• Complete your ABACUS by July 24!
• Read ABA CEO Allison Hill’s letter summarizing the 2026 annual publisher meetings.
• Check out the Ci2026 keynote and education session recordings.
• Apply for a Wi2027 scholarship by tomorrow, July 23!
• Check out Hachette’s new Raising Readers campaign.
  

It’s trade show season! ABA will be attending each of the Summer/Fall Regional Trade Shows, beginning with New Voices New Rooms (hosted by SIBA and NAIBA).

At New Voices New Rooms, ABA will be hosting the education session, “Building a Bookstore Budget.” This session will explore the fundamentals of budgeting and how you can use ABACUS to help you plan!

ABA will also be manning a booth where you can stop by to meet your Member Relations Manager, ask questions, or just say hello!

Check your regional show’s schedule to see where you can find us at your show.

You can view the list of 2026 summer/fall regional trade shows on BookWeb.

Pictured above (left to right): ABA Member Relations Manager Kaitlynn Cassady and COO Joy Dallanegra-Sanger at Heartland in 2025.

Hachette Book Group has launched their new Raising Readers campaign encouraging adults to read to children for just 10 minutes each day to help inspire a lifelong love of reading!

Indie bookstores can visit JoinRaisingReaders.com to learn more, find resources, and learn how to participate.

We're excited for this opportunity for booksellers and publishers to come together to take action in response to the decline in reading.

“Your feedback for the publishers via our annual publisher survey was invaluable to this meeting. We were able to speak directly to some of the obstacles you face selling books and what you need from publishers to remove them,” Hill reported. 

She also said that in the meetings, “We very clearly stated your desire to sell books by human authors, illustrators, and artists, rather than AI, and your demand for transparency around publisher use of generative AI.”

You can find Hill’s full letter summarizing the meetings on BookWeb.

• Tuesday, July 28 at 3:00 pm ET: ShopTalk: ABA Children's Group
• Thursday, July 30 at 3:00 pm ET: New Member Series: Meet the Partners (Holiday Sidelines Edition)
• Tuesday, August 11 at 3:00 pm ET: New Member Series: Store Ownership 101
• Tuesday, August 18 at 3:00 pm ET: New Member Series: Meet the Partners
• Thursday, August 20 at 3:00 pm ET: ShopTalk: Holiday Shopping Starts Here: Preparing for Indies First
• Friday, August 21 at 2:00 pm ET: Board Office Hours

Lately, there has been an increase in scammers posing as book festival organizers who are reaching out to authors and their publicists. 

Unfortunately, there’s no way to prevent this from happening, but there are steps you can take if you encounter this scam (or similar ones)!

• Document everything. Take screenshots.
• Report the email to the email service the scammer used. (For example, report to Gmail if they used a Gmail address.)
• Report to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center if you lost money.
• Report to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
• Report to the Authors Guild so they can warn their authors.
• Post a fraud alert on social media or your website’s home page.
• Send an email to your contact list to keep them informed.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Organizations will not send emails from a Gmail address. 
• If you receive an email from someone you regularly correspond with, but it’s from an unusual/different address, contact them directly (via their normal email, message, or phone) to verify whether that email is real.