California Bookstore Day Garners Sponsorship From Penguin Random House

Penguin Random House (PRH) will be supporting next spring’s celebration of California Bookstore Day (CBD) with a $15,000 sponsorship. The news, announced on Wednesday by the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, was welcomed by Samantha Schoech, the event’s program director. “Penguin Random House’s sponsorship will help us expand our outreach — to readers, to authors, and to media — so that our participating stores again can achieve significant sales increases similar to those they enjoyed for the inaugural CBD earlier this year,” she said. “This donation is a wonderful kickoff to our fundraising effort, and we are most grateful for this enormously motivating encouragement and support.”

In announcing the company’s sponsorship, PRH president and U.S. COO Madeline McIntosh said, “California Bookstore Day was a terrific event this year — our publishers and sales colleagues loved being part of it, and so did our authors. We want to help bring even bigger crowds into the bookstores next May.”

Though the monetary gift is gratifying, said NCIBA Executive Director Hut Landon, “this is not just about a financial contribution — the event gains significant cachet from this ‘stamp of approval’ from such an important and influential publisher.  We have long valued Penguin Random House’s commitment to independents, and we will continue our efforts to justify it moving forward. On behalf of all our booksellers, we thank them for this latest show of support.”

The second annual California Bookstore Day will take place on Saturday, May 2, 2015, and NCIBA has said that it would work with interested regional associations to help facilitate bookstore day efforts in other parts of the country.

The American Booksellers Association will be providing financial and other in-kind support for Bookstore Day celebrations and will work closely with NCIBA and the other regional associations that choose to participate.