Treeline Tips and Tricks: Building Community

By Joe Foster, Edelweiss/Treeline Education and Outreach Coordinator

Being part of the greater bookselling community is one of the more rewarding aspects of bookselling. Getting to know others who have dedicated their lives to this pursuit, whether as a store owner, sales rep, frontline bookseller, events coordinator, buyer… you learn that there are people who face your same challenges, love the same books (or not), and have customer or author stories that are as amusing as your own. It’s a great thing and can be a balm of sorts when things are especially trying. The beauty, too, is the disparate sorts of personalities and life histories that all sort of coalesce towards this common pursuit: a love of the written word.

Edelweiss has a way for you to experience that love-of-the-book part of the community on a daily basis, with booksellers from around the country, or even with just your own staff. Connecting with someone in the Edelweiss Community means you see what they’re excited about, what they’ve read, as well as their reviews of upcoming titles. Your job is very much about being knowledgeable about new books, and you can leverage your colleagues’ passions and insight to do so. (You can find a tutorial about the Edelweiss Community here.)

There can be a gap in this sense of community, at times, in that buyers and owners tend to be the ones who get the most interaction with the greater bookselling community, while frontline booksellers, by and large, are left out of the conversation. It can be expensive to send those frontline booksellers to trade shows, but having them connect with other booksellers around the country via Edelweiss is free and can only serve to help them feel connected and to learn about titles they may have otherwise missed. They can also connect with sales reps and see the titles your reps are excited about, while your reps can get a sense of a bookseller’s tastes, which can only help them do their jobs better and get books into the hands of the people who can do the most with them.

Buyers can also benefit greatly from having their frontline bookselling colleagues connected in the Edelweiss Community. Seeing what a colleague who speaks directly to customers all day is excited about, and ordering more appropriately as a result, is a win for all involved. (More information about getting your staff on Edelweiss can be found here.)

Incidentally, the Edelweiss Community will be much more integrated in to the upcoming Edelweiss+, the new version of Edelweiss coming out very soon.

If you have questions, contact us at [email protected].