Joe Gordon, who until recently was an employee of Waterstone’s bookshop in Edinburgh, has been sacked for blogging. British SF Writer Charlie Stross knows Joe well, and has some comments on the subject:
For starters, Joe is an extremely knowledgable specialist bookseller. He’s an SF fan. Not just an SF fan, but a reasonably personable bookselling SF fan with an encyclopaedic grasp of the field and an enthusiasm for it that was infectious — it was difficult to walk into that shop and walk out again without having spent far too much money. His buying recommendations spread throughout the company (and outside it, as a regular reviewer writing for the online SF lit crit field), to an extent such that one editor of my acquaintance knew him by name as one of the key people to target if you wanted a new SF book launch in the UK to go down well. People trusted his opinions, people inside his company. The combination of specialist knowledge with enthusiasm isn’t something you can buy: if you’re running a business you just have to hope you can grab it when you see it. For a fellow occupying a relatively humble niche — no manager, he — Joe was disproportionately influential.
For seconds … over the past few years Waterstones has plotted a precarious path through the turbulent waters of corporate retail. Most recently, the company was taken over by HMV, another large retail media chain. About six to eight months ago a new manager arrived at Joe’s branch, and reading between the lines it appears that there was an immediate negative reaction: perhaps calling it a clash of corporate cultures wouldn’t be excessive. Joe was banished from the front desk to the stock room, a grubby windowless basement from which he had no exposure to customers. The previously thriving program of author readings and signings mysteriously vanished. Shelf space devoted to SF and fantasy — Joe’s speciality — receded into the shadowy depths of the store and shortened, shedding titles and variety (which, for a genre where sales are largely midlist driven and readers are browsers, is the kiss of death). And finally, Joe was accused of gross misconduct by his manager on the basis of a trawl through his online journal.
The story has now made it into the national media. If Joe was sacked from ‘bringing the company into disrepute’, then his pointy-haired idiot of a boss has brought the company into far more disrepute than one blog ever could.
This sort of behaviour makes me most unwilling to patronise this corporation; unfortunately almost all the larger book shops in my area are theirs. Unless Waterstones somehow sees sense, all my future book purchases are going to be online.