Dear Booksellers, For the past two weeks, ABA COO Joy and I, along with ABA Board President Jamie Fiocco (Flyleaf Books) and ABA Board Vice President Brad Graham (Politics & Prose), have been conducting ABA’s annual individual check-in meetings with publishers and Ingram. Needless to say, these meetings were not business as usual this year. Continuing my reports from Friday and Tuesday, a few things of note: In addition to the pressing issues related to the flow of books and money right now, our meetings with publishers were an opportunity to discuss many other topics: Edelweiss360, Batch, Bookshop and IndieBound, virtual events, potential direct to home opportunities with publishers or support for Ingram Consumer Direct Fulfillment (CDF), digital galleys (we advocated strongly for keeping print galleys but reducing the quantities or making them print-on-demand to reduce waste and expense), the needs of small and very small stores (including eliminating carton quantity requirements), school business opportunities, and more. I’ve focused my updates on sharing the best practices of publishers. Rest assured that we also addressed (and continue to address) “worst practices” with them as well. We still hope that there will be more announcements of relief from publishers as they realize that supporting the indies is critical to their own businesses’ success. Thank you to those who have shared your stories about publishers that are supporting stores on a case-by-case basis. Stores should continue to reach out to ALL of their sales reps and credit reps. Thank the publishers for what they are offering. Tell them how they can do better. Ask for what you need. Tell them how you’re doing.
During the course of these conversations, it became clear that the entire industry needs to start strategizing about the holiday season. Many stores depend on the holiday season for a significant percentage of their annual revenue. (Stores that depend on the summer season will be looking for ways to make up lost sales from their high season.) This holiday season will be impacted by social distancing and changes in consumer behavior, at the least. ABA is focusing on how to prepare stores for the best 4th quarter possible. We’re looking at: Will printers survive the crisis? How will bookstores need to buy differently if we anticipate that printing capacity will be diminished and publishers won’t be able to reprint hot titles quickly? If ecommerce trends continue and consumers move more to online shopping for the holidays, will we see the paper shortage we saw a couple of seasons ago (reportedly caused by the increase in Amazon boxes)? How will stores need to buy differently in anticipation of how that shortage impacts print runs? For stores, how will increased online volume impact store staffing? Capacity? Cost of goods? What best practices can ABA share to help stores prepare for these changes? How can we improve IndieCommerce and IndieLite for the holiday season (and beyond)? What best practices can we share with stores to help them improve their online order fulfillment procedures? What can we do now to improve the supply chain for the season? What conversations can we have directly with shipping vendors, or indirectly through wholesalers and publishers, to ensure that shipping vendors are prepared? What kind of marketing campaign can we launch to encourage consumers to buy early to help with the bottleneck or breakdown that could occur with potentially unprecedented ecommerce volume for stores in December? How will bookstores need to reimagine their businesses for the holiday season — their events, their physical space, gift wrap, etc.?
The list goes on…we’re working on it and we welcome your thoughts on what else we can be thinking about to help you with the 4th quarter and the holiday season. ABA is here for all of you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. We are an incredibly creative, resilient, supportive industry. We’ll get through this, together. Best,
Allison |
