One of the best parts about being on the road with my wife for her book tour for the past month has been visiting so many of my favorite — as well as new to me! — independent bookstores throughout the country. Independent bookstores — especially queer-owned, Black owned, and feminist ones — often aren’t just small and local businesses but also community hubs. And lately, they’ve been a crucial battleground for the fight against book bans and attempts to silence and erase queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices. Many make a point to not just stock but champion banned books, like Lauren Groff’s The Lynx in Gainesville, one of the many places my wife and I have hit up in the past month. This year, Independent Bookstore Day, which always falls on the last Saturday of April, feels especially important and fraught, as mega-retailer Amazon decided to throw one of its book sales at the same time. Fuck that.
Amazon already controls 60% of the market, has historically sold books and e-books at a loss in its attempts to squash small competition and monopolize the industry, has horrific extractive capitalism practices, among other evils you probably already know about. It is very bad for the publishing industry. It’s bad for books.
Independent bookstores care about books in a way Amazon never has, and real human booksellers are great at recommending books and perhaps introducing you to lesser known, up-and-coming authors. Wanna meet cool queer people? Look into whether your local indie has any upcoming events with queer authors, and I guarantee you’ll meet some there.
And today, we should do everything we can to offset Amazon’s attempts to once again monopolize book sales by running a special discount on a day meant for supporting the bookstores that actually matter. You don’t have to shop in-person if you can’t or don’t want to. You can shop at independent bookstores directly through their websites or through shopping on Bookshop.org, which donates profits directly to independent bookstores. When you shop via the Bookshop.org links in Autostraddle’s book lists, Autostraddle also gets a kickback, so you get to support independent bookstores and independent queer media in one go! We also have our own Bookshop.org storefront. Need some queer book recommendations? Wow, we have SO MANY FOR YOU. Here are some recent lists to start with:
- 15 Queer Romance Books and Sapphic Literary Novels Set On Reality TV Shows
- Queer Books To Read if You Love ‘Yellowjackets’
- Our Most Anticipated Queer Books for April 2025 and Our Most Anticipated Queer Books for March 2025 (if you’re shopping in person, the titles on this list are likely to be stocked at your indie since they’re new!)
- Queer Books About the Environment for When All You Can Think About Is Climate Crisis
- Feeling Feral? Here’s 17 Novels For The Weird Girls
- Butch Memoirs To Check Out in Honor of “Hijab Butch Blues”
It’s also National Poetry Month, so stocking up on some queer poetry on Independent Bookstore Day sounds like a great plan. Preordering books at an indie or buying gift cards and merch also helps with cashflow, and for some of these stores, the margins are super slim, so truly everything helps!!!!
I love so many independent bookstores around this country and have the privilege of knowing the booksellers and owners at many of them. I wish I could shout them ALL out here, but that would be a very long list. I promise I’m working on a comprehensive Autostraddle list of queer-owned bookstores. For now, some of my favorite pieces of indie bookstore merch I own include: my giant tote from The Lynx (Gainesville) that I sometimes use as a backup tennis bag; my Loyalty (DC) crewneck; my Tombolo (St. Petersburg) snapback; Bishop & Wilde’s (Portland) incredible DOES READING MAKE YOU GAY? shirt; my Books Are Magic (Brooklyn) keychain (but also I NEED the Coke-inspired tumbler, so maybe I’ll be ordering one today).
I live in Florida, so independent bookstores here — truly at the forefront of book ban battles — especially mean a lot to me, and five of them have teamed up for a fundraiser collaboration to support the American Booksellers for Free Expression, which was founded in 1990 to fight censorship and whose mission has become increasingly essential in the fight against fascism. The fundraiser is built around a hot pink shirt that says DO NOT COMPLY, and the participating bookstores include The Lynx, Tombolo Books, Fern & Fable, Books and Books, White Rose, and Spellbound.
At a recent stop on my wife’s tour, she did an event at Women & Children First in Chicago. At every Women & Children First event I’ve been to, the bookseller introducing the event highlights the fact that the explicitly feminist bookstore often hosts smaller authors and that community contributions help them do so, passing around a collection bucket for any dollars and change folks in the audience might have to give. It reminds me, naturally, of the collection plate passed around church growing up. And that’s really what independent bookstores have become for me: a new and better church. A place for fellowship and discovery. Okay, I know I’m starting to get a bit corny here so let me log off and get my ass to an independent bookstore.
Tell me where you’re going and what you’re buying! And even if you can’t participate for whatever reason, please for the love of god do not shop at Am*zon this weekend!
