DEIC Booksellers are invited to nominate themselves or a fellow bookseller to the American Booksellers Association’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee (DEIC), which serves as a sounding board and advisory council on issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, representation, and access facing the bookselling community and ABA.
There’s a short form to fill out to nominate members and nominations are due by 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday, January 20, 2021. (Please note: The committee decided to go ahead and announce now but with an extended nomination timeline in recognition of the busy holiday season. Hopefully people hear about it now and can consider it more fully after the holidays.)
More information (and contacts for questions) is available in the BTW article published earlier this week.
IndieCommerce Holiday Shopping Home Stretch: The IndieCommerce team has still been rolling out quite a few new features and services over the past few weeks. To help you get the most out of your IndieCommerce or IndieLite website, they have put together this extensive list of new features and suggestions to help you convert more customers into buyers and manage the increase in online sales volume over the next two weeks. Emergencies: If your IndieCommerce or IndieLite website is experiencing an outage -- if customers can’t place orders or you can't process orders so it’s an emergency -- please take the following steps: Check the IndieCommerce Status Page. If you don’t see an incident reported on that page, then… Submit a critical outage report. We monitor for critical/emergency outage reports 24/7. As soon as you submit a critical outage report, it’s forwarded to IndieCommerce staff for review. Please include as much detail as possible and please only use this form for emergencies as described above. Note: You must have a BookWeb.org account to submit this form, so make sure your team has login credentials handy.
Non-Emergency Support: For non-emergency IndieCommerce issues, email [email protected] and include your store name, site URL, and as much detail as possible about your question or issue.
Advocacy Health Insurance Open Enrollment ends Tuesday, December 15. This is the last chance for booksellers to get Affordable Care Act (ACA) health coverage for 2021 in most states. Contact ABA’s membership health insurance partner LIG Solutions for a no-obligation health insurance assessment before the December 15 deadline. There’s still time to tell Congress to pass COVID-19 relief. Booksellers can now advocate for their businesses using our new one-click tool. (It takes 2 minutes!) Simply add your personal story (optional) to a pre-written message to lawmakers urging them to pass COVID-19 relief, enter your name and address, and hit send. Our ask (included in the pre-written message) includes tax deductibility for PPP loans. Take action here. The Paid Leave and Paid Sick Days Reimbursement program (through the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, or FFCRA) ends on December 31, 2020. Under this program, small businesses are required to provide employees with certain paid leave due to COVID-19. The federal government will reimburse small businesses for 100 percent of the required paid leave, up to a cap, in the form of a refundable tax credit. For more information on how to claim the tax credit, see here and here. Contact your accountant with any questions specifically related to your business. More relief may still be available in your area, so continue to check regularly. For example, Los Angeles County California businesses may be eligible for a new small business recovery fund that will award grants of between $5,000 and $25,000 to businesses with fewer than 20 employees (full-time, part-time, and/or contracted workers). The application window for the first round runs from December 14 to December 20. Learn more here.
December Events Last Coffee Break of 2020! Tuesday, December 15, at 3:00 p.m. ET
Join us for this opportunity to share support, ask questions, and trade best practices. All booksellers are welcome. If you’ve never attended these events before, they’re a great way to hear what’s working well at other stores, crowdsource solutions to any challenges you’re facing at your store, and, now, talk about the holiday season for your store. Email [email protected] for Zoom login details.
Good luck this weekend! 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 |
