With local-interest book offerings increasingly recognized as a key to independent bookseller success, Arcadia Publishing, a leading publisher of local content, and the American Booksellers Association have announced the YourTown partnership program [5] to enable bookstores to assemble and display uniquely customized assortments of local-interest books for their customers.

In addition to a new set of sales terms, the YourTown partnership program grants ABA members access to the newly launched YourTown Store Match service, making available a store-specific curated assortment of hyper-local titles drawn from the 14,000 local-interest books published by the Arcadia Publishing and History Press imprints.

“For years, we have been emphasizing to our members just how important it is to feature books of special interest to their local communities,” said ABA CEO Oren Teicher. “We could not be more pleased to be working with Arcadia to help independent bookstores make local ‘come alive’ in their stores.”

“We are gratified to be partnering with ABA to advance Arcadia’s mission, which is to connect people with their past, with their communities, and with one another,” said Arcadia Publishing CEO David Steinberger. “We need to thank ABA — its board and senior staff — and other indie booksellers for their insight and assistance in developing what we believe will be a transformational program.”

An agreement has also been reached with Above the Treeline so that the YourTown Store Match service will soon be available through Edelweiss+, the online platform for selling, discovering, and ordering books.

“We are always focused on providing booksellers with the tools they need to succeed,” said John Rubin, CEO of Above the Treeline. “We’re excited to be working with Arcadia and ABA to help booksellers ‘go local’ by accessing the YourTown Store Match service through Edelweiss+.”

In developing the YourTown partnership program — which also includes a new friction-free co-op process and special terms of sale for display orders, B2B orders, and new store openings — the Arcadia team gathered feedback and input from the independent bookselling community.

Many independent booksellers have long recognized how displaying titles from Arcadia Publishing and The History Press and hosting related author events help connect stores to their local communities. “Arcadia is a publisher that knows how important deeply local history is to how we, as small business employees and customers, lead our everyday lives,” said Jonathan Woollen, event manager at Politics and Prose [6] in Washington, D.C.

“We have sold countless copies of Arcadia books, made so much easier with use of their free spinner,” said Annie Philbrick, owner of Bank Square Books [7] in Mystic, Connecticut, and Savoy Bookshop & Café in Westerly, Rhode Island. “Over the years we have sold over 2,000 copies of the Images of America book Mystic, and almost 1,000 copies of Leigh Fought’s History of Mystic.”

Independent bookstores seeking to access the YourTown Store Match service can contact their Arcadia sales rep, e-mail [email protected] [8], or visit www.arcadiapublishing.com/storematch [5].

Founded in 1994, Arcadia is the publisher of a backlist of 14,000 books of local history and local interest and is the home of the iconic sepia-jacketed Images of America series featuring unique hyper-local histories of countless hometowns across all 50 states. Its History Press imprint publishes a range of other local and regional-themed series, such as American Palate, which focuses on local food, beer, and wine, and Haunted America, which retells stories of famous hauntings, one American city and town at a time.