Dear Booksellers, Beginning today, ABA’s daily update schedule will be changing to twice a week as we shift our focus to other priorities for members. Watch for new educational programming and other announcements in the days ahead. Updates will occur on Mondays and Fridays, and BTW will continue to be published every Wednesday. For today, we’re asking for your help one last time on some important ABA matters: Call for ABA Board Nominations
The ABA board is accepting nominations of Black booksellers for appointment to the board. Members may nominate booksellers with three years of bookstore experience no later than 11:59 PM ET on Tuesday, August 4, and self-nominations are also welcome. Other qualifications and considerations are outlined in the “ABA Nomination and Election Guidelines.” ABA Demographic Survey Deadline Extended
The deadline for this important demographic survey has been extended until Monday, July 27, for those who haven’t had a chance to respond yet. 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. If you receive an error message please contact [email protected]. As a reminder, ABA spent two weeks developing these surveys, and the questions were 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. The ABA team also did research to help ensure that demographic information, specifically, was as inclusive as possible. If we missed things or have been less inclusive than we intended, we welcome input so that we can continue learning and improving. Bookstore Owners Survey Deadline Extended
Bookstore owners received a survey via email with 7 questions (3-5 minutes of your time) about their store’s operating status (sales and purchasing/sales forecasts) along with optional questions identifying their stores in terms of demographics. This survey will be re-sent to owners with the subject line “Reminder: Bookstore Owner Survey.” As a reminder, 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.) Thank you to everyone who has already participated in the nomination and survey processes, and thank you in advance to those of you helping us now. All of this important business will help position ABA to better serve our members. In the meantime, ABA is here for 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 |
