125 Years of ABA: Q&A with Christine Onorati

Bookselling This Week: Why don't you tell me a little bit about your store?

Christine Onorati: Oh, goodness. I opened my first small bookstore on Long Island in 2001. So, I've been doing this for a while. I had a small used and new bookstore there for about five years. Then I moved and reopened in Brooklyn (where we still are) in 2007.

We just celebrated our 18th year there.

When I opened in Brooklyn, we had just moved to Greenpoint — we knew we were going to move the store with us wherever we moved. It was a sort of small town in the city that didn't have any bookstores [...] which seems crazy now.

But it was really lovely. My first store, Long Island: I couldn't get people to come because they would just go to the Barnes & Noble — it wasn't even Amazon at the time. They would rather drive an extra 20 minutes to the Barnes & Noble to save 10% instead of coming to our shop.

Then I got to Brooklyn and people were so happy to have us there. They really understood what a bookstore was. The welcome we had in Brooklyn was incredible.

We opened there in 2007, and, the indie bookstore world was still bouncing back from the Barnes & Noble years. There weren't a lot of bookstores in Brooklyn at the time. There were some, of course, but it definitely was a little bit of a leap of faith then.

We had a good landlord who was happy to have us, and it was kind of the heyday — for me — of what bookselling was. We had great author connections and wonderful, loyal customers and writer friends. It was just a wonderful to be in New York City at that time.

Then in 2013, I opened a second location in Jersey City.

We had family who were opening a restaurant there and we took over the space next door and opened a really big bookstore cafe, which was unbelievably difficult.

My hat goes off to anyone who can run those sorts of parallel businesses! They’re two very, very different businesses with different business models and different needs.

After several years, we closed the cafe, and eventually moved to our current space in Jersey City.

We also have a little airport satellite through Hudson News in Newark Airport, New Jersey, in Terminal A.

We're just chugging along after 24 years in bookselling, 18 in Brooklyn.

BTW: That's amazing. 18 years! Congratulations!

CO: Thanks. It's a long time. It feels like so much has changed in those 18 years. It's really crazy.

BTW: If I remember correctly, you also have a therapy background? You gave a mental health talk at Winter Institute 2023.

CO: I'm a therapist now. About six or seven years ago, I got my grad degree and became a therapist. My husband, who always worked at a different career, had a corporate layoff, so he came and started running the day-to-day of the bookstores.

So, he came in right before COVID, and I was already in grad school.

COVID became such a scramble for so many months to just stay afloat. It was a really awful time in bookselling. Every day, not knowing if we’ll be able to stay open. How are we going to keep people paid?

My husband sort of came and really took over during those years. And he's still there.

After I went through all of my school and became licensed, I took the buying back. So, I do the adult buying for the stores and most of the finances. But he really runs the day-to-day. And we have some really wonderful staff.

I'm kind of at a distance from it now. Even when I was on the ABA Board, I was already able to step back.

I started serving on the Board in 2017 and finished in 2023.

BTW: How did that therapy background affect the way that you were able to lead on the Board?

CO: I hope that my voice as a therapist helped.

My experience in therapy is from a family systems background — where everything is connected. You have to look and see how something is affecting the system. So, whatever the system is, in a Board meeting with a bunch of different booksellers who come from very different places, it's important to ask, “How are we serving the system?”

What's what needs to be done? And how do we do it with as much empathy and kindness as we possibly can?

We had a lot of really tough years there, through COVID and through the Black Lives Matter movement, through the unionization of a lot of our stores.

There are definitely times where it was hard to keep everybody in that mode. I’m not saying we did it perfectly, but I think that training helped me keep that conversation focused on where it needed to be.

And of course, one of the best things I ever did on the ABA Board, was be part of the process to hire Allison Hill, who I think is just the best.

I was part of the search committee to hire the next CEO and I couldn't have been more thrilled when it was her. I knew Allison a bit through the bookstore world and always admired her and thought she would be the best CEO. I'm just so glad that I was able to be part of it in a leadership role when we were able to hire her.

Of course, she started and like 30 seconds later, COVID happened. Nothing like taking on this tremendous job, having this global pandemic happen right as you start, and having all of this responsibility to try and manage all of these bookstores who were just all flailing!

As far as I'm concerned, Allison is just the North Star. She handled everything as best as she could. I mean, who could have the training for that?

Being able to be part of that was really, really important and something that I'll always look back on really proudly, because I'm so glad that we got her.

BTW: In a lot of the conversations that I've had, COVID, obviously, is a huge challenge that people mentioned. Some people have mentioned Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

What are some other challenges that you're seeing now?

One of the biggest challenges of this industry is always going to be the financial viability of it.

It's very, very difficult to stay afloat. The margins are so small to begin with.

Even after all of these years, it's a constant battle. You really can't get lazy when you’re running bookstores. You have to be constantly hustling and figuring out how to increase revenue in a time where the majority of people are not buying books.

I feel like there's been several threats in my bookselling time. When I first started, it was definitely Barnes & Noble.

Then it was e-books. Some people would have told you that e-books were going to put us out of business. That there’d be no bookstores anymore.

Not, it’s Amazon, for sure.

I remember a dinner with Andy Hunter from Bookshop.org where I said to him, “Andy, you got to help us. Selling books independently on our own websites is necessary, but it's not going to move the needle to take away anything from Amazon.”

And not even a year later, he showed up to an ABA Board meeting presenting us with the idea for Bookshop.org.

But Amazon is still insidious. It's in everything, so it does feel like an uphill battle.

That’s going to be a constant struggle for us in this industry. But to me, finances are always the thing.

I have fair leases with both of my landlords, but every year, that's going to go up 3%. Every year, I give my staff raises — I would never have a business if I couldn't pay my staff fairly. And unfortunately, it’s impossible for me to expect to have a three to 5% percent increase in sales every year because there’s so much competition now.

The finances are nonstop. It is a constant part of this business, and so it's difficult.

BTW: It seems like even though it's incredibly difficult, you have managed to strike that balance.

You've got to figure out how to make it as rewarding as it can be for you. There is a great amount of freedom I have in this business.  I still love walking into my stores. I still love it when I meet somebody.

And how do we continue? What's the secession plan for stores like mine?

Sustainability is tough.

Historically, a lot of the strategies for longevity rely on not really treating employees well. But, for me, I don't know how you separate the business from the employees like that.

That tells me there's more to be done here to figure out how our business can be sustainable, and where we can keep paying people what they need to be paid.

But I don't even know anymore what that looks like.

I remember when I first joined ABA — probably when I had my first store — I would sit in those very academic workshops that the old CFO would run, and he would explain how to be profitable with a bookstore. There was a very clear formula.

I don't think that formula works anymore. I'm not even sure there is a formula that works across the board because there's always going to be discrepancies.

It's a much more sort of murky process now.

The hard part of being involved with ABA is that ABA has to try and figure out these generalities that work for everybody. And it's very difficult because everybody's different.

BTW: Along those lines, is there anything that we have — any resource or any projects — that you have found particularly useful?

The partnerships are really important to us.

To me, Above the Treeline is a partnership that we can't do without. I find it absolutely irreplaceable for my business. Being able to see my statistics, do my orders, and see my sales history…when I first started, it was all paper. I've been around long enough to remember having to see every rep and go over the catalogs page by page. It's changed our business entirely.

That wouldn't have happened without the ABA partnership.

Bookshop.org is another example. Thank God, ABA had the vision to figure out that that was a good thing for us.

BTW: So for the next 125 years of ABA what are the things you want us to prioritize? You’ve already mentioned some things, like sustainability and financial stability.

I've always pushed for more infrastructure — though because we’re all so different, it’s really hard — like a more universal POS system that’s affordable. We all pay a lot for imperfect programs.

A better, universal system would bring us more power in the book world, and we’d be better able to compete with Amazon in, for example, showing pre-orders.

At this point, everything for me is “How do we get a little bit higher in the power dynamic of the book world?”

Unfortunately, because Amazon has all the systems that make all that stuff very easy. Even the authors who hate Amazon are forced to have to push their pre-orders there.

We have work to do there. Things like that can't happen without the funnel of ABA.

ABA is absolutely the hub through which any of those improvements or advocacy come. Without ABA, we're all just a bunch of different disparate voices that nobody wants to hear from.

Bookstores have one of the most constricting retail systems, because we sell things with prices on them. We are being constrained with a ceiling from the minute we purchase a product. We cannot raise that price even if our rent goes up or our payroll goes up.

The only options we have are to sell more of them or to return it — which is a bizarre and laborious, but necessary, part of our ecosystem of bookselling.

Is there a better system for returns? I bet at some point there will be. Is there some groundbreaking new way to look at our model? Probably, though it’s not clear right now.

I do think there are options and opportunities down the road for optimizing what we've got. But I have faith that that's in Allison's hands, or ABA's hands.

I hope that there's going to be a lot of changes in this industry in the next 125 years. But it has to come from ABA.

So, yeah, no pressure on Allison. I put a lot of hope in the fact that she's doing all the thinking and the dreaming that we can't really do.

Is there anything else that you wanted to mention, but you feel like you didn't get the chance to? Or anything you want to leave with booksellers?

I'm sometimes very frustrated at our industry, probably more than ever now, but there are no days when I don't think that what we do is important. There are no days that I don't think about what life would look like if we didn't have bookstores like mine.

Human connection is so important for us. We are meant for connection. And that’s what bookselling is, that’s what books are. They are connection.

And I think that's what a bookstore is. The connection you get from a bookstore, even if you don’t know anyone there, is so important.

And that’s why we do it.

Bookselling is a labor of love.