IndieBookman & Friends » Distribution

eBooks

IndieBookMan — Wed, 11 May 2011 23:51:12 +0000

Show #16

The newest IndieBookMan Show is here, and it’s the probably the most informative show we have done to date. This week we are talking about eBooks – and who isn’t talking about eBooks these days?

But how is the eBook revolution effecting readers, writers and publishers? In other words… how is this new technology going to effect you?

We delve into that very question and more this week as we look at the quickly developing world of eBooks.

In this show we talk to:

Mario Armstrong, Digital Lifestyle Expert and radio show host. Mario weighs in with his astute thoughts on the technical impact of ebooks.
Brian Felson is the President of BookBaby. This new service will get your book on all the various ebook platforms, and Brian shares his thoughts on how ebooks are going to change the publishing and sales of books.
Deborah Emin runs Sullivan Street Press – a successful indie that has decided to publish eBooks and only eBooks. How has this decision impacted their business, and the authors that they publish?
We call Kindle owner and lover Rob Carlson to find out why he is so excited about this ubiquitous eBook reading device.

Special thanks to Monopoli and Persona for the use of their music this week.
Also, a huge thank you to our friends at The Inverse Delirium podcast for producing the opening segment for this weeks show.

The IndieBookMan Show is a member of the Baltimore Podcasting Network.

Thanks, and please enjoy show #16, eBooks:

Special Edition: Pablo D’Stair, Uncut Interview

IndieBookMan — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 02:21:20 +0000

Show #15

We wanted to try something a little different this week. As you know, we interview a lot of people for the show – from self published authors to international heroes of indie publishing.

We run a pretty tight editing ship, and an interview that may appear to be under 5 minutes is usually the result of a much longer conversation. A lot gets left on the cutting room floor, as they say.

But a lot of what gets cut out is good, interesting and really informative stuff so… we want, from time to time, to bring you extended versions of these interviews so that you get the benefit of the entire conversation.

We start this week with my call to Pablo D’Stair who we featured in our most recent show “Give It Away.”

Pablo is an author and publisher and, really, a philosopher of book marketing. I think you will hear what I mean.

He has some really great, deep thoughts about book marketing… and we couldn’t fit them all into the show but I think you are going to like hearing the rest of what he had to say.

So here we are, with my extended, unedited interview with Pablo D’stair.

Give It Away

admin — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:50:46 +0000

Show #14

This week, we talk about Giving It Away! “It” being your book. Many publishers and authors are giving their books away these days. Why would they do that? We were confused too, so we wanted to find out!

Why are they doing it, and is it something that would work for you? Find out this week as:

We talk to Christophe Casamassima of Furniture Press about his PO25¢EM project. He leaves little books of poetry all over the world, free for anyone to pick up and enjoy.
Pablo D’Stair of Brown Paper Publishing explains how he is using the “Give it Away” model to build brand recognition and relationships with his readers
We hear from Neil Gaiman explaining how free ebooks improved his sales… and why he views piracy as a good thing.
And then to get a practical perspective we talk to indie book marketing guru Shel Horowitz to see what he thinks about giving books away. Is it a good idea, or a big mistake?

There is a lot going on in this show. Even if you don’t decide to give your book away, we hope you are at least inspired to think of new ways to reach out to your audience.

Special thanks for music thisweek from Persona.

Coming soon, our 15th episode, “eBooks.” We are going to find out what all the fuss is about, and how you can get on board with your book.

And now, please enjoy Give It Away:

Amazon

IndieBookMan — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:05:18 +0000

This week, we take a trip to the Amazon. Well, to Amazon.com, anyway. The book-selling giant, not the South American jungle.

Join us as we explore the ins-and-outs of using Amazon. Is it good for indie publishing, or is Jeff Bezos and his gang greedily enriching themselves on the backs of writers and publishers? To find out, we speak this week to:

Jeff Waxman, founder of Against Amazon. Find out why he is against Amazon and why he is convinced that — once you know what he knows — you will be too.
We speak with a publisher and 2 authors about their feelings about using Amazon’s services to sell their books:
- Christophe Casamassima of Furniture Press
- Deanna Proach, author of the novel Day of Revenge
- Toby Tate, author of the novel Diablero.
Each weighs in on how Amazon is working for them
And we close things out with our weekly call to Karl Brown, who gives us his thoughts on “The Big A,” and if it’s good for an indie author or not.

Special thanks this week to Kenobi for the use of their music.

We will be off next week, but back on March 2nd with our 10th episode, “Guerilla Marketing.” We will explore techniques and tactics for marketing your book using sweat and creativity instead of a huge marketing budget. Make sure you catch us on March 2nd for that.

And now, please enjoy Amazon:

IndieBookMan Radio Show #14: Distribution!

IndieBookMan — Wed, 19 May 2010 00:32:55 +0000

What: IndieBookMan Radio Show #14: Distribution!
When: Wednesday, May 19th 8PM
Where: http://umbrellaradio.org
Who: Anyone who is interested in writing, reading or publishing indie books

NOTE: This is an online broadcast… you don’t even have to leave your house! Just tune in at http://umbrellaradio.org, relax and listen…

HOW do I get my book into bookstores? How do I get the big-box chain stores to notice my book? How to I get the attention of the hip indie book stores across the nation?

You want to know how? Here is how: Distribution. A funny little word that means so much in the publishing industry, and is so often misunderstood.

Well, we’re going to clear up a lot of the mystery behind distribution on The IndieBookMan this week. Our guest is Davida Breier. Davida knows more than anyone I know about how distribution works, why you would or would not want to mess with it, and how you can make it work for you.

We will be talking about:

- What you would need to do to line up major distribution
- Is distribution right for you and your book?
- How to get by if you decide to forgo formal distribution channels
- And SO MUCH MORE!

So if you have ever wondered how all of this “Getting my book in bookstores” business works – and if you have a book you’d better be wondering about that – than this is exactly the show for you.

Davida Breier is the Manager for Hopkins Fulfillment Services (HFS), the distribution division at Johns Hopkins University Press. She’s worked for National Book Network (NBN), where she was the Marketing Director and oversaw NBN Fusion, a digital publishing and distribution initiative. Prior to that, she was the Sales and Marketing Director for Biblio Distribution, managing over 500 independent presses. She is also a board member for the non-profit publisher, No Voice Unheard and is a contributing writer and photographer for their new book Ninety-Five: Meeting America’s Farmed Animals in Stories and Photographs.

Davida has been involved in small press since 1994 and has published 70 zines with two more planned for this summer.

You really really don’t want to miss this show.

—

The IndieBookMan Radio Show covers all aspects of literature, writing, books and indie publishing in the Baltimore region and far beyond.

If you are interested in literature, books, writing or publishing, if you know you have a book inside of you and want to find out how to get it out into the world and into the hands of readers, then The IndieBookMan Radio Show is just what you need.

Hosted by AuthorsBookshop.com founder Brad Grochowski (a.k.a. the IndieBookMan) each show features an author, publisher or mover-and-shaker in the indie book world. We explore their history, walk through the steps they took to success, and find out a bit about their project.

Join us May 19th at 8:00 PM est at http://umbrellaradio.org for the live broadcast, listen to the archive at http://indiebookman.com or subscribe to the podcast at http://bit.ly/ibm_podcast

Vox Pop, Sander, and Me — Chapter 4

Andy Laties — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 02:37:00 +0000

Here’s another chapter in the saga of Vox Pop — our attempts to expand our bookstore/cafe/publishing empire. Enjoy! — Andy Laties

Chapter 4

When he released me from his embrace, Shelly Drobny reached into the air, strained upwards with his fingers, grasped something invisible, and shouted, “You’ve got the brass ring!”

The plan was a million dollars to begin with; more when we’d launched at least three new storefronts. The money would come in two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar tranches. Locations should be college-towns in markets where Air America Radio had broadcast affiliates. In fact, Vox Pop was to be the public face of Air America in dozens of towns being served by the progressive talk-radio network founded by Shelly and Anita Drobny a few years before.

I had driven in from Amherst on this October 2005 evening expecting a first conversation on this subject, but Sander Hicks’s friendship with the Drobnys was further along than I’d realized. I’d first met them at Vox Pop back in June, just prior to the BEA convention, when Shelly had done a book signing of his memoir Road To Air America. I hadn’t realized that in the meantime he’d agreed to have Vox Pop issue the paperback edition of the book.

Drobny was evidently impressed with Sander’s political and media activism, and with Vox Pop’s business plan and first year’s activity. Our first book, American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone, published back in November of 2004, had sold through its entire two-thousand copy print-run in one month. Our second title, Sander’s own book, The Big Wedding: 9/11, The Conspiracy and The Cover-Up, had also sold through its entire print-run—twenty-five hundred copies—in one month. My book Rebel Bookseller had only sold one-thousand copies at first, but the reorders were still coming, and we’d gotten a starred review in Publishers Weekly. In addition, on that evening in October, just before dinner with the Drobnys, I watched Sander demonstrate our Instabook machine. It was quite an intriguing device, popping out a paperback book in a matter of minutes. Unfortunately, I personally knew a bit too much back-story after a year of Instabook wrangling to be relaxed during a session of promoting the virtues of in-house book printing. The miraculous machine had a propensity for embarrassing breakdowns. Sander was lucky this time though, and the Instabook performed on cue.

Thus the dinner meeting was the culmination of months of courtship, and its outcome augured well for Vox Pop’s ambitious growth plan.

We’d opened the storefront one year before, in November of 2004, and our mix of musical performance, open mikes, political debates and book-signings–along with Holley’s café development and book-buying and Sander and Holley’s engaged, personable presence in the store–had quickly elicited a pleased neighborhood following. It turned out that people had been waiting for us: The Village Voice informed the city that we were straight out of Greenwich Village in the 60s. The New York Times reported that our arrival in Ditmas Park meant real estate values would soon be climbing. Sander and Holley had taken the apartment upstairs from the café, and with the arrival of their son in April, they looked the model young entrepreneurial success story.

Unfortunately our café product mix was rather inexpensive, we didn’t have very much seating, and there wasn’t enough space for a robust book inventory to be displayed. Monthly sales were at less than half break-even levels. Sander and Holley soon realized they would need a more extensive menu to satisfy their patrons and earn adequate income, but with no space for a kitchen this was problematic. Vox Pop applied for a beer and wine license, increased its selection of prepared-food items, and struggled with the mounting pile of bills.

Vox Pop had launched with very little capital. I had encouraged this: my mantra was, “You can’t get yourself out of trouble until you get into trouble.” I felt that when people saw how great we were, we’d find funding somehow. The first actual funders, perhaps unsurprisingly, though, were family and friends. Holley’s family, primarily, and Sander’s friends.

In particular, though, I was quite intrigued at Sander’s ability to convince our customers to buy stock in the company. When it came time for Rebel Bookseller to go to the printer, for instance, it was a neighbor who provided the six thousand dollars to buy three thousand copies.

Not that all of the neighbors were so happy about our presence. At the firehouse down the block some firemen referred to us as “commie coffee” and refused to patronize us. Apparently Sander’s activism in the 9/11 Truth Movement was perceived as unpatriotic. I told him our slogan should be “9/11, 24/7” in honor of the prominent display of 9/11 literature near the front door. Of course, he’d done serious, original research, traveling around the country to interview a variety of unusual individuals and learn their disturbing stories, so I never questioned his learning or his passion on the subject. And the success of his book showed that many others felt the same way about the importance of unveiling the entire story behind the 9/11 disaster.

After Shelly Drobny’s momentous announcement of impending venture investment, Sander and I began to wrestle with the operational implications. How would Vox Pop manage a rapid expansion? I felt that our successful public relations work in New York City meant we had to launch our first round of expansion in the region, even though the Drobnys had expressed an interest in college-towns around the country. As a compromise, we pinpointed collegiate neighborhoods: Greenwich Village, for New York University, and The Bronx, for Fordham University. Sander made appointments with real estate brokers and we spent several days together location-hunting. By January 2006, with little by way of follow-up contact from the Drobnys, we concluded that we might be able to elicit the first promised two-hundred-fifty thousand dollars by committing to a high-profile location in Greenwich Village. Village Comics, a longstanding bookstore on Sullivan Street one block from NYU, was closing down. Their twenty-one-hundred square foot storefront seemed perfect for a bookstore-café. The rent was high at seven thousand dollars per month, but I felt such a hot location with a full program of special events could earn enough to justify it.

We were heavy into negotiations with the landlord and needed cash to seal the deal. Sander tried to put Shelly Drobny on the spot. The bad news came: Air America Radio was suddenly in financial turmoil and the Drobnys were not liquid. Their Vox Pop investment would need to be postponed.

Our Greenwich Village deal was abandoned.

Meanwhile, we’d heard that the owners of a record-store and café in Williamsburg, Brooklyn wanted out, and were looking for someone to assume ownership. They were open to creative financing. Sander and I went over there one evening. The place was packed. It looked appealing, but the fixturing was restaurant-like and we worried that the space could not be configured for concerts or book-signings. As we browsed the CD racks in the attached record-store, the clerk asked Sander, “Are you the guy in that movie?”

“Horns and Halos? Yes, that’s me.”

The clerk str
aightened up a bit. “You’re Sander Hicks? That movie was awesome!”

We walked out of the store, and I said, “People recognize you in the street? You should run for office!” He gave me a sidelong glance.

A few days later I opened an email. Sander was being encouraged by friends to run for Governor of New York on the Green Party ticket.

“An Industry Gone Mad”

Andy Laties — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:25:00 +0000

Here’s another installment from my forthcoming book. (I won’t post every chapter, only occassional ones.)

VoxPop, Sander and Me — Chapter 3

“Fifty thousand in cash! Fifty thousand in cash to launch your new indie bookstore! Get your free fifty thousand!” I was passing out translucent envelopes containing banknotes, stickers and silver coins to attendees strolling the aisles of Book Expo America, in the cavernous halls of the Javits Center, New York, June 2005. Two professional women approached the Vox Pop booth and accepted the packets.

I continued, “Yes, it’s fifty thousand in real money, actually more–let’s see–you’ve got a fifty thousand lira coin–that’s from Turkey, plus a one thousand cruzado banknote from Brazil. On the front is Antonio de Machado, the father of Brazilian literature. You can afford to open a nice bookstore with this fifty-one thousand in capital. Now all you need is my book.” I handed them each the review copies I’d had printed back in Amherst–there were only thirty, which I’d have to hoard and distribute carefully. “I’m afraid I can’t give you those, but the actual book ships in August. You can order it from SCB Distributors.” I gestured at the main area of our group of small press booths, where the marketer of us all was headquartered.

The women examined their books. One read the title aloud to the other. Rebel Bookseller: How To Improvise Your Own Indie Store And Beat Back The Chains. She looked back at me and asked, “So, how do you do that?”

I answered, “Well, you have the capital I just gave you, so that will help.”

They looked at each other. I continued, “No–the book is designed to convince chainstore employees to quit and open their own independent bookstores. I tell about how thousands of us chain bookstore employees of the 80s did that, and it damaged Dalton, Walden and Crown. I’m saying it could happen again, and we could destabilize Barnes & Noble and Borders.” They were looking at me and nodding and smiling. They handed me the books back and drifted away chatting. They had lost interest, lost focus, and probably not even realized they were being rude.

I began calling out again, “Fifty thousand in cash, fifty thousand, free, in capital to underwrite your new indie store,” brandishing my envelopes, leaning forward to press these into the hands of glaze-eyed, slack-jawed passers-by.

This was my industry?

I had attended the old American Booksellers Association trade show for most of the years between 1985 and 1997 when my Chicago bookstores were actively engaged in industry affairs, back when I was looking to buy remainders, sell advertising in my catalog, line up author visits, and build relationships. For eight years since, though, I had been in self-imposed exile. I’d dropped out of ABA in 1998. I had barely noticed the ABA lawsuits against Barnes & Noble and Borders. When the ABA school program and education department had been dismantled, I hadn’t cared. Maybe closing The Children’s Bookstore had sapped my political energy. Maybe I didn’t have time for volunteering once our store at Chicago Children’s Museum had hits its crazy stride: eighty hour workweeks don’t leave much time for industry politics.

In 2003 though, after moving to Amherst to launch Eric Carle Museum’s bookstore, I’d started writing about my 1980s period immersed in ABA committee work. The process of telling this tale had helped me front my opinions and notice the overarching patterns I’d been living inside. My research began to teach me about the world I’d gained and lost since my first job at B. Dalton Bookseller in 1979.

In 1959, the year I was born, there were ten thousand independent bookstores selling new trade books. By 1979, with the growth of the chains, this number had dropped to two thousand. Yet by 1991, there were over five thousand indies nationwide. I realized that I had played a part in this renaissance, as an innovative marketer and then as a writer and educator. I’d assisted in the destruction of that era’s chainstore corporations.

Hence, Rebel Bookseller’s focus: to revive the revolution for the next generation.

But was it too late? Here at Book Expo America, the ABA Convention’s successor tradeshow, not many blue-badged booksellers were in evidence. Rather the majority of attendees had yellow or red badges: they worked for publishing houses large and small, or support industries. They were authors, agents, librarians or members of the media. The fact that only sixteen hundred independent bookstores remained in the entire country dramatically changed the mood of the show. All these publishers, with all their books, and few bookstore-owners to sell to!

This was my first time manning a publisher’s booth. The book industry tradeshow from this fixed-in-place perspective was repetitive and boring. Keeping up appearances was the issue. Making sure my pitch to passers-by sounded enthusiastic was critical. Somehow, I needed to sell–and no-one, not even those occasional booksellers, was placing any orders.

I’d started the show elated, because The Wall Street Journal had printed a front-page article using my arguments, theories and proofs about how superstore chains’ excessive ordering and returning were forcing prices up, depressing book sales. I’d first spoken to the WSJ book industry reporter in January 2005, after reading his article documenting the steady book price inflation of recent decades. That article offered no explanation for the phenomenon. When I’d emailed him with my assertion that superstore returns practices were responsible for the inflation, he’d challenged me to prove it. I’d done a round of research and sent him PDFs of Publishers Weekly articles from years past. I’d demonstrated how in the 90s, leading industry players had fretted that this very thing was happening. So, one could assume that the current high prices were the predicted and predictable outcome of the returns crisis of the 90s.

I’d also showed him Rebel Bookseller’s “9th Rant,” called “Publish, Perish,” about a fictionalized book whose bad timing resulted in being shipped and returned, shipped and returned, ultimately to be remaindered and put out of print.

Most importantly, I’d warned him that when he wrote the story, he should seriously consider leaving any mention of me and my book out. I expected Barnes & Noble to hate me for doing Rebel Bookseller, and I knew the company could be extremely hostile and vindictive toward critics. I told him about his predecessor at WSJ, Meg Cox, who he said he didn’t know (he’d been on the book industry beat there for eighteen months, he said).

I’d spoken with Meg Cox in 2003. I’d wanted to know if Wall Street Journal had stood up for her during the 1992 spat over her article “Risky Plot: Barnes & Noble’s Boss Has Big Growth Plans That Booksellers Fear,” about B&N CEO Len Riggio. She’d told me Wall Street Journal hadn’t caved in. They’d refused to apologize to Riggio for the “tone” of her article. They’d treated Meg fairly. But her work definitely got harder because for the rest of her time in the job, Len Riggio refused to give her an interview. Writing on the book industry for Wall Street Journal and never having access to the boss of Barnes & Noble was tricky.

On June 3, 2005, the Friday of the BEA show, when WSJ’s article “An Industry Gone Mad” appeared–all about the returns crisis and its impact driving book prices up, including the tale of a single title being shipped back and forth across the country only to end up remaindered–of course I read it fast to see if Rebel Bookseller or I were credited. We were not. Still
, I bought five copies of the newspaper, and showed them around all weekend.

I brought a copy to the Publishers Weekly booth and pitched my old friend Dick Donahue on reviewing Rebel Bookseller. “Look, the Journal’s book reporter talked with me in January and he’s assembled all this quantitative research confirming my book’s central thesis. Superstores are hurting book sales growth.”

Dick wasn’t very surprised, or aroused.

In fact, industry people–longtimers, insiders–none of them were surprised or aroused by me, by Rebel Bookseller, or by the conclusions in The Wall Street Journal. They liked Barnes & Noble. Anyway, Barnes & Noble was a fact of life. The old publishing gang looked beaten down and past their prime.

I figured it out. Back in the day, tons of ABA show attendees were independent business people. They owned their own operations, and their presence at the show was exciting and risky for them. They’d come in from all over the country at great personal expense, and they were placing orders, getting specials deals, collecting free swag galore, scouting new opportunities, taking classes, and participating in lively roundtables. But now, in 2005, most of these BEA attendees were working for large corporations. Only a small proportion owned their own businesses–and indeed plenty of these business owners weren’t booksellers, but rather small press people who were suffering from the fact of having paid for an expensive booth only to experience the same absence of buyers for bookstores that I was dealing with myself.

I’d started the day telling anyone and everyone that they should quit their jobs and open bookstores to sell all the books everyone at this show was pitching. But by the end of the first day I was pretty tired of giving my handouts to publishing employees. No one took me seriously. They knew you should never open an independent bookstore. I was a lunatic.

A team from CSPAN-2’s show Book TV was prowling the aisles. They stopped and asked,

“What’s your book about?”

“I tell how the chains destroyed the book-reading culture in this country, and how we can destroy the chains by working together.”

They asked, “But if the chains are so bad, why did customers choose them over other bookstores?”

“Customers didn’t decide. It was all a hoax played on Wall Street investors. Len Riggio noticed that private stores are capitalized at about five times earnings. But publicly held companies can be valued at ten or even thirty times earnings. So–if you’ve got an operation big enough to go public, and you can pitch the promise of unending sales growth, you can get access to enough capital to over-buy unsustainably on buildout and fixturing. It’s true the customers were entranced by the superstores’ buildouts and fixturing. But they didn’t buy enough for all the superstores to be really profitable on a year-after-year basis. The company shares’ inflated price-to-earning ratio would only hold up while the company was putting on a fancy show, building lots of new superstores every year— and that couldn’t go on forever. Bookstores aren’t a good sector to invest in, compared to other industries. Bookstore companies shouldn’t be listed on Wall Street.”

They asked, “Then why are you trying to get people to open their own bookstore if they’re not a good place to invest?”

“Because when people like me tie up our personal capital in a bookstore we realize additional intangible benefits. Our lives become more important–we sacrifice some opportunities of potential financial return on investment, but we are more satisfied with our lives as community members.”

“Any last thoughts?”

“Yes. Barnes & Noble is going down!”

A Solution for Capital-Starved Independent Bookstores

Andy Laties — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:57:00 +0000

Yesterday on the bookstore industry newsletter Shelf Awareness, this remarkable proposal was floated. (My personal response is appended further down in this blogpost.)

A Solution for Capital-Starved Independent Bookstores

The following is a proposal made by Jack McKeown, former president and CEO of the Perseus Books Group and former president and publisher of the Adult Trade Group at HarperCollins. Currently he is director of business development for Verso Digital, the first vertical ad network for book publishers, and is president of Conemarra Partners, a media consultancy.

Last week brought the depressing news that Seattle’s Elliott Bay bookstore is in financial distress and may be forced to relocate from its Pioneer Square home of the last 36 years. Facing an expiring lease and a maxed-out credit line, owner Peter Aaron said, “Finding a lender to keep us liquid is an ongoing battle.” This has become an all-too-familiar story, of course. Securing adequate investment and working capital, never an easy task for independent bookstores, has been elevated to crisis proportions by the current recession. Is there a solution–one that could help independent bookstores maintain their local competitive advantage and even promote their expansion for years to come?
The Background

From my many years as a publishing executive, I always have believed that turbulent times in our industry foster opportunity as well as dislocation. The concept that I am floating is not especially complicated, but it does require a leap of imagination and strong leadership at the national level.

A thriving neighborhood bookstore is recognized as a key element in the social, cultural and economic fabric of any community. This is an opinion widely shared by urban planners, government planning boards, Smart Growth advocates and real-estate developers around the country. They will tell you that a bookstore offers a tremendous public amenity that should be built into the master plan of any new development or neighborhood revitalization. Primarily it has been the national chains that have been the beneficiaries of this perception, and their superior access to capital is a fundamental reason why.

But with the recession, chain-store expansion has ground to a halt and a period of contraction almost certainly will follow. (Barnes & Noble COO Mitch Klipper confirmed as much in an investor presentation last week.) This is part of a larger, radical reshaping of America’s retail landscape. More than 400 of the 2,000 largest U.S. malls have closed in the past two years and data suggest that at least another 1,000 are in distress. This represents an acceleration of a trend already underway before the recession took root. Main Street retail was decimated when the malls exploded decades ago, but may well rebound with a tidal wave of mall closures. “One of the biggest consequences of mall closings is the loss of a sense of community, a place where people gather and socialize,” said David Birnbey of the Shopping Center Group, as quoted in “The Vanishing Shopping Mall.” Can independent bookstores be positioned to help fill the vacuum as commercial real estate markets begin their gradual recovery?

The Concept

Essentially, my concept advances a sustainability and neighborhood redevelopment argument, with the independent bookstore at its center. I would like to propose the creation of a Neighborhood Bookstore Development Bank (NBDB). It is inspired by such special-purpose investment vehicles as the Fresh Food Financing Initiative (FFFI)–a successful five-year-old loan program for independent, neighborhood grocery stores. It also incorporates some of the mechanisms behind the proposed National Infrastructure Bank, as described by Felix Rohatyn and Everett Ehrlich in their October 2008 article for the New York Review of Books (“A New Bank to Save Our Infrastructure”).

The NBDB would be structured as a private investment bank, i.e., as an entity that evaluates project proposals and assembles a portfolio of investments to fund them. It would look to a prominent trade organization, such as the American Booksellers Association, to provide leadership in the form of a mission charter and board memberships, but otherwise would operate at arms-length. At the heart of the concept is a NBDB Commission, a committee of experts who would evaluate proposals to provide loans to existing or start-up bookstores on a case-by-case basis. The ABA would assist individual bookstores in assembling their business plans, but the bank’s Commission would operate independently and with the highest transparency, in order to attract capital and maintain the bank on a sound economic foundation.

Mission of the NBDB

The NBDB’s core mission would be to promote the expansion of healthy independent bookstores and to provide start-up funds to new bookseller entrepreneurs, while simultaneously generating acceptable returns to the bank’s investors. Among its specific goals would be the following:

Support capital improvements and expansion of established bookstores
Assist established bookstores in converting from commercial rental to ownership of their storefronts
Promote the creation of new bookstores in underserved markets or as part of new real-estate developments
Convert buildings to bookstores through adaptive reuse of historic structures, acquisitions of distressed properties or by foreclosure sales
Support established bookstores in upgrading their systems and websites, and in creating or expanding their e-commerce capabilities
Finance the establishment of print-on-demand centers (e.g., Espresso Book Machines) within local bookstores to generate new revenue streams
A recommended balance of investments between existing and new stores would be 60/40–a conservative approach meant to mitigate some of the risk of a portfolio too heavily weighted toward start-ups.

Financing

The NBDB would be capitalized through an initial round of paid-in equity and then leveraged at a suggested conservative ratio of 3:1. So, for instance, $2.5 million in minimum seed capital would be leveraged to $10 million at the outset. The pool of initial investors could include the ABA itself, along with such interested players as the national wholesalers (e.g., Ingram and Baker & Taylor). These parties would stand to earn meaningful annual dividends as well as long-term appreciation on their investments.

All the while they would be supporting the growth of a core customer segment.

Additional seed capital could be secured from REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) and private equity companies, perhaps as part of larger real-estate development financings. Capital would be callable beyond the seed round, with the ultimate objective of achieving a ratio of $10 million: $40 million by year three. These sums may strike some observers as modest indeed, but their impact on creating a base of larger and healthier independent bookstores would be dramatic, considering the under-capitalized state of the business now.

Ultimately the bank’s loans would be packaged and sold in the secondary capital markets, timed to take advantage of the recovery. The NBDB also would tap into the federal government’s interest in stimulating capital investment in local, community-based development projects and in promoting sustainability. Government grants and guarantees could be part of the solution to jump-start the effort, as has been the case with the FFFI. In addition, the NBDB could provide an engine for private-public partnerships at the local level, including community-owned bookstore retail via chartered stock companies.

In conclusion, the NBDB could play a major role in changing the narrative on independent bookstores from one of decline to rebound. For an industry preoccupied with
the discussion surrounding e-books and e-readers, it may seem like a counterintuitive strategy. But that could well prove its strength. It would play into larger demographic patterns, such as the imminent retirement of 78 million baby boomers, the urban migration of younger age groups and the contraction of America’s malls. These trends point to the development of better bricks-and-mortar, neighborhood-centered retail. With adequate capital at their disposal, and equipped with strong business plans that meet the NBDB’s test, independent booksellers could reposition themselves for a brighter future.

Here is the response I sent to Shelf Awareness (it wasn’t published by them, however):

Jack McKeown’s proposal to establish a Neighborhood Bookstore Development Bank (NBDB) is very welcome, and his analysis of the exciting prospects for our industry is superb.

As Shorebank and Calvert Foundation have shown in their decades of work with Community Development Finance Institutions worldwide, socially motivated investors can shift economic landscapes while earning solid returns. Calvert’s “Community Investment Notes” have in fact performed better during this recession than most other financial instruments. Jack’s proposed NBDB would among other beneficial effects, assist CDFIs and other potential partner institutions to evaluate and supervise bookstore loans they could make on their own to our critical but poorly understood sector of the American economy.

I would recommend, however, that Jack’s banking concept be supplemented with a coordinated apprenticeship initiative modeled on Grameen Bank’s Grameen Trust Replication Program, that has helped seed the world with hundreds of self-sustaining microfinance institutions (MFIs) over the past two decades.

MFIs specialize in making very tiny loans to very poor families, using loan-interest to fund operations expense. Grameen Trust Replication Program invites prospective MFI founders (microlenders) to spend significant time observing and participating in the operation of Grameen Bank, in Bangladesh. These prospective microlenders are then invited to apply for grant/loan combination packages. Upon approval of start-up funding, the new microlenders become part of a loose, international Grameen support network. Taking a similar “apprenticeship plus capital” approach to stimulating the growth of U.S. independent bookselling could help ensure that individuals wishing to launch new independent bookstores obtain a salutary mix of investment capital, debt, education and ongoing professional support.

Andy Laties, author, “Rebel Bookseller: How To Improvise Your Own Indie Store And Beat Back The Chains”

Vox Pop, Sander, and Me — Chapter One

Andy Laties — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:05:00 +0000

I’m working on a new book. Here’s the first chapter!

Vox Pop, Sander, and Me

Chapter One

By Andrew Laties

“Who will screw the chains? How will they screw the chains? When will they screw the chains?”

The entire email response to my book query for Screw The Chains: A Free-Jazz Improvising Radical Children’s Bookseller Gets Chewed Up And Spat Out Of Sweet Home Superstore Hell, Chicago. Featuring Dada Buddha’s Guide To Theatrical Bookselling.

This response seemed to show that its writer hadn’t read my query.

So, why was he responding?

And yet, his response was the most positive I’d received in months. So many editors, agents, publishers, former colleagues, book industry acquaintances had received my manuscript. So few had acknowledged the huge package. And here’s this guy responding.

I’d found him using a technique I’d read about in Writer’s Market. Find a book that’s similar to the book you’ve written. Search the acknowledgements page for the name of an agent or editor. Write to this person that you have done a book similar to one they’ve worked on, and would they look at your book, too?

In the case of Sander Hicks, his name showed up on the Internet as publisher of a book I’d found at Broadside Bookshop by Bertell Ollman called Ballbuster? True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman. That sounded like me.

I answered Hicks: “Chain-store employees will quit and open their own stores. They will overwhelm the market and crowd the big stores out of business. In the next ten years.”

Thus began our dialogue of mutual action. Our unspoken pact was to each pretend that whatever we said would happen, and when things didn’t turn out right, we’d cover for each other.

That is, we had in common a theatrical bent. We’d both been successful in the past through assertion, demanding reality play the part we’d written. Failures were written off to a recalcitrance of the real. Fake it till you make it. Keep the faith.

My book was about refusing to accept the judgment of the world. Neglecting to accept that things had gone wrong. Keeping with it after everyone else had given up. Perseverance to the point of perseveration. The beating-a-dead-horse-till-it-leaps-to-life approach to business.

Hicks was early in a venture capital fundraising campaign. He was launching a national chain. Four hundred muckraking media production offices doubling as coffee shops. These gonzo micro-publishing centers—staffed by journalist/baristas and activist café customers—would feed their best locally-distributed works onward to an over-arching media company for national distribution. That Hicks would consider publishing a book attacking chain-stores while striving mightily to launch a chain himself might have been some sort of tipoff to me.

But I refused to be tipped off. I wanted a publisher, and my chosen one, 81-year-old Lyle Stuart—publisher of Anarchist Cookbook—had already said no. So I needed Hicks: he was the younger generation’s Lyle Stuart. Fearless founder of Soft Skull Press, publisher of Fortunate Son, featured star in Horns & Halos movie—Hicks was my last chance, shy of taking Daniel Pinkwater’s advice and publishing myself.

When I told Sander I’d earned a $200,000 salary out of a $900,000 per year store, he bit. He’d publish my book….would I help him re-write his business plan?

I sent my manuscript by mail, and read his emailed plan. Starbucks was huge, why shouldn’t there be a unionized anti-Starbucks? The plan talked up religion and social justice while promising huge profits. It was light on techniques and budgets. No proprietary systems or technology. Rewriting would be work. But I needed additional income, and came up with a proposal. What if these coffee-shop-cum-publishing-centers had bookstores inside, and I became the national buyer? I’d work from home in Amherst.

The answer was yes. Since Hicks was arranging meetings with venture capitalists—in particular a left-wing heavyweight who’d made money with George Soros in currency trading—I busied myself conceptualizing bookstores inside alternative coffeehouses. I spent eight weeks poring over publisher catalogs and websites. I reviewed hundreds of thousands of titles, as I’d recently done while developing my store at Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. I created twenty-five categories that matched the themes of Sander’s coffeehouses. Every book would be unusual and amazing. A thousand title inventory was perfect.

I peppered Hicks with emails. We should buy the recently released Instabook machine for each location so our plan had technology. We should produce lots of literary events. Café-tables should have built-in book displays so coffee drinkers would find themselves looking at books to buy. A TV channel, a music booking agency, a dog-and-pony show.

Sometimes Hicks answered, sometimes he didn’t. No comment on my book. But we scheduled a phone call and talked about the business plan and how to raise five million dollars.

I got worried in May when he stopped responding to email. For five weeks I heard nothing and I concluded reluctantly that I’d made another of my idiotic misjudgments and my book didn’t have a publisher. My café-bookstore inventory list had been an excuse to pretend I was opening another store of my own. I had to start looking for a publisher again. I was depressed.

He finally wrote back. He and coffee-shop-expert partner Holley Anderson had been driving cross-country. Five times. It would be a national chain; they were laying groundwork. They’d been trying to meet with venture capitalists, assessing locations for future coffeeshops, beating the bushes. He hadn’t had a chance to read my book, but we needed to rewrite the business plan. They were moving to New York in July and the first store would be there, maybe Brooklyn.

My wife was the voice of doubt. Sander Hicks would not publish my book. No-one would because it was self-congratulatory and uninteresting. She’d forbidden me to include her in it, and (luckily) she refused to read it or have passages read aloud.

Things had turned out badly. We’d lost a valuable business, lost our friends, traded our townhouse on the Near North Side of Chicago for a ranch house in the suburbs of Amherst, blown through our retirement savings (with penalty for early withdrawal), ruined our credit, taken a seventy-five percent pay cut. The kids seemed to have adjusted ok, but that was the best that could be said. At least by her to me.

I knew that couples whose businesses went south often ended up divorced, and I didn’t want that. My plan was to write a bestseller, make a bunch of money, restore my status, and extract us from our ignominious situation.

So, landing on Hicks as my only possible publisher was an ominous turn of events. Sure, he’d published some hot-selling books, but he’d recently lost his company just like I’d lost mine, in turmoil and recrimination. Would this new company, crazily called Drench Kiss Media Corporation, be a success? My wife’s assessment couldn’t be dismissed. Most likely I was wasting time. My book and Sander’s company would fail to materialize. My distractedness during my first year at Eric Carle Museum might even get me fired.

Luckily, my wife’s was not the only voice on the subject of my book. Eric Carle—the most successful children’s book writer alive—offered to write me a blurb. Norton Juster—another of the most successful children’s authors—told me which were his favorite chapters. Daniel Pinkwater—leading author and National Public Radio star—had written that normally he couldn’t make it past a few pages when someone sent him a manuscript, but with mine he’d been unable to put it down, and
on flipping the pages, no matter where he stopped, he enjoyed what he was reading. None of these men had any idea how I would get my book published, though, since in it I attacked Len Riggio, owner of Barnes & Noble—America’s most popular corporation—accusing him of damaging the culture of reading and driving book prices sky high.

Which, again, brought me, inevitably, to this man Sander Hicks. He’d published the biography of George W. Bush that told of a 1972 arrest for cocaine use while driving—an arrest all record of which was quashed and expunged by father George H.W. Bush. The book, Fortunate Son, written by James Hatfield, was first printed in a seventy-five thousand copy print-run, then recalled and incinerated by its publisher. Hicks’s company Soft Skull Press had obtained the rights after this recall, and republished the book, surviving lawsuits and publicity debacles in order to see the information distributed. (The key anecdote’s source turned out to be close Bush friend Karl Rove who’d told Jim Hatfield the story personally, and never denied having done so. However Hatfield ended up a suicide.)

If anyone was qualified to handle my book, it was surely this man who’d seen an unpublishable book into print, even though he’d lost control of his company while doing so. My wife’s skepticism didn’t jibe with the facts. I was certain that if I remained focused on it, Sander would indeed publish my book, and his coffee-shops, to be called Vox Pop, would come into being as well.

[Andy Laties’s book—Rebel Bookseller: How To Improvise Your Own Indie Store And Beat Back The Chains—was published by Vox Pop in 2005 and won the 2006 Independent Publisher Award for Best Book on the Subject of Writing and Publishing.]

Itinerant Book Show—A New Form of Book Distribution

IndieBookMan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:23:00 +0000

Deborah Emin is a New York-based acquaintance of mine—we’re both friends of major novelist Sigrid Nunez; she was also one of the first writers to interview Cantarabooks author Stephen Gyllenhaal in his new persona as poet.

Her Itinerant Book Show should give you a few ideas, so get a car, grab some of your books to sell, and hit the road:

For all you frustrated writers whose books are not appearing in bookstores around the country, we have a new program designed for you. It is called the Itinerant Book Show. This new project which is currently being funded by Sullivan Street Press was born out of the realization that too many small towns and neighborhoods are inadequately served by the bookstore industry and thus, too many books are ignored. Given these two ideas, that the bookstores are dwindling and that even where there are bookstores many good books are not available, a new form of distribution came to mind.
My life took a turn when the flood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa happened in June 2008. I decided to travel back and forth between Queens and Cedar Rapids in order to cover the story of how that town would recover from such a massive flood. When I drove there the first time, I realized I was a) pretty lonely showing up in towns not knowing anyone; and b) I had a new publishing company starting up and wondered if this would be a way to sell my own books along the way. But then coming back from the first trip between New York and Iowa I also felt that what we had started here in my own neighborhood, a monthly reading series, could also be applied to the towns I would be driving through during the years of reporting. In theory, this new form of book distribution could make the travel less lonely and allow me to talk to people about the things I find most interesting—books, publishing, the future of the book business and the radical changes in the business models occurring now.
What began as this theoretical notion turned into actually loading up my Toyota Prius with as many books as I could and looking for venues where I could share them. Each stop along my route gave me new ideas about how to present what I began to call the Itinerant Book Show. Consider this article an early report of an ongoing experiment.
At first, I thought I could set up these venues by phone and email. My initial efforts proved fragmentary. I had some people I could track down but nothing really settled. I had the books, but no one to talk to. But for my trip this past June, I had found two venues in Toledo, Ohio where I could try out my experimental book distribution ideas.
My first foray into book distribution was really like sitting at a book fair where I was the only book dealer. At Organic Bliss Cafe on Secor Road in Toledo, the owner had given me a three-hour period in which to come and talk to his lunch crowd. I walked in with very little in the way of publicity or promotion and set up my books, put out some brochures and hoped someone would show some interest. I had discovered this cafe while looking for a place to eat near the motel I had stayed at in March. When I walked into the cafe with arms loaded with books, I saw a man in a white coat in the entryway selling organic milk but also giving away free samples. I realized that this might not be the best venue for my meager wares. During my entire three hour stint at the cafe only two men were willing to speak to me. But not wanting to call this a waste of time, I began thinking how to improve my dreary looking display.
Not wanting to call this first attempt a failure, I looked forward to the performance I was to give at a recently opened coffee house nearby. But while trying to ease that sense of failure, I received an email from Jesse Lipman, the owner of that new coffee house. He wrote that he had mistakenly overbooked. He had just opened Ground Level Coffee and his email said that I was welcome to come but he could not promise me any time to perform. At first I wanted to throw my BlackBerry across the room and retreat in defeat. But It dawned on me that his problems were similar to mine. He was just starting out; he too was going to make mistakes; and I would be returning in September and many times after that so why antagonize a new contact? Instead of giving in to that angry frustration, I decided to show up at his coffee house and see what it looked like and what kind of performance space it was. That decision was a wise one and it gave me the opportunity to hear some remarkable high school students read from their work.
When I left Toledo, I still was not pleased with my efforts at putting this new distribution idea forward. But there was one more possibility of a show on my return trip. In Clarion, PA I had found Michelle’s Cafe. It was a beautiful room, filled with wooden tables and book cases. The walls were festooned with a number of quilts chronicling the travels around the world of the woman who had made them. It felt just right, exactly the kind of space I had imagined while dreaming about this experiment on the road. But in order to accommodate their schedule, it turned out, I had to shorten my stay in Iowa. But it was worth it because it became the highlight of that first road show.
Books were sold which meant authors would receive some money. The people who showed up were lively and engaging and it felt like we began a wonderful relationship that night.
Another unexpected invitation came when I met F. John Herbert in Cedar Rapids. I had met with him to discuss his gallery’s flooding the previous June. (John runs the CSPS Gallery. Cedar Rapids has a large Czech population and this gallery’s initials stand for Czech and Slovak Prudential Society, the original tenant of this building). His umbrella organization, Legion Arts, serves as a conduit for artists and performers from all over the world to come to Cedar Rapids and exhibit their work or perform. While I thought I was interviewing John about the flood, he was in turn asking me to perform in his space during my next visit.
John called me an evangelist as I described what the Itinerant Book Show meant to me. I prefer to think of myself as Johnny Appleseed.
I am planting the seeds of my passion for books and helping people understand why reading is important in a democracy. Standing in front of people to talk about the books I carry is a wonderful way to explain this necessity. This experiment must be working because I have been asked back to each venue. Conversations have begun that people want to continue. That speaks volumes, don’t you think, about how the world of books affects us all.

For more information, visit Deborah Emin at her website.

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