How Stories Find Their Readers

During one of the panels I joined at FLIP, I had a conversation that stayed with me.

It was a discussion about secondhand books with Guilherme Moura, founder of Casa do Leitor, an independent bookstore in the small town of Bom Jesus dos Perdões, in the countryside of São Paulo. He told us that when he decided to open the town's first and only bookstore, many people thought he was crazy. A town that size, they said, simply wasn't interested in books. Opening a bookstore would be a mistake.

As he spoke, I couldn't help thinking that there might be a flaw hidden in that assumption.

It assumes that readers have to exist before a bookstore does.

But what if the order is actually the other way around?

That question stayed with me over the following days in Paraty. Little by little, I began to realize that FLIP itself seems to work that way.

You walk into a literary house because the façade catches your eye and leave wanting to read an author you've never heard of. You overhear a conversation and completely change your plans for the day. Someone recommends a book over lunch, and by the afternoon you're searching for it in a bookstore. For a few days, books stop living only on shelves. They take over the city.

Maybe FLIP isn't simply a gathering of readers.

Maybe, above all, it's a place where the chances of people and stories finding each other become much greater.

That's when the question started to make sense.

That same feeling followed me back to Rio.

On the Sunday FLIP came to an end, I attended the launch of Eu Duvido Você Terminar Este Livro ("I Bet You Won't Finish This Book"), by Giuliana Mafra, at Galeria Magalu in São Paulo. The line wrapped around the block. Some people arrived at five o'clock in the morning. More than 500 copies were sold in just a few hours.

Of course, the author's popularity explains much of that success. But I found myself wondering: how many of those people had left home already planning to buy that book? And how many discovered it simply because they happened to walk by, saw the crowd, and decided to step inside?

We'll probably never know.

But I began to realize that the launch event, my conversation with Guilherme, and those days in Paraty weren't different stories. They were different expressions of the same idea.

In each of those places, someone had created an environment where the encounter between a person and a story became more likely.

For years, I've heard—and repeated—that one of the publishing industry's greatest challenges is creating new readers. I still believe that's an important conversation. But I came back from FLIP wondering whether there's an even more fundamental question to ask first.

How do we create more opportunities for people and stories to find each other?

It may seem like a subtle shift in perspective, but it changes a great deal. It expands the role of bookstores, libraries, schools, literary festivals, book clubs, digital platforms, BookTok creators, and everyone else who, in one way or another, helps a story find the right person.

I'm not sure this idea answers the challenges of reading in Brazil.

But ever since I returned from Paraty, it has felt like a better place to begin the conversation.