Regional Hand-Selling Initiatives Celebrate Diversity

This holiday season, independent booksellers in New England and Northern California are participating in hand-selling initiatives to raise awareness about diverse books for young readers and to show the power of independent booksellers to influence the sales and success of these titles.

Through the end of the year, booksellers in the New England Independent Booksellers Association region are highlighting Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers) in their stores.

“We’d love to get regional bookstores excited about enthusiastically hand-selling this book,” said Sara Hines, co-chair for the New England Children’s Booksellers Advisory Council and co-owner of Eight Cousins in Falmouth, Massachusetts. “It has everything that we love about picture books — great characters and lovely illustrations.”

Booksellers participating in the Last Stop on Market Street challenge will be eligible to win a visit from the author based on their efforts to feature the book, which can include hand-selling the title, highlighting it in store displays or story times, and showcasing it online and in marketing materials. Booksellers can get more details about the initiative from their Penguin sales rep.

Hines hopes to see the initiative become a reoccurring campaign on a national level with a new title featured each year. “We’re all going to learn a lot this year and that will help us,” she said.

In the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association region, the hand-selling initiative Mirrors & Windows, coordinated by the Northern California Children’s Booksellers Alliance (NCCBA), challenges booksellers to highlight two books through the end of the year: The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher by Dana Alison Levy (Delacorte Books for Young Readers) and One Word From Sophia by Jim Averbeck, illustrated by Yasmeen Ismail (Atheneum Books for Young Readers).

Lauren O’Niell, chair of NCCBA and children’s buyer and manager at San Francisco’s The Booksmith, noted that the selected books don’t focus on a particular diversity aspect but rather feature incidental diversity. “We’ve reached a point where there are diversity issue books, and what we want to see more of are books that represent diversity without having a specific diverse message,” said O’Niell.

NCIBA is tracking sales data from participating bookstores through the end of December and will be compiling it to deliver to publishers. “The goal with this initiative is to get some hard sales data that we can take to publishers as a way to show that this is what we as independent booksellers can do — we want these books, we can sell them, give us more,” explained O’Niell.

Like Hines, O’Niell hopes to see this type of initiative become a reoccurring promotion throughout the year. Questions about the initiative can be addressed to O’Niell at [email protected].

In addition to these two regional initiatives, We Need Diverse Books launched a national campaign last week to highlight Drum Dream Girl: How One Girl’s Courage Changed Music by Margarita Engle, illustrated by Rafael López (HMH Books for Young Readers), during the holiday season. Learn more here.