Dear Booksellers, ABA is conducting two brief surveys to collect information to help us better meet the needs of our bookstores and our booksellers, and we need your help! Booksellers & Bookstore Owners
Please help us by answering a set of optional questions: Demographic Questions: Historically, ABA has not collected demographic information on our members. As a result, we have lacked critical information needed to recognize, serve, and support all of our members. We are asking 7 demographic questions (approximately 2 minutes of your time). All questions are optional and most include spaces to write in answers; we don’t want to limit people’s answers to the options we supply for them. *Aggregated* bookseller information will be shared. *Individual* bookseller data will not be shared outside of ABA. Individual demographic information will be used for specific ABA purposes only. For example, as ABA reviews potential bookseller panelists who are knowledgeable about a subject, like science fiction, ABA would use these lists to cross-reference the names of booksellers to ensure diverse representation on the panel. Fill out the survey here. You will need to be signed in to BookWeb.org to fill out the survey. Your Bookweb.org username should appear here: . If no username appears, you can create an account. If you've forgotten your password, you can request a new password. Bookstore Owners
Bookstore owners are also being asked to complete a second survey, which will be sent via email with the subject line "Bookstore Owner Survey." Operations Questions: COVID-19 has had a significant impact on our industry. To better understand how stores are doing, we are asking 7 questions (approximately 3-5 minutes of your time) about sales and purchasing/sales forecasts. The data requested is information that bookstore owners will know off the top of their heads. Individual store sales, purchasing and forecast information will not be shared with anyone. This data will only be shared as aggregated numbers to better help ABA in our lobbying efforts around government relief and in our advocacy work with publishers on behalf of stores. (We may or may not also share this aggregated information with the media or other partners, if we decide that it is useful to the industry for us to do so.) Again, individual store sales, purchasing, and forecast information will not be shared. Identity Question: Bookstore owners will also be asked one optional question identifying their stores in terms of demographics (for example, as a Black-owned bookstore or a woman-owned bookstore). Historically, ABA has not collected demographic information on our member stores. As a result, we have lacked critical information needed to recognize, serve, and support all of our members. By answering the identity question, you grant permission to ABA to share your individual store demographic identity data for the purpose of providing information — to publishers, press, the public, and other partners — such as lists of bookstores that identify in certain ways. For example, we could include a Black-owned bookstore on a list of Black-owned businesses. Process
ABA has spent two weeks developing these surveys, and the questions have been thoroughly vetted and discussed. Input was solicited from every member of the ABA team; all of the booksellers on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee; and several individual booksellers. We thank them all for their feedback and suggestions. The ABA team also did research to help ensure that demographic information, specifically, was as inclusive as possible. All of that said, we may still have missed things or been less inclusive than we intended. If so, we welcome input so that we can continue learning and improving. Importance
Those of you who attended Wi15 in Baltimore may have heard Harvard Business School professor Ryan Raffaelli explain how important financial data is. To his point, we are in a precarious time for our industry, and we need ABA’s work supporting member stores to be based on more than assumptions and conjecture about how stories are doing. Equally important for the health of our industry is ABA’s commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and representation. Demographic data is critical to helping us to that end. Simply put, we recognize that to meet the needs of our members, we need to know who our members are and how they’re doing. We thank you all in advance for helping us with this goal so that we can better help you. Deadline
The deadline for both surveys is Monday, July 20, at 11:59 p.m. ET. ABA is here for all of you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. Members can contact me directly or email the Membership, Advocacy, or IndieCommerce teams. Best,
Allison |
