The prompt

This Week’s prompt is “Is it difficult to find new books in local bookstores? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer)”.

• The prompt
  • About The Book Blogger Hop
• Finding Queer Books in Bookstores

About The Book Blogger Hop

The Book Blogger Hop was originally created by Jennifer @ Crazy-For-Books in March 2010 and ended on December 31, 2012. With Jennifer’s permission, Billy @coffeeaddictedwriter relaunched the hop on February 15, 2013. Each week the hop will start on a Friday and end the following Thursday. There will be a weekly prompt featuring a book related question. The hop’s purpose is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, befriend other bloggers, and receive new followers to your own blog. 

Finding Queer Books in Bookstores

How I would love to go to a small independent bookstore, browse the shelves and end up buying an armful of new queer books. Sadly, my reality looks different. The small bookstores in my area – few that there are – don’t stock their shelves with queer novels. I’ve got the option to go to a bigger bookstore like Thalia but there’s not a lot to find. Depending on the city, there isn’t anything queer but a few popular boys love manga.

Queer books are hugely underrepresented in Germany’s bookstores – independent or not. Sometimes you find some queer Young Adult books but only if they are hugely popular and so far only feature cis gay boys in my experience. Anything else? Nope. Doesn’t exist.

So, you gotta take your research online and then order at your bookstore of choice. More often than not without knowing how expensive it will be through that bookstore. So far it has always been a higher price than at Amazon. If it’s through an independent bookstore and I knew there weren’t any huge expanses in the upcoming weeks, I usually bought it.

Buying books in English – queer or otherwise – at Thalia is fun though. You pay more for the same book if you take it out of the shelf yourself. If you order it online, a person working there will go to the exact same shelf and get it for you for a cheaper price. At least that happened in the past when I bought queer books at Thalia.

Now though, I work for a bookstore myself, so even though I’m a marketing manager I pay less to buy queer books depending on the publishing house which is a very appreciated side effect of my work life. I still research online for queer books though.

Do you have a trusted bookstore you can simply browse the shelves of? Do you have to do your research and order from that store? Tell me about your book buying.