MPIBA Show: New Location, Same Successful Event

This year's Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association (MPIBA) Trade Show, held from September 17 - 20 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Colorado Springs, earned positive reviews from booksellers who spoke to BTW. "This was the second MPIBA show that I've attended," said Vicki Burger of Wind City Books in Casper, Wyoming. "The first time, our bookstore had only been open for two weeks ... and it was overwhelming. This year it was very helpful and very informative."

This year was the first time in about 20 years that the trade show was not in Denver, though MPIBA President Andy Nettell of Arches Book Company and Back of Beyond Books in Moab, Utah, told BTW the show would be back there next year. But even with a new location, lower attendance, and "hard economic times," the "trade show floor seemed pretty active," he said.

The show opened on Wednesday with a keynote address by Nobel Prize-winner Frank Wilczek (The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces, Basic Books), who discussed his varied career and explained how physicists understand the essential nature of reality. "It was great to have this amazing, cutting-edge physicist reading prose," Nettell said. He also gave rave reviews to other authors making appearances at the show, including Chuck Klosterman, John Hodgman, and Laura Pedersen, who were featured at Saturday's Author Breakfast for Literacy, which turned out to be "a lot of fun."

The show's educational programming ran the gamut, from training employees to selling used books online; co-op for small stores to getting the most out of the children's section; creating authorless events to bookselling in challenging times. Two sessions that received special mention from a number of booksellers were ABA's "Connecting to Your Customers and Community With IndieBound" and MPIBA's "Bookselling in Challenging Times."

At the IndieBound workshop and continental breakfast, ABA CEO Avin Mark Domnitz and IndieBound Outreach Liaison Paige Poe shared insights about the extraordinary opportunities that IndieBound provides for booksellers and other independent retailers.

"The IndieBound workshop provided a lot of ideas," said Jacqie Hasan of the Book Rack in Fort Collins, Colorado. "We're going to branch out into sidelines because there's so many IndieBound materials we can use and so much you can do with it.... We're already using the Eat Read Sleep poster around the store, and people come in and they want to buy it!"

"Our store is in a small town ... and it's only my partner and me running the store -- and we have a coffee operation as well," said Wind City Books' Burger, "so to find the time to look over the IndieBound website was difficult. But at the presentation, they pulled up the website and showed us different things you could do, and it made me a lot more confident."

"For so long, we heard IndieBound is coming," Nettell said, "but now that it's here, it's nice to see what stores are doing. It gave us a kick in the butt to fully take advantage of what ABA has to offer. I don't think anyone understood the full scope of the IndieBound movement."

"IndieBound is great," said Joe Foster of Maria's Bookshop, who acknowledged he was already fairly well versed on IndieBound before the show.

"Bookselling in Challenging Times" provided guidance to booksellers about how to identify areas where they can cut costs. The session was very timely, Nettell said, "because it's not going to get any easier in the short term."

Foster told BTW that the session was valuable because the panelists were "giving specific, concrete examples of what to do when times are tough. Fortunately, our store is doing really well -- we had a great summer."

On Saturday, there was a showing of Paperback Dreams, a documentary about independent bookstores that will be airing on PBS stations this fall. The film follows Andy Ross, a long-time owner of the former Cody's, and Clark Kepler, owner of Kepler's Books, over the course of two tumultuous years in the book business. "That was amazing," said Foster. "I really enjoyed it." Said Book Rack's Hasan, "I want to hold an event around Paperback Dreams."

Burger "found that the author presentations were excellent" throughout the show. "It's easier to sell a book when you've talked to an author because you can't read every book."

Hasan added that she enjoyed the Pick of the Lists session, where publishers' sales reps took 15 minutes each to present the top titles from their fall lists. "We're doing a winter catalog ... for the first time," she said. "I was interested in seeing if it helps with this holiday season."

Overall, "I thought the MPIBA Trade Show was great," said Foster. "The venue was different, but there was a good energy and some cool authors." --David Grogan