NYC Bookstore Sells a Single Title

Between e-books, competition from Internet booksellers and an ever-changing literary landscape, no one is really sure how to sell books anymore and the field is open for brand new ideas. So what’s a debut author to do?

New “non-famous, scandal-free author” Andrew Kessler has pulled out all the stops and is trying something that is getting him ink all over the world: he’s opened a shop in NYC’s West Village to sell his new novel, Martian Summer (Pegasus). Kessler told CNN that reactions to the store “vary so wildly. A lot of people are scared to come in. Some people wonder if we're Scientologists.”

Kessler opened the Hudson Street store in mid-April and will keep it open until the middle of this month. From The Guardian:

Kessler, who calls his project "monobookism", opened his shop on Hudson Street in New York last month. It contains 3,000 copies of his book Martian Summer, displayed in "new and noteworthy" sections, under "new in non-fiction", under "science" – and with a sign for the wary, "We have one book but we're NOT scientologists", sitting outside.

An "armchair astronaut's" account of the 2008 Nasa mission to Mars, Martian Summer was published by Pegasus in April. It sees Kessler, a writer and creative director at an advertising agency, charting the day-to-day dramas of the Phoenix mission that explored the planet's north pole, after he won "the nerd lottery" to spend three months in mission control with 130 scientists.