COVID has led to many bookstores closing their doors and looking for alternatives. Prior to the pandemic larger book retailers knew that readers do a great deal of shopping online. They may have preferred the browsing experience of a box store, but a lot of the decision making began long before they stepped foot into a physical store.
Many booksellers with Indie physical locations were ill equipped to meet the demand of moving into an online platform. They began working with an innovative site called Bookshop.com which aggregated bookstores on to their own pages. This site was looking to take some of the sales from Amazon, which represents at least 70% of all book sales. The booksellers on bookshop.com are set up for customers to order from them and the orders are fulfilled by Ingram, the largest book wholesaler.
We created Deb's Book Paradise many years ago as part of Micro Publishing Media, Inc, our Indie book publishing company. The name is new but the concept is a long time in the making. We recognized that shoppers are looking for discoverability of what they want to read. We also based the store, other than highlighting the new titles we publish, after those out of the way used bookstores where you can find things that may be arcane to others but just right for you.
We make sure that all our inventory is in excellent shape. Otherwise we tell you exactly what flaws it might have. We hope you will support the indie bookshops. We don't know what the world will be like over the next few years. Everything has changed. What we want to maintain is your access to titles that are not based only on what is on the bestsellers lists.
We also have a social network for writers and readers called: Writersnetworking.com
We want you to have virtual book clubs so you can discover new voices among the thousands of offerings.