Mark your calendars! On Monday, April 24, at 3:00 pm ET, the American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE), ABA’s free speech initiative, will be hosting a virtual panel on how to fight book bans in your community.

The panel, "Local Organizing to Combat Book Bans," will feature Chris Finan, Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship; Samiya Bashir, Executive Director at Lambda Literary; Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project; and Zoe Perzo, Content Coordinator at ABA and former librarian. The discussion will be moderated by David Grogan, ABFE Director.

The deadline to submit this year’s Publisher Survey is Sunday, April 9. If you have not already, please take a moment to share your experiences with publishers and how they handle common issues. 

Survey results will help inform the agenda for ABA's upcoming meetings with publishers.

ABA is launching a new educational series: ABA Education Meetups! This first meeting will be a Doc Swap for stores to share their favorite forms, crowdsource ideas on procedural documents, and geek out over a good checklist. Join the ABA Education team on Thursday, April 13, at 3:00 pm ET, with your finest forms and choicest checklists.

Future ABA Education Meetups will include virtual bookstore tours, bookseller lightning talks, and more!

In an effort to increase support for our members, ABA will be adding a new category of content to our social media. We'd love to hear (and share) when you're:

• Opening a new store
• Opening a new location
• Moving locations
• Making renovations or expansions

Anyone making these changes can send information, including social media handles and photos, to [email protected].

As a reminder, if you are thinking of selling your business, you are always welcome to submit an ad to our classified section on BookWeb. 

Ronnie Riley is the author of Jude Saves the World, a Winter/Spring 2023 Indies Introduce Kids selection. Here, Riley and Gabriella Crivilare of Prairie Fox Books in Ottawa, IL, discuss Jude Saves the World.

Here are the 25 Indie Next List and 6 Now in Paperback picks on the May 2023 Indie Next List flier. Top pick? Happy Place by Emily Henry. And, to mark the start of a new month, April Indie Next List and March/April Kids’ Indie Next List social media assets are live on BookWeb.

Here is the Indie Personal Finance Bestseller List, based on sales at independent bookstores nationwide for the eight-week period ending April 2, 2023.

Applications for We Need Diverse Books’ 2023 Internship Grant Program are now open. This program provides supplemental grants to applicants from diverse backgrounds who are pursuing a summer publishing internship. Applications will be accepted until April 30.