Slide Presentation

Title 1 schools work with a small number of resources and even smaller budgets to bring authors to student audiences, host book fairs, and keep accounts with independent bookstores. Luckily, many bookstores do manage successful and profitable partnerships with Title 1 schools. Panelists with ongoing success in partnering with Title 1 schools will share with attendees:

• How to approach Title 1 schools
• How these partnerships are effective and profitable
• How to assist a school in maximizing monies received from a granting organization
• How to build community goodwill through partnership with a Title 1 school

Almost every bookstore has a story time, but not every bookstore has a story time that keeps customers coming back again and again. This session is designed to teach attendees:

• The performance aspect of story time and how to turn up the energy
• Tips and tricks to be the best reader in the world
• How to keep little ones engaged
• Ways to adjust your approach when the crowd gets restless
• How to read to kids of all ages

With hundreds of subscription boxes to choose from, how will a customer know that yours is the right one for them? Attendees will learn the following from bookstores that have successful subscription box programs:

• Best practices for marketing
• Inventory control
• Options for special services
• How to select categories
• Fulfillment management
• Order tracking

You don’t need an infinite amount of space to remain competitive in independent bookselling. Bookstores under 1,000 square feet share what they do to maximize their selling space and host events without having to knock down walls. Attendees will learn from panelists who call a small store home:

• The logistics of hosting an in-store event
• Crowd management in a small space
• Inventory management in a small stockroom
• Keeping it fresh with inventive displays

When your wallet is slim and margins are small, every penny counts. But there are little things that can be done every single day to boost a bookstore’s bottom line. Bookstore panelists who have effectively pinched a penny here and saved a penny there will teach attendees:

• How to identify small costs that add up
• Where to look for savings
• Small actions booksellers can take to impact overall savings and sales

Optimize your bookstore search and reordering process by implementing tags and keywords for categories and sub-categories in your point-of-sale system, Edelweiss, and in staff reference documents. Attendees of this session will learn:

• The benefits of using tags and keywords
• Tag and keyword suggestions
• Best practices for implementing tags and keywords
• How to get staff involved

The ABACUS benchmarking report is designed to provide easy-to-understand guidelines for identifying independent bookstore business performance improvement opportunities. If you have never participated in the survey and would like to learn more about reporting to ABACUS-19, which will open in spring 2020, this session will teach you:

• The importance of reporting to ABACUS
• Information you need to prepare to complete the report
• Best practices from booksellers who reported their store's numbers to the 2018 ABACUS
• Actionable steps to take when you return home to prepare for ABACUS-19

Indies Introduce is about what independent booksellers do best: Discovering exciting debut authors and sharing the best with readers across the country. You will hear about the title selection process from the bookseller panelists who curated the list and many of this season’s debut authors will be present to read a short passage and answer a question posed by one of the panelists.

This year, the American Booksellers Association is partnering with Well-Read Black Girl founder Glory Edim to bring book club meetings to independent bookstores nationwide with the goal of amplifying diverse voices and supporting emerging writers of color. Booksellers are invited to sign on to serve as ambassadors and host Well-Read Black Girl book clubs in their stores throughout the year. Learn more about the partnership.

Everyone wants to be a book influencer on social media, but it takes more than logging in and sharing a photo. Instagram influencer and debut author Hafsah Faizal will teach attendees:

• What it means to have an Instagram persona and how to establish a unique voice
• How to gain followers
• Best practices for targeted messaging
• How to effectively use hashtags
• Tips to curate beautiful, attention-grabbing photos
• How to establish profitable partnerships with other businesses and organizations

Pre-registation required; $45 fee per person; space is limited and lunch is provided. Hosting events in-store and offsite is a great way to strengthen a customer base, build goodwill within your community, and make money. But tackling the ins and outs of events, no matter how large or small, is daunting, time-consuming, and, let’s face it, overwhelming. This full-day, two-part workshop led by aces in bookstore event management will teach attendees:

• Best practices for in-store author events
• Tips for navigating events in a small space
• Best practices for off-site author events, including partnering with schools and libraries, hosting large-scale events, and using alternate venues
• Best practices for ticketing events and anticipating turnout
• How to launch a book festival in your community

Events University is open to all booksellers, including those who are not registered for Children’s Institute.

Bookstores are important fixtures in every community. They serve as places to gather, to find and research new ideas, to explore new worlds, and to find refuge. But bookstores can also be intimidating for people who are underrepresented by the makeup of a store's staff That’s why it is important for a store to not only reflect its immediate community but also the larger community. In this session, HR leaders will share with attendees:

• The importance of hiring a diverse staff
• The impact a diverse staff has within the store and on the greater community
• How to find great bookstore employee candidates outside your store’s community

There’s nothing like walking into your favorite bookstore and being on a first-name basis with the staff. Why not say, “Thank you for being a friend,” and reward customers’ loyalty with a frequent buyer card, membership subscription, or other benefit program that will keep them coming back over and over again? A panel of booksellers with robust customer loyalty programs will share:

• Background on their store’s customer loyalty programs
• How to create a program that rewards the customer but also the store
• How to onboard customers
• How to market the program
• How to integrate a new program into your store’s culture

Representation matters. #OwnVoices matters. As bearers of knowledge and information for children, it is imperative that a bookstore’s inventory reflects the experiences of all kinds of people to cultivate cultural awareness and engender empathy in youth. One step toward a more inclusive collection of books is to conduct a diversity audit on your store’s inventory. This session will teach attendees how to:

• Assess their inventory
• Conduct an audit
• Identify where attention needs to be focused
• Use an audit to inform the ordering process

Holiday gift buying is not a last-minute task, but how does a gift buyer not only source but anticipate what will be a popular gift six months down the road? In this session, bookstores that have a unique collection of non-book items will teach buyers:

• The role seasonal non-book items play in holiday sales
• Best practices for discovering the next “it” holiday gift
• Efficiencies and systems for ordering and reordering, shipment scheduling, and storing holiday gift items
• How to move, move, move items that may not be selling