2023 Membership Renewal Letter

Dear Booksellers,

2022 went by so fast! As it sped by, we hope you found value in ABA’s resources and support. Here are some of the benefit highlights from 2022:

Education. In 2022 ABA offered over 100 education sessions through virtual webinars, tech and marketing meetups, regional fall show presentations, and conferences — virtual Snow Days and Children’s Institute in Phoenix, our first in-person since the pandemic began! ABA also continued to invest in ABACUS, the financial benchmarking survey and report for independent bookstores, to help stores analyze their financials and look for ways to improve profitability.
Advocacy. ABA’s Advocacy team continued to push for a federal e-commerce assistance program for independent retailers; lobbied in support of the Credit Card Competition Act to control rates related to debit card interchanges fees; lobbied for the American Innovation and Choice Online Act to help level the e-commerce playing field; and met with attorneys general and the FTC to provide them with information about Amazon’s monopolistic practices and lobby for investigations into its antitrust violations. ABA also commissioned Civic Economics to do a study of the economic impact of Amazon on communities and widely shared the resulting report, Unfulfilled: Amazon and the American Retail Landscape.
Freedom of Expression. ABFE (American Booksellers for Free Expression, ABA’s Freedom of Expression initiative) partnered with NCAC, Media Coalition, ACLU, and others to fight book bans, continued to provide stores faced with local school and library book banning challenges with resources and assistance, helped produce and promote Banned Books Week, and organized and shared a petition signed by over 1,600 independent booksellers and consumers in support of the right to read.
Marketing. ABA continued to offer turnkey marketing assets to stores: the “Good books come to those who shop early” campaign, the refreshed “October is the new December” campaign, the refreshed #BoxedOut campaign, new seasonal assets for fall and Valentine’s Day, as well as our perennials for you to share with your customers — the email and print Indie Next List and Kids’ Next List subscriptions and the Reading Group Guide. We also created the “Welcome to Bookselling” asset to help onboard booksellers new to the industry, the Holidays & Observances Calendar to help you plan your social media for the year, and the Independent Bookstore Bestsellers List to promote the value of the indie channel.
Children’s Bookselling. ABA continued to champion children’s booksellers and bookselling by offering children’s programming (Children’s Shop Talk and Discord group), resources (ABC Best Books for Young Readers catalog), and education — the virtual and in-person Children’s Institute.
E-commerce. The almost 600 stores that use ABA’s platform for e-commerce experienced tremendous support and dozens of enhancements to the platform in 2022. Development of IndieCommerce 2.0 continued and the first stores began migrating to the new platform.
Partners. ABA continued to offer members benefits through our partners: discounts with Eventbrite and Crowdcast, rebates with Constant Contact, a free design offer through Bonfire, discounted shipping through PartnerShip, and relationships with Bookshop — over 1,395 ABA stores participated in the Bookshop pool and over 1,300 participated in the partnership program. ABA stores earned $8.2M from Bookshop sales in 2022! ABA also facilitated James Patterson’s generous gift of $250K in holiday bonuses for ABA member store booksellers.
Insurance. We’re glad that some of you were able to offer health insurance to your employees through ABA’s Book Industry Health Insurance Partnership (BIHIP) with LIG Solutions last year. (The law still prohibits ABA from offering a national membership health insurance plan, but we will continue to lobby for a bigger solution.) Others benefited from ABA’s Bookseller Insurance Program (formerly Libris) for property, workers comp, and liability insurance. (Remember you can use your local broker for this program!)
Publicity. ABA participated in dozens of interviews in 2022 to promote both independent bookstores and the issues of importance to you. We continued our partnership with Good Morning America to promote the value of independent bookstores and create visibility for stores. We planned the biggest Independent Bookstore Day to date and promoted Indies First alongside Small Business Saturday, providing bookstores with additional publisher discounts on book orders for Q4 and promoting shopping indie for the holidays.
Networking and Community. Thousands of booksellers and bookstore members came together last year to network, share best practices, and talk shop through ShopTalks, Meetups, Board Office Hours, ABA Town Hall, ABA Open Houses, virtual gatherings like Snow Days, and the in-person Children’s Institute.
Resources. Hundreds of you reached out for support around various issues or to get answers to your questions. We appreciated the opportunity to help you negotiate with your landlord, figure out how to value your store, learn how to write an op-ed, make a plan to buy your building, resolve issues with publishers, create an employee handbook, respond to human resources questions, and more.
Equity & Representation. ABA expanded programming to better support all of our members and to rise to our commitment to equity, representation, antiracism, and access. We launched the Advance Access for Underrepresented Voices newsletter; offered antiracist, diversity, and de-escalation training for members; and worked on several DEI initiatives including some with the help of ABA’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee (DEIC).

This is just a small selection of all that we did in 2022! A huge thank you to the ABA team and to all of you who helped us in so many ways.

For 2023, ABA is poised to support you like we did last year and in new ways that not only help you prepare for your organizational future, but also help shape our collective future.

It’s an honor to support you and the important work you do and we hope you give us the opportunity to continue our support this year with the renewal of your ABA membership.

Our quick renewal process only takes a few minutes; most of your information has been pre-populated. Log on now to renew using your Bookweb.org username: . If no username appears here then you need an account! You can create an account here.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. The Membership team at [email protected] and all of us here at ABA are always happy to help you however we can.

Allison Hill
ABA CEO