Headline: “A Sad Chapter for the Bookish,” March 1, 2007.

http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2007/0301/biz/stories/13feb_bookstores.htm

There are blogs that are strictly local. In this neck of the woods there’s a Haverford blog that lets you know what’s going on in that township probably better than anything else around.

A bookstore blogging isn’t doing anything much different from what it does when it sends out press releases—only blogging can be a way of doing that better. Why worry about whether the readers of said blog can get to the store physically or not? It’s easy enough to offer online sales. And sure, some people will be enthusiastic, but not buy. But others will buy. The point is to make what you are doing known to the public, to as much of the public as you can reach. And getting a dialogue going, it seems to me, is always good.

I dig the future-looking time arrow of your comment, but I am having trouble thinking through the application of it: The blogosphere’s power derives from its disregard for geography, but indie brick-n-mortar is, contrarily, defined by a dependence on locality.

How do you sort for blogger/lurkers who can physically reach your store? Or do you web-front sales to support distant-blogger purchase impulse?

How do you tame the “Snakes on a Plane” problem; the tendency of bloggers to be more enthusiastic about making hype about a thing than they are about actually buying the thing?

Each bookstore has their own multi-pronged approach underpinning their survival as part of their business plan. It is these various adjunct endeavors that make bookstores community centers and although many struggle, the do survive.

A few examples:

Elliot Bay Bookstore in Seattle supports first time authors and when authors become successful they often return first to Elliot Bay first to discuss a new book.

Harvard Bookstore, near Harvard Square in Boston, first schedules author talks with authors from each of the 50 universities/colleges around Boston. They also have a help desk that will find a book, no matter how archane, anywhere in the world.

Milwaukee’s Woodland Patterns Book Center, born in 1979, is one of two not-for-profit bookstores in the U.S. and it handles 25,000 small press titles. First concentrating on poetry then fiction/non-fiction, visual and musical arts. The owners believe art is interrelated and love poetry so they even carry poetry broadsheets. They have an annual poetry marathon, writing workshops, a bus that visits neighborhoods lending books and hosting workshops and each week feature experiemental music played in their sound studio/gallery and broadcast on Milwaukee Public Radio.

What your business executive leaves out in talking about why bookstores thrive or don’t is their function to their community. When people feel connected to their local bookseller they support these bookstores. They attend book lectures, bedtime story readings (Women and Children First, Chicago), concerts. They drink coffee at the coffee shop attached to the bookstore reading a book or sit on a sofa browsing a book or magazine (Schwartz Books on Downer in Milwaukee).

Book buying is, in a way a sensual experience: feeling the book in your hands as the words flow into your mind. You get to spend time with an author in a comfortable community place where you get to know, and rely, on those who love books.

Don’t ever count out independent bookstores—or the relevance or endurance of the public in buying books. Publishing houses won’t go out of business either—they may be insular, but as long as they make money finding and publishing authors whose work we want to know—they will stay in business.

Besides, publishing is an international business these days and I would argue that reading has endured as long as we have been in the planet. Books with pages we can turn will be with us for a very long time.

The importance to books and authors and publishers and bookstores of the blogosphere cannot be overestimated. The newspaper book review section, let’s be honest, is going the way of the dodo, and for the same reason - it’s being killed of by dimwits who think the only thing that sells is another bloody article about American Idol - or the Grammys , for God’s sake.

Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing ™: Frank Wilson is the book review editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a fellow blogger at Books Inq. (He receives over 1000 ARC’s a week! How do I know this? For insider info about the life and work of a book reviewer, check out this online, two-part, interview with Frank in the The Kenyon Review entitled “An Interview with Frank Wilson” and Critical Mass’s brief interview as well entitled “Critical I: Six Questions for Philadelphia Inquirer Book Editor Frank Wilson.”) Frank is also a published poet.  

In my posts I meant that the readers of books were the market, as in a book proposl, where I write, “The market for this book will be readers of (insert titles of similar books).”

I didn’t mean to say the bookstore is the market. This is what happens when you learn to train yourself in writing proposalese.

There may very well be a contraction among the chain stores, if a you say Borders is weakening. I remember Crown Books, now long gone. It can happen.

But as long as there are enough customers to support brick and mortar stores, there will be chain stores and they will dominate the business. That’s the bookselling ecology.

The “real” readers, by themselves, wouldn’t sustain the number and size of the big chains as they currently exist..

• Who drives or walks past the store already? School bus? Taxis? City bus? Commuters? Taxi drivers love “local color” anecdotes. Take a ride, give the driver an anecdote about the store (George Washington slept here). Hand over a fistful of 10%-off coupons and give the driver a free book for every (15, 20, whatever number) customers who redeem one.
• Street signage or animal-suited human promo, on the street, for the hour the school bus goes by.
• Free coffee for city bus pass holders; transfer fare discount for stopping at the store (where applicable).
• Rush-hour refuge (bars know this as “happy hour”). Commuters take 5% of all audio books, specially designed for consumption while driving, between 5-7pm. Play a best-seller on the in-store audio system during those hours. Happy hour in-store cafe pricing to invite them to wait out the traffic.
• Do you know who your best customers are? Make them free-lance opinion makers. More fistfuls of those coupons you gave the taxi driver. Track who refers the most new customers, dole out rewards to the top n (10, 5, whatever) refer-ers.
• Weekly white-board trivia, in-store. Right behind the counter, high enough and big enough to see from where the customer stands, write a book-based trivia question. One Name&Email card, filled out by customers and dropped in a box, with the correct answer will be drawn each [day of week you need more traffic]. Wins something of enough value to be attractive. ‘Must be present to win’ stipulation optional.
• Recurring in-store video-game tournament for under-12 year olds. Seriously. Set up the TV and game console, appoint a younger employee to ref and set a first-signed-up limit of 16 players. Single-elimination, 4-round, 15-game format could play in under 75 minutes. Surround the area with pick-me-up copies of 12-and-under titles. Top three finishers receive books as prizes. All entrants get a bookmark or something. Season champ receives something big, like first midnight copy of Harry Potter.
• Many cities have an art-district “gallery hop” monthly or seasonally. Display some starving genius’ local works in your best-lit space and sign up to be a stop on the hop.
• Foot-traffic alliances. Who are your store’s neighbors? Shoe store? Oil change place? “Penzoil, Pumps & Pynchon” program, first Fridays. They hand out your bookmarks, you hand out their whatevers.
• Turn-the-screen-around marketing. You know what will be out months from now. Most customers don’t. Video stores have done it for years. Big posters of next week’s/month’s/season’s street dates for anticipated titles. I had to find out about my favorite author’s next title from the jacket of the previous one, after I got it home. I’ll buy it at the first place that has it, not the closest or cheapest place. What else do you know that you traditionally don’t think customers would like to know too?

And here’s the paradig’em shifter: Rental. Libraries have months-long wait lists for the top lending-cyclers. A leading complaint of Amazon reviewers is the ripped-off feeling of paying extortionate hardcover price for a fave author’s so-so effort. Those books end up on the used shelves; the dissapointed reader re-caps some of their purchase price; used stores get a slice on the second sale. Capture that whole cycle for yourself by setting it up explicitly to work that way for n-number of rental iterations. Keep a list of top-sellers; for each title on the list, keep n copies aside in the “rental” section. Buy them yourself if the publisher or distributor requires. Then Blockbuster rules apply. Netflix rules for customers who can’t be bothered to show up. Rates will settle to appropriate levels after some leaked-secret testing and piloting with select customer groups (see opinion makers above). Build in a blanket Keep-and-Buy option. Then contact me for royalty arrangements on this idea.

Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing ™: Last of a Dying Breed returns to The Publishing Contrarian! It’s been a while. Nice to have you back. And…I love these ideas. Yet, I’ve not seen them implemented anywhere. The question is: Do independent bookstores have the drive, energy and enthusiasm to test your ideas? 

And I have to say yahoo to the Christian bookstores in Columbia, South Carolina. sorry that’s where my heart is

I believe that to survive in the book business, or any business takes a lot of work, and a lot of stamina for repeatedly trying and creating ideas…and having that “I refuse to give up.” attitude. I think searching for ideas it also a huge part of the process. And using the parts that work while discarding the rest.

I wonder if the indy that closed in Columbia would have folded if they had this plethera of ideas to work with before the end came.