Yesterday I had a thought to finally get hold of Daniel Zomparelli’s highly lauded Poetry is Dead magazine (which I’ve been aware of for a while, but haven’t actually read). I looked at the website, and it told me it was “available in bookstores across Canada.” Right, I said.

My confidence fell right at that point because I live in Vancouver, and if you’ve been to Vancouver recently, you know that the bookstore is next to extinct here. There are a tiny number of holdout exceptions, but Vancouverites are not generally in position to just “go to your local bookstore.” I did check a couple of what I thought were likely spots—but to no avail. I subscribed online intead.

Which is, I think, what we are increasingly doing. I don’t mean subscribing, but ordering online. And this thought dovetailed with a conversation in our family of late about self-publishing. Conventional wisdom says that a self-published author can’t expect to do nearly so well as an author armed with sales representatives and marketing channels.

That may be, but the rise of Amazon means this plays out very differently than it did a decade ago. Nowadays, everything in Amazon (which is nearly everything, period) has the same basic chance as everything else in Amazon, except for what external promotion can leverage. So things with huge media budgets are going to be bestsellers regardless where (or perhaps even whether) they’re sold. And so too seems to be the case with a growing number of stories about self-published authors selling scads of books on the strength of blog and word-of-mouth push.

Of course this is not new. Word of mouth has always been the thing that sells books. We are told time and again that two-thirds of bookstore purchases are impulse buys, which suggests that people buy what they spot and recognize, or had heard about before. And to tell the whole story, we also know that the vast majority of book published don’t sell at all, or sell very poorly, which is to say people only hear about and recognize a very few titles. I don’t imagine the self-publishing market is any different in this respect; those tales of amazing sales are no doubt the head end of their own extremely long tail, populated with gazillions of books no one has ever heard of.

The difference—the key difference—is that in the old world of numerous bookstores, you at least had a chance of seeing books. The sensible marketing strategy to the aforementioned impulse-purchase scenario is to get the books out there, in as large quantities as you can muster. If the book isn’t on the shelf, it won’t sell. If the book isn’t face out, it won’t sell, and so on. Alana from Coach House once remarked to my sugestion that printing on-demand was the solution to Canadian small presses’ financial risk. “Well,” she said, “You have still get hundreds of copies out there just to make the book visible.”

Visibility. This has been a keystone of book marketing and book sales for decades. It’s what sales reps and distributors and wholesalers are really about. It’s why bookstore returns are a problem: you have to print in excess of the actual market in order to keep the book visible on the bookstore shelves through its entire sales life. If you printed only to the actual demand, the book would disappear quickly, and that would the end of it.

But visibility is now an increasingly precious commodity, because the bookstores—long the primary agent of visibility—are disappearing. And really, a bookstore like Chapters doesn’t really do any real visibility work for anything that isn’t on the tables and displays near the front door. The rest of their supposed inventory just sits, like the unopened drawers full of artifacts at a museum.

So where is visibility today? We talk a lot about the role of book bloggers and book recommendation sites as taking on the role traditionally played by reviews and radio talk shows. That’s fine, but does this work on a large enough scale to offset the loss of visibility that the loss of your local bookstore presents? Have books actually become less visible today?