ABA Preparing for Tipping Point
by Judith Rosen -- Publishers Weekly, 5/5/2008 6:50:00 AM
In advance of the American Booksellers Association’s new initiative to be announced at the Celebration of Bookselling on Thursday night at BEA, the organization has been giving booksellers a sneak peek at the direction it will take at nine regional ABA Forums entitled “Bookselling at the Tipping Point.”
At the concluding forum, held last week in association with the New England Independent Booksellers Association in Portsmouth, N.H., ABA COO Oren Teicher stated, “We are convinced things really are at a tipping point.” And he cited a combination of factors from consumer interest in shopping green to corporate retailers being forced to close hundreds of stores to indicate that the time is right for locally-owned, independent bookstores to rebound.
Despite ABA’s drop in membership from a high of 4,400 retail companies to 1,800 today and statistics indicating that for the past five years half of all books sold have been outside bookstore channels, Teicher expressed optimism for bookseller survival. For him, however, it is crucial that booksellers cross-promote a message of shopping local and shopping independent with other independent businesses.
“There is a moment in 2008 and 2009 that now works to our advantage. There’s wind behind our sail, “ said Teicher, who has been buoyed by consumer reaction to shopping local programs. “Fifty percent of American consumers are shopping in independent businesses because they are independent. There is an opportunity that we’ve not had in a long time.”
To capitalize on that opportunity, ABA has spent the past year working with identity consulting firm Brains on Fire in Greenville, S.C., to overhaul its nine-year-old Book Sense program and provide edgier marketing materials to member stores. Unlike Book Sense, which Teicher acknowledged never connected with consumers, the new, as yet unnamed, initiative is meant to do exactly that and will be inclusive of all ABA bookstores. The bestsellers and picks lists will remain, as will the gift card program. However, said Teicher, “they will be surrounded with tools to help you emphasize who you are.” After the trade show, ABA will send out a white box to help booksellers get started.
As part of the initiative, Booksense.com will also be revamped and the name Booksense will go away. Stores with the Booksense URL in their name will be converted to www.thestorename.com. More importantly the back end of Booksense.com is moving to Open Source, which will allow for greater programming flexibility and more bells and whistles for online stores. “In fairness,” said Teicher, “this transition is not going to happen overnight. We’ll be morphing stores at the end of this summer and changing for two to three months after that.”
Many booksellers at the NEIBA Forum were energized by Teicher’s presentation. “I think it was very interesting and very encouraging,” commented Ellen Richmond, owner of Children’s Book Cellar in Waterville, Maine, “because the last few weeks have been very rough.” Others, like Darcy Lambert, who runs the First Edition Book Club and is associate textbook manager at Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Mass., found the forum both “helpful and at the same time unsatisfying.” Since she is already in the midst of putting together a buy local program in the Pioneer Valley, she would have liked to have learned more about what other booksellers are already doing and to swap ideas. Presumably that will be part of the ABA’s next step as it works to phase out Book Sense and phase in its new initiative.
