Sea Change by the Seashore

From the log of Betsy Rider of Otto's, A Booklover's Paradise in Williamsport, Pennsylvania

The sun came out, after weeks of rain, the Saturday [October 15] we arrived in Atlantic City for the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association Trade Show. The show's imaginative theme, "Sea Change by the Seashore," inspired me to think in nautical terms of our bookstore, and of our trip. During the 250-mile drive, I found myself singing the Gilbert & Sullivan ditty, "We sail the ocean blue, and our saucy ship's a beauty..." When I tried to think of another, I sang (silently -- my daughter was aboard and she thinks I'm crazy enough anyway) "On the good ship, Lollipop..." So I was ready to pull in to port and have some of my barnacles scraped off!

Saturday: Arrival at the Tropicana -- as exotic as any foreign port -- and our first attempt at charting our course from parking to registration to room to trade show. After a walk on the beach and boardwalk, we rested on a bench in the shopping mall inside the resort and tried to guess which of the many people walking by were booksellers or sales reps -- see the new sneakers, the business suits, the focused but leisurely pace? They're here for the tradeshow, I bet.

Sunday: We met a few of the other booksellers and NAIBA board members for a stroll on the almost deserted beach -- a good way to get acquainted with each other and with nature.

Then we went back for a continental breakfast (more choices than most), where we sat at tables labeled by store type -- we chose "Downtown." We met an interesting bunch of booksellers dealing with problems like ours. Moving on to the first speaker of the show, we enjoyed the experiences and insights shared by bookseller Betsy Burton, author of The King's English (Gibbs Smith). She covered a number of issues we'd had to deal with: first and foremost -- why we can't quit our bookselling vocation.

"It is our responsibility," she said, "to keep the voices of the characters in books heard." She said her book has 17 lists of the best in their field. She talked about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and why we should make our voices heard. She talked about organizing other independent businesses in her neighborhood to show the "powers that be" that independent businesses are the backbone of their community. She cited figures that show chains bleed money out of the community. Only 13 percent of the chains' gross income stays in the community, while 48 percent of the independents' gets recycled into the local economy. She said her organization started a nonprofit entity called "Local First" and got funds from government and other community-minded businesses to educate people about the importance of supporting local businesses. They produced a brochure, which she passed out and offered us the opportunity to get more of for our own communities. At the very least, she explained, we can get our local governments to stop giving perks to chains to encourage them to open in our community.

The next treat of the day, "The Pick of the Lists -- Adult Titles" went too quickly, with great one-liners to pass on to our customers about the publisher reps' favorite books. This was followed by the Author Luncheon where we met an author not on the program but sitting at our table -- Tom Quinn, author of The Lion of Saint Mark (Thomas Dunne Books). He gave us some insights into the face-lifting a manuscript goes through before it gets published.

The first speaker, Jonathan Safron Foer, told us just enough about his book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Houghton Mifflin) to make me want to read it. The second speaker, Suzanne Fisher Staples, author of the novel Under the Persimmon Tree (FSG), said her aim in the book was to, first, tell a story and, second, to show human dignity in the face of extreme adversity. Her stays in Afghanistan gave some depth to the scant news available to us on that hot spot. She said she believes stories are our hope for the future, if we are ever going to have peace -- if we are ever going to see beyond "the collateral damage" to the real people.

Pete Hamill, the winner of NAIBA's Legacy Award and author of the new Christmas book, The Gift (Little, Brown), entertained us with his adventures in reading -- he's rereading all the books he read in his youth and he's found that he underlined all the wrong places! "If you find a kid in your store, coddle him. Give him the good stuff -- the classics!" Reading is active, he said, you have to invent the characters. TV is passive. It uses a different part of the brain. He thinks there could very well be a connection between TV watching and Alzheimer's. A great bookstore, he said, is where you find the books you didn't think you needed.

The Children's Pick of the Lists was a real winner! The presenters were enthusiastic booksellers who buy for their stores. They gave us a printout of the books that they were gushing over (I mean that in a nice way), and I wrote the gist of the book next to the titles and ISBNs. I could have taken at least twice as much time absorbing their enthusiasm!

Electronic Marketing stressed the importance of each store having its own website (with or without an inventory) so potential customers can get acquainted with the store if they can't visit in person. E-mailings also extend your advertising to a targeted audience. And one neat idea I had never thought of -- if you're programming your phone message that plays when people call after hours, don't forget to add your website and/or your e-mail address so potential customers can place their requests immediately for replies the next day. It was also interesting to hear that, according to a survey, one-half of one percent of bookstore sales are made over the Internet.

The ABA "Outside Sales" seminar was presented by booksellers who do a lot of them. They also prepared an outline, which covered their material and on which I wrote notes of the few ideas I hadn't yet tried, like promoting small gift certificates as party favors or Halloween treats and being the organizer for author events in the schools in exchange for an appearance of the author in your store. Book Fairs in the schools, someone said, could be more successful if you provided lists of the books-to-come and took pre-sales. Group open-air sales could give you a chance to partner with other stores or even service groups like Rotary, etc. And cooperating with local vendors could involve florists, kitchen supply stores, or bakeries -- you might want to swap books for cookies!

The Reading Room was an unexpected treat. I had thought that might be the time for me to read the books I had been given so far -- Duh! Instead we enjoyed the authors Larry Kane (Lennon Revealed, Running Press), Ben Mizrich (Busting Vegas, HarperCollins), and John Halliday (Flying Through Midnight, S&S/Scribner) reading the most exciting or most significant parts of their books. Now I feel much better equipped to sell their books.

The Movable Feast was high on my list of anticipated pleasures, and I wasn't disappointed. The luck of the draw had me seated near Laura Lippman (To the Power of Three, William Morrow), Jordan Sannenblick (Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie, Scholastic), Tom Quinn (again), and Kay Gibbons (The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, Harcourt). They each talked about their books and I was most impressed with Jordan's book as he told the circuitous route it took on the way to Scholastic. The small press he started with was ready to remainder the thousand-plus books they weren't able to sell, but he told them to donate them to the Cancer Society since the theme dealt with the effect of cancer on the sibling(s) of the victim of that disease. They loved the book and begged for more copies. The kids they gave the book to begged for more copies. Next stop, Scholastic. I read it overnight and recorded a 60-second spot for my central Pennsylvania radio audience the day after I got home.

Monday: The Breakfast of Champions at 7:30 a.m.! (That makes all of us champions right there!) threw the spotlight on authors who received NAIBA's Book of the Year Award and on one sales rep and one bookseller who also got awards. Sue Flynn of Scholastic is the Rep of the Year, and I was the Bookseller of the Year. Right after our brief acceptance remarks, David McCullough, author of 1776 (S&S), spoke on the value of bookstores. Books, he said, are the antidote to apathy -- they change lives, as his was changed, years ago, when he read Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox (Anchor). He described one of his heroes from the Revolutionary War -- the low-ranking officer who suggested to Washington that the cannons at Fort Ticonderoga could be moved to Boston and then, in the dead of winter, proved that it could be done and drove the British out of the city. That man was Henry Knox, and he was an independent bookseller!

Philip Roth, author of The Plot Against America (Vintage), was represented by one of his editors, who passed along his remarks on anti-Semitism in America and announced a May 2006 publication date of his next book, Everyman. Jon Muth, author of Zen Shorts (Scholastic), won the award for best Children's Picture Book, and he said his goal is to show children's relationship to wisdom, both practical and prudential (or understanding what we cannot change.) Libba Bray, who wrote the YA novel, A Great and Terrible Beauty (Delacorte Books for Young Readers), was refreshingly candid when she squealed, "I never even won a Dr. Pepper!" She said we see ourselves in books so we can connect with the outer world. She repeated a sentiment often expressed by speakers this weekend -- "I just love independent bookstores," and then she added, "They're like Cheers only with books!" And she repeated my quote, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"

After the breakfast we toured the publishers' ships-at-anchor in the "Book Buying Frenzy" until our feet could take no more and we set sail for home, our hold filled to the brim with stimulating memories of our Sea Change by the Sea.

Related Trade Show News

NAIBA Executive Director Eileen Dengler told BTW, "The trade show floor had so much energy, and orders were being placed left and right. New exhibitors were thrilled that they were receiving so much attention from booksellers.... It was just a great event, and I am so appreciative to the publishers and independent rep groups who continue to come and show their support of the independent booksellers, who continue to grow and thrive through their attendance at the convention."

Dengler also reported that NAIBA will be donating $2,500 to the Bookseller Relief Fund, a combination of donations from the trade show autographing area and NAIBA funds.

Karen Beem of Newtown Bookstore in Newtown, Pennsylvania, was welcomed to the NAIBA Board of Directors at the show.

At the American Booksellers Association's booth on the trade floor, Dan Cullen, ABA editorial director and editor-in-chief of the Book Sense Picks lists, and BookSense.com Director Len Vlahos met with booksellers and discussed ABA programming and services. ABA awarded a scholarship to its inaugural Winter Education Institute to Susan Weis of Breathe Books in Baltimore, Maryland. The scholarship includes hotel accommodations to attend the Institute, which will be held on Thursday, January 26, and Friday, January 27, 2006, in Long Beach. Also awarded at the ABA booth at the show was an inkjet printer to Good Yarns of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

The winners were chosen at random from booksellers who stopped by the ABA booth at the show and dropped off a business card.