Dear Booksellers,
ABA meets with publishers regularly, but once a year during May and June we have our annual meetings with about 40 publishers. These meetings are attended by me, ABA’s Chief Operating Officer Joy Dallanegra-Sanger, and 2–3 ABA Board Members per meeting, all of whom are booksellers and bookstore owners. On the publisher side, a variety of staff attend — depending on the publisher — but we usually meet with the Publisher or CEO along with various senior staff members and others on the publisher’s team who work with indies. These meeting tones and topics can vary greatly, based on who attends and on publisher culture and priorities. It’s evident in all of them though that the publishers love indie bookstores.
Part of ABA’s job in this meeting is to give the publishers a view of the industry landscape from our vantage point: How the indie channel is doing. How indie sales changed from 2024 to 2025. The challenges indies faced. The intel we share is informed by member survey results, ABACUS results, ABA membership data, and everything you shared with the ABA staff and ABA Board the previous year in conversations, forums, task forces, and emails, and at regionals, Institutes, and (our favorite) in your stores. It also helps tremendously to have the board members on the call to speak to their store’s experience and add color to the commentary.
In the recent meetings, I shared that the indie channel grew in 2025 both in numbers and in sales. I also shared that the trends for new stores in recent years continued: there was variety in terms of format and model and diversity with 13% of new stores owners identifying as Black, Indigenous, Latina/o/x, Chicana/o/x, Hispanic, and/or Asian American or Pacific Islander. This growth and diversity were something for us all to celebrate.
I also shared your challenges. 2025 was one of the most challenging years indie bookstores had ever faced. The list of challenges was long and included rising costs, the labor shortage, staff turnover (how it impacts your bandwidth and how the loss of experienced booksellers with deep backlist knowledge impacts the industry), tariffs, the impact of ICE and the National Guard in our communities, economic uncertainty, supply chain issues, harassment, free expression challenges, school budget cuts, and more. I conveyed that the indies rose despite it all, but that indie bookselling continues to be precarious for many. We need more publisher support.
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. Number one on the list for indies — it’s a perennial — is better discounts. But also at the top of the list in the survey results again this year was fewer damages. Damages are costing publishers and booksellers significant money and time. We also shared your thoughts about transparency around shipping delays; last minute changes of book prices; excessive paper invoices; clarity around on sale dates; the continued need for books by diverse authors to avoid a chilling effect from book bans and challenges; questions about Covered and Edelweiss; and more. We thanked the publishers who are participating in Batch — paving the way for a more efficient industry and freeing you up to focus on selling books — and urged others to follow their lead.
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.
The publishers shared the view of the industry landscape from their vantage point too, and their challenges echoed many of the booksellers’ challenges. But for many of them their 2025 sales were up too, and the indies were an important part of that trend. 95% of the publishers said the sales with indie bookstores were up for 2025 over 2024, and in many cases the indies outperformed the overall market for the publisher. (And the majority of the sales increases were year-over-year sales with stores that had been opened more than one year.) The indie market share for publishers ranged everywhere from 5% to 20%. (A few indie presses were at the high end.) With specific titles, children’s books, and pub date sales the percentages were often much higher! (Interestingly, two publishers mentioned that indies could be selling more graphic novels and manga, so watch for future ABA education related to this topic.)
Some of the factors we observed that drove indie sales and market share (publishers, take note!) included adding sales reps, offering additional discounts and extended dating, participating in Batch, higher minimums, promoting books through ABA Institutes and programs, and consolidating marketing emails into one weekly newsletter. Again and again in meetings we also heard from publishers how much they value the Indie Bestsellers List, Indie Next List, and Kids’ Indie Next List.
We were also struck by how many publishers shared the number of new indie store accounts they opened in 2025, echoing our channel’s growth. ABA is grateful to the many sales reps and publisher customer service representatives who helped new stores learn the bookselling ropes in 2025 and to the publishers who hired staff specifically for this purpose. (We continue to encourage new members to take advantage of this help and open publisher accounts early in their store journey.)
We spent some time sharing and brainstorming in the meetings too, about the kinds of books we’ve heard booksellers need from the publishers to meet demand (more Spanish language books; more children’s/young adult sports books; more original paperbacks; more hybrid graphic middle readers; jacketless, paper over board children’s books; manga-like illustrated short chapter books for middle grade and teen readers at an affordable price point, etc.); how we can all work together to drive backlist titles (more profitable for publishers than frontlist and arguably more profitable for booksellers as well); how to reinvigorate nonfiction sales; and how to optimize the impact of ABA programs like Indie Next List, Kids’ Indie Next List, Indies Introduce, and Indie Choice Awards.
There were two significant topics we discussed through the lens of partnership with the publishers. The first was AI. How can we all protect our shared commitment to human authors and illustrators, and what will transparency and clarity look like going forward? The second was the decline in reading. Bookstores, publishers, and others in the industry are all working on this issue in a variety of ways, but coming together to work in concert on joint initiatives will ensure more impact — historically it always has in this industry. It’s also imperative that we connect the dots between the attack on diversity in literature and the decline in reading. We look forward to ways that ABA, publishers, and others in the industry can work together to address this serious industry problem.
Overall, the meetings felt productive. One example was the beginning of benchmarking and best practices for damages that we hope will lead to improvements. There are many conversations to continue and work to begin coming out of the meetings this year. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to accomplish some things this year in partnership with publishers that will help both the top and bottom lines for indie bookstores.
In the meantime, watch BTW for actions that come out of those meetings and reach out if you have questions.
Allison K. Hill, ABA CEO