Remaking
the Regionals
Regional
Bookseller Trade Shows Strive to Get Their Groove Back
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (AUGUST 2003)
The
nine major regional bookseller trade shows are, in a
perfect world, where manna falls from heaven. From Portland,
Oregon to Jekyll Island, Georgia, that’s where finished
fall titles are grabbable for the first time; where
an independent bookseller can actually catch the eye
of a sales manager; where orders are written, and those
already written are upped. It’s where booksellers and
reps have collegial tęte-ŕ-tętes, while authors sign
copies for gaga bookstore clerks. It’s where buzz builds
for fall and starts for spring. And saliently, for the
nation’s hardscrabble booksellers, it’s not a costly
convention in New York or Los Angeles. “It’s a way to
do good solid business without having to incur the high
cost of BookExpo America,” as one publisher sums
up. “It’s sort of where the rubber meets the road.”
(See Calendar for fall
show dates and details.)
Yet those Pirellis have been hitting some cold, hard,
asphalt lately. While some regional groups are keeping
traction in a lousy economic climate, others have been
socked with bookseller attrition, slumping ad sales
for their holiday catalogs, and what they perceive as
a jilting from large publishing houses. “We’re seeing
some increases in small presses,” says Thom Chambliss,
Executive Director of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers
Association, “but with the conglomeration of the
industry, we’re getting less participation from the
majors on a regular basis. They’re cutting back in every
way they can.” And he’s not the only one feeling the
pain. “In the past three years our number of exhibitors
has gone down,” says Lisa Knudsen, Executive
Director of Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association.
“All the regional associations have suffered financially
from the consolidations in publishing.”
Crux
of the Catalog
When
it comes to publisher support, the regional sine
qua non is buying advertising in the winter catalogs
— the major revenue source for most regional groups,
and a key marketing piece that booksellers pitch to
customers over the holiday season. MPBA prints 500,000
copies of its version, with as many as 10,000 given
free to each member store, plus inserts in The Denver
Post and The Bloomsbury Review. The problem,
however, is not merely conning publishers into taking
ads; the real trick is to get them to take the right
ad. “Many times, marketing departments are not even
thinking regionally at all,” Knudsen says, and they’ll
put blockbuster titles in catalogs across the board
— the same titles that are heavily discounted at the
chains. “If the books that are advertised are not the
ones our booksellers can sell, the whole thing is an
exercise in futility.” So last spring the group got
25 booksellers to suggest better titles to publishers;
the strategy worked, and some titles publishers had
intended to advertise were pulled and replaced with
bookseller suggestions. It may be a tough battle, however,
as publishers such as Hyperion, which used to
carefully pick books for each region, now buy space
across all the catalogs for just a couple of key titles,
according to former Sales Director Michael Burkin
(who will now head up field sales and client distribution
at Simon & Schuster).
Indeed, “everybody’s budgets are tight right now,” says
Susan Walker, Executive Director of the Upper
Midwest Booksellers Association. “We have publishers
who have advertised with us year after year, and this
year they are telling us they cannot do it.” The UMBA
prints 310,000 catalogs, with distribution directly
to store customers and inserts in regional copies of
the New York Times. Meanwhile, UMBA’s “Midwest
Favorites” program offers reduced ad rates to regional
publishers or to midlist titles from large houses. UMBA
has also been deploying more sophisticated tools — Bookscan
data and Book Sense regional bestseller lists
— that help persuade publishers to pitch in. “We had
19 books that were in the catalog that were all on the
bestseller list during the time that the catalog was
active,” Walker says. “It was awfully nice to go to
the publishers and say, ‘See, it worked!’”
Beyond the catalog, groups such as the New Atlantic
Independent Booksellers Association are working
hard to keep show numbers from slipping. “This year
is the first time in a few years that we’re seeing new
exhibitors come onto our trade show floor,” notes Executive
Director Eileen Dengler. “We’re getting newer,
smaller presses, and this year we’re expecting we might
even be sold out.” The show will highlight bookstore
events that can be held to market titles without necessarily
having the author on hand (Joe Drabyak of The
Chester County Book & Music Company will roam
the halls, daring any publisher to suggest a title they
think can’t be promoted without an author), as well
as profitable store sidelines. Dengler says membership
has jumped by at least 100 to about 300 stores since
she took over in early 2000, partly due to bolstered
renewals, plus initiatives including the author tour
program, which clusters bookstores in geographic zones
that authors can feasibly hit in a two-day blitz.
As cash-strapped booksellers abandon BEA, adds Jim
Dana, Executive Director at the Great Lakes Booksellers
Association, “the regionals are getting to be more
important for them in terms of their one trade show
for the year.” Meanwhile, Dana has taken a radical approach
to keeping his stores on the map. “Publishers kept asking
me what was happening in the stores,” he explains. “It
was very clear to me that in New York a lot of those
people don’t see many stores outside of the East Coast.”
So for three years now Dana has escorted a group of
booksellers on a week-long trek to New York City, visiting
publishers for brief presentations about their stores
that frequently turn into mini-focus groups. “There
have been some great success stories,” Dana says, “with
booksellers from pretty out-of-the-way places now being
sent authors and having ongoing relationships with publishers
that didn’t exist before — and would probably never
have existed had they not had that personal experience.”
Some larger publishers say their commitment to regional
shows hasn’t wavered. “The regional shows have been
something that all the publishers that I’ve worked at
have always taken very seriously,” says Josh Marwell,
SVP Sales at HarperCollins. “We have a full booth
at all of them.” As do other large publishers, Harper
sends telephone sales reps to the shows — in addition
to marketing, publicity, and other sales staffers —
where they gain face-to-face time with front-line bookstore
buyers who would not normally attend the larger national
convention: “It’s a benefit that has year-long positive
effect,” Marwell says. “Over the last five years we’ve
had the same level of participation,” adds Kathy
Smith, VP Sales Administration and Operations. “We
do have authors going to every single show. We do have
advance readers and galleys to give away. We participate
in all of the regional holiday catalogs.” Executives
at other large houses privately admit to cutting back
on the catalogs — $2,000 for an entry can mean no marketing
— and argue that buying space does not influence orders.
And at smaller houses, budgets are even more barren.
“Our advertising budgets are just not big enough to
participate in as many holiday catalogs as I would like,”
says Hilary Reeves, Managing Director
of Milkweed Editions. “But we have elbow grease,
and we use it to maximum effect. To a certain degree
these regional shows are big-time elbow grease.” Of
course, for some publishers, manna does still fall from
heaven. Stranger in the Woods, self-published
from Michigan–based Carl R. Sams II Photography,
got its start at GLBA and other regional shows and hit
#1 on the New York Times Children’s Picture Book
list last December (it was also #4 on the Book Sense
National Bestseller List; the title’s millionth
copy is currently on press). “That first year we actually
bought cover positions on some of the bookseller association
catalogs,” Sams tells PT, “and they’re the ones
that put us on the national bestseller list.”
From a rep’s perspective, the regionals still pay off
— at least in goodwill. “I haven’t really noticed the
larger publishers pulling back from the regional shows,
at least not ours,” observes Ted Heinecken of
Heinecken Associates. He says the regionals have
been putting more pressure on membership to actually
buy titles in the catalog and display them in stores.
“I keep thinking that there might be a way to combine
this with Book Sense,” he says — possibly in the form
of a national Book Sense catalog — and adds that he
does track orders and calculates the profit or loss
on attending the show. “At this point, I’m happy if
we can show that we’re breaking even with these calculations.
Then the profit would be more likely to show up in terms
of goodwill.” Others note that the regionals could benefit
from some conglomeration themselves, perhaps combining
forces (NEBA with NAIBA, UMBA with Great Lakes) for
greater heft and store diversity.
Don
Sturtz of Fujii Associates concurs that freight
and travel costs can be hard to recoup on show orders.
“If the membership is not able to support us by writing
orders, maybe we should rethink the exhibition portion
of the shows,” he says. Sturtz — who works with UMBA,
Great Lakes, and Mid-South, and will support all three
shows this year — would also like to see educational
programming on nuts-and-bolts issues that include local
reps, rather than higher-level publisher-to-bookseller
chats about financial management or selling Spanish-language
titles (take note, Random House, which finances
many of these sessions). “The stores need to communicate
better to the reps what we’re doing right and wrong,”
Sturtz observes. “And we need to communicate to the
booksellers what we need them to do to make it profitable
for both of us to show up at their doorstep.”
©2003
Publishing Trends
