sixteen. It really changed my outlook. I went from reading that to reading Nietzsche and the existentialists.”

Helped by his new perspective, Hunter began to come out of his shell in his late teens, identifying most with peers who were on the periphery of mainstream culture. In college, in Massachusetts, he befriended musicians and filmmakers, and would drink, go out, and have a good time. His inner circle wasn’t literary, which sometimes felt strange.

“I wasn’t really part of a community of writers, and sometimes I pined for it, or I thought, ‘What’s wrong with me that in my inner self I’m centered around books, but my social life and the people I know [are] all creative people, but they’re making films or they’re making music?’

“But I liked the kind of lust for life and the connection in the musical scene a lot. I think that’s what really attracted me to it. Giancarlo [DiTrapano— founder of Tyrant Books in Rome and New York] framed a writer’s life as deeply experiencing things and connecting with other people—being reflective and living on the margins of society in an uncompromising way. I think musicians have similar ways of living. That was really exciting for me.”

Not long after college, Hunter started working in magazines in Los Angeles, and meeting writers. A music reviewer for a magazine that Hunter worked at—who turned out to be novelist and screenwriter Patrick DeWitt—often talked to him about writing and literature, and the two became friends.

“We would go to this old hotel in Hollywood that had saunas and swimming pools in the basement— maybe it was built in the ’20s. It was a total old-school, Hollywood, gorgeous place that nobody knew about. We would go there and share writing and short stories, things like that. That was the first time I had relationships with other writers; people who were really interested in the novel and short stories and literature.”

Professionally, Hunter amassed a ton of experience in magazines, and also did some work in IT. After starting an MFA, he began thinking about how his magazine and tech experience might cross over into the book space, which he felt was lacking in excitement and mass appeal.

“I felt like we needed some advocates for literary culture who were tech savvy, and able to do stuff online that would build and reach an audience of readers that were being left out of the online conversation—because at the time there wasn’t that much [online literary discussion],” Hunter says.

So, in 2009 he started Electric Literature, embracing web publishing, e-books, audio, POD, social media, and what was at the time the only iPhone app dedicated to books and literature. Its innovation and great curation (publishing authors like Lydia Davis and Colson Whitehead) led to an audience in the millions—a previously unheard-of crossover between the perceived old-school book world and the digital.

“Online is where it was happening, but in the literary world, you have people who don’t like technology—they don’t like the distraction of online, and they see it as a threat to everything that they care about,” he says. “As a result, they were lagging and not embracing it as fully and as actively as I felt they needed to.”

Hunter knew that without becoming part of online culture, books and reading would be relegated to a much smaller, less important part of society, and he worked to make literary publishing and reading a major presence in the online conversation.

And despite the protestations of the dyed-in-thewool paper-only book crowd, Hunter was right; a huge community of book lovers flocked to his sites— Electric Literature, Literary Hub—which now have millions of visitors.

“Those audiences are being exposed to ideas and thoughts and discussions about literature and books,” he says. “By virtue of those things existing, more people are talking about books online. When you used to go to the subway in Manhattan fifteen years ago, everybody would have a book in their hands. Now everyone’s staring at their phone. The question is, what are they staring at? Hopefully, either a book or a conversation about a book, or they’re being reminded of the importance of books—how they’re exciting and interesting.”

You’d think that having built several thriving online literary communities would provide both enough work and enough satisfaction to tide a person over for a while, but Hunter seems to be the type who’s always seeking out a new challenge—and the transition from magazine editor to online book advocate was a path that would allow Hunter’s professional life to land on his real love: publishing and selling books.

“I always cared about books more than anything else,” he says. “Maybe I just had an insecurity or an imposter syndrome thing, which kept me from directly addressing the world that I really cared about. I had to come at it very elliptically. Once I was able to, then I embraced it.”

Embracing it meant cofounding independent publisher Catapult, which publishes new and exciting authors, offers writing classes, and provides a virtual space to nurture writers and to help propel the independent publishing industry.

His shift into independent publishing brought back an idea that Hunter had had a decade earlier—to create a platform that would help to maintain the culture of indie presses and indie bookstores in the face of Amazon’s wrecking ball.

“Amazon is dramatically tilted toward bestsellers. The diversity of thought and ideas and new writing—all of the stuff that makes literature a dynamic, exciting culture—it’s not really Amazon’s MO. They just care about selling a book as if it’s a product. They sell granola bars and drones in the same way. We’re entrusting the culture that we love, that I’ve dedicated my life to, to companies that really couldn’t care less about it.”

Hence, Bookshop.org.

“We’re trying to offset Amazon with something that is more friendly towards independent culture,” Hunter says. “Independent culture could be anything from independent presses—of which Bookshop sells a vastly higher percentage than Amazon, as a percentage of sales—to independent businesses like bookstores, and all different points of view that are not homogenous.”

The business’s success has already shown that there is an eagerness among readers to help fortify the independent literary industry. But the Amazon train keeps rolling, and we need more people like Hunter to try to slow it down.

“I feel like I’m trying to weave a spiderweb to hold up a collapsing building,” he says. “I’m proud of everything that I’m doing, because it’s all successful and doing well, but the forces of Silicon Valley culture and capitalism are so strong that that might not amount to enough.”

As for his own literary life, Hunter is constantly reading—on his own, with his kids, for work. I asked him about books that he’s enjoyed the most recently.

“I’ll put in a pitch for Joan Silber’s Secrets of Happiness. My nine-year-old daughter started reading it and she said, ‘This is the best book I’ve ever read.’ I’m like, ‘It’s for grown-ups.’ I had read it two years earlier and I couldn’t remember what the language was like. Then she went to bed, and I picked it up and read something like, ‘We laid around fucking for hours,’ and I thought, ‘Oh no!’” Hunter says, laughing.

A nine-year-old with an enquiring literary mind? We might have another changemaker on our hands.

To help indie bookstores while you do your book shopping, either buy directly through your local indie, or visit Bookshop.org. Check out Hunter’s other projects at catapult.co, electricliterature.com and lithub.com.