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Booksellers face a “tough” landscape but have the opportunity to sell experiences beyond the product itself, ABA c.e.o. Oren Teicher told BookExpo as the second day of the conference explored the power of retail.
A power panel consisting of PRH US c.e.o. Madeline McIntosh, B&N chief merchandising officer Tim Mantel, ABA c.e.o. Oren Teicher, Readerlink c.e.o. Dennis Abboud, and Sourcebooks c.e.o. Dominique Raccah, guided by National Public Radio correspondent Lynn Neary, focused on making books and building community – what’s going right, and what can be improved.
To begin with, Teicher offered a correction: though indies have had “a few good years, it’s still tough out there. Retail has lots of challenges, and many stores still struggle. But the good news is that stores can sell experiences and connections to the community beyond the product itself, and that there are lots of opportunities, for instance, with the localism movement. Even in 2019, we’ve barely scratched the surface. Our data shows that consumers discover books in stores and libraries, and that can’t be replicated online”; though the relationship between indies and B&N has had “a rather checkered past…now, for sure, we want both strong indies and strong chains.”
What B&N is doing to try to improve its outlook, Mantel said, is “an enormous amount of consumer insight work on what motivates people to shop. More than 60% come in with a single title in mind, but we end up selling more. We absolutely have to know the local terrain and give stores some flexibility,” in order to do so.
Readerlink, Abboud explained, sells to airports, mass merchandisers, “where books are not a destination item. 77% of purchases are impulse buys – we focus on the shopper’s habits. 50% of the higher-value baskets in our stores involve book-buyers, and we use that [rationale] to get more space for books. Our average store stocks 100-2000 titles, so those are very heavily curated and data-driven.” Many of the ultimate customers “are exposed to an author for the first time,” and having made that discovery, the desire to read more by the same author often drives them to seek backlist in bookstores.
Airport stores, catering to “more affluent” customers, are “working to sell more esoteric authors, and the airport business is up this year,” Abboud noted. McIntosh seconded that: “airport stores and indies were the two channels” that early on helped to sell PRH books like Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.
Replying to a question on how publishers and retailers work together, McIntosh focused on PRH’s “extraordinary reps, who are in partnership throughout the sales process,” and also on “customised marketing campaigns. We still invest a huge amount of money and time in author tours. An author like Amor Towles or Celeste Ng invests years of his or her life in building individual experiences.” However, “you can only have one author in one place at one time,” so PRH has “done a lot of work” on generating experiences without authors, e.g., a “Mom’s Night Out,” or a “Teen Weekend,” where readers “can love each other.”
These do “take patience to develop,” Mantel cautioned. When B&N did its first “Kids’ Book Hangout,” 13,000 kids came. “It was an amazing Saturday, but we didn’t sell more books. Eight weeks later, 15,000 showed up – and we sold a lot of coffee to their parents. Eventually, with later hangouts, we began to sell books. You have to stick with it and trust your instincts.”