Educational and Collegial Show For NAIBA

Excellent educational seminars and lots of happy mingling with reps, authors, and other booksellers were reported at the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA) Fall Trade Show, held last weekend at King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, at the Valley Forge Convention Center. As always, the Moveable Feast was a bookseller favorite as well as NAIBA and ABA educational programming. ABA educational offerings were: "Shop Local: Forming Business Alliances in Your Community," "Constant Contact Demonstration," and "Know Your Customer: Increase Sales."

Eileen Dengler, NAIBA executive director, reported a successful show. "The education was excellent. The rooms were pretty crowded for most of the sessions. Everyone seemed excited about the Feast. We had great authors. What's so nice about having authors meet booksellers is that it really brought books to the attention of booksellers who otherwise wouldn't have heard about them."

New NAIBA president Joe Drabyak of Chester County Book Company in West Chester, Pennsylvania, covered some of the high and low points of the show. "Overall the enthusiasm of participants was very high, the educational programs were excellent, and there was a wonderful collegiality. We tried a number of different things this year.... The new location at Valley Forge was thematically correlated with the declaration of our own independence as booksellers." However, the venue, which NAIBA shared with the Valley Forge Gun Show show, was "problematic," Drabyak noted.

He listed several show standouts, which included the Keynote address "A Lifetime of Politics & Prose," featuring store owners Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade. "It was like Inside the Actor's Studio for booksellers," Drabyak said. "We had the opportunity to hear about the formation of Politics & Prose, the triumphs and tragedies, what went very well and what did not." Other notable events, he said, included the Early Bird Buffet Supper and the Pick of the List session.

ABA drawing prizewinners, Archie Kutz of Lift Bridge Book Shop in Brockport, New York, and Rob Stahl of Colgate Bookstore in Hamilton, New York, and NAIBA Board member, also rated the education highly.

Kutz won the color inkjet printer raffled off at the ABA Booth. This qualified him to enter into the drawing to win airfare and a hotel stay at ABA's Winter Institute in Portland, Oregon, February 1 - 2, 2007.

Hotel ABA winner was Stahl, who won a four-night stay at Hotel ABA in Brooklyn for BookExpo America 2007, compliments of BEA. "I'm very excited," he said. "I used to joke that I never win anything. Now I can't do that."

Stahl attended the first session of ABA's educational programming, "Shop Local: Forming Business Alliances in Your Community," which was moderated by ABA COO Oren Teicher and featured a presentation by Jeff Milchen of the American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA), who discussed how locally owned businesses have a far greater economic impact on their communities than do national chains. "I took a lot of information back home," Stahl said. "I'll be sharing it not only with store managers, but with the local Hamilton Business Alliance."

Kutz also attended the Shop Local session, which, he said, "covered all the bases" on how to create an independent business alliance. "It was a helpful orientation on how to get started. I'll be getting together with other independent businesses in the neighborhood."

The Constant Contact Demonstration, presented by Meg Smith, ABA's director of membership marketing, covered the service that facilitates the creation, mailing, and tracking of e-mail marketing campaigns. It was an especially valuable session for Priscilla Mitchell from Mysteries on Main Street in Johnstown, New York. She told BTW, "We've been starting to do a newsletter and stressing about it. It takes a lot of time. With this template, it'll be a lot easier."

Mitchell also attended Smith's presentation of "Know Your Customer: Increase Sales," which focused on combining individual contact, surveys, market research, and the use of a store database to form an effective strategy for communicating with customers. She plans on conducting a survey at Mysteries On Main Street based on what she gleaned from the session. "We haven't done a survey in a long time. I think it's something we need to do because, for example, we still have customers who come in and say they didn't know we were here.... It makes me think that our ads on the radio and in the newspaper didn't reach them. I need to find out why that is."

Other educational offerings included NAIBA's New Books for New Audiences, which focused on building Latino literature, urban fiction, graphic novels, and manga sections. "It was very interesting," said new NAIBA Board member Jessica Stockton of McNally Robinson Booksellers in New York City. "The session included information on self published and small press titles... Many don't go through normal distribution channels, and I needed to know more about where they are coming from."

"The Pick of the List was also really great," Stockton continued. "One title that I'm interested in handselling is called Finn (by Jon Clinch, Random House, February '07). It's told from the perspective of Huck Finn's estranged father. It looked fascinating."

Stockton noted that "competition was fierce" at the show's Literary Quiz Bowl, which included questions based on A.J. Jacob's The Know-It-All (S&S). "Everyone was geeking out with book knowledge," she said.

For Mitchell, meeting authors at the Moveable Feast and throughout the show was a personal highlight. She described meeting Jeff Goodell author of Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future (Houghton Mifflin) as especially interesting to her because, she explained, "My husband's grandfather worked in the mines for three winters so that he could pay his taxes. He was hurt in a collapse and never went back down in the mine." Mitchell also enjoyed meeting Abigail Thomas (A Three Dog Life, Harcourt). "She has shown so much courage in building a new life and telling her story," Mitchell said.

"Overall it was a really good show," said Stahl, who expressed his appreciation both to ABA and publishers for helping the show to expand. "The energy level was high," he added. "I talked to all the bookstores that showed up. There were many new people there who were opening new bookstores. It was really nice to meet people I'd never seen before." --Karen Schechner