A crew from the local CBS affiliate starts filming, professional and amateur photographers snap photos and curious observers mill about in front of the Harwood Heights Kmart in suburban Chicago one recent morning, as 14 women, ranging in age from 28 to 62, get off a tour bus. The side of the bus is covered by a huge banner featuring the Kmart logo and, in hot pink block letters, "Sizzling Summer Reads: Author Tour 2006."
Inside the store's entrance, about 100 customers—most of them middle-aged, most of them female, some already lugging armfuls of paperbacks—line up beside three tables set between two posters that ask, "Looking for Romance?" The query is framed by dreamy headshots of the 14 women from the bus, all romance novelists, who are now entering the store. Each author takes her seat behind a stack of mass market paperbacks books florid covers and titles like Simply Love, Playing with Fire or Just One of Those Flings.
A female voice booms over the intercom, "Attention, Kmart shoppers: we'd like to direct your attention to the front of the store. We are currently having a signing with 14 of your favorite authors." The announcement is repeated every several minutes for the next hour, while fans move from author to author, chatting them up and stuffing books into cloth bags provided at the store.
Writer Wendy Corsi Staub (Zebra) asks a customer, "Well, what do you like to read? We've got everything." Gena Showalter (Harlequin) adds, "NASCAR, suspense, we've got historicals."
The Kmart Sizzling Summer Reads Author Tour 2006 is part of an ongoing collaboration between the wholesaler Levy Home Entertainment, mass-merchandise retailers and romance book publishers. Over the course of four days, the authors logged more than 400 miles on the tour bus, visiting three Chicago-area Kmarts and eight suburban Detroit stores, all among Kmart's top stores for book sales.
This is the fifth regional bus tour that Levy has organized since 2001. This summer, however, marks the first time that Kmart has participated in the venture, which has included tours of Wal-Mart, Kroger and regional chain stores. The tour is part of Kmart's drive to pump up book sales in its 1,400 stores. Even before Kmart merged with Sears in spring 2005, the retailer began reengineering its in-store book departments: repositioning the sections, increasing their size and scope, and adding new fixtures.
According to Elizabeth Lies, a book buyer for the Chicago-based retailer, Kmart book departments range in size from five to 160 square feet; the average is 75 square feet. Most stores carry about 1,000 titles, with 150 new titles added to the shelves each month, says Lies. There's a range of nonfiction and fiction, including plenty of romance titles.
According to the Romance Writers of America, romance accounted for 39.3% of all fiction sales, or $1.2 billion, in 2004. Also according to the RWA, about 31% of romance readers purchase their books at mass merchandise stores such as Target, Wal-Mart and, yes, Kmart. Neither Levy nor Kmart will provide sales figures, but John Lindsay, Levy's v-p of marketing and inventory, says Kmart's efforts to reinvent its book departments are paying off, with an average 35% increase in sales in stores that have been remodeled in the past two years.
It's impossible to say just how many books the recent bus tour moved—again, neither Kmart nor Levy are talking. But any observer could tell that during the hour the authors held court at Harwood Heights, shoppers bought hundreds of books. Beyond that, participating in the tour assured an author of having her book shelved in every Kmart store, not just the ones on the tour.
With 10 stores to go, the authors prepare to get back on the bus for the 45-minute drive to their next stop, in Oak Lawn. "That woman brought her entire backlist for me to sign, and all of Brenda Novak's backlist and several other authors' backlists," says S&S author Sabrina Jeffries, pointing at a woman carrying two bags full of books, including the four titles she'd purchased that morning.
