Indies Forward Moving Forward on Organization’s Goals

Members of Indies Forward, a volunteer organization dedicated to cultivating, supporting, and sustaining new and emerging booksellers, have accomplished much since the group’s founding last year, including facilitating a larger role for the new generation of booksellers at this year’s fall regional trade shows.

Indies Forward, which partners with the American Booksellers Association, was founded by Kim Hooyboer of Third Place Books in Seattle, Washington, then a bookseller at Seattle’s The Elliott Bay Book Company, and her colleagues, who identified a strong desire for tailored networking and education opportunities for young booksellers at industry gatherings, and in general. The organization’s other three founding members are Emma Nichols of The Elliott Bay Book Company; Hannah Oliver Depp, operations director at WORD in Brooklyn, New York, and Jersey City, New Jersey; and Sam Kaas, events coordinator at Third Place Books.

Kaas said Indies Forward has been working with volunteers from each of the nine independent bookseller association regions to help establish meetups in their regions. At the moment, Indies Forward members from every region are in communication with fall regional trade show organizers to advocate for more networking opportunities, which may include remote meetups after hours, a meeting during the show, and/or a consultation station with information for potential new members.

“Indies Forward is, at its heart, a grassroots organization, which is cool because it means that there are lots of people to help spread the word, and also that there are many different regions, stores, people, and situations,” said Kaas. “But that also means it can be tough from a [logistical] perspective, so it really serves the quirkiness and, above all, the diversity of needs of different regions for us to be supportive of the national whole and to encourage folks in each region to do what works best for them.”

Young and emerging booksellers mingle at the Indies Forward Children's Institute afterparty in April.

To help with this logistics-parsing and idea-sharing, members of Indies Forward use Slack, an invitation-only online forum for communication and collaboration, to communicate on a daily basis, said Kaas; Indies Forward’s Slack channel now has 215 active users, with every association region represented.

“Slack has worked really well for us so far,” said Kaas. “As a platform, the goal of this was not just to connect booksellers at shows but to create a community that is active all the time, and I’ve been seeing a lot of that springing up on our Slack channel.”

As part of their work, Indies Forward has also reached out to bookstore owners to encourage them, through direct advocacy, to invest in letting their younger booksellers attend more regional shows. At last year’s PNBA regional show, Kaas said he and other Indies Forward organizers set up a meetup for those younger booksellers who couldn’t make it until the evening hours, and at this year’s Children’s Institute, members ran a personal finance session for young booksellers based on the principles of Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties by Beth Kobliner (Touchstone) and other sources.

“Last year, Indies Forward was brand new, putting things together in real time. We really haven’t established a norm yet, but this fall show season will be the first one where we will have had Slack and any real national presence outside of PNBA and NAIBA, so it will be interesting to see how it goes,” said Kaas. “Down the line, another thing we’d like to see is not only events like afterparties, but actual programming at the shows that reflects the influence of younger booksellers. Hopefully we will see a little more of that in the future.”

The Indies Forward Consultation Station setup at Children's Institute in Portland this April.

In January, Indies Forward made an appearance at Winter Institute 12 in Minneapolis, where they set up a consultation station and hosted a well-attended young professionals afterparty; they ran a second consultation station at Children’s Institute in Portland, Oregon, this April.

Members of Indies Forward were among the booksellers who spoke up at the Winter Institute Town Hall to urge ABA to do more to improve diversity within the association and the larger bookselling industry. At the institute the ABA Board announced the creation of the new Diversity Task Force. Kaas said that Oliver Depp, who was appointed to the task force, reported that they are also working with fall regional show organizers to encourage a younger and more diverse lineup on various panels.

Booksellers who would like to be involved in Indies Forward should send an e-mail with their name, store, and region to [email protected].