Sitting in the comfort of my New York City apartment, shoes off, feet up after a long and fruitless day at the New York International Gift Show looking for non-book product for TreadWaters (my pretend, inherited bookstore nestled in a small town in upstate Connecticut), I mulled over the mystery entrepreneur’s words from a previous posting. If you recall, I had asked him what it would take to make an independent bookstore successful these days. Mystery Entrepeneur had replied: “When in doubt—Ask! What would you have to believe about my store to be willing to come here and spend money here?”
I could think of many changes I could make within the store that would encourage people to pause and think of dropping by TreadWaters before driving to the more convenient Barnes & Noble on the main highway just outside of town, and I planned to make all of them, but I had the niggling feeling that those improvements would not create the dramatic increase in traffic that I needed—like a stampede to TreadWaters.
I knew many other independent bookstores had increased the number of in-store events, showcased complementary products, offered a variety of book genres and stood ready, as knowledgeable handsellers, to help any and all who ventured into the bookstore. Yet, there just weren’t enough people entering their stores and walking away with shopping bags stuffed with books. And despite often heroic efforts to increase traffic to the stores, more and more independents had folded and the media had taken to sounding the death knell more and more loudly throughout the industry. (As recently as yesterday the LA Times ran an article entitled “Bookshops’ Latest Sad Plot Twist,” forwarded to me by Dave Newton.)
Wicked Witch Badgers People for Clues to Turning Around Independent Bookstore.
Creative suggestions from visitors to this blog, many with insider knowledge, flooded the Comments section of my last two postings about independent bookstores. The problem, as Mystery Entrepreneur said it would be, was that the suggestions were all over the place, from narrow and fairly easy to implement in the bookstore to more broad-based, ill-defined statements about being “hooked” into the community. The Mystery Entrepreneur had said: “Most of the people…will not have an answer—or, at least, not an answer that would prove to be truthful and accurate. But some, eventually, will. Sort of. And that’s the place to start. … someone will figure it out, and, in the process, change the way people who buy and read books interface with the people who produce them.”
So I pressed on, asking Mystery Entrepreneur’s question, again and again, until I began to get a sense that I might be onto something when it came to comments about community. For example, I had an off-the-record cup of coffee early in the morning last week with a top publishing executive in New York City. We hunkered down in a Starbucks at a table for two surrounded by slumped and sleeping homeless people nursing their cups in order to stay out of the 22-degree cold. We talked about my recent postings in The Publishing Contrarian. “A successful bookstore is all about being a real participant in the community,” he said. Another publishing industry executive on another day said: “If you can’t get them into the store, take the bookstore to the people.” In his comment in The Publishing Contrarian Frazer Dobson attributed part of the 30-years of success at Park Row Books in Charlotte, North Carolina, to “reaching out to the community.” He also suggested NOT coming up with “wild, new paradigm shifting ideas.”
(more…)
The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron, winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s lit, has shocked, yes, shocked some school librarians. They are ripping The Higher Power of Lucky off their shelves, banning it, not ordering it. So there!