More than 1,600 independent bookstores across the United States celebrated Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 26—although some bookstores kicked off the festivities up to five days earlier, and others extended the party into Sunday. “This is like a holiday,” commented St. Paul, Minn., resident Alex Scott, a former bookseller at Women and Children First in Chicago, as her stack of books was rung up at the register. “It’s absolute magic,” responded the store’s outreach manager, Emily Kallas, noting that shortly after the store opened that morning, a customer found one of the 800 golden tickets good for 12 audiobook credits that Libro.fm had distributed to indies.
“Everyone’s coming out, talking books, wanting to shop local,” Kallas said. Referring to Amazon’s book sale on April 23–28, which the online retail behemoth claimed in a statement that it sent to several news outlets was an "unintentional" overlap, Kallas said that customers were responding by “showing up more, and saying ‘no, no, no, don’t even try to do this to our indies.’”
Lauren Groff, the author who owns the Lynx Books in Gainesville, Fla., agreed, saying that sales were 50% above last year’s sales. "I have no idea if Amazon had an impact, though I suspect the store's pushback on social media, my personal pushback on social media, and others, like Bookshop.org, contributed to drive people to the store," Groff said.
Carrie Koepke, the general manager of the Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Mo., reported that this year’s sales broke the store’s previous records, with a number of customers denigrating Amazon for the timing of its sale. Cathy Fiebach, the owner of Main Point Books in Wayne, Pa., said that Amazon's move, which the store publicized on social media, "might have helped" the store's 35% increase in sales over last year's IBD. "I had people come in, angry and wanting to show they support us," Fiebach said.
Although Tom Batterson, the manager of New Story Community Bookstore in Battle Creek, Mich., reported that "foot traffic was way up for the day" and transactions up 30%, he still felt that the day was “a mixed bag” as a number of customers mentioned their purchases on Amazon and Barnes & Noble (B&N held a sale offering 25% off pre-orders on April 23–25). Lorraine Wilburn, owner of the Little Sparrow Bookshop in North Canton, Ohio, reported that IBD sales were down this year, adding that Amazon may have impacted her store’s sales, “but what really hurt me was all our libraries decided to do book sales yesterday. I'm going to be salty about that for a long time.”
Passports to the world of indies
This year, more bookstores than ever partnered on crawls, with passports for customers offering discounts on future purchases. “We had an amazing day,” reported Kate Lockard Snyder, the owner of Plaid Elephant Books in Danville, Ky., which partnered with four other central Kentucky indies to organize their first bookstore crawl. “That brought in some lovely new foot traffic and contributed to this being our best sales day ever.”
The Nonbinarian Bookstore in Brooklyn, which opened six months ago, also participated in its first bookstore crawl, joining 25 other indies in that borough. Medals were presented by the Nonbinarian booksellers to customers for whom the store was their 20th bookstore; three shoppers for whom the Nonbinarian was their 26th and final stop on the crawl received the honors. "Everyone in the store would erupt into applause" when the first medal was awarded to a shopper, recounted owner K. Kerimian, “It was just like a really wholesome moment, like everyone was celebrating this person."
In the Atlanta, Ga., metro area, seven Black woman–owned indies collaborated on the inaugural Black Girl Book Fair, which took place outside Brave + Kind Books in Decatur. Julia Davis, owner of the Book Worm in Powder Springs, said that the collaboration with the other stores on the event made the day her "most successful and most fulfilling IBD yet," adding that many customers visited her store before driving 40 minutes to the Black Girl Book Fair.
Nina Barrett, the owner of Bookends and Beginnings in Evanston, one of 55 Chicagoland bookstores participating in the country's largest crawl and passport combo, said net revenues were up 44% over last year, and the store broke its 11-year record for one-day sales. “The number of transactions was up 65%,” she added. “The bookstore crawl has really caught on in Chicago's book-loving community." And although Lincoln Avenue is closed to traffic due to construction, Suzy Takacs, the owner of Chicago's Book Cellar, reported that the day was "definitely our biggest IBD yet, and may be one of our biggest sales days ever, with a lot of new faces" buying books.
“It was the biggest day in our store’s [46-year] history,” declared Women and Children First co-owner Lynn Mooney, noting that the store raked in $3,000 in sales within an hour of opening. “It was 20% higher than our previous last highest sales day, which was last year’s IBD,” she said, attributing it to the “confluence of national IBD and the Chicago bookstore crawl,” and the popularity of “Chicago-exclusive merch,” including two different posters and a postcard by Lucy Knisley, and a broadside of a poem by José Olivarez entitled “The Democrats Need to Stop Asking Me for $5.”
Close to 40 bookstores across the Twin Cities participated in the bookstore crawl and passport program sponsored by Rain Taxi. On a city block in Minneapolis that had been all but decimated in the week of violence following George Floyd’s murder five years ago, customers browsed inside Moon Palace Books, which reported sales 50% above last year's IBD, and in the parking lot beside the store, Mind’s Eye Comics maintained a booth next to Babycake’s Book Stack mobile bookstore. Paperback Exchange, which had to close its doors after being flooded in February, operated a pop-up all weekend in a Quonset hut behind Moon Palace where their undamaged inventory has been stored since the flood. And across the street, Uncle Edgar’s and Uncle Hugo’s, the twin bookstores that had been burned to the ground on May 30, 2020, welcomed customers to the space the Uncles moved into three years ago.
“There’s so much good bookselling going on here,” Moon Palace co-owner Jamie Schwesnedl said. “Today, we are in the bookstore district.”
Book people were out in force in the Western states too. San Diego held its annual book crawl with 14 stores, complete with a shuttle bus and appearances by Newbery-winning author-ambassador Dave Eggers. Six stores in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles, held a book crawl of their own, while Sacramento independent booksellers organized 10 local stores for a Read the Region event.
At San Francisco’s Bookshop West Portal—where IBD sales trounced last year’s strong numbers—visitors had the opportunity to “engage in some grassroots activism throughout the day with a postcarding campaign” to send messages to legislators, said buyer and special project manager Susan Tunis. “We are very fortunate not to have issues with book banning in San Francisco, but library funding, First Amendment rights, and Amazon’s monopoly affect us all.” West Portal also hosted its first Drag Story Hour with drag performer Panda Dulce, aka middle grade author Kyle Casey Chu (The Queen Bees of Tybee County). “That was our first Drag Story Hour, but it won’t be our last,” Tunis said.
In Las Vegas, Writer’s Block cofounder Drew Cohen called this IBD “one of our busiest shopping days ever, and certainly in the top three busiest we’ve experienced” since opening in 2014.
Portland, Ore., saw its first-ever North Portland Book Crawl, with 10 participating shops and a book giveaway. Other Portland stores threw parties of their own. The city’s nonprofit Literary Arts, which opened a new headquarters and independent bookshop on December 7, hosted a kids’ Spanish-language storytime, a pop-up writing class with local indie author Michelle Kicherer (Sexy Life, Hello), and a zine-making workshop led by graphic design teacher Kathleen Barnett.
Across the Willamette River, Powell’s City of Books unveiled an independent bookstore map of the area, with visits from Oregon governor Tina Kotek, Portland mayor Keith Wilson, city councilmember Mitch Green, and Powell’s president and owner Emily Powell.
Farther north, Washington bibliophiles attempted to visit all 29 Seattle-area stores on the maximalist Bookstore Day Passport Challenge—plus the nearby South Sound Book Crawl, with 11 stores. (A contender for PW's Bookstore of the Year, Ballast Books, got in on both passports, thanks to its Bremerton, Wash., location.) Georgiana Blomberg, owner of Magnolia's Bookstore, said she'd ordered ahead but still sold out of several titles, and shelves across the region were depleted by the weekend's conclusion.
The last Saturday in April can get a little out of hand. At Seattle's Arundel Books, staffers inadvertently created a reading challenge when they hung an IBD display backward, joked store owner Phil Bevis. “No one spotted the oops until they went to take a photo for our social media,” Bevis said, and the sign was quickly corrected. Even so, the cattywampus version captured the air of excitement ahead of another fizzy Independent Bookstore Day.
