Dear Booksellers,

In these strange days, nothing looks quite the same, even poetry:

                               -Social Distancing by Juan Felipe Herrera, with design by Anthony Cody

Our next regularly scheduled coffee break, on Thursday, April 16, at 3:00 pm ET, will be replaced with a Government Relief Webinar:

Tom Jardim and Scott Salmon, experts in employment and labor law from the law firm Jardim, Meisner & Susser, P.C., will walk booksellers through the federal government relief and wage requirements recently passed in response to COVID-19 in a session titled “Government Relief and Wage Requirements: What You Need to Know.” 

Jardim and Salmon will cover the relief for small businesses in the CARES Act, such as the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program, the Paycheck Protection Program, increased unemployment benefits, and tax/tax credit information. Additionally, the webinar will cover wage and hour requirements in part implemented by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. Following the presentation, booksellers will have the opportunity to ask Jardim and Salmon questions about government relief and wage requirements.

The webinar will be held in lieu of ABA’s scheduled coffee break on Thursday. To allow for sufficient time to field questions, the webinar will run from 3:00 p.m. to approximately 4:15 p.m. ET. Join the webinar here; the meeting ID is 749 778 583.

For those unable to attend, a recording of the webinar will be posted on BookWeb in the coming days. If you have any questions, please contact ABA’s Advocacy Team at advocacy@bookweb.org.

Independent Bookstore Day will not take place as planned on April 25, but it has been transformed into a #VirtualBookstoreParty. A week of online activities and a Twitter party with customers, authors, booksellers, and Ambassador Sean Doolittle will be held April 19–25. (Independent Bookstore Day is tentatively rescheduled for August 29.)

The next BookExpo, UnBound, and BookCon, originally scheduled for May/June 2020, then rescheduled for July 2020, won’t occur now until spring of 2021, but ReedPop explored virtual programming this past weekend with the first BookCon Read-a-Thon.

In-person shopping has been replaced by FaceTime and virtual shopping: Customers of Changing Hands in Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona; Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, New Hampshire; and other retailers like The Schaefer House and Initially Yours in Jefferson City, Missouri, can now FaceTime with the stores’ staff to “shop” or get recommendations. 

Indie bookstores, known for in-person, personalized hand-selling and physical shelf-talkers, are learning to speak a new love language with customers via their e-commerce sites. They’re also welcoming new customers, driven into their arms by Amazon’s deprioritization of books. Our IndieCommerce team notes that the stores experiencing the greatest growth or success in online sales right now are those who are actively driving those sales, not just sitting back and waiting for customers to place orders. Some great ideas we’ve seen to stay connected with customers, drive customer engagement, and produce online sales include: 

• Hosting virtual events and listing those events front and center on store websites
• Customizing the book selection on your homepage to reflect the times
• Posting regular videos on social media to connect with stores’ regular customers and selling unique items to attract new customers
• Sharing the store’s story, its history, and how the store and the staff are doing during the crisis. And don’t hesitate to say if you’re struggling.
• Communicating with customers via your website, email, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter about books, about what’s going on, about life. Be supportive, be inspiring, be authentic, be compassionate. We all need that right now.
• Connecting with authors: The cross-pollination between authors and books on social media is a great way to support authors, sell books, and create content for customers.
• Reminding customers through messaging that there are real people on the other side of an internet order: adding personalized notes to packages, asking how people are doing.
• Promoting your commitment to safe practices: wiping down books, wearing masks and gloves, reassuring customers that your staff’s safety—and their safety—is your top priority.

Lots of things look different now and will be different on the other side of this crisis. While we’re all still adjusting to the present, we need to start thinking about the future. How will our business change? What role will e-commerce and technology play in the future of bookstores? How will consumer behavior and expectations be altered? How can we strengthen our model to mitigate risk in the future? ABA has started thinking about this future, conducting environmental scanning, and asking publishers their viewpoint. We encourage you to do the same, starting here. 

ABA is here for you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. We are an incredibly creative, resilient, supportive industry. We’ll get through this, together.

Best,
Allison