Bookselling is an inherently political profession, and few people know that better than Danny Caine, owner of the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, and author of one of our favorite reads, How to Resist Amazon and Why. We talked politics, poetry, and bookstore cats; the Raven has two—Dashiell and Ngaio, the store’s undisputed social media stars. When Caine’s tweetstorm about how Amazon’s pricing screws indie bookstores went viral, he started playing closer attention to the store’s social media, and realized that it could be used in service of politics as well as adorable cats. Since being picked up for distribution by local Portland publisher Microcosm, How to Resist Amazon and Why has sold more than 5,000 copies, even though Amazon has quit selling it after Caine criticized them in an article in the NYT. (Thinkyface emoji)

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Foreign.

Welcome to the hybrid Cub Scout podcast with me. Emily

Einolander and me. Corinne kolasky, hello. We're mapping

the frontier between traditional and indie publishing, and today

we have Dani Kane of the Raven bookstore with us. Dani Kane is

the author of the poetry collection's continental

breakfast and El Dorado Freddy's, as well as the chat

book uncle Harold's Maxwell House, Haggadah, haggadah and

the zine how to resist Amazon and why. His poetry has appeared

in diagram Hobart barrel house and Mid American review, among

other places. The Midwest independent Booksellers

Association declared him the 2019 Midwest bookseller of the

year. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where he owns Raven

bookstore. So welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. All

right, so we're going to start with our favorite icebreaker

question. Actually, Corinne should ask this one, because

it's, it's her special. It's my specialty. I am a cat person.

Okay, so tell us about your shop cats.

Dashel, thank you. And then nayo, is that right now? Yeah,

they're both. They're named after mystery authors. Okay,

Dashiell is named after Dashiell Hammett, sure. And Nio is named

after nio Marsh, who was a golden age crime fiction writer

who's a kind of contemporary of Agatha Christie. So, Oh, very

cool classic.

They came with the store. It wasn't my idea. Yep.

So you were like, I don't want this store if the cats aren't

coming with it. Basically, well, I think it would. We would have

lost a lot of customers. Yeah, you know, they're part of

they're part of the package, right? Of course. Dash was a bit

younger. He's a tabby, and he is very gregarious. Ah, okay. He

really loves to, you know, flirt and be social with grown ups,

he's not super fond of kids, and he likes to act very tough

around dogs. He'll get all like, muscley and intense when there's

a dog in the store.

Nayo is much more refined. We call her the queen.

We can kind of go days without seeing nio, and then all of a

sudden she'll try to sit on every lap of everybody who sits

down. But she's very regal and poised, and she's just this tiny

black cat, okay, okay. And how old you said Dashiell the

younger one? Yeah, well, but they're both kind of old, so

Okay, 10, and maybe nayo is 12. Oh, wow. Okay, okay, yeah, all

right, very cool. They came to the store, I think in around

2010

when they were kittens, right, right. Okay, so they've kind of,

so they're used to, sort of, like the hubbub of store, yeah.

Okay, that's good. That's important,

absolutely. Um, so tell, tell us a little about the origin of the

bookstore, how you came to be

be the owner of it, and what kind of books you sell. Just

give us an overview. Sure.

It opened on September 1, 1987

as a mystery only bookstore is a very tiny store. It was founded

by two women, Pat Katie and Mary Lou Wright, who had met in

college and then reconnected in Lawrence years later,

no bank would take them seriously enough to give them a

loan. They thought it was a hobby,

indeed. So they scrapped together funding from friends

and second mortgages. And they, they, you know, they got it

open. The first customer was Matt Dillon, who was in town.

Whoa, what did he buy? A couple mysteries, a couple paperbacks.

He was in town to film a movie. They've saved the receipt

somewhere. That's awesome. They didn't frame it. It's in a

scrapbook.

So, yeah, they eventually expanded. But for the first

20 years or so, it was they really stuck to the like mystery

and local only, the little bit of nature, only local authors,

right? Well, no so mysteries from everywhere, and then local

authors as well.

But then in 1997 a Borders Books and music opened right across

the street. Oh, come on, yeah. It's like the Amazon store

across the street from Parnassus in Nashville. I know

as soon.

Saw that, I thought, we've been there. I think I even sent them

a tweet saying as much

so that that changed things for a lot of independent retail in

downtown Lawrence, many other bookstores closed. There used to

be a lot more stores than there are now. Somehow the Raven

persisted, and then in 2008 they sold the store to Heidi, who

Heidi hired me. Eventually, I moved to Lawrence in 2014

to start an MFA in poetry at the University of Kansas. I had

never lived in a town that had a bookstore like the Raven, so I

instantly wanted to get a job there.

I began a campaign. It took about six months

becoming a store regular and becoming a friendly I had a

friend on the inside because a grad school friend of mine,

someone from the program, worked there, and she started working

on Heidi to try to get me a job in there. And then about six

months after moving to Lawrence, I started working at the raven

and it was everything I thought it would be. It was a dream come

true. And then I started just to get more and more curious and

involved with with as many parts of the business as I could.

And then when I finished, when I got close to finishing my

degree, Heidi started talking about retiring, and it just

worked out. The timing was great. So then in August, I

graduated. In May 2017 in August, I took over as the new

owner of the store. Congratulations, thanks. Yeah,

that's a dream come true. Not everyone can say that about

their careers. I know I'm lucky.

All right. So have you always been pretty active online, or

did you dive in more as a business owner?

It's a good question. I don't,

I don't think I wouldn't consider myself. I wouldn't have

considered myself super active online.

I am of the generation, like Facebook was invented when I was

a freshman in college, like it was the we were

the first generation on social media, really, that the class of

2008 you know, we, we were there when it started. So it's not

really a it hasn't always been a thing for me.

And I wouldn't have guessed that it would have been such an

important part of my business.

For those of you who may not know, Raven bookstore is pretty

big on Book, Twitter and Instagram, so you should go

check them out lots of entertaining tweets and photos,

including ones of the cats. So if that's not a selling point, I

don't know what is. That was the that was the really, all I

thought of it was, it was just a way to show off the cats,

especially on Instagram. And the rule had always been a cat post

would always get twice as much attention as a book post. And it

was just like, okay, so anytime the cats are doing something

silly, we'll take a picture and post it. That's literally all I

thought about it,

you know, until last year, and then everything blew up. Right,

right? Yeah, so segwaying into our next question, actually. So

what drew you into a more sort of activist role in the book

community?

The 2016 presidential election, yes, I think,

well, it was even before that. I think

Kansas is an interesting place.

I think a lot of movement, a lot of things that happen

politically in the nation kind of start in Kansas, like

the governorship of Sam Brownback was kind of the Tea

Party practice run all those economic policies started here

with with brownbacks tenure as governor, And

I just think especially nowadays,

at this point in the presidential election, I kind of

people look at the Midwest

for for,

you know, for the politics, for political reasons. And so it's I

lived I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland is a classic or

Ohio is a classic swing state. It's another really interesting

political place. But just coming out to Kansas as the nation was

kind of heading in the direction it was in made me pay attention

in new ways. And then

I think bookselling is a naturally political profession.

There's very little that booksellers do that you can't

talk political. And even before I took over,

we would put together displays

of like read indigenous voices, like novel by Native Americans.

Yes or working on stuff for Black History Month and and

Heidi always gave me the green light on whatever I wanted to

do. And so it started with these little displays. But

the more time I spent bookselling, the more I realized

it's a political profession. When anybody who tries to be a

bookseller,

not a politically. Doesn't understand what political means.

I don't think, yeah, even if you I worked at Powell's for the

Christmas season. I was, I was supposed to work there longer,

so they gave me a section and just the very idea of like, oh,

what? I have all of these books with the spine out, but on the

shelf, I have to face some of the books out. Which ones do I

face out? Like, which ones do I want people to see and which

ones do I want people not to see as much?

And that's the that's the most basic gesture of book selling,

is what to display. But like, even in that you can make an

argument, you can engage with ideas. You can be political in

that, that very most basic building block of book selling.

And so then you add things like newsletters or social media

accounts, and it's like, what are you trying to say as a

store? And I think it's small, especially a small independent

bookstore, can really be an effective activist space, and

there's, I don't think it's just us. There are a ton of other

bookstores that are doing really interesting activist work, and

it's a natural fit. Do

you have some bookstores off the top of your head that we should

check out who are doing this work?

Well, last summer, A Room of One's Own in Madison, Wisconsin

led a campaign called booksellers against borders,

where they they had, they just rallied a bunch of bookstores to

donate a portion of their sales over a given weekend to rises to

help with legal aid for people, for refugees. At the southern

board of the United States, they raised more than $100,000

through that campaign. God, that's amazing. And that was one

idea from one bookseller in Madison, Wisconsin.

I think I there are a ton of really interesting stories in

New York City, but I think about the strand and their their their

battle to be, they don't want to be declared a landmark, but the

city wants to declare them a landmark.

So they've, they've done really interesting things with how they

tell their story.

So it's or even Parnassus making their case to Nashville as

Amazon moves in across the street

there, you know, and patch and her gang, or, you know, even

beginning that store. There was no independent bookstore in

Nashville for the longest time, and in this to say, I think

there's an audience for independent retail in this in

this city that that hasn't traditionally shown it. That's a

great kind of political statement. Absolutely, I

actually lived in Nashville for about two years, and I was

always shocked that there was no, you know, like, reliable

independent bookstore to visit. It was just like as a book

person. It was person, it was just like, that felt like sort

of unforgivable. Yeah, exactly that, too. So it was just, I was

so happy when she finally opened that, you know, and that finally

has a presence there. So I wanted to ask, too, do you think

that there's maybe a greater spirit of solidarity now among

sort of independent bookstores across the country since, well,

I guess since both Amazon has kind of creeped into your

territory, and also since the, you know, political situation

has gotten more divisive in the past few years too. Do you find

there's sort of more solidarity now? Yeah, I do

well, and it's kind of tricky, because my my full time entry

into the book selling happened as Donald Trump was rising to

power. So in a way, I don't know that much about book selling

before Trump, but I can say that

it's an amazingly welcoming and supportive community, and it's

there's no when we get together for conferences or meetings.

There's no sense of competition or protecting our secrets. We at

our national conference at winter Institute in Baltimore. A

couple weeks ago, there was a this. Harvard professor, Ryan

Raffaelli, has been doing a study, kind of like an

anthropological business study on independent bookstores and

their survival. And he's like, how are bookstores doing so well

when they're not supposed to? And he wrote this whole white

paper about it, which is really amazing.

But he said, of all the businesses he's ever studied,

nobody has been as this. Never he hasn't seen as much

solidarity as he has with independent bookstores, like we

all share our best practices with each other, and he never

sees that. It seems perfectly normal for us, because the more

bookstores the merrier, of course.

So one of my favorite parts about the industry is how, I

mean, it's not perfect. It's not we're not all holding hands and

singing the rainbow connection. Really.

We're very, very similar.

Supportive of each other, and I think the idea is just the

rising tide raises all ships. Yep, that makes sense. I love

using the rainbow connection instead of kumbaya in this

situation. I'm going to use that from now

warms my heart.

Okay, so let's get into how to resist Amazon and why. How did

that get inspired, and how did you decide to put it together?

And what did you use as a heuristic to kind of organize it

Sure?

Well, I wrote the there was the whole there were in April, we I

posted a tweet thread that went viral about pricing on Amazon

and why, why books are more expensive in any bookstores, and

that got me that that really blew up our platform, and made

me think about activism and the story I was telling, and I

wanted to make sure, now that I was lucky enough to have this

platform, I didn't want to waste it,

so I was much more conscious and careful about what went up on

social media. One of the things well as I'm assembling these

arguments and be becoming this, this small business activist, I

was like, What's my thesis statement? What am I? What's my

goal? What am I fighting for? I want this to play if I want to

consider it a success. So I kind of laid that all out in this

lecture. Letter, an open letter to Jeff Bezos, and I posted it

across all of our platforms, and people were engaging with it and

seemed really interested in it. But then my friend Suzanne, who

runs Max Bax books in Cleveland, which is one of my hometown

bookstores, sent me a message that said,

if you turn this into a broadside, I could sell it to my

customers. I

was like, okay, that's kind of interesting. And that reminded

me of a discussion, a separate discussion I had been having

with with my friend Ben, who went to the same creative

writing program as I did in Kansas. We were talking on

Twitter about zines, and he was like, man, someone should make a

bookstore zine about Amazon and helping people unplug from

Amazon and like that popped into my head, combined with Suzanne's

text, and I was like, why don't I just combine all of this stuff

into a zine? And

in grad school, that was I made like, 20 zines in my career. In

grad school, just like every time I had 10 poems, I would

throw a zine together. I would like, bring, go to a show up to

a reading, and have a pile of zines to sell. And like, maybe

it could pay for my beers afterwards or something. It was

just I was at the point. It's lucky. Now, I didn't think about

it at the time, but I can make a zine in a couple hours. I have

templates on my computer. It's just something I do.

So I screenshotted all the tweets, I put the letter in

there, I added a couple new essays, and then it was

important for me to end with a list of concrete steps about how

you can unplug and resist Amazon. And

so really, it was just kind of assembling it across the course

of an afternoon. And I was like, okay, you know, I'll like, I'll

make 100 I'll go to Kinko's, I'll copy 100 I'll pull out the

long arm stapler, and we'll sit around the dining room table

tonight and staple these. And then got one of the stapled

ones. Where is

it? Somewhere?

The gray ones? If it's grayscale on the cover? Yes, it's an

original. We got an original, awesome.

We got it from Jan's paperbacks in Beaverton, Oregon. Oh, that's

great.

Yeah. So the gray ones, anything, any of the gray ones,

I hand stapled at my dining room table, and like, it started

selling like crazy out of the store. I started hearing from

bookstores. I set up a little page on my website where

bookstores could order them, and it became really clear that I

was going to need some help.

So was part of the reason that you connected with Joe Biel,

because you're both from Cleveland. No,

actually, that was a really pleasant surprise. And so Joe

just really fortuitously sent me a message, and was like, I think

we could sell this. I think we could put out a version of it.

And we The negotiations were very easy, but it's a non

exclusive contract, so we still sell our Raven version, and they

sell the microcosm version, but it's, I mean, they sold. It took

about five weeks to sell through their first printing of 5000

copies. Wow, incredible. Yeah, both the raven and the microcosm

edition are in second editions. I've, I've contracted it out.

I'm no longer stapling.

So or

just hours I was spending hours at Kinko's just standing, I

would bring my laptop and do work while I was waiting for the

photocopier. Sounds kind of miserable,

but it's like, I don't know it was cool, at least in the

beginning, to try to have, like a DIY ethos, but then it got

totally out of the.

Troll, but I'm glad. I mean, of course, to have it be in this

many places and see it in this many stores, and have this huge

audience is way beyond any of my expectations. But I'm really

happy to see it. Yeah, so are we, yeah, and thank you a

million times over for creating it honestly. Well, thanks for

saying that. When we started this podcast, we were kind of

trying to do that. But I think we just really got overwhelmed,

because we started doing research into Amazon, and we're,

like, trying to figure out what's going on, and we worked

at a you know, we well, you still do. We worked at the same

publishing company, and so it was just like, jumping into that

whole world was really overwhelming. So and they it

didn't quite affect us at the same level as it would a

bookseller. Like since working at a bookstore, I would probably

be able to explain it a lot better, but when we got into it,

we're just like, whoa. This is, this is a mess.

Yeah, it puts publishers in a funny place, because a lot of

people, obviously are opposed to the way Amazon does business, in

the amount of control they have over the entire industry. But

for a publisher, really, to take on Amazon, you're you're yelling

at someone who's responsible for half of your sales, and it's

like, if and Amazon is perfectly, can perfectly,

legally say, like, up everything from Penguin Random House is

going to appear on the fifth search page and beyond, or we're

just not going to sell it, and that would be a huge hit. So

it's they really have much too large of a chokehold on the

industry. But one of the reasons I was so excited to work with

microcosm is because they were one of the few that have taken a

very clear and vocal stance and said, We're going to really try

hard not to do business with Amazon. And it's it's reaped

huge rewards for them. Their sales have gone way up. They had

an amazing year last year since unplugging from Amazon. Yeah,

and if you that's part of the reason that we tried to that we

got an interview with them was because we saw the Publishers

Weekly article come out, and I think there was a period of time

where I was trying to convince our boss to do the same thing.

Because I was like, Look, someone in town did it, like we

should do it too. And they were looking at me like,

like we should do that with our exclusive books. Like, like, no,

but yeah, it was a big article, and everyone was just like,

yeah, how is this possible? Like, you can't do that, and

these, like, our sales are getting better. And let me quote

you all the numbers. Yeah. He quoted all the numbers, yeah.

Just today they posted they're hiring another full timer for

their warehouse because of the shipping demands. Wow, that's

really great well, and I think at the zine too, it's really

great that you post, you sort of added, like, concrete steps that

people could take to sort of, you know, like, don't review

books on Goodreads, or like, don't shop at Whole Foods.

Because I think it's like a lot of people don't know exactly how

big Amazon's overreach is, and like how it bleeds into every

part of your life. So I just have to say again, thank you for

including that, because I think that is super helpful. So, yeah,

absolutely.

Oh, yeah, I'll take the next

one anymore. Amazon related thoughts, no, just that I hate

them, but, I mean, I think we're all the same page here. So,

so now you went to school for poetry. So can you tell us, sort

of how you became interested in that in the first place?

I mean, it's just a really good high school teacher and how it

feel like it's how it always starts. Yeah, I was just telling

this story to my writing club yesterday.

We were,

it was AP English in 12th grade, and

like, part of one of the things on our syllabus was the Love

Song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot, right?

For, for

whatever reason, my teacher, I still to this day, don't know

why she did this, but she was like, we cannot talk about this

poem in this classroom. We have to go somewhere else. And so she

booked the, like, the grown up conference room across the hall

from the principal's office with, like, the swivel chairs

and everything. And we, like, it was basically like, we're gonna

go to this room and only emerge after we've unlocked this poem

three days and oh my God,

that sounds like Bible study camp, except more fun.

Something about the moving to a different space and treating

this poem with this this degree of respect.

It really caught and then as soon as I got to college, a

couple months later, I started writing really bad love poems.

And yeah, I actually

my first publication of poetry was in a zine that my friend

made, and they would put one on each lunch table. And.

The cafeteria, like scissors and glue sticks at the copier, and

it came out, like once every two weeks. And I, like, they did six

of them, and I had a poem and five of them.

So, you know, it's been poetry and scene since the beginning.

So it was just a natural jump to All

right, I'm going to ask this question, because I have to give

Karen shit about it. She, she's the one who was like, What's

your take on Instagram poetry? And I just want to say, I just

want to out you as saying you hate it.

I don't know, but yeah. I mean, as someone who you know is a

poet yourself, and has, you know, taken classes, obviously,

a ton of schooling. I mean, do you consider it poetry? Do you

not? I mean, I just, like, I know that's such a, it's just

such a, like, tricky question, because, like, What is poetry,

right? Like, I don't, yeah, I just wanted to get your take on

this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Every, every time someone asks

me a big, like, zoomed out question about poetry. I like, I

want to run away and hide. I don't, especially a leading

question current, sorry, I just I feel,

though I have studied it and created books of it, I feel

no right to cast broad definition level anything about

poetry, because poetry is a really big tent, and that's a

great thing. And I think poetry, even more than others, has shown

an ability to welcome and champion all kinds of voices,

which is something that that certain places seem to be having

trouble with these days.

So I like, I like, who am I to sit over something that a lot of

people like, I don't know, and it's like, rupee cower is a

bookstore owner. We love rupee tower. Oh, I did not know that

about her, actually. Okay, now, yeah,

she sold a lot of books, and poetry sections are doing well,

and a lot more young people are hanging out back there.

And there have been a few people who have come in and looked for

what's next after they read both of her books. And instead of

sending them towards other Instagram, poets will be like,

here's some Danez Smith or here's some E viewing, and

that's really rewarding and fun. One of the one of the first

poems, one of the first poets that hooked me was Billy

Collins, who I totally roll my eyes at now,

but back in the day, I didn't think poetry could be funny. And

here's this old guy cracking jokes, and I'm like, oh, okay,

this isn't as serious as I thought so I don't know. I used

to read Keats before bed when I was 16 and cry myself asleep.

I'm not ashamed.

Not anymore.

There was, I'll say one more thing about Ruby cower though

there was that, what I forgot, what magazine it was that called

her the writer of the decade. It was, I think it was the Atlantic

or the New Republic, and maybe it was the New Republic, yeah,

yeah. Corinne texted me when she saw that.

What's happening such a perfect troll move on their part,

they knew exactly what they were doing. Like, let's make Twitter

talk about this for weeks. Like, okay, mission accomplished.

Yeah, that's true. That's kind of brilliant. That is kind of

brilliant, now that I think about it, that's true. So who

are a few of your favorite poets, and have there been any

poetry collections that have come out recently that we should

sort of look into.

Sure, well, the I think the first, the most, the kind of

touchstone book for me and what I write now is probably lunch

poems by Frank O'Hara, which is a classic.

But I love everything about that book,

including the tiny trim size, like, I really like small, like,

pocket poetry is a cool idea.

Lately.

I studied in Cleveland with Philip meters. His most recent

collection is

sand opera from a couple years ago. But he has a new one coming

out from Copper Canyon this spring, called shrapnel maps,

and we worked on that a little bit when I was a student. I read

a very early version of it for him, and it's an amazing book.

He's a huge influence on me and a great teacher. Erica Meitner

is a friend. Her book, copia was important in putting together my

first book, and she had a collection last year called Holy

moly. Carry me. Both of them are from boa editions, and they're

very, very good.

And then I love Jennifer Knox too. She put out four books from

bloof, and she's making the jump to the big leagues with Copper

Canyon this fall too. And.

She writes the most outlandish and hilarious poetry, but again,

someone who shows me that

you can be wacky in a poem

that's that's important, and her poems are very, very funny and

very weird.

Great. I love it. Thank you for I don't read a lot of poetry,

but I feel like I should to be part of the Zeitgeist.

So where can people find you? Online? Oh, my website is just

Danny kane.com it's D, A, n, n, y, C, A, I N, e.com

all my books are up there. You can read a bunch of my poems

that are online, and my tour dates for the upcoming El Dorado

Freddie tour are on the website as well.

Perfect. And then Twitter for the bookstore, of course, yeah,

well, Twitter, it's at Raven bookstore is the big boy

account. And then at Mr. Kane is my personal Twitter. So that's

poetry and book news. Yeah, cool.

All right, anything else you want to plug

Eldorado Freddy's comes up March, 3 from belt publishing.

All right, pre orders are important. Oh, yeah, they super

are

go pre order books not from Amazon. No. Order it right from

belt. Okay, yeah, we'll, we'll make sure to link that. Also

linking books. Everyone, if you're linking books, never link

to Amazon. Don't do it

all right. Danny, thank you so much for being super fun. Oh

man, it was great to talk to you. And yeah, so follow us at

hybrid pub scout on Twitter, hybrid pub Scout pod on

Instagram. We're on Facebook. We have a Facebook page hybrid pub

scout. And thanks for giving a rip about books. You.

You.