As the American Booksellers Association continues its campaign to highlight the importance of backlist titles, booksellers are reminded that they have just a few more weeks to take advantage of a number of publisher and university press special offers in conjunction with Indies First on Small Business Saturday [5], this year November 25.

[6]To help booksellers evaluate the advantages of backlist offers, ABA has created a convenient new buying tool, the Backlist Buying Calculator [7], a self-calculating Excel sheet designed to calculate and analyze a store’s backlist buying savings. The calculator was part of ABA’s fall trade show education session, “Maximizing Backlist: Proven Ways to Market, Promote, and Sell Backlist Titles,” which focused on how backlist titles with proven track records can be as important as frontlist titles for store sales and bottom-line profits, especially given some publishers’ new backlist terms.

Booksellers can login to BookWeb now to access the calculator as well as the PowerPoint presentation from the education session [8]; e-mail [email protected] [9] for login information.

The ABA Book Buyer’s Handbook [10] includes the list of the numerous publisher offers on backlist and frontlist titles available to exclusively to ABA member booksellers in conjunction with Indies First; 25 special offers from publishers and university presses are still available to booksellers during varying dates.

Booksellers should act now to take advantage of Indies First publisher offers. Promotional codes are available on a dedicated page in the Book Buyer’s Handbook [10] as well as in an Excel spreadsheet [11] on the Indies First homepage [5] on BookWeb (a username and password are required).

Stores that will be hosting authors for Indies First on Small Business Saturday are encouraged to review the publisher offers to select titles that their guest booksellers will be hand-selling during their visits.

As part of ABA’s campaign to promote the importance of backlist, Bookselling This Week’s “How We Sell Backlist” column has highlighted the different efforts made by booksellers to feature backlist titles. The column has profiled Third Place Books [12], Parnassus Books [13], Scuppernong Books [14], and Midtown Reader [15]. Let us know [16] if you would like your backlist efforts to be shared in BTW.