Dear Booksellers, 

We were honored to support your stores in 2025 and we hope you found value in ABA’s work and resources. As you get ready to renew your membership for 2026, here are some of the benefit highlights from 2025:

ABA offered over 100 educational sessions both virtually and in-person. We hosted the largest Winter Institute in ABA’s history in Denver, CO, and hosted Children’s Institute in Portland, OR. Much of the programming is available to members via BookWeb.org and BookED, ABA’s education podcast. In the summer/fall, our Education team traveled to all six of the regional association trade shows to present our financial stability session, Measure What Matters: 5 KPIs for Turbulent Times and American Booksellers for Free Expression joined us for Navigating Attacks on Your Stores. Throughout the year, ABA produced virtual webinars on key topics such as Meet the Partners, Edelweiss Tools, POS Power Hour, and Bridging the Teen Lit Gap. ABA updated resources in the Bookstore Resource Library and continued to invest in ABACUS, the financial benchmarking survey and report for independent bookstores to help stores analyze their financials and look for ways to improve profitability. This year we added several education sessions to help booksellers fill out the survey and sessions afterwards to help booksellers put the results to good use for their stores.

ABA continued to prioritize our lobbying efforts in support of the Credit Card Competition Act with multiple “fly-ins” to Capitol Hill. We were grateful to the almost 40 booksellers who joined us in Washington, DC, this year. We created a coalition of 12 associations to lobby for ADA compliance website regulation that would support accessibility while ending frivolous lawsuits for small businesses. ABA met twice with the Federal Trade Commission to discuss Amazon’s anticompetitive behavior. ABA submitted testimony opposing the latest Mastercard/Visa settlement. ABA continued to advocate on behalf of swipe legislation that would prohibit swipe fees on the sales tax portion of sales. ABA met with state legislators from Maryland, South Dakota, and Utah, and communicated with several others in advance of upcoming legislative sessions. The Advocacy team also created a page to update its members on tariffs. We continued to provide advocacy resources on BookWeb and used VoterVoice to make your voices heard in support of small business issues.

Photo above left to right: Woods Prael, Gunzil and Bowser Children’s Bookstore, Warrensburg, MO; Jeff Peters, East End Books, Provincetown, and Boston, MA; Demetrius Frazier, Resist Booksellers, Petersburg, VA.

American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE), ABA’s Freedom of Expression initiative, was busier than ever this year. We continued our lawsuits, along with our coalition partners, against unconstitutional laws in Texas and Arkansas that would threaten the business of bookselling, access to books, diversity of books, and the right to read. We also signed amicus briefs in support of others filing similar lawsuits in other states. We mobilized and informed booksellers across the country to help prevent similar laws from taking effect, presenting preparedness guidelines for stores anticipating protests or harassment at Winter Institute and regional trade shows. We supported stores facing an increased number of free expression challenges and offered resources for how to handle these challenges. Year-round, we held webinars to address free expression issues, often collaborating with our allies. We partnered with our allies in the book industry and beyond. We helped produce and promote Banned Books Week, including sending over 900 complementary Banned Books Week kits to members who opted in, featuring a bookseller-exclusive campaign and assets on the theme of liberation. And we kept you informed about the state of free expression in the United States and how recent developments could impact you, your store, and your community.

Photo above: 2025 Banned Books Week Display Contest winner, Books & Company in Oconomowoc, WI.

ABA continued to offer turnkey marketing assets to stores: The “It’s Giving… Community, Cozy, Connection” and “Your Dollars Do More Here” fall campaigns; the refreshed Jólabókaflód campaign and “Shelf Care for the Holidays” holiday campaigns, Valentine’s Day; and more, as well as our perennials for you to share with your customers: the email and print Indie Next List and Kids’ Indie Next List subscriptions, Reading Group Guides, the Gift Guide for Genre Lovers, and Indies Introduce. We also continued adding to the Holidays & Observances Calendar. And we supported and promoted the Indie Bestsellers List and completed our partnership with USA Today to feature independent bookstores each week to promote the value of the indie channel.

ABA continued to champion children’s booksellers and bookselling by offering children’s programming (Children’s ShopTalk and Discord group), resources, (Best Books for Young Readers catalog), and education — Children’s Institute and Winter Institute.

Photo above: Ci2025 Keynote Speaker and incoming host of Reading Rainbow, Mychal Threets.

IndieCommerce remained a top priority as we continued to add functionality, improve performance, and work toward finishing migrating the final stores for the IndieCommerce 2.0 platform. ABA also invested in the Bookshop.org e-books initiative to offer members a robust e-book option for their customers.

ABA added several affinity partners this year to offer discounts and deals to our members (Apply Stickers; DeleteMe, Indigo Maiden, Morgan Swank Studio, MVB US (Pubeasy/Pubnet), Punchkins, R.I.S.E Cards, and Scattered Slime) and continued to offer members benefits through our longstanding partners like Eventbrite, Crowdcast, The Booksellers Insurance Program, W.G. Ellerkamp, Bonfire, PayUSA, Withfriends, Page Anchor, Pixel + Ink Creative, Square, QuickBooks, Gravity credit card processing, Constant Contact, ZingTrain, and PartnerShip. ABA’s partnership with Bookshop.org continues as well — over 2,500 ABA stores now participate in the Bookshop pool and over 2,500 participate in the partnership program with affiliate pages. As of this letter, ABA stores have earned almost $43.7M from Bookshop.org sales since the site launched! ABA also facilitated James Patterson’s generous bonuses totalling $300K to booksellers.

We’re glad that some of you were able to offer health insurance to your employees through ABA’s Book Industry Health Insurance Partnership (BIHIP) with Gallagher (formerly LIG Solutions) last year. (The law still prohibits ABA from offering a national association membership health insurance plan.) Others benefited from ABA’s Bookseller Insurance Program, managed by CoverHound, for property, workers comp, and liability insurance. (Remember, you can use your local broker for this program and still get the discount!)  

ABA participated in dozens of interviews in 2025 to promote both independent bookstores and the issues of importance to you. We named LeVar Burton our new Indie Bookstore Ambassador for the year, planned the biggest Independent Bookstore Day to date, and promoted Indies First alongside Small Business Saturday, providing bookstores with additional publisher discounts on book orders for Q4 and promoting shopping indie for the holidays. And we completed part of our partnership with USA Today, featuring 40 independent bookstores in 2025, and continuing our partnership to include indie bookstore sales in its bestseller list.

Thousands of booksellers and bookstore members came together last year to network, share best practices, and talk shop through ShopTalks, Meetups, Board Office Hours, ABA Community Forums, ABA Open Houses, and the in-person Winter Institute in Denver, CO, and Children’s Institute in Portland, OR.

Hundreds of you reached out for support around various issues or to get answers to your questions. We appreciated the opportunity to help you negotiate with your landlord, analyze and come up with solutions for your cash flow, figure out how to determine your stores’ valuation, learn how to write an op-ed, make a plan to buy your building, resolve issues with publishers, help you prepare for or respond to book challenges and harassment in your stores, and respond to human resources questions and crisis communication fires, and more.

ABA continued to work to better support all of our members and to rise to our commitment to equity, representation, antiracism, and access. We continued the Advance Access for Underrepresented Voices newsletter; offered antiracist, diversity, and de-escalation training for members; partnered with vendors like the Democracy Security Project to offer discounts on in-store de-escalation training for members; supported in-person and virtual Affinity Meetups as well as new Discord groups for members who identify as Black, Indigenous, Asian American and Pacific Islander, Latina/o/x, Chicana/o/x, and/or Hispanic, as well as members who are part of the LGBTQIA2S+, Disabled, and Neurodiverse communities; expanded our accessibility support at Institutes; and made changes to Institutes, much with invaluable input from ABA’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council (DEIC). We also launched IGNITE, a Winter Institute pre-conference for Black, Indigenous, Asian American and Pacific Islander, Latina/o/x, Chicana/o/x, and/or Hispanic, and BIPOC attendees to gather for networking, support, and education, as well as PATHWAYS, a mixer for BIPOC attendees at Children’s Institute.

This is just a small selection of all that we did in 2025! A huge thank you to the ABA team and a special thank you to those of you who served on councils, panels, the ABA Board, tasks forces, and committees; who shared ideas, experiences, and time with us; and who reached out and gave us the opportunity to assist you.

ABA is committed to supporting you like we did last year and in new ways that not only help you prepare for your store’s future, but also help shape our collective future. We hope you’ll give us that opportunity again by renewing your membership. We’re mindful of your rising expenses and have only increased membership dues nominally in line with the cost of living.  

Our quick renewal process only takes a few minutes; most of your information has been pre-populated. Log on now to renew using your BookWeb.org username: . If no username appears here then you need an account! You can create an account here. 

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. The Membership Team at [email protected] and all of us here at ABA are always happy to assist you.

May this new year bring renewed energy, abundance, and hope. 

Allison K Hill
CEO