Economic Woes Can’t Keep Western Booksellers Down

By Jenny Shank, 9-29-09

This weekend I attended the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association (MPIBA) annual trade show, which was held in Denver.  For all the doom and gloom I’ve been hearing about the book business in recent years, I found the booksellers at this conference to be a fairly contented lot.  Maybe they just seemed upbeat because they enjoy this event, or maybe they’ve been cheered by all the popular books publishers have released this fall, which have brought in renewed traffic to their stores. 

Several people, including Charles Stillwagon of the Tattered Cover and Arsen Kashkashian of the Boulder Book Store, told me Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol and Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory have been selling briskly.  Both of those stores hosted packed readings with Krakauer this month, and Stillwagon said he was surprised by how well the Dan Brown book is selling at the Tattered Cover, given that it’s the sort of book a reader could buy anywhere—and at a great discount online.  But as I learned in a session entitled “Surviving Tough Times,” every independent book store has been hit hard by the recession, so maybe these booksellers seemed happy to me simply because they enjoy what they do for a living, and are thankful to still be doing it.

Len Vlahos, Chief Operating Officer of the American Booksellers Association, led the “Surviving Tough Times” session, and he offered a lot of practical advice about how to reduce costs and increase sales, such as renegotiating leases, cutting staff hours, and using part time employees more than full time employees.  Even skimping on bags saves money.  He said that instructing employees to shift from asking customers, “Would you like a bag?” to “Do you need a bag?” cuts bag use by 20 percent.  One bookseller said her store offers “guilt free bags"—reused bags from other stores.  He advised people to get creative with how they use their space.  “We saw one store bring in a masseuse and a tarot card reader,” he said.

Nancy Munier of the Wheatland Mercantile Book Nook in Wyoming, which sells handmade guns alongside books, said that her store has made extra money by stocking books about guns and bringing them to gun shows to sell.  The crowd agreed with Vlahos that sales of regular-priced books are down, while sales of used, bargain, and sale books are up a bit.

Still, there was evidence of the economic strain these booksellers have been under.  When Vlahos asked the crowd, “Does anybody here do profit sharing?” a man in the audience shot back, “Anybody here making profit?” One bookseller said that these cost-cutting measures might be helpful, but added, “I fear that this is not going to be temporary, that this is the new normal.” Vlahos conceded, “If we’re defining a new normal, the business model of running a store that sells almost exclusively new books to customers is probably not sustainable.”

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Despite the difficulty of making money writing and selling books, people are still writing and selling books.  One such hopeful is sixteen-year-old Colorado author Riley Carney, who is about to release her debut fantasy novel for teens, The Fire Stone, part of a projected five-book series called The Reign of the Elements, which has to do with a 15-year-old named Matt who lives in a land called Mundaria and embarks on a quest.  Carney was set up at a table in the exhibition hall with her publisher—and mother—Wendy Carney, who started BookLight Press in order to publish her daughter’s books.  Even though Riley Carney isn’t working through traditional publishing channels, it’s impressive that someone her age has completed one 300-page novel, let alone multiple novels of this length.

Wendy Carney said Riley began writing the novel when she was 15, and they tried for a time to find an agent and an established publisher for it, but she felt most publishers they contacted couldn’t believe that a writer Riley’s age would be able to complete the series.  So Wendy decided to publish the novel through Lightning Source, a print-on-demand company owned by Ingram.  Wendy edits the books, changing mostly small grammatical errors.  They plan to release books in The Reign of the Elements series at six-month intervals, and Wendy said many representatives of libraries and bookstores have expressed interest in the books.

Riley Carney will contribute proceeds from the book to her nonprofit literacy charity, Breaking the Chain.

Riley formerly attended Kent Denver, and is now home schooled so that she has more time to write.  She said, “When I go for a month without writing, I get all bunched up,” squeezing her hands into fists and flashing a big smile.

Check back tomorrow for more of my report from the MPIBA Trade Show.

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