Bookstores

From Publishers Weekly:

Hundreds of employees at the locations of Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., staged a one-day strike on Labor Day to protest stalled negotiations between ILWU Local 5, the union which has represented Powell’s staff since 2000, and management. The union’s contract ran out on June 7, and employees and management are at an impasse after negotiations have stalled. Last week, the union filed claim of unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board against the bookstore, claiming management is not engaging in good faith and is stalling.

At the heart of the issues is the wage structure, with employees arguing that wages have not kept pace with inflation. As reported by the Oregonian, union reps have stated that the majority of employees start at $16.25 an hour, which is not close to the livable wage, which is now $21.85 for the area. Powell’s says it has offered to raise the starting wage for top employees to over $22 and offer as much as $24.25, after increases.

The union characterized Powell’s “last, best, final offer,” offered on August 11, as a lowball proposal. It said that booksellers start at $15.45 an hour, the area’s minimum wage, while 85% make below livable wage, which is $21.85.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From Esquire:

“There is no such thing as a ‘nonpolitical’ bookstore,” Josh Cook writes in The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century. In the age of book banning, publishing industry consolidation, and the pandemic’s lingering aftershocks, Cook’s words ring with frightening truth.

The Art of Libromancy, new on shelves today, taxonomizes the joys, challenges, and disruptions of independent bookselling in 2023. Cook, a veteran bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writes from the front lines of the sales floor and the stockroom, dissecting how booksellers evaluate what to sell and how to sell it. From making recommendations to organizing display tables to stocking books by politicians, these seemingly granular decisions are matters of moral urgency; as Cook reminds us, “People use books to develop their morals, support and test their belief structures, come to conclusions about the state of the world, and make voting decisions.”

The massive systemic pressures facing bookstores are enough to make anyone feel powerless, but Cook insists that booksellers have a powerful role to play in advancing social justice and shoring up community bonds. “Person to person, display to display, reader to reader, event to event,” he tells Esquire, “book sales have a real opportunity to shape publishing and the world of books in a way that creates a more sustainable books ecosystem and also a more sustainable world.”

. . . .

ESQUIRE: What are the biggest challenges facing bookstores and booksellers nowadays?

JOSH COOK: The challenges facing society are the same challenges bookstores face: climate change, the threat of fascism in America, the problems that capitalism creates in communities. All of that makes it more difficult to sell books because people are struggling—they don’t have the money they should have for the amount of work that they do, and they don’t have the leisure to enjoy books and connect with the bookish community. We need to have booksellers and readers to sell books, but some parts of our society make that very difficult.

Looking closer at bookstores themselves, one of the biggest challenges is, of course, Amazon. From its inception, Amazon’s goal has seemingly been to put every other retailer out of business, and they got their start going for bookstores. Independent bookstores have made a compelling argument for their readers as to why it’s important and in their best interests to pay 40% to 60% more for a title with them than they would pay at Amazon. That’s heartening—and there have been hopeful shifts in how monopoly and antitrust legislation are enforced in the United States. The next thing is consolidation in the publishing industry. There are five publishers that publish the vast majority of books in English, but that consolidation also applies to printers and wholesalers. If one of these giant companies makes a decision, it has an immediate impact on bookstores.

These systemic problems are enough to make anyone feel powerless, but you argue that booksellers can create change. What can booksellers do to advance social justice in their stores?

The most important thing booksellers can do is always ask themselves, Can I do more with this recommendation? Can I do more with this display? Can I do more with this event? You want to bring great reads to your community, and you want to recommend a book that someone is actually going to buy. But I think there’s space in those conversations, in those displays, in those events, to say, “Is this book a book that makes the world a better place? Is this book a book that also supports my values? Is this a book that’s going to add more to the community?” It’s about understanding that you’re always an advocate as well as a bookseller. For whatever reason you decide to put a book in someone’s hand or place it on display, you’re an advocate for that book. That’s a responsibility, but also a power. Person to person, display to display, reader to reader, event to event, book sales have a real opportunity to shape publishing and the world of books in a way that creates a more sustainable books ecosystem and also a more sustainable world.

In the book, you write, “There’s no such thing as a non-political bookstore.” The choice of if and how to sell books by right-wing writers is one of the most obvious political decisions facing bookstores. You argue that genre can be a helpful tool to solve this challenge. How can genre usefully help us engage with the problem of right-wing books?

Genre is a way of providing context and framing for the books that you sell. Sometimes that’s just letting someone know that one book is more likely to have robots and lasers in it than another book. Alex Shepherd wrote in The New Republic that if fact checking was required in nonfiction books, that would pose an existential crisis for conservative publishing. So if a bookstore wants to represent a broad spectrum of contemporary American political thought, but also wants to say that these books are nonfiction, that’s a challenge. One way you could solve that problem is to add context through genre. “Politicians and pundits” was my idea for our store. I thought we should separate political talk show hosts and politicians from political science. That’s not to say that politicians and pundits can’t write truthful books, but that when you present it in that context, your customers recognize it as something different. It’s hard to know what kind of impact this would have, but it has the potential to produce a really interesting conversation. Genre is just an agreement, and agreements can change.

As book bans surge in libraries and schools, I’ve been troubled to see it expanding into bookstores. What are you seeing and hearing on the front lines?

The biggest threat right now is in Texas, which has basically made it impossible to sell books to schools. This is really important to know in terms of national context. It’s easy to think, “It’s just happening in the red states,” but because Texas is such a huge market, their educational decisions have an impact on educational publishing. I saw recently that Follett was asking its publishers to start pre-screening their books for continued sale in Texas. The impact of that is much broader than Texas.

The most important thing to know about book bans is that people who believe in them will go as far as they can. If they can only get to school libraries and public libraries before pressure or legal systems stop them, that’s as far as they’ll get. If they can get to bookstores, they will; if they can get to publishers, they will. If they can get to writers, they will; if they can get to readers, they will. In the bookstore world, there’s an appropriate level of alarm. I can’t speak directly to the organizing efforts of the American Booksellers Association or PenAmerica, but I know they’re working on it. There are reasons to be really scared, but there are also reasons to be hopeful.

What are those reasons to be hopeful?

No one is treating this as an isolated thing. I also think it’s clear that the vast majority of people don’t support book bans. It’s clear from reporting on the groups leading these challenges that they’re a fringe minority—it’s just that they’re well-funded, well-organized, and committed to imposing their views on other people. Every time they fight and lose, that’s a reason to be hopeful. The question is: how do we get the majority into avenues of power where they can fight back and create the community that we actually want?

Another sea change we’re seeing in bookselling is a rise in unionization efforts. Do you feel that there’s a groundswell among booksellers to join the labor movement?

I do. One of the challenges that bookselling has always faced is the idea of vocational awe—the sense that because you’re working with books, doing community work in the arts, that everything inherent about you and what you do will be positive. That’s just not true and it’s never been true, though it’s been a useful tool for books and other creative industries to convince people to work for far less than they’re worth. During the pandemic, this illusion was punctured. Bookstore owners and corporate America in general said, “I know you’re dying, but go to work anyway.” A lot of questions arose from that—and once you start asking those questions, it’s not hard to ask about wages, working conditions, unpaid overtime, and everything that vocational awe.

One of the great solutions to these questions is, of course, unionizing. As a manager and owner, unionizing is also good for managers and owners, because it creates an empowered workforce—and in a community-heavy industry like bookstores, you want people to feel good about being there. Unionizing also means you’ve got a contract, so there’s no more doubt anymore. There’s no more judgment; there’s no more having to figure things out. Small businesses often have to figure things out on the fly, but for stores that unionize, that’s all hammered out in negotiations, which provides some real pathways better communication, better production, and ultimately better sales.

What advice do you have about how best to patronize our local bookstores?

If you ever get a great recommendation from someone, go back and tell them or send an email to the store. It’s really validating and energizing when we find out that you loved our recommendation. A few other things that don’t cost money: if you talk about books on social media, include a link to your favorite bookstore. Direct links sell more and don’t cost you anything, so it’s a great way to support bookstores without having to buy anything more. Also: if you’re someone who plans well, do your holiday shopping in October. If you know you’re going to spend $100 on books this holiday season, that $100 is great in October for a few reasons. At this point in the year, bookstores might be short on cash ahead of the huge holiday season. Spreading out shopping makes it easier to raise wages, because there isn’t that cash crunch. Something else to consider: there will be people in our stores in December who if we do not help them, they’ll buy a Visa gift card for the reader in their life, so for those of you who are savvy bookstore shoppers, if we’re not helping you in that on December 22nd at 7:45 PM, we’ll have more time and more energy to help those who otherwise would not be shopping with us.

The last thing I would say as a way to use bookstores well is this: take some risks. Walk up to a bookseller and say, “Give me your favorite book,” or, “Give me what I should read now.” Try it, read it. You’ll maybe discover a genre you’ve never heard of before. You’ll discover authors you’ve never heard of before. You’ll get something really exciting, and if you don’t like it, that’s okay. It’s all about being willing to be connected to the community, and willing to support your bookstores and booksellers.

Link to the rest at Esquire

PG suggests that the reason many (most?) bookstore owners resist unionization is that 90% of retail bookstores are financially marginal operations. If unionization results in pressure to increase employee salaries (a major factor in a great preponderance of unionization campaigns) the bookstore is brought closer to bankruptcy if the employees are unionized.

As far as bookstore employees providing genius book recommendations, that’s an experience PG has never had. Of course, PG’s book choices border on the manic. Even he cannot project what he’ll be reading in a week, so he expects he’s different from a great many readers.

PG’s mother (God rest her soul) took PG and his siblings to the library on a regular basis unless it was simply too far to drive. In college, PG worked at the very large university library, reshelving books and helping students and/or professors find this or that obscure volume deeply buried or, worse, misfiled in the endless stacks.

He has no bad memories of those library experiences. However, times change.

Online at Amazon or online at his local library is the exclusive way PG selects his books.

Having just downsized from Casa PG, PG is highly aware of how many printed boat anchors he and Mrs. PG acquired over many years of residing in that house, most prior to the widespread availability of ebooks. Printed books fell under the category of “burdened by too many possessions.”

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Barnes & Noble workers at the retail giant’s main Brooklyn location have voted to unionize after the company’s New York Flagship Store unionized earlier this month. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) announced June 29 that it will represent more than 30 booksellers, baristas, cashiers, and non-supervisory employees at the Barnes & Noble Park Slope location after 88% voted in favor to join the union.

“Workers are sending a clear message to Barnes & Noble, organizing a union is the only way to win a voice at work that can create real change – and they’re winning by historic margins,” said RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum in a statement. “Bookstore workers across the industry, from independent sellers to corporate behemoths like Barnes & Noble face safety concerns, lack of training, and substandard wages. Only with a union, will these issues and more be heard.

According to RWDSU, workers at the Brooklyn store faced safety and workplace quality issues, such as “workplace harassment, substandard pay for the industry below that of independent booksellers, unstable scheduling practices, a lack of structure when it comes to job duties and tasks at work, and favoritism.” The RWDSU said the workers are aiming to address these issues when their first contract negotiations commence this year.

“It is time for the industry to open a new chapter on how it treats its workers, and Barnes & Noble workers are writing the book,” added Appelbaum.

Bookseller Sydul Akhanji said he is “happy and relieved” with the outcome. “Excited to see how things go moving forward. I hope B&N is listening to us and will work with us as we begin negotiations,” he said. “And I hope other retail workers who are interested in unionization find this moment to be inspiring and get active.”

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

From Book Riot:

When I realized my childhood Barnes & Noble was closing, I was devastated. I’m an indie bookstore lover, but growing up, there were no indie bookstores in my town: only one gorgeous, cozy Barnes & Noble. We went to book clubs there as kids, met there as teens basically every Friday night, studied for the SATs there, got coffee there to catch up over summers home from college. It held tons of concentrated memories.

The good news was that it was simply moving, not closing for good. It would have a new location and be one of the first “new Barnes & Noble stores” using their new layout, approach, and model. But was that good news?

Let’s back up. Years ago, there was a push to support indies over mega chains, but in recent years, Amazon’s threat has changed the story somewhat, leading many book lovers (me included) to acknowledge that Barnes & Noble, as one of the few remaining brick-and-mortar chains, is still a preferable option over Amazon. They’ve made some headway over the past couple years as they once again spin to becoming the “hero” of the story, the big-box store that outlasted and survived Amazon, proving our love of physical locations and physical books despite the odds.

. . . .

However, their new attempts to rejuvenate their stores are a way to appropriate the warm coziness and trust we have in an indie bookstore while taking away the mechanics of an indie on the back end. The maze-like layout is meant to be a “curated, cozy, and welcoming space for communities to work, read and browse.” But while branding and new layouts may seem innocent, anyone who has worked in the business world knows that it’s often more complicated than it appears.

After Barnes & Noble was sold to a hedge fund in 2019, owners Elliott Advisors brought in James Daunt, the chief executive of UK chain Waterstones (owned by the same company, I should add). His strategy for saving Barnes & Noble included giving local stores more individualized flexibility to choose what they sell based on local demand, moving away from the gifts and toys section, moving locations into smaller physical spaces, and redesigning the stores.

It’s not a coincidence that Barnes & Noble sought to capture something of what the indies were bringing to the table. Over the pandemic, books boomed, but so did a certain nostalgia for physical spaces and for wandering and browsing in-person. Indie bookstores benefited from this, and new ones have been popping up all over the country over the last few years. Barnes & Noble wants to take advantage of this moment.

But all moments aren’t created equal. As Jenn Northington unpacked in her piece in 2022, there was a 12.4% drop in hardcover sales from 2021 to 2022. And in 2022, Twitter buzzed with the realization that Barnes & Noble’s new policy seemed to be to stock only hardcovers that had “proven sales” records, making it harder for debut authors, “genre” authors, and authors traditionally neglected by the industry (people of color, queer and trans authors, disabled authors, etc.) to be discovered.

. . . .

Northington says it best:

“If the only hardcovers you can find at your local branch are also the ones that are on the bestseller list, which are also the ones getting marketing dollars, which are also the ones that the algorithms are suggesting to you online, then the chances of, say, a debut author from a marginalized community getting their book in front of your face long enough for you to see it and consider buying it are lower than ever.”

Some argue that it’s okay because B&N will still sell a more diverse selection of paperbacks — these rules are only for hardcover releases. But how can you get a paperback printing if your hardcover doesn’t sell? And how can your hardcover sell if a bookseller won’t sell it unless you can prove it will sell in advance?

Barnes & Noble is trying to capture the wonder of wandering your local indie bookstore, while simultaneously narrowing how much you could possibly discover. It wants you to think that it’s as personal and local as your independent bookstore would be, while showing you the same five books you’ve already seen blasted all over BookTok. They’ll continue to get that good bestseller money while convincing people that they’re in a community space.

. . . .

The implication is obvious. Barnes & Noble is trying to improve their bottom line. Which is fine: a bookstore is a business, and a chain needs to make money to keep stores open. What I don’t like is that they are quietly prioritizing profits in ways that hurt the goals of the literary community while also pushing this vision of Barnes & Noble as your local indie that supports your community and is a haven for readers. They are putting on the costume and language of a pretty neighborhood independent bookstore, but their inner mechanics are still all big-box chain corporation. They’re trying to disguise their profit-driven corporate decisions behind pretty warm-lit curtains.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

PG doesn’t recall that he’s read anything about it, but he wonders if the partner/employee/etc. at Elliot Advisors who championed the acquisition of Barnes & Noble in 2019 has been fired, demoted, etc., for what was surely a huge mistake from the standpoint of making money.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Workers at the Barnes & Noble’s flagship store in New York City’s Union Square are hoping to join the growing numbers of booksellers across the country who have opted for collective bargaining: they filed with the National Labor Relations Board on Friday, requesting a union election with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU). RWDSU already is the union representing several indie bookstores in New York: McNally Jackson, Greenlight, and Book Culture. Workers at the Barnes & Noble Education Store at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. recently filed for a union election with RWDSU; it has been scheduled for May 12. (B&N Education is a separate company from B&N.)

“We like to keep the numbers close to our chests, but there’s an overwhelming majority of the more than 100 workers at B&N on Union Square who have filled out authorization cards,” RWDSU director of communications Chelsea Connor told PW. “We always demand recognition first, and if we don’t get it, then we go to an election.” Connor says that pending the two parties coming to an agreement over the terms of the election, it could be held as early as next month, with booksellers, baristas, cashiers, and other non-supervisory personnel eligible to vote.

. . . .

Connor noted that filing with the NLRB for a union election was done after B&N representatives did not voluntarily recognize the union, thus preventing negotiations from starting immediately to address the grievances cited by the workers, including safety issues, harassment in the workplace, substandard pay, erratic scheduling, a lack of structure regarding job responsibilities, favoritism by management, and a lack of transparency regarding promotions.

B&N’s corporate headquarters is housed on the upper floors above the bookstore in the same building.

During a gathering of booksellers and others inside the store on Friday afternoon that organizers called a “walk on the boss,” Aaron Lascano, one of the booksellers leading the campaign for unionization at the Union Square store, announced the filing and explained why unionization was necessary. “Management and corporate are quick to offer gratitude for our work,” he said, “But at every available opportunity, they have demonstrated to us that we are disposable. How can we see this? Because this year, despite our store crushing our financial goal by several million dollars, there is no discussion of a bonus or a raise for us. We saw this last year too, when we also crushed that year’s plan, and then were offered raises of 20-40 cents. We see this over the company’s long history, which even when it did hand out yearly raises, only provided raises of 25 cents per year. Coming out of Covid, this company promised better pay, better support for full-time workers, and a clear promotion path. None of this has materialized.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

From Publisher’s Weekly:

As book banning efforts intensify—along with assaults on women’s bodily autonomy and on the AP African American studies curriculum—old-school feminist bookstores and new intersectional feminist stores alike are drawing customers seeking safe spaces for buying books and gathering information.

Sarah Hollenbeck, co-owner of Women & Children First in Chicago, echoed other feminist booksellers PW spoke with when she said that the current culture wars have rejuvenated her 44-year-old store. “In recent years, we’ve only stood stronger in our mission and encouraged our community to invest in the ongoing work,” Hollenbeck said. “Our most recent tote bag reads ‘Support Your Local Feminist Bookstore’ in big, bold, all-caps letters. That pretty much captures the tone of our current marketing strategy.”

WCF also has been buoyed by spikes in new customers and sales due to external factors. Most notably, in June 2022, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker visited WCF to mark his repeal of a state law requiring minors to obtain parental consent before having an abortion, just before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. “We continue to have quite a bit of interest in certain titles, like the new edition of The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service and Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion,” Hollenbeck said.

WCF has also upped its scheduling of collaborative programming benefiting feminist organizations, including two Bake Sale for Abortion fundraisers for the Chicago Abortion Fund.

Sales at 49-year-old Charis Books & More in Decatur, Ga. also “have gone up, and up, and up” in the past year, said co-owner Sara Luce Look, who ascribes this success to being “rooted in community that holds us accountable.” Charis has always had robust programming in collaboration with like-minded organizations, such as one Atlanta group focused on reproductive justice and another on domestic violence. “The kinds of books we carry and the programing we do are intertwined,” Look added, noting that the store is going to be a distribution point for Plan B contraception pills.

Most of the indies identifying as feminist stores that have opened in recent years also embrace LGBTQ books and Black literature. One such store, Socialight Society in Lansing, Mich., was founded in 2021 as a pop-up specializing in books by Black women; it moved into a bricks-and-mortar space inside the Lansing Mall a year ago. Owner Nyshell Lawrence said she was inspired to open Socialight Society after visiting a large bookstore in Lansing that had a “pretty disappointing” section of books by BIPOC authors.

“Things are going well” with in-store and online sales, plus sales to local schools, Lawrence said, noting that Socialight stocks 300 titles. Conversations with customers often concern banned books, since “people want to get their hands on them,” she noted.

This past summer, sales at Socialight rose when customers were given the opportunity to donate books to be handed out to protesters for women’s rights rallying outside the Michigan state capitol building. “Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics was probably the most popular book handed out to the protesters,” Lawrence said.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

From LitHub:

Yep, that’s right—not NFTs! Shocking, I know. According to a Forbes Advisor analysis, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Google Trends, bookstores are projected to be the most recession-proof type of U.S. business in 2023, followed by PR firms, interior design services, staffing agencies, and marketing consulting services.

Forbes Advisor, which assessed 60 small business types to evaluate their 2023 recession-proof-ness (?), calculated that the number of bookstores in the U.S. increased by 43% during the latter part of the pandemic. Bookstores also “enjoyed steady wage growth” during this time (+16%) as well as during the Great Recession (+13%). These stats, plus their “moderate startup cost” (around $75k, apparently), earned bookstores the top spot in the recession-proof rankings.

What are the least recession-proof business, you wonder? Furniture stores, followed by women’s clothing boutiques, taxi/rideshare services, used car dealerships, and housing construction companies. Makes sense—people tend to delay big or unnecessary purchases during a recession, but luckily for bookstore owners, books are both cost effective and necessary.

Link to the rest at LitHub

Color PG exceedingly skeptical about the OP’s predictions about PR firms and marketing consulting services. PG knows nothing about interior design services or staffing agencies.

It will surprise no one who visits TPVX on a regular basis that PG doesn’t think bookstores have a golden future ahead of them. That said, in past lives, PG loved going into some bookstores to shop, chat, etc. In past lives, PG bought a 1954 Chevrolet (very used) for $100, too, but those days are long gone.

Minimum wage in New York City is $15.00 per hour. Minimum wage in California is $15.50. Overtime minimum wage (over 8 hours per day or some other stuff) is time-and-a-half or $23.25 per hour. Plus there are additional cost and taxes the employer has to pay on top of the wages for each worker.

Indie bookstores tend to be only marginally-profitable businesses under most circumstances, so PG doesn’t see much smart money going into book retailing.

From Kill Zone:

What goes around comes around. And around. And around.

So goes the tale of Barnes & Noble.

The bookseller was founded in New York in 1886 as Arthur Hinds & Company. A clerk named Gilbert Clifford Noble rose to partnership and soon changed the name to Hinds & Noble. In 1917, Noble partnered with William Barnes to become Barnes & Noble.

. . . .

Big fish eat little fish. To the dismay of readers, few indie minnows survived B&N’s dominance.

“Barnes & Noble was perceived as not just the enemy,” said a former chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, which represents indie shops, told the New York Times, “but as being everything about corporate book selling that was wrong.”

. . . .

Then…along came a whale named Amazon.

Online book sales thrived while physical bookstores dropped by the wayside. The juggernaut of Amazon led to mergers and bankruptcies of sizable chains like Waldenbooks, Crown, and B. Dalton. In 2011, Borders filed bankruptcy, leaving B&N the sole remaining national bookstore chain.

Amazon was fast gaining ground.

In 2010, B&N introduced the Nook e-reader to compete with Kindle but it never came close to Kindle’s success. Stores added coffee shops, free wi-fi, gifts, and non-book merchandise, hoping to survive. Nothing worked. Sales dropped, employees were fired, stores closed.

Per Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker:

“By 2018 the company was in total collapse. Barnes & Noble lost $18 million that year, and fired 1,800 full time employees—in essence shifting almost all store operations to part time staff. Around that same time, the company fired its CEO due to sexual harassment claims.”

The bookseller that had put so many other bookstores out of business appeared ready to join their fate.

Enter James Daunt. The 59-year-old former banker and business exec had founded Daunt Books and turned around Waterstone’s, a British bookseller that had once languished in similar straits to B&N. In 2019, he took the helm as B&N’s CEO and set out to rescue the floundering chain.

. . . .

Y’know, like mom-and-pop indie bookstores used to do.

Managers have free rein to stock books by local authors, including good-quality self-published ones, and those of regional interest. They no longer have to stock books chosen by a single head buyer from thousands of miles away.

A few months ago, I visited B&N in Missoula, Montana. The manager not only ordered some of my books, she is also happy to host an in-person event later this year.

B&N stores are now becoming more like the indie bookstores they used to put out of business.

Daunt’s strategies are succeeding. In 2023, B&N plans to open 30 new stores. Ironically, some will take over the same locations where Amazon’s experimental physical bookstores failed.

. . . .

What’s coming around now for B&N is good news for readers. It also gives a boost to local authors who want to see their books on real shelves.

Link to the rest at Kill Zone and thanks to H. for the tip.

As PG has noted before, Barnes & Noble is no longer a publicly-held company.

The federal securities laws require publicly held companies that file reports with the SEC to submit financial statements that are accurate, truthful, and complete and prepared according to a set of accounting standards called “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles” (or “GAAP”)

From the United States Securities and Exchange Commission

As PG has mentioned before, Barnes & Noble is currently owned by a hedge fund and is not and has not for quite a long time been publicly traded nor has it posted any audited financial information.

Barnes & Noble is free to spread happy talk about it’s health and future without violating any laws. Per the Barnes & Noble website,

The Company operates approximately 600 Barnes & Noble bookstores across the United States

PG doesn’t think Barnes & Noble has released any exact number for its store locations for a long time. One online source puts the number of stores at 588.

Per Statista, Barnes & Noble had 72I stores in 2008. The Statista data show that Barnes & Noble had about 100 more stores in 2008 than it’s claiming in 2023. Some of the 588 current Barnes & Noble stores are in airports, FWIW.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

A range of factors are leading U.S. bookstores to expand their Spanish-language offerings. Driven by language-immersion schools and bilingual families, many stores are now specializing in bilingual books for young readers. Others serve heritage-language customers who want to practice their Spanish, as well as language learners seeking cultural immersion.

Booksellers often flag their Spanish-language selections with bilingual shelftalkers, encourage handselling and promotion on social media, and ask book clubs for buzzworthy bilingual picks. At Cellar Door Books in Riverside, Calif., a Latinx book club plans to read Desideria Mesa’s Bindle Punk Bruja and Tehlor Kay Meija’s We Set the Dark on Fire, and store owner Linda Sherman-Nurick sees potential in Spanish-language editions of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Not “a Nation of Immigrants”.

“Either because they are more comfortable reading in Spanish, or they want to read books in their original language as the author intended, or they are learning Spanish, people want access to good-quality Spanish-language books,” said Veronica Johnson, who operates Libros Bookmobile in Hutto, Tex. “Many Latinx folks are bilingual, and we want materials in both languages,” yet “even non-native speakers and non-Latinx folks ask for Spanish-language titles.”

While classics from Jorge Amado, Jorge Luis Borges, and Pablo Neruda remain popular, readers are also gravitating toward Isabel Allende, Sandra Cisneros’s new Mujer sin vergüenza, and bestsellers like Erika Sánchez’s Yo no soy tu perfecta hija Mexicana. Several stores, including Tía Chucha’s Centro Cultural and Bookstore in Sylmar, Calif., reported strong sales of Los cuatro acuerdos by Don Miguel Ruiz.

At Palabras Bilingual Bookstore in Phoenix, owner Chawa Magaña said readers love well-known authors Laura Esquivel, Elena Poniatowska, and Samanta Schweblin, along with “Latinx authors who consistently translate their work from English to Spanish and make it easily available here in the U.S.,” such as Julia Alvarez, Pat Mora, and Yung Pueblo.

General-interest bookstores are increasing their Spanish-language offerings, too. Claudia Vega of Whose Books in Dallas said she’s “looking to expand our adult section” because bilingual kids’ books do so well. And at Elliott Bay Book Co. in Seattle, general manager John Duvernoy called Spanish-language fiction “our most reliable selling foreign-language section.”

Curious customers may not have an author or a title in mind, yet “they want titles to peruse,” said Susan Post, co-owner of BookWoman in Austin. Post singled out local favorites: Liliana Valenzuela’s bilingual poetry book Codex of Love: Bendita ternura, as well as Honduran Colombian creator Kat Fajardo’s graphic novel Miss Quinces.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

From Bloomberg:

When the final Harry Potter installment was published on July 21, 2007, bookstores across the U.S. celebrated with midnight release parties — some with booze, befitting a series whose earliest readers were now in their 20s. These parties took place at thousands of bookstores at a time that was, in retrospect, Peak Bookstore.

“That era, 1997 to 2007, was truly a sweet spot for readers,” Jenna Amatulli reminisced in HuffPost in 2017. “They watched the fandom bloom from nothing, lined up willingly outside of a physical store — oftentimes without a celebrity-sighting incentive — and read without the fear of a push-alert or Twitter spoiler.”

Turnout for the same release today would be lower, because of Amazon.com Inc., because of dying malls, because of J.K. Rowling’s support for gender essentialism — and because there are simply fewer bookstores. Between 1991 and 2011, the U.S. lost 1,000 chain bookstores. A story in The Bulwark checking in on Borders locations 10 years after its 2011 bankruptcy revealed that some had become Books-A-Million, but many more of their “medium-box” locations now sold food, furniture or clothes.

Even so, that HuffPost story, now five years old, may have played taps for the chain bookstore too soon.

. . . .

Plenty of Millennials who grew up with a Waldenbooks, a Crown or a Borders have the same nostalgia for those chains that they feel for the malls that once contained them. At the same time, Gen Z is taking to TikTok to talk about books — driving billions of views as well as sales for authors’ backlists — and staging those videos at Barnes & Noble. B&N’s green-and-cream decor persists as an accessible symbol for books and, in a country recently starved for social interaction, a place where one day we will browse together again. Trends may come and go, but wooden shelves and squishy chairs will always mean, “Curl up with a book.”

The last of the major chains is betting on that rebound: Barnes & Noble, which once said it would whittle itself down to 450 stores by 2022, started the year with 625 — and plans to add 20 to 25 more in 2022. James Daunt, who took over as chief executive officer in 2019 after hedge fund Elliott Management Corp. acquired the company, has been refurbishing existing stores and empowering store managers to use their local knowledge. Book sales have boomed during the pandemic, up 13% year over year, and at least 172 new independent bookstores opened in 2021. Some of those indies have even taken to the mall.

Chain box stores were big businesses, sure, but they were also a crucial third space for casual hangouts and serendipitous run-ins that metro suburbs, smaller cities and rural places often lack. As literary critic Adam Morgan tweeted in January, “I grew up in post-boom textile mill towns in North and South Carolina; we had no independent bookstores, so Barnes & Noble was the only literary space I knew until grad school … It felt like New York to me. That forest green and warm polished wood was like walking into another world I didn’t want to leave.”

Why do we have nostalgia for these shops that were, by many rubrics, worse than the bookstores we have now? More generic, more plastic, less curated, less authentic. Because those bookstores were never just about books — they were about access, and freedom. The chains reached deeper into America, and brought books to a wider demographic, than today’s approximately 6,000 stores can. Yes, we have Amazon now. But it will never be the same as sitting on the carpet in some under-trafficked aisle and reading your first Sweet Valley High, your first Stephen King, or your first biography of The Great One.

. . . .

“The big-box store was a glorious thing while it lasted. To people in many parts of America, they were a kind of Aladdin’s cave,” Wharton management professor Dan Raff told All Things Considered in 2011.

The chain stores were pick-up joints without the alcohol, teen hangouts without the style pressures of the mall, opportunities to explore identity.

Barnes & Noble bought B. Dalton in 1986, setting off a race to be the biggest national bookstore chain, with the various stores adding software, music and standalone kids shops. But the downfall of the mall spelled trouble for both Borders and B&N, leading to bigger and bigger locations, selling more and more items that weren’t books. The stores added cafes, whimsical children’s sections and big comfy chairs, expanding to multi-level spaces of the type satirized in the 1998 rom-com You’ve Got Mail.

. . . .

It’s not until you add the coffee shop to the chain bookstore, circa 1990, that it becomes the best illustration of sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the “third place.” The chain stores were pick-up joints without the alcohol, teen hangouts without the style pressures of the mall, opportunities to explore identity both socially and via reading material out from under the thumb of parents and teachers. As with the malls and shopping centers that often support a bookstore, these private enterprises offered accommodation to a broad range of people, in terms of class, race and age.

“Nowadays you look at a Best Buy, a Ross, and you shop and you get out,” says Daniel Gerber, regional director for Barnes & Noble in the south. “But with the cafes, people would go in there and spend five and six hours. It was a pick-up place, the antithesis of the bar scene.”

Readers found platonic community in the aisles as well. “Romance readers know where they are welcome,” says Sarah MacLean, bestselling romance author, co-host of the podcast Fated Mates, and one-time Cranston, Rhode Island, Borders employee. “They know they can get their books at a supermarket, at Costco, at Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million and they can get them without judgment.”

Link to the rest at Bloomberg

PG suggests that basing a come-back business plan on nostalgia may be a little risky, but his type is definitely not in the business plan for any big box store, so what does he know?

From Slate:

To visit Philadelphia’s Joseph Fox Bookshop in the last two weeks of January was to attend a wake.

Tucked away on a narrow one-way street in the heart of Center City, the 71-year-old institution held a special magic. Its neatly curated selection of hip novels, architectural tomes, and children’s literature was framed by pleasantly tasteful interior decor and soothing lighting. Everyone behind the counter knew their stuff and would gladly recommend a gift, even if you were only half-sure about the recipient’s favorite novel.

So when rumors began to spread on Twitter that the beloved staple might soon close, a story soon confirmed by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the reaction was dramatic.

. . . .

“I wasn’t prepared for the outpouring of emotion,” says Michael Fox, 69, whose father opened the shop in 1951. “People were crying outside the book store, people were bringing us presents and food. There’s been this extraordinary outpouring of affection and sadness.”

Joseph Fox was thronged in those last weeks of business, its narrow rowhouse confines bursting with grieving loyalists. While locals mourned for one Philadelphia icon, however, there were also dark murmurings about a potentially much greater malady.

Is Center City experiencing a retail meltdown? Nearly two years into the era of remote work, are Philadelphia’s downtown, and other central business districts around the country, finally collapsing? The relatively high-end commercial corridors of Walnut and Chestnut streets—both hit hard by the shutdown and looting and property destruction in 2020—are still pocked with vacancies. Their counterparts on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road, Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, and Manhattan’s SoHo all saw vacancy rates of 20 percent or higher in 2021.

“Walnut Street used to be this vibrant, thriving, amazing community of stores, all these big chain clothing stores—and they’re just not reopening,” says Fox. “At six o’clock when we close, there’s no one on the street. That’s a real indication that something changed. People are not in town, they aren’t working.”

. . . .

This is very specifically a downtown problem. At the macro level, the national retail market is proving resilient two years into the pandemic, with many of its weaker performers already culled by the “retail apocalypse” of 2018 and 2019. For the first time since 2014, the real estate analytics company CoStar Group tracked more store openings than closings last year.

Buoyed by unprecedented amounts of federal support for households and businesses in 2020 and early 2021, paired with increased savings due to inactivity earlier in the pandemic, Americans pounded down the doors of national retailers last year.

“Retail sales blew through the roof at a much higher rate than we would have ever expected and consumption hit all-time highs,” says Brandon Svec, national director of U.S. retail analytics with the CoStar Group. “The consumer was unleashed back into the world with vaccines in their arms and a couple extra trillion dollars in their bank accounts.”

That larger truth obscures inequities. The booming metropolitan areas of the Southeast and Southwest are outperforming more stagnant counterparts in the Northeast and Midwest. Rural regions continue to suffer from a dearth of retail activity, while suburbs are outperforming urban cores especially in older, denser cities like Philadelphia.

Michael Fox isn’t imagining things when he laments reduced foot traffic and boarded up storefronts. By the count of Philadelphia’s Center City District, a third of downtown consumers are still absent. In 2019, an average of 428,000 people walked the streets of central Philadelphia every day. In 2021, there were only 267,000—a gap almost entirely explained by the continued prevalence of remote work.

Link to the rest at Slate

From Publishers Weekly:

Riding strong gains in the second half of the year, bookstore sales increased 39% in 2021 over 2020, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Sales were $9.03 billion, compared to sales of $6.50 billion in pandemic-ravaged 2020.

The rebound was not quite enough to bring 2021 bookstore sales back to 2019 levels, falling 1% below 2019 sales of $9.13 billion.

Consumers apparently did buy books early and often in the fourth quarter of 2021. December bookstore sales increased 33.6% over December 2020, rising to $1.20 billion from $900 million in December 2020. The December increase followed sales jumps of 53% in October and 43% in November.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From The Wall Street Journal:

After losing ground to e-commerce, bricks-and-mortar stores are back in style.

Retailers this year are expected to open more stores than they close for the first time since 2017, according to an analysis of more than 900 chains by IHL Group, a research and advisory company. Most of the growth is coming from mass merchants, food, drugs and convenience chains.

Department stores and specialty retailers, which experienced the biggest shakeout over the past five years, are still closing more stores than they are opening. But the pace of closures has slowed from record levels.

Behind the shift are changing views about the value of physical stores, industry executives and analysts said.

Stores have become integral in fulfilling e-commerce orders. They serve as distribution hubs and convenient places for shoppers to pick up and return online purchases—services that will be key this holiday season as orders once again threaten to overwhelm shipping carriers.

As the cost of acquiring customers online has skyrocketed, stores also are a less expensive way to attract new shoppers. And as landlords have become more willing to accept shorter and more flexible lease terms, retailers are less likely to wind up locked into unproductive locations, the executives and analysts said.

“Five or six years ago, there was lots of discussion about whether e-commerce would gobble up bricks-and-mortar retail,” said Toni Roeller, senior vice president of in-store environment and visual merchandising at Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. Instead, she said, the online and store experience became more closely linked, which translated into a need for more stores.

The stores that retailers are opening today are different. Some are smaller, and more of them offer experiences beyond browsing.

Dick’s is adding to its fleet of more than 800 stores by opening newer concepts that include House of Sport, Public Lands and Golf Galaxy stores that have interactive features such as batting cages, rock-climbing walls and putting greens. It also has added some of those features to its namesake Dick’s stores.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From The Associated Press:

Britta Larson, a shift leader at Half Price Books in Roseville, Minnesota, has been with the store for nearly 12 years but only recently thought about whether she wanted to join a union.

“With the pandemic going on, we all were just weary of the constant dismissals we got when we raised concerns about staffing and workload to upper management,” said Larson, noting that the staff had been reduced when the store shut down for a time and was “stretched extremely thin” once it opened again.

“Before the pandemic, I’d say we would have kind of just thought ‘Things aren’t great’ because it was all we had ever known. The pandemic forced us to do some things differently and we learned from that.”

Labor action has surged in many industries over the past two years, including in bookselling, a business where unions had been rare. Since 2020, employees have unionized or are attempting to do so everywhere from Printed Matter in New York City to Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle and Bookshop Santa Cruz in California. In Minnesota, workers at four Half Price Books stores have announced plans to affiliate with locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

“I think COVID-19 was a rude awakening for bookstore workers, and really anyone who works with the public,” says Owen Hill, a buyer at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, California, which unionized earlier this year. “We were given no say regarding safe working conditions, even though we were risking our health by showing up for work. We had to organize in order to be a part of the conversation around worker safety.”

The publishing world has not a magnet for those seeking to get rich. Bookselling, especially independent bookselling, has a long affinity with liberal politics and a long sense of mission that transcends the desire to make a profit. Larson told The Associated Press that she and fellow Half Price staffers would rather unionize than quit because of their “enjoyment of books and love of our jobs as booksellers.”

But when workers organize, even the most progressive-minded owners might object.

Moe’s Books was co-founded in 1959 by the cigar-smoking Moe Moskowitz, a longtime activist and agitator known in part for letting his store serve as a refuge for anti-war protesters in the 1960s. Moe’s is now run by his daughter, Doris Moskowitz, who has spoken of the store’s egalitarian atmosphere and tradition of valuing dissent and social consciousness.

But when the staff announced in March that it was affiliating with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union, Moskowitz acknowledged mixed feelings, telling the digital news site Berkeleyside that the “decision to unionize, which I deeply respect from a political perspective, has left me very sad and confused.” In September, workers picketed the store and alleged unfair labor practices (denied by Moskowitz), though Hill says the situation has since improved.

“After lots of ups and downs, and major disagreements, the parties have come together,” Hill said. “We’re zeroing in on a contract, and both sides are negotiating in good faith. I expect that we will be voting on a new contract just after Thanksgiving (fingers crossed). I think management realized that both sides are committed to keeping the store open — we’re such an important part of the community.”

. . . .

Half Price Books also has its roots in the anti-establishment. It was co-founded in 1972 by Ken Gjemre, a former executive at the Zale Corporation who in middle age wanted to make a living more in line with his ideals as a pacifist, environmentalist and civil libertarian. A 2003 article in PR Week, published a year after Gjemre’s death, described Half Price as “forgiving and generous to its unconventional workforce, which is peppered with aging hippies and liberal-arts majors.”

Half Price has grown from a former laundromat in Dallas to more than 100 locations around the country. In response to a request for comment on the current labor action in Minnesota, Half Price Books executive vice president and chief strategy officer Kathy Doyle Thomas said in a statement: “Half Price Books strives to provide competitive benefits and good working conditions for all 1,900 employees across the country. We understand there is a movement to organize workers, and we respect the right of employees to vote. We are committed to following all procedures required by law.”

The company sent a different message to employees. In a statement posted for a time in some of the Minnesota stores, workers were told that Half Price would oppose unionization “with every legal means available to us.” Forming a union, the company added, was “a very serious decision, one that could affect your working future, and the future of those that depend on you. We believe that, once you get all the facts about the union, you will decide that our future will be better without a union.”

Link to the rest at Associated Press

From Literary Hub:

We love indie bookstores. Even people who don’t read books love them. Insofar as movies and TV are a technicolor mirror of public perception, indie bookstores are wonderful and pure, quaint and charming—no one who works at (or owns!) an indie bookstore could be anything but a selfless and thoughtful champion of truth and beauty (even if they’re mean and sarcastic on the outside they most definitely have a heart of gold on the inside).

The problem with this widespread and rose-tinted version of independent bookstores is that it makes it easy to forget that to be a bookseller is to work an often thankless retail job for barely living wages with little to no benefits except for free books and the occasional opportunity to introduce local teens to the stories of Breece D’J Pancake or the early work of Anne Carson.

So how do we make bookselling—which, if we understand books as central to the ongoing attempt to puzzle out humanity and its complexities, is a worthy job—a better, longer-term career option for those who are most passionate about books?

This is one of the central questions at the heart of an upcoming two-part event called “Reimagining Bookstores.” Don’t let the title alarm you, this is not an app-based attempt to “disrupt” bookselling—in fact, the open forum is being co-hosted by a who’s-who of some of this country’s best bookstores, including Avid Bookshop in Athens, GA, San Francisco’s Booksmith, Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, CA, Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore, and Seattle’s Third Place Books.

Link to the rest at Literary Hub

PG doesn’t usually include multiple excerpts from the same source on the same day, but he was surprised to see the OP’s topic.

The unfortunate reality is that almost all bookstores are marginal businesses.

PG doubts that anyone who thinks much about a career that will allow her/him to support a family in the absence of a wealthy spouse would seriously consider employment in a bookstore as any sort of long-term solution to anything. If PG’s unsystematic assessment of the few physical bookstores he has entered during the last year or two is correct, many people who work in bookstores would not be likely candidates for any sort of work that could support a middle-class lifestyle.

PG lives in an area that includes a couple of large universities and occasionally sees a college-student type in a bookstore. Still, primarily, the employees strike PG as more of the drop-out, need-a-job-now types who worry that waiting tables in a restaurant would be too much work. At least, when you go home after your shift in the bookstore is finished, you don’t smell like french-fry oil.

Given the existence of Amazon, even bookstores in smaller communities where they’re the only bookstore in town don’t have much real pricing power. If they can sell pastries from a local bakery or even a local grocery store, they may earn higher profits from those sales than from books.

This situation is not just a reflection of the Amazon effect, however. When PG first learned that bookstores could return unsold copies of books to the publisher (via the distributor) for full credit, that was his first clue that the book business had significant built-in problems.

PG would be happy to know if any other class of retailers can routinely return as many unsold goods as they wish to the manufacturers without paying anything for the privilege of doing so after the goods had been handled, picked over, etc., by a significant number of prospective buyers.

From CrimeReads:

Let’s face it, all readers have the same dream—to own a bookstore! Ah, the images it conjures. Spending our days with books, reveling in the aromas of paper and ink, tingling with anticipation when we think of the fictional worlds waiting for us inside the covers of books

. . . .

The Lost and Found Bookshop by Susan Wiggs

Natalie Harper inherits her mother’s financially strapped bookshop and also becomes the caretaker of her ailing grandfather. When Grandpa’s health declines, Natalie decides to sell the shop and the aging building that houses it. There’s only one problem: Grandpa owns the building and he refuses to sell. Enter Peach Gallagher, a contractor hired to handle repairs. So begins Natalie’s journey of making new connections and discovering the truth about her family, her future, and her own heart.

Bookshop by the Sea by Denise Hunter

The responsibilities of raising her siblings have meant that Sophie has had to put aside her dream of owning a bookstore in Piper’s Cove. Now, her sibs are all grown up, and Sophie’s going to make her bookshop dream come true. A wedding reunites Sophie with Aiden Maddox the high school sweetheart who walked out on her without a backward glance. Can she trust Aiden to stick around and help her get the shop up and running? And while she’s at it, can she trust him with her heart?

The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser

Thea Mottram’s husband walks out on her just when her uncle passes and she inherits his antique book collection. She travels to Scotland to check sell the books and comes to love the town of Baldochrie and its quirky residents. The only person she can’t win over Edward Maltravers, the bookstore owner she’d like to sell her uncle’s collection to. Somehow bickering with Edward proves oddly refreshing and exciting.

Link to the rest at CrimeReads

From What’s New in Publishing:

Few retailers are more important to specialty magazine publishers than Barnes and Noble. The Publishing Pandemic Roundtable (Joe Berger, Bo Sacks, Samir Husni, Gemma Peckham, Sherin Pierce, and me) met with Krifka Steffey, the Director of Merchandise for Newsstand and Media, to talk about the chain’s recovery in 2021, and the fresh, innovative product she’d like to see.

Since we last spoke, Barnes and Noble has closed two of their New York offices, the one on 6^th Avenue and the 5^th Avenue office where magazine publishers have been accustomed to go for their meetings.

The majority of the Barnes and Noble personnel will have their offices in the location above Union Square, along with new office space in Clifton NJ.  While Krifka expects to be in the office many days, others she will work remote or from one of the stores.

She’s taken advantage of this time to visit the stores. While the chain was already moving in the direction of refreshing and customizing their stores by location, that change was accelerated by the temporary closings and shorter hours of the COVID lockdown. One of biggest changes Krifka finds is that the cookie-cutter approach of former years is now gone. Each of the individual stores in the chain are molding themselves into unique bookstores. The look and feel of the stores, the books set out front, the hand selling, the books recommended—all are now individualized.

Bo: I think the direction you’re taking is one hundred percent fabulous.

Krifka: It’s a work in progress, changing a direction that had been set for years.

Joe: What difference do these changes make in the product buying?

Krifka: For magazines, we’re still doing it the same; but, for example, with trade books, headquarters will do the initial distribution, and then there are district-level replenishment buyers and store managers who will make local decisions. When something is regionally focused, an author from an area, you’ll see it reflected. It’s a big shift to more local control.

Sherin: Where each store is operating almost as an independent bookstore.

Krifka: Right. On our newsstand, the way we’ve always bought has been individualized. Our work with magazines is highly curated. It’s nice that the book side is starting to mirror that.

Joe: Is store traffic increasing?

Krifka: Yes, overall. New York City has shown a slower recovery than elsewhere. But everywhere we’re seeing positive year-over-year growth week after week. We’re also comparing to two years ago and seeing positive trends even against pre-COVID sales levels.

Sherin: It’s the same with our products. The Old Farmer’s Almanac Garden Guide has grown dramatically. Comparing to 2019, we’re through the roof.

Krifka: Yes, we’re seeing nice growth in Home and Garden. And we’re seeing a switch from digital back to physical. Our customer likes the experience of print copies.

Bo: Are you seeing an influence from Book Tok?

Krifka: Anything that does well on Book Tok sells like crazy in our stores.

Bo: It’s at almost ten billion views.

Krifka: And they’re the right age group, young adults turning into loyal customers. Manga, for example, is huge, and we’ve got a great assortment. Outrageous food trends are big.

Joe: How are things developing in the magazine world?

Krifka: We’re not seeing a lot of surprises. Customers are following their former patterns, buying what we’d expect them to buy. There aren’t many new launches or big things pending. I’m seeing some missed opportunities. We should have seen some publications on outer space, that could have been big. Post-COVID, they’ll be a lot of people struggling to get back into new routines; where’s the product for that?

Publishers need to dig in, to ask, what are people going to need from us, what are they going to use? People are moving back into schedules. Hotel bookings are up, people are moving around more; we need to see those publications for drives, for traveling. There are holes in our assortments, and we need fresh, new, relevant product. I can get the customers back into the store, I can get the magazines out on the shelves, but if I don’t have exciting new product sales are not going to improve.

Link to the rest at What’s New in Publishing