Winter Institute 7 is now fully booked. However, a waiting list is forming, and, if you would like to be added to the waiting list, please fill out the waiting list form.

Registration is now open for ABA’s Seventh Annual Winter Institute. Wi7, sponsored by the Ingram Content Group, will be held from Wednesday, January 18, through Friday, January 20, 2012, at the Astor Crowne Plaza in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

ABA will open registration for the Seventh Annual Winter Institute, sponsored by the Ingram Content Group, on Thursday afternoon, September 15. Wi7 will be held from Wednesday, January 18, through Friday, January 20, 2012, in New Orleans.

For the third year, the American Booksellers Association will award the Avin Mark Domnitz Scholarship to attend the Winter Institute to the owner or an employee of a bookstore who submits the store’s 2010 financial data to the ABACUS-10 survey before the August 15 deadline.

Meryl Halls, head of membership services for the Booksellers Association of the United Kingdom & Ireland, talks about her experience at Wi6, the value of collective brainstorming, the challenges facing booksellers in the U.K., e-books, and more.

Last month’s Winter Institute session “How to Create New Business Models Through Strategic Thinking” revealed how indie booksellers are using their ingenuity and their roots in the community to come up with new ways to grow book sales. 

Kristen McLean, former ABC executive director, now a consultant to ABA, offers insights and action points for booksellers based on the “The Children’s Book Consumer in the Digital Age,” a joint study by Bowker Pubtrack and ABC.

Among the good news coming out of last month’s Winter Institute was the announcement that the Ingram Content Group would continue its commitment as the lead sponsor of ABA’s educational programming for the next three years.

Among the events held in conjunction with Winter Institute 6 was a meeting hosted by ABA for the leaders of the booksellers associations of Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland, New Zealand, and Canada. This week, BTW talks with one of the participants – Lee Trentadue, vice president of the Canadian Booksellers Association – about building “new friendships and co-operative liaisons.”

Here’s one last look at the record-breaking number of authors who participated in this year’s Winter Institute.