125 Years of ABA: Q&A with Danny Caine

This year marks ABA’s 125th year of helping indie bookstores thrive. As part of our 125th anniversary celebration, we’ll be sharing interviews with key figures in the industry and exploring how the organization has changed since its inception in 1900.

Danny Caine is a former bookseller and former co-owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas. During his time as a bookseller, he served on the ABA Board of Directors, and also published several successful titles defending small businesses and encouraging people to buy local. He now works at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

This week, Danny Caine sat down with Bookselling This Week to discuss his unique perspective of the industry and the part bookstores play.

Bookselling This Week: One of the reasons I felt it was important to talk to you is because you have a breadth of experience in the book industry that others might not. Meaning of course that you’ve been a bookseller and bookstore owner, an ABA Board Member, and an author — specifically of titles championing indie bookstores. As you’ve gained all of these experiences, how has your view of the book industry, and bookselling, and even ABA changed?

Danny Caine: The more time I spent in the industry, the more I realized how challenging it is to start, maintain, and grow a bookstore.

We're in a tough time for booksellers. I'm not sure it's ever easy, but the ways that it's challenging change.

For a while it was, how do we keep our customers safe from COVID? How do we keep our business going? And then, how do we keep going without the government funding we got from COVID?

And there's always Amazon.

With that knowledge of how hard it is, my admiration for booksellers has only grown, because the work is so important. It's so crucial to communities, authors, and other booksellers. 

That comes from being an author more than anything else, because How to Resist Amazon and Why sold pretty much entirely through bookstores. And it's still selling.

It's an honor to play a part in these discussions about bookstores and Amazon, and it's really an honor to have a place on the shelf — even four and a half years after that book came out. I understand the work that it takes to sell books and just how meaningful it is that a book is chosen — not only when it's brand new. The biggest compliment you can give a book is to stock it for years at a time, and that's happened in so many places.

I'm just so appreciative of it. I owe all of my success as an author to bookstores and I'm really in awe of how hard and creatively people are working to make this work in a really challenging climate.

BTW: You mentioned COVID, of course. What are some other challenges you feel booksellers or indie bookstores have overcome in your time as a bookseller?

DC: COVID was a hundred challenges in one. I think that the supply chain is still dealing with it. I think the end of a lot of those programs caused inflation. Books are getting more expensive and people are hyperconscious of their budgets these days.

[Another challenge is] being able to carve a spot and even grow in the time of Amazon — finding not only market space, but a voice, as Amazon continues to get bigger and more powerful.

Working at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, with a broader view of small businesses and their importance, I realize just how much of a leader bookstores are in this movement. A lot of these discussions started at bookstores because we were Amazon's first victims.

They started by selling books, so we've known about their threat for the longest. A lot of other people have come under the tent, which is good, but I think bookstores are leaders in getting out the message of the importance of small business to communities.

Not only did we survive Amazon, but we managed to basically start a campaign and be a crucial voice in the Buy Local movement. It's a testament to the creativity and persistence of booksellers.

There's bad winter weather — with climate change, severe weather is only going to get worse. You've got bookstores dealing with fires in LA. The Raven was closed briefly in February because of heavy snow.

Landlords are always a challenge. Commercial rents are so sky high and a lot of places weirdly incentivize vacant storefronts. If you're a landlord with an empty storefront, you can get a write off from that, which means there's no incentive for them to make sure their stores are filled. There's some policy popping up here and there that gets rid of that loophole, but being able to afford your space or afford to buy a building is always a challenge for bookstores.

From big system-wide stuff down to, like, getting a case of 12 copies of Onyx Storm, but four of them are damaged and you have 15 pre-orders for it. How do you deal with that? You have to make sure you've got good stock and also communicate to customers that this is going to take a little while, but please don't go to Amazon. Please stay with us.

Bookselling is a minefield of challenges, so it’s just so much more amazing that people are doing such great work.

BTW: What was something ABA did or offered that was especially helpful or meaningful to you?

DC: The first thing that leaps to mind is community.

Over the ten years I spent bookselling, I've met some of my closest friends. [At the time of this interview] we're on the cusp of Winter Institute, and that's when the whole community gathers.

It's just such a magical time and it's one of the ways that it kept me going. I'm sure I'm not alone in that. This is an incredibly challenging job in an incredibly challenging market. There's a feeling of solidarity in knowing that there are so many other booksellers who are in the same boat.

ABA does such a good job convening that community, and ensuring communication, and giving us time and space to gather and share ideas. Being in community with each other is just crucial. I wouldn't have been able to make it without the help and community of other booksellers. I'm forever grateful to ABA for creating those community spaces, and for the lifelong friends that I met through bookselling.

And returning to the Buy Local movement, much of the reason why it’s growing and catching on is because of the work ABA has been doing for years. In some ways, it feels like the rest of the world is catching up to stuff that we’ve been saying for a long time —  about Amazon, about small businesses, about communities.

BTW: Those are all of my big questions for you. Would you like to mention what you're doing now and where people can find you?

DC: The podcast is one of my main responsibilities at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. It's called Building Local Power.

It comes out every two weeks, and we find great stories within this local power/Buy Local movement. There’s lots of interesting and compelling content about Amazon and small businesses.

I would love for people to join that community and stay in touch.