In 2005, Meeropol left her job as a nurse after 24 years and became the events coordinator at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Mass. Today, she works there part time, organizing book groups. “I already spent so much time there buying books,” she said. “Now I get paid for talking with other book lovers. I’m part of a ­literary ­community.”

That sort of camaraderie was exactly what Jennifer Close was seeking after she moved to Washington, D.C., from New York last year. A former editor at Portfolio magazine, Close had secured a two-book deal in the low six figures with Alfred A. Knopf. She had always wanted to work in a bookstore, and the urge only intensified when she started writing her second novel full time.

“I was so isolated,” Close said. “I had no inspiration. I thought, What am I going to write about, my dog? I had to get out of the house.”

She interviewed at Politics and Prose, and she has worked there four days a week ever since.

In addition to teaching her the ins and outs of the book business, the job has provided a built-in sales force for her novel “Girls in White Dresses,” due out in August.

“Almost everyone in the store has read the manuscript,” Close said. “People are already thinking about how to sell it and who to sell it to.”

Mark LaFramboise, who has been a buyer for Politics and Prose for 13 years, advised Close to include her bookselling job in her official author bio: “It automatically endears her to anybody who works in a bookstore,” he said. He added that Politics and Prose likes employing authors because “people who write a lot tend to read a lot too, which is great for us.”

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Some successful writers who have left their day jobs behind still think of them with nostalgia. LaFramboise recalled a recent meeting of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, where Patti Smith was honored for her book “Just Kids.” In the memoir, Smith recounts her time working — and sometimes sleeping — at the uptown branch of the Manhattan bookstore Brentano’s. (Robert Mapplethorpe was a clerk at the downtown branch.)

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“She told us, ‘I’m one of you,’ ” LaFramboise said. “She was more of a bookseller than a rock star.”

Jonathan Lethem worked in used-book stores in New York and California for 15 years. His first three books were published while he was employed at Moe’s in Berkeley. Though he quit after Hollywood optioned “Gun, With Occasional Music,” Lethem said he was “still a bookseller by constitution.”

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Two years ago, he helped found Red Gap Books, a used-book store in Blue Hill, Me. Now a self-described “stealth bookseller,” Lethem said a lot of the books in the shop come from his own scouting missions. “I have the habit of accumulation,” he said. “When I first met my wife, my kitchen cabinets were full of books. The store allows me to keep collecting, while maintaining peace at home.”

Perhaps the most famous author-­bookseller is Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Lonesome Dove” and more than 40 other books. In 1971, he opened Booked Up in Washington, D.C. In 1987, he moved the store to his hometown, Archer City, Tex., where it has expanded to some 200,000 volumes. McMurtry, who is getting married at Booked Up next month, said writing and bookselling make for “a perfect balance.”

“Fiction is a lonely occupation, bookselling is social,” McMurtry said. He has 26,000 books in his private library, and spends a lot of time scouting for the shop. “The search for books is the most interesting part. It’s like an Easter egg hunt — you might find the perfect book today, or you might not.”

Being surrounded by books can have its downsides, according to Kevin Sampsell, who works at Powell’s in Portland, Ore. “Sometimes when you’re walking through the store, seeing so many books on the shelves, you think, how can I cause a ripple in this gigantic ocean?” he said.

Sampsell — the author of the memoir “A Common Pornography” and the publisher of a small press called Future Tense Books — has worked at Powell’s since 1997. He said he would “be scared to try to write full time, from a financial perspective.” Powell’s employees, who are unionized, have health insurance, a 401(k) plan and, of course, book discounts. “Plus,” he said, “I like having a job to go to.”

Other writers agree that bookselling work has a concreteness that writing itself can lack. “It’s tangible — you go in and straighten the shelves and sell a book to someone who might have never thought of buying it otherwise,” said Jami Attenberg, who works every Saturday at Word in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Attenberg has published three novels, most recently “The Melting Season,” with a fourth on the way in 2012. She started working in the bookstore last summer, after giving several readings there. “No matter how much money I made from writing, I’d keep the bookstore job,” she said.

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Adam Wilson, who worked at BookCourt until recently, said the job provided a chance to meet writers he admired. He also met the editor of his forthcoming novel, “Flatscreen,” at BookCourt. “More than a writer, I’m a reader. I love putting books into people’s hands,” he said, though he freely admitted, “There were definitely times when I tried to sneak in a little work on my novel during a slow shift.”

BookCourt’s general manager, Zack Zook, estimates that three-quarters of the store’s employees are writers. An hour before our interview, he hired Martha Southgate, a novelist whose fourth book, “The Taste of Salt,” will be out in September.

Zook recalled one former staffer who couldn’t stop writing on the clock: “He got fired. But after his novel was published, we threw him a book party.”