Sunday, December 9, 2007

Read This Long Entry Because It's Important!!! Bookstore Tourism, or The Death of a Great Idea

Larry Portzline is a great guy from Harrisburg, PA who I met at the beginning of this year at an Opening Your Own Bookstore conference on Amelia Islannd in north Florida. He's one of the friendliest, smartest guys I've ever met and we had a great time hanging out drinking beers talking about our ideas on stores and books, the whole nine. Larry thought up a great idea a couple of years back: what if he chartered a bus, sold tickets, and went to New York City to visit as many independent bookstores as possible in a day? Well, he tried it, sold out the bus far more quickly (far more quicklier?) than he expected, and the trip was a huge success. That first trip focused on bookstores in Greenwich Village--Three Lives & Co., Partners & Crime, Biography Bookshop, and so on.

Since then Larry has been working his ass off to promote Bookstore Tourism all across the country on his Friends of Indie Bookstores blog, writing guidebooks for how to run your own bookstore tours, doing interviews (here's a good one with LitMinds), shaking hands and kissing babies with all the powers that be in the independent bookstore world. They loved the idea. OF COURSE they did, they were getting customers bussed to their front doors, people pre-disposed to buy books who were giddy with the thought of not shopping in a Barnes & Noble or Borders. (Sidebar: I happen to like Borders, some of them anyway, and have found myself plenty of times shopping at the fantastic B&N at Union Square simply because I couldn't find a book somewhere else and because I hate ordering books online, but let's be honest: shopping in an independent bookstore is about a gazillion times better than any megachain experience, hands down, no arguing, and it always will be.)

One busload of shoppers coming into your store on a Saturday or Sunday if you're a small indie store can make not just your day but your week and possibly even your month. It's a landfall on wheels.

THEN, Larry got an even better idea. He decided to tour the country to visit independent bookstores. An On the Road of independent bookstore shopping. He was going to try to hit 200 stores in 50 days (or 60, can't remember and it doesn't matter, it was definitely 200 stores) and blog the entire experience, get stories into newspapers, on local tv, all that. He even had two reporters lined up who were going to travel in the van with him for the first four or five days to kick the whole things off. I was going to fly out west somewhere and join him for a week or two just because it sounded like a kick-ass idea and a hell of a lot of fun and I like road trips.

He had the support of the ABA and the various regional booksellers associations. The ABA--or American Booksellers Association--is the trade group that fights for and represents as a whole independent bookstores to the publishers. And they are a good thing. There are more member stores in the ABA across the country than there are Barnes & Nobles and Borders stores put together, though you'd never know it from the media because of the way the publishing industry operates right now. The two big chains, along with Amazon and increasingly the discount clubs likes Sams and Costco, hold all the power in publishing. In fact, there's one buyer at Barnes & Noble who--if she doesn't like a book or decides B&N isn't going to carry or make a big buy--can single-handedly get a book canceled or otherwise change a publishers whole plan for a book. (This is not an exaggeration, it's common knowledge at the NY publishing houses, especially in the editorial and sales departments, and I could give you her name but I don't want Len Riggio's henchmen coming after me.) The ABA does not have that kind of power because they have no influence on the buying patterns of their member stores. They can't guarantee, as B&N can, a buy of 20,000 copies of a books. So while the ABA does incredibly wonderful things, (for example, they brought the class-action lawsuit against the publishers a few years back when the publishers were giving unfair and illegal discounts to the chain stores which they weren't giving to the indies,) and while they're run by wonderful people, they don't necessarily have much foresight and even when they do, they can't put any money into their initiatives because membership dues are low.

Why am I going on about this? Explaining all this? Because Larry has finally given up on getting any help whatsoever from the insanely short-sighted ABA or the regional associations like North Atlantic Independent Booksellers Associations, SouthEastern Booksellers Associations, the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association, and so on. There are 7 or 8 of them and they're even less organized and less forward-thinking than their parent organization. Why has Larry given up? Because earlier this week someone finally told him that no help was coming. They LOVE the Book Tour, they LOVE Bookstore Tourism, but they can't put any $$$ behind it because they have all these other concerns. (I guess that's why, I'm speculating at this point.)

So guess what? Not only is the Tour off--and I'm pissed because I was really looking forward to driving around in a van with another big hairy man visiting bookstore after bookstore day after day; I mean, seriously, is that a frickin' dream trip or what?--bur Larry has gotten so frustrated with these people, justifiably, that he's quit the Bookstore Tourism effort entirely! And who can blame him!?! When the very people who would benefit most, when the amount of publicity that could be generated for something like this outweighs anything any single one of these indie stores could do for themselves, when this Tour makes so much frickin' sense and would generate so much frickin' business, well that's definitely when they should pull their support and not lift a goddamn finger to help... to help themselves...

Great thinking, guys! Hey, let's just let all the independent bookstores shutter their doors and we'll all buy whatever the fuck that one B&N buyer thinks we should read. Sounds good to me.

(Wondering why there's no links to any of Larry's websites? That's because he's already shut them down.)

4 comments:

Karen Lillis said...

Thanks for letting us know this sad news. Larry had a really great idea, and a timely one. Indie bookstores are good for libraries, neighborhoods, the small press, and the freedom of the press. Who will recognize that and support their revival?

Frazer said...

Yeah, thanks a lot, especially for trashing SIBA, the other regionals, and the ABA. We work our collective asses off to pay the bills day in day out, and now we get this from you because we haven't showered money we don't have on the bookstore tourism idea? I own an indie, and am active in SIBA, and I'm frankly insulted by your comments. Did you ever think there might be some other culprit here besides the ABA and the regionals? Such as, oh, I don't know, people aren't reading as much? Or that indie bookstores are dying at a much greater rate than they're being born? That indie stores and regional associations would love to be able to help but just don't have the resources?

For the record, my store has never benefited from Larry's efforts. If it had, I would have supported him to the extent I was able. I love his idea of bookstore tourism, but it's really not applicable to my store, just as it isn't applicable for many indie bookstores.

Both the ABA and SIBA have been essential for my survival the past few years, and in that, they've been doing the job they were created to do--help their core members succeed. Bookstore tourism is a lovely idea, but doesn't paying the rent come first?

Frazer

Stubbs said...

Frazer--

If you read more carefully, you'll notice that I trashed the ABA and the regionals nnot because they don't work their asses off, they do, but because Larry had been given assurances by various representatives of those organizations that they were going to support him financially in this great idea. Had they not done that then Larry would not have based his plans on receiving that support and, conversely, wouldn't have been quite as crushed or felt the rug pulled out from under him when they told him they weren't going to support him.

I know exactly how hard you work in your store (wherever it is, indies are a ton of work) and how hard keeping an indie afloat is. I've worked in both the bookstore end and the publishing end. But your bookstore-as-victim attitude is exactly the small-mindedness I was referring to. It's completely inner-directed and looking to blame society at large for your problems. Quit positioning yourself as a victim and start finding creative ways to market yourself and maybe you can turn all this around. That's what Larry was trying to do.

Finally, your assertion that indie bookstores are dying at a much greater rate than they're being born is actually not true. Ten years ago it was true, and yes, about 2000 indies closed in about a five or six year span, but in the past year many more indies have opened than closed, the tide is turning.

lady t said...

"For the record, my store has never benefited from Larry's efforts. If it had, I would have supported him to the extent I was able. I love his idea of bookstore tourism, but it's really not applicable to my store, just as it isn't applicable for many indie bookstores."

You know,Frazer,that's a rather telling statement there that I think explains why Larry just threw his hands up and shut the whole thing down. This whole attitude of "what's in for ME and MY store?" is more lethal to the indie bookstore movement than any chain store/online competition and I speak as someone who did work in an independant bookstore for several years.

If you had taken the time to throughly read the post,you would've seen that Stubbs did praise the ABA and others for all of the good work they did and are doing but finds fault with the lack of support for an initiative that would literally bring hordes of customers right to the doors of small book stores,ready to spend their do-ray-me.

Maybe it would help if some of you guys stopped whining about "people don't read as much"-which is total baloney-or how hard it is to keep indie stores alive. Every small business has it's tough turnover rate(look at restaurants as the best example of that)and just recently at the ABA website,they did a whole feature on 13 new stores that opened up this October.

Yes,it's hard out there and yes, it's damn important to pay the bills but holding pity parties aren't a good way to make thing better. Being proactive is. If you can't afford to,fine,but don't get all snitty when someone comes along to point out some of the probelms and wants to bring attention to them in order to get folks interested in solutions.