Dear Booksellers,

We’re counting down the days until we see you all at the Annual Meeting and Town Hall! Thursday’s meeting will be the ultimate update, so we’ll skip our usual daily update that day. I hope you’ll join us “in person” to hear what’s going on instead.

Annual Meeting

Register now for ABA’s Annual Meeting and Town Hall, which will begin at 2:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, June 11. (The brief Annual Meeting will flow immediately into the Town Hall meeting.) See the meeting agenda here.

Booksellers are encouraged to submit questions or comments ahead of time at [email protected]. Members will also be able to raise their Zoom hands to speak and/or submit questions via the Zoom Q&A function during the Town Hall. ABA will call on members who wish to speak in the order that their hands are raised. Once all hands are called on and all who wish to speak have spoken, ABA will read the questions submitted via Zoom Q&A, excluding questions that have already been asked and/or answered. (The general chat will be turned off to avoid confusion.) The meeting will end at 4:00 p.m. ET or when booksellers have finished sharing, whichever comes first. The Publishers Weekly 2020 Bookstore of the Year ceremony will immediately follow.

Publishers can bookmark this link to watch the Annual Meeting and Town Hall (video to go live June 11).

We suggest that members log on a few minutes early to ensure that they are able to access the webinar. If you have technical difficulties, contact ABA’s event tech team.

Sign Up for ABA’s Marketing and Technology Meetups

• Join us for a Technology Meetup on Thursday, June 11, at 1:00 p.m. ET, featuring bookseller Angela Trigg of Haunted Bookshop in Mobile, Alabama, who has created a chatbot through which customers can place orders. Registration is required.

• Join us for a Marketing Meetup on Thursday, June 25, at 1:00 p.m. ET, for a session that revisits the topic of “Marketing Your Store to a School,” previously covered in March. This new session will focus on doing businesses while in various states of being open and as events are largely occurring virtually instead of in-person. Registration is required.  

Bookseller Best Practices  

Thank you to those of you who have reached out with ideas and experiences for me to share with others. Below are a few of the topics emailed to me recently. Reach out if you have your own to share!

• Remember to be mindful of curfews in your area when scheduling staff. Make sure booksellers, especially POC booksellers, have enough time to get home before curfew. 

• When letting customers know that antiracist titles are out of stock, provide other resources, such as links to Black Lives Matter articles and essays. (Thanks, Point Reyes Books!)

• For non-Black booksellers, here are tips on how to be an antiracist ally to Black people.

• For booksellers of color, text “nostigma” to 707070 for free therapy support provided by The Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation.

• A few stores have reported that adding greeting cards to their websites has significantly increased their average dollar per transaction for online sales. 

• Many booksellers may be concerned about returning to work. A few stores have mentioned things that helped: sharing as much detailed information with staff about policies and procedures as possible, hosting a Zoom call for staff to openly discuss their concerns, or conducting a “dress rehearsal” for staff to come to work and do a run through before the store opens to customers. For staff who may have been out for a while, this chance to acclimate has proven to be helpful for some.

• The American Library Association continues to feature useful reopening resources that are relevant to bookstores. 

See you Thursday!

ABA is here for all of you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. We are an incredibly creative, resilient, supportive industry. We’ll get through this, together.

Best,
Allison