McKenna Jordan is the owner of Murder By The Book in Houston, Texas, and a consultant for Minotaur Books at Macmillan Publishers.
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Bookselling is this weird world where it’s kind of like rainbows and unicorns and magic, but it’s also a business.
My job is to discover new authors. To find amazing new voices and to put those books into as many hands as I can.
Customers know about the number one New York Times bestsellers. What they don’t know about is the brand-new historical mystery set in India that they’re going to absolutely love because of the charming characters. So those are the books that I seek out as the proprietor of Murder By The Book, one of the oldest and largest mystery specialty bookstores in the country.
I read Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train six months before it comes out and just keep nagging the publicist, “This book is amazing. We want to order hundreds of copies. You have to bring her over for a tour.” We hand-sell 600 or 800 copies of The Girl on the Train before it becomes The Girl on the Train. It’s so fun to be able to do that and make a difference very, very early on in an author’s career.
I love doing this. I love reading a great book and recommending something that people haven’t heard of before, getting to have interesting conversations with customers. And once they’ve read and loved it, they come back. They’re so happy that you found something new for them.
I first came to the store as a customer, a college kid finishing up an English literature degree and shopping on weekends for cheap finds in the used-book section.
Every time I come in, I ask if there are any openings on staff.
The answer is always the same. No, because no one ever leaves.
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Finally, they change up the Saturday schedule. Four hours a week become available. I’m hired. My first day of work is January 11, 2003. That same day, an abandoned Rottweiler puppy finds its way to the store. Soon the whole staff is out back watching a manager named David coax the frightened dog to eat a few bites of his sandwich.
I’m at the register all alone, answering customers’ questions by myself on my first day. I learn right away that working at this store is going to take some hustle.
By the summer, I’m covering people’s vacations and basically working full-time. David and I become fast friends. He takes the puppy home and names him Travis. We go out after work for drinks—cosmos for me, margaritas on the rocks with salt for David—and talk about our days at the store. And books. Always books.
Though it takes a few years for us to notice and then do something about it, David and I fall in love. We marry in 2008 at Dryburgh Abbey in Scotland. The Houston Chronicle does a great piece on us, “A Storybook Marriage.”
The original owner of Murder By The Book, who started the store in 1980, is making her retirement plans. She’s always wanted to leave the store to David but sees that he doesn’t have any kind of business sense. And that I do.
In January 2009, I purchase the store from her. I’m twenty-six. David and I are married, and happy here together at Murder By The Book. He has his own publishing company, Busted Flush, and I have the store. That kind of team effort seems like a good plan.
Then David dies unexpectedly on September 13, 2010. He’s thirty-eight.
Life takes us in some weird directions, right?
David was a force of nature, and very well loved by all the authors and customers. Six hundred people attend his memorial service. People fly in from all over the country, all over the world. Lee Child flies in from the UK.
People in the crime fiction community are very supportive. “Read a book in his honor,” the publisher of Mystery Scene magazine suggests. In 2011, Bouchercon, the annual World Mystery Convention, establishes the David Thompson Memorial Special Service Award for basically being a good guy or woman in the field of mystery.
I have to very quickly figure out, Okay, here we are. I’ve got staff that depend on me. Everything has to go on. It’s my store and I need to make it work. Let me figure it out.
My staff is wonderful, but it’s not easy. It takes a really long time before the store finds its way. Still, I remain its sole owner. I’m just now over forty. So the store’s been a big part of my life for more than twenty years. We’re in a new era.
We’re constantly trying to hand-sell books to people who want more great books.
We keep databases of everything that our customers buy. We hustle. We’re a New York Times reporting bookstore. That matters to publishers. In short, we sell a lot of books. But we also develop relationships with people. We know the names of our customers, their children, and what’s happening in their lives. And in among those conversations, we recommend books that we know they’re going to love. It is definitely a community. We have a well-run, well-oiled machine for author events, from the presale signing to how we do the line afterward. And we try very hard to make sure we sell a lot of books, make sure that the experience is good all around, both for our customers and for the authors.
The crowd is happy and the author signs a lot of books and sells a lot of books, consistently some of the highest figures on tour.
Authors want to come back, and they’ll tell their publicists.
We push for a long time to get one particular author to the store. “Can we get James Patterson? Can we get James Patterson?”
And finally we get to host James Patterson. As you would imagine, we have a huge turnout, with people lined up for a good while. It was all very smooth and organized. He was a delight. Everyone was happy. So that was an amazing night.
Book signings so often are. When people come in to meet their favorite author, we stress to them, “If you want to keep seeing authors come through here, support us so that we can stay around and keep doing this. Come to the store, have a good time—and buy the book.”
The best is when customers leave with a stack of books, saying, “This is the most wonderful talk I’ve ever heard and thank you so much for hosting it.”
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