Booksellers Blog

Have you thought about your marketing for Holiday 2009 yet? You’re probably finishing your fall buying about now, and getting ready to breathe a sigh of relief. Maybe you’re planning on enjoying the summer, handselling some beach-reads, and preparing for back to school. Not so fast. Now is the time to prepare for your holiday [...]

Don’t think of this as another twitter post, think of it as a continuation of yesterday’s post. Becky McCray at The Small Biz Survival blog has an important post today: Is Twitter worth it for small town businesses? She asks (and then answers) the tough questions that I know you have been asking: But what [...]

Have you watched the Gary Vaynerchuk BEA video yet? If not, please do. Really. It’s not only motivating, Gary brings up some controversial topics that I would love to see debated and discussed among booksellers. If those things are being talked about somewhere, would you please let me know where? If you have watched the [...]

I’m still trying to condense my thoughts about BEA into a manageable post. However, I do want to highlight one of the best sessions at BEA. It was also the only BEA-organized (as opposed to ABA-organized) session that was targeted specifically to Independent Booksellers. In this video, Gary Vaynerchuk is talking to YOU. It is [...]

Julia Taylor at ThinkMKE wrote a blog post in February that somehow bubbled up on Twitter last week.  Titled “An Idea on how to Save your Hometown Paper,” the post outlines an intriguing way to meld the local newspaper and technology to support local businesses. The time is right, she says: Consumers today are starting [...]

Chris Brogan has written a very clear post about the 5 steps in the continuum from getting a prospective customer’s attention through the purchase phase, and beyond. Awareness Attention Engagement Execution Extension These phases hold true both online and in the real world. Brogan’s post describes the five phases in some detail, and is an [...]

We’ve talked a lot here about promoting the store and your community through social networking and blogging. But we haven’t talked much about promoting specific books. Do you remember “Reservation Boards”? Here’s where I admit that I am as old as dirt. When I first started working as a sales rep, Reservation Boards were a [...]

It seems that you just can’t get away from Twitter these days. It’s referenced in CNN news reports, the New York Times writes Sunday Magazine pieces and  feature articles about it, and it has started to permeate the minds of booksellers as well. Stephanie Anderson (@Bookavore) wrote an excellent introduction to twitter for Shelf-Awareness in [...]

In an earlier post, I wrote about the need to determine your goals before deciding on the tools to use to attain those goals.  When you read a newspaper article trumpeting that there are now 150 million members on Facebook, it’s easy to think “oh, my store has to be on Facebook!”  But that may [...]

I read a post this morning that floored me.  It was written by someone who is not in the book world, and only a small portion is about books. But it crystallizes one of the biggest problems facing independent bookstores right now. Sally McKenzie, a retail and e-commerce consultant, was browsing for books at Powell’s [...]