How Children's Content Creators Can Help Indie Bookstores (And Our Careers, too)

In this February 2020 Forbes article, How Indie Bookstores Beat Amazon At The Bookselling Game: Lessons Here For Every Retailer, Pamela N. Danziger argues that community, curation, and convening are three superpowers Indie Bookstores can use to succeed.

It's worth asking ourselves, as writers and illustrators, how can we leverage those same three "Cs"?

How can we build community (online, with our works, and in person)?

How can we curate content (and maybe have our books included in that curated content)?

And how can we convene - bring together - folks interested in our content?

Doing so could build synergy towards success with our audiences, indie bookstores, and our own books.

Read the full article on Forbes.com here.

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

Ellen Meeropol's ARC tour: Innovations in Book Marketing

Reported by Robert Gray in Shelf Awareness, the road trip that Ellen Meeropol took with a car full of ARCs, visiting "58 indie bookstores in 15 days" is remarkable.

A screen shot of the Shelf Awareness article, including a photo of Ellen by her car, which featured signage about her upcoming book release.

While not done for a children's book, the idea is replicable. (Ellen credits the idea to her friend and fellow Red Hen Press author Cai Emmons, who made a similar indie pilgrimage for her novel.)

As Ellen put it,

"So what was I doing in October and November was driving around New England with ARCs and chocolate bars covered in the image of the book jacket, visiting indie bookstores? The plan was to personally introduce my new novel to booksellers, store owners and fiction buyers. I asked them to take look at my novel, to consider stocking it, making an IndieNext nomination, recommending it to book groups and handselling it to customers."

And that personal touch seems impactful — Ellen's a former bookseller herself, so her strategy was thoughtful (and included chocolate.)

"I didn't use a standard pitch. When I handed them the ARC, most booksellers immediately turned to the back and read the short description and the blurbs. I followed their lead, about offering more information or not. Often our conversations were more about bookselling and our favorite current reads than about my book."

The result? When asked, Ellen answered,

"What difference will it make to my novel? I don't know. But in these days of increasing grassroots book promotion, I'm happy to have driven those roads, visited those stores, and met those booksellers."

The article about Ellen's ARC tour of indie bookstores is well worth-reading.

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

Industry Info to Know: How Local Indie Stores Can Compete With Amazon

This analysis by Scott Thorne of the research by Ryan L. Raffaelli, assistant professor in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School, was fascinating.

The take-away, that local indie bookstores can succeed by leveraging three advantages they have over online retailers:

His research found that resurgent booksellers engaged in three bottom up practices throughout the industry:
1) Community. Emphasizing their position as a local member of the community, able to interact with other community members in a way that Amazon and other online retailers could not.
2) Curation. While online retailers focus on very wide inventory and discounted prices, the brick and mortar stores emphasized the selection they offered and the ability of their staff to guide customers to books and other items they would enjoy.
3) Convening. Bookstores leveraged their physical locations, scheduling even more events than they had in the past. Those were either free or paid, with some offering in excess of 500 per year, making them an important part of the local entertainment scene.

The opportunity this presents for we authors and illustrators is clear: We should be tapping into the communities we are already part of, positioning our titles to local stores as part of their curation process, and thinking events.

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

Porter Square Books Writers In Residence Program - What an Amazing Trend To Start!

As reported in Shelf Awareness, Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts has launched a "Writers in Residence Program."

As the store explains on their website:

"In order to make the resources needed to write books more available to the writers and aspiring writers in our community, Porter Square Books will select two writers, one writing for adults and one writing for young readers, to be our 2019 Writers in Residence."

Not only are there perks for the two writers selected (including a staff discount on everything and access to the store office—a quiet space to work—after 5pm and on the weekends) but there are also responsibilities (including three event introductions, three pieces for the store's blog, dibs on the authors' book launch event for the book they worked on during the residency.)

You can find out more and apply here.

It's a great initiative on behalf of this one bookstore, and hopefully an inspiration for other bookstores to follow suit... Imagine the impact if all the 1,100 indiebound bookstores created their own "Writers in Residence" Programs. And then, if every bookstore in the country—no, the world!—participated, too.

And if the selection of these writers is made with an eye to #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #OwnVoices, it could really make an impact—starting one store, one writer, one book, and one reader at a time!

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

Book Swag: One Bookstore's Perspective

Bookmarks. Buttons. Posters. Book-Branded Lip Balm. Storytime Kits. Kid-Friendly give-aways. Samplers.

Besides an ARC, what do bookstores actually use/want? What swag helps your book succeed—and what might not be worth the expense?

To help us figure it out, Meghan Dietsche Goel, the Children's Book Buyer and Programming Director for BookPeople in Austin, Texas, shared her take in this PW article, "Book Treats Brought by the Postal Service."

It's great to hear from the bookstore's perspective about what has value, and how issues like simplicity of packaging and display space considerations fit in the mix. The article is well-worth reading.

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

"There's No Serendipity Online" - Inspiration and Wisdom about Discovering Books from Tom Cheesewright on Shelf Awareness

When thinking about the many roles bookstores can play (including community building, thought-leadership, and offering a safe space for diversity to be celebrated), this insight into serendipitous discovery felt profound and, worth sharing:

"Machines remain really bad at giving us a good discovery experience. The most sophisticated engines of personalization in the world are bad at finding us products that we don't know we want. They're good at helping us find things we absolutely know we want, and we know how to describe, but they're terrible at finding us those serendipitous discoveries, and human beings remain much better at that. It's why browsing a bookshop is so much a nicer experience if you don't know what you want, than browsing an online store. There's no serendipity online."

—Tom Cheesewright, an applied futurist, replying to the Bookseller's question: "If we're all reading e-books, is there still a place for bookshops?"

From the Thursday April 19, 2018 edition of Shelf Awareness.

Indies First - Authors and Illustrators To Become Booksellers For A Day (Saturday November 30, 2013)

Sherman Alexie has cooked up a great idea, and the American Booksellers Association is helping out.

SHERMAN ALEXIE

September 1, 2013

Hello, hello, you gorgeous book nerds,

Now is the time to be a superhero for independent bookstores. I want all of us (you and you and especially you) to spend an amazing day hand-selling books at your local independent bookstore on Small Business Saturday (that's the Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 30 this year, so you know it's a huge weekend for everyone who, you know, wants to make a living).

Here's the plan: We book nerds will become booksellers. We will make recommendations. We will practice nepotism and urge readers to buy multiple copies of our friends' books. Maybe you'll sign and sell books of your own in the process. I think the collective results could be mind-boggling (maybe even world-changing).

I was a bookseller-for-a-day at Seattle's Queen Anne Book Company when it reopened this past April. Janis Segress, one of the new co-owners, came up with this brilliant idea. What could be better than spending a day hanging out in your favorite hometown indie, hand- selling books you love to people who will love them too and signing a stack of your own? Why not give it a try? Let’s call it Indies First.

Grassroots is my favorite kind of movement, and anyway there’s not a lot of work involved in this one. Just pick a bookstore, talk to the owner (or answer the phone when they call you) and reach an agreement about how to spend your time that day. You’d also need to agree to place that store’s buy button in a prominent place on your website, above the Amazon button if you have one. After all, this is Indies First, not Indies Only, and it’s designed to include Indies in our world but not to exclude anyone else.

This is a great way to fight for independents—one that will actually help them. It’ll help you as well; the Indies I’ve talked to have told me that last year Small Business Saturday was one of their biggest days of the year, in some cases the biggest after the Saturday before Christmas—and that means your books will get a huge boost, wherever you choose to be.

The most important thing is that we’ll all be helping Independent bookstores, and God knows they’ve helped us over the years. So join the Indie First Movement and help your favorite independent bookstore. Help all indie bookstores. Reach out to them and join the movement. Indies First!

Yours in Independence,

Sherman Alexie, An Absolutely True Part-Time Indie

Very cool.

If you want to participate, visit the Indies First site to sign up.

Illustrate and Write On, 
Lee


ps - My thanks to Sarah Laurenson for sharing this news with me, so I could share it with all of you.

In the News This Week

Fridays on the SCBWI blog, I share snippets of and links to some of the publishing/media-related news I've read during the last week that I found interesting, helpful, and/or fun.



This week's news includes PW's coverage of SCBWI 40th Annual Summer Conference (which is technically last week's news, but I didn't want you to miss it); Little, Brown and Holiday house entering the leveled reader realm; magazine editors reaching out to the young and wired; syncing posts on multiple social networks; some e-reader-related news; Twitter contest tips; indie bookstore coverage including some fun from The Daily Show's John Hodgman; and more.

SCBWI Conference Celebrates 40th Anniversary with Record Turnout (PW)
A surprise guest appearance by Judy Blume at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators annual summer conference in Los Angeles made the 40th anniversary of the organization even more meaningful to the record-breaking number of attendees, which included writers, illustrators, publishers, editors, and agents. Nearly 1,350 people were on hand for the conference, which was held August 4-8 at the Century Plaza Hotel.

Two Leveled Reader Programs Debut This Fall (PW)
A phone call from a librarian friend at the Boston Public Library allegedly prompted Ursula Nordstrom in the mid-1950s to launch Harper & Row’s I Can Read! line of beginning readers. After the librarian told the legendary editor that there was a dearth of simple books that new readers were able to tackle on their own, Nordstrom set out to fill that void. The first I Can Read! title, Else Holmelund Minarik’s Little Bear, illustrated by Maurice Sendak, was released in 1957. That same year, Random House debuted Beginner Books with Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. In subsequent years, many other early reader programs entered the marketplace, including Random House’s Step into Reading, Scholastic Readers, HMH Books’ Green Light Readers, and most recently Square Fish’s My Readers, which launched this spring. This fall, two new leveled reader lines join their ranks: Little, Brown’s Passport to Reading and I Like to Read Books from Holiday House.
 

Liberty Buys Barnes & Noble Stake (MCN)
Liberty Media said it has agreed to purchase $204 million of Barnes & Noble preferred stock, a deal which would eventually give it a 16.6 % stake and trumps a $1 billion bid the media  giant had made for the troubled book retailer in May.

iPad Killer: Amazon Goes Razor Blades On Tablet Landscape (PWxyz)
This October is likely going to be a defining moment for tablets. That’s if, as expected, Amazon drops its tablet into the increasingly crowded fray, which at the moment is only slightly more organized than the Wild West. Many are expecting Amazon to set things straight, eliminating the pretenders and giving us a better idea of what exactly buyers want out of a tablet. But before we get to what might happen, let’s get caught up on what already has happened.

Easily And Automatically Sync Posts Between Twitter, Google+ And Facebook (AllTwitter)
We’ve written before about how to tweet your Google+ posts to Twitter, and now we’ve got an even more robust way to sync up your various social media profiles.

4 Things To Remember When Running A Twitter Contest (AllTwitter)
Twitter is a fantastic place to host a contest. You have a direct line to your customers and fans, you can easily set a time limit, and you can even use a hashtag to track it easily. However, there are some things you’ve got to consider when setting up your Twitter contest, or else the scammers, hackers, and otherwise deceptive people will start coming out of the woodwork and ruin all your best intentions.

HARRY POTTER CHAINED to new Sony reader (Register)
Sony will bundle its next generation e-reader with the entire series of Harry Potter stories from November, The Register has learnt. The bespectacled wizard debuts in digital format in October – the same time as the Sony-sponsored Pottermore "online reading experience" goes live – according to well-placed sources in the vendor's retail channel.

Editors Face Teen Angst (WWD)
Magazine newsstand sales were revealed last week by the Audit Bureau of Circulations and the numbers were bleak. Editors are desperate to engage the younger generation — those tweeters, Facebookers, text messagers and Web surfers who will ensure that titles have a future beyond the Baby Boomers. But what do they have to offer this prized demographic? More pictures of Lady Gaga or Kim Kardashian?

Independent bookstores add a new chapter (WaPo)

The brick-and-mortar bookstore is, like most of the economy, dead or close to it. See: Amazon, growth of. See: Borders, tanking of. Everybody knows this. So here’s Eileen McGervey, owner of One More Page bookstore in Arlington, standing next to her gourmet chocolates and a nice little wine selection, right across from the food and travel section, and she . . . opened in January of this year?

  
John Hodgman Shares Tips for Indie Bookstores (GalleyCat)
Author John Hodgman poked fun at the demise of Borders in a Daily Show appearance (video embedded above) this week,  urging booksellers to “replace their old-fashioned bookshelves with beautiful, well-appointed downloading pods.”