Booksellers & Publishers to Come Together for Focus Group

From Tuesday, February 28, through Thursday, March 2, booksellers and publishers will meet in New York City for the first in a planned series of focus groups organized by the American Booksellers Association on behalf of the participating publishers. The sessions have been developed as a means for publishers to meet with a cross section of ABA member booksellers to test new ideas and to garner bookseller feedback about existing programs.

Over the course of three days, the invited booksellers will attend six two-hour sessions, each with a different publisher. ABA's objective for the focus groups is to achieve a more productive relationship with a growing number of vendors while providing a cost effective means for publishers to get valuable input from independent booksellers.

Participating publishers in this first series of meetings include Grove Atlantic; HarperCollins; Holtzbrinck (Holt; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; St. Martin's; Tor; Picador; and distribution client Bloomsbury); Houghton Mifflin (Adult and Children's Divisions); Hyperion; John Wiley; Penguin USA (Adult and Children's Divisions); Random House (Adult and Children's Divisions); Scholastic; Simon & Schuster; Time Warner Book Group; and Workman. Depending on publisher interest and demand, additional focus group meetings will be scheduled in the future.

Questions about the focus group should be addressed to Book Sense Marketing Director Mark Nichols at (914) 591-2665, ext. 6640, or at [email protected].