Winter Institute

Winter Institute 11 will be held in Denver, Colorado, from Saturday evening, January 23, through Tuesday, January 26, 2016, but between now and then there are few dates that registered booksellers should keep in mind.

All Winter Institute 11 attendees are invited to share their favorite backlist book with friends and colleagues at the first-ever Backlist Book Swap, to be held on Saturday evening, January 23. A form is available on BookWeb.org for booksellers to share their favorite under-read book with ABA now.

Even with a 15 percent increase in the registration cap, the 2016 Winter Institute reached capacity in record time last week. Booksellers can now add their names to waitlists for registration and for reservations at the host hotel, the Sheraton Denver Downtown.

If you’ve registered for Winter Institute 2016 and are starting to think about travel plans, now is the time to check out the travel discounts available to event attendees and to consider taking part in pre- and post-institute events.

Registration for the 11th annual Winter Institute opened on Wednesday afternoon, September 9, and, despite the fact that ABA increased bookseller registration by 15 percent, the institute reached full capacity on Friday morning, September 11. Booksellers can now add their names to a waitlst.

ABA bookstore and provisional members should be on the lookout for an e-mail announcing the opening of registration for the 2016 Winter Institute to arrive in their inboxes on Wednesday afternoon, September 9.

ABA’s first-ever online application process for booksellers interested in submitting their names for an opportunity to win a Winter Institute publisher-sponsored scholarship is open from now until October 26.

In response to enthusiastic feedback from booksellers who participated in Winter Institute 10’s Advanced Learning Session on Human Resources, ABA has invited the session’s presenter, Dr. John Sherlock, to lead two Human Resources Workshops this fall.

Event registration and hotel reservations for ABA’s 2016 Winter Institute are scheduled to open on Wednesday, September 9, 2015. The 11th annual education event will be held in Denver, Colorado, from Saturday evening, January 23, through Tuesday, January 26, 2016.

Booksellers who are starting to think about their travel plans for Winter Institute 11 should bear in mind that ABA is planning a post-event ski trip for January 27 to the Copper Mountain resort, located 75 miles outside of Denver.

ABA will award the Avin Mark Domnitz Scholarship to attend Winter Institute 11 to the owner or an employee of a bookstore that submits its 2014 financial data to the ABACUS-14 survey before the July 1 deadline.

To facilitate conversations that began during the Roundtable Discussions on POS Systems at Winter Institute 10, and to foster new discussions, six new booksellers-only online forums were recently added to BookWeb.org.

Here is an array of great ideas for promoting bookstores as hubs of creativity, community, and activity, all gleaned from the bookseller discussion groups following Steven Johnson’s plenary talk, “How We Got to Now,” at Winter Institute 10.

Booksellers and e-mail marketing company representatives discussed three different platforms at the Wi10 education session “E-mail Marketing Options: Shelf Awareness, Ingram Sendr, Constant Contact.”

At a Winter Institute panel presented by the ABC Children’s Group at ABA, booksellers offered strategies for communicating with customers about products, encouraging and training staff to upsell, and buying and displaying book and non-book pairings to maximize sales.