PNBA Preparing Spring Catalog for Booksellers

The Pacific NW Booksellers Association is following their popular Holiday Catalog with a new "Leafing Out" Catalog for regional booksellers to distribute in the Spring.

PNBA Marketing Director Brian Juenemann suggests that publishers consider buying space in the catalgo for books with regional appeal, gifts for moms, grads, dads, inspiration for the garden, or activities to keep the kids busy when school lets out.

"Flip through your catalogs, confer with your rep and pick my brain--if I have your catalog on hand, I have surely flagged my odds-on favorites for success. It all has to be in place by February 11th, when production begins--and, space sold out last year--so don't push your decisions too far into the new year. I'm looking forward to talking a little spring with you," Juenemann wrote in a recent e-mail to publishers.

Junemann's contact information is:

Brian Juenemann
Marketing Director
Pacific NW Booksellers Assoc.
541-683-4363
brian@pnba.org

BPNW Display at Fall Trade Show

On Sept 16, Book Publishers Northwest joined with Northwest Association of Book Publishers and IBPA to display members books at the PNBA Fall Trade Show for booksellers and librarians.

Celeste Bennett sent us the following photos of the display and trade show floor.



Members at the show reported that traffic appeared to be up from the 2007 show.



BPNW's display included books and sales literature demonstrating the wide range of material published in the Northwest.

PNBA Display Books Donated to Rural Library

The Darby Community Library in Darby, Montana, were picked to benefit from the PNBA Rural Library Drive. At the end of the PNBA Fall Trade Show, exhibitors like Book Publishers Northwest left their display books with volunteers from the library.

The community recently acquired a new building that will now be stocked with a wide range of wonderful titles donated by BPNW members and others at the PNBA Fall Trade Show.

No Meeting in August, Preparing for PNBA

Book Publishers Northwest's next meeting will be September 18 at Good Shepherd Center, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Join Gail Sexton, our 2008 Pub U Scholar, for a publisher's roundtable for good advice on starting, growing, or just having fun with your publishing business.


PNBA Fall Trade Show: Free Display for BPNW Members

Book Publishers Northwest will have a joint display with NWABP and IBPA. Every 2008 BPNW member can display one title for free at this regional trade show.

Join Today To Display Your Book At PNBA
Free display of one book at the PNBA Fall Trade Show is restricted to 2008 members who joined before July 30 or 2008/09 members who join by Sept. 1.

Join BPNW today for this and other benefits!

PNBA Author Proposals Due June 27

Appoximately 400 booksellers from more than 130 Northwest stores and librarians from as many as fifty libraries to attend Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association's Fall Trade Show. Proposals for author signings are due at PNBA on June 27.


Send books or ARCs, along with your proposals, author bios and reviews to PNBA at the address below. Contact Thom Chambliss at 541-683-4363 or thom@pnba.org, and visit www.pnba.org for more info about the PNBA show.

SPEAKING OPPORTUNITIES
PNBA has spots for eight nationally-known authors to speak:
· four at the Book & Author Breakfast Tuesday, September 16.
· four at the Book & Author Breakfast Wednesday, September 17.
(Publishers donate 150 pre-signed books or ARCs for these events)

AUTHOR FEAST
PNBA has twenty spots for nationally and NW-known authors to meet with booksellers during dinner. Authors will rotate through tables of booksellers, spending 20 minutes with each group, at a banquet on Tuesday evening, September 16.
(Publishers donate 150 books or ARCs for this event)

AUTOGRAPHING SLOTS
PNBA has 50+ autographing spots of one half-hour each:
· Monday, Sept. 15 from 8-10 p.m. at a dessert party
· Tuesday, September 16 from 4:45 p.m. to 6:15 p.m., at the close of the exhibits
· Wednesday, September 17 from 9:45 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the exhibit show floor
(Publishers donate 50 copies of each book for these signings)


PNBA MUST RECEIVE YOUR PROPOSALS AND BOOKS BY THIS FRIDAY, JUNE 27.

If there is a day that your author is NOT available, include that information with your materials. A contact email address must be sent with each proposal.

The list of the proposed authors will be submitted to PNBA's Selection Committee, which will supply a priortized list to PNBA staff by July 7. PNBA staff will begin sending invitations for authors on Tuesday, July 8.

To help off-set the expense of promoting authors, PNBA charges $350 for breakfast authors, $250 for feast authors and $125 for each author at a signing.

Authors' expenses are their publisher's responsibility.

Send proposals to:

PNBA's Fall Show Author Proposals
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association
214 East 12th Avenue
Eugene, OR 97401-3245

One Bookstore Opens, Another Closes

From our friends at Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, some Oregon bookstore news:

PNBA member JoAnne Kohler plans to open a general interest bookstore, Tea Party Bookshop, in downtown Salem by the end of July. The store will be located opposite the Phoenix Inn and the city's convention center at 420 Ferry St SE, Salem, OR 97301.

Kohler says the name for the store came to her while reading Stacy Mitchell's Big-Box Swindle. Kohler was inspired by Mitchell's reference to the Boston Tea Party being the first instance of Americans rebelling against a corporation controlling their buying options.

At the end of May, Bend’s downtown bookstore, The Book Barn, closed after 35 years of business. Linda Torres, the store's seventh owner (and who'd owned the store for the last seven years), was quoted in the Bend Bulletin as saying "competition from online retailer Amazon.com and big-box stores, coupled with a slow spring, spelled the end" of the Book Barn.

PNBA Trade Show Registration Forms

Here is the link to PNBA's web page with information about the fall show and the vendor registration forms. Please note, too, that if you choose to exhibit for two days, you must register by FRIDAY, JUNE 27. The link to the two-day registration forms will be removed on Friday, June 27.

To find out more about PNBA's changes to the Fall Tradeshow, check link above or read the interview with Thom Chambliss.

FAQs Answered for PNBA Fall Show

Thom Chambliss, director of Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, recently answered vendor’s most frequently asked questions about PNBA’s Fall Show 2008.

The 2008 show will be held Monday through Wednesday, September 15 to 17, at the Portland Airport Holiday Inn Hotel and Convention Center. For more information, see www.pnba.org.

Q: Are author signing, workshop speaking, and other promotional and educational event opportunities on Wednesday only open to two-day exhibitors?

A: NO, anyone with a fall 08 PNBA badge, including those who exhibit one day, will have access to the entire show, including Wednesday. If you exhibit for only one day, you are welcome to attend the events on Wednesday, you just won't have your own exhibit space that day.

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Q: I am a little confused as to how that extra day (Wednesday, the second day ofexhibits) will work.

A: The second "day of exhibits" will have many fewer exhibitors, and those exhibitors will be situated (both days) near the front of the exhibit hall (generally speaking), so that all attendees entering the hall on the second day will need to walk past the exhibitors tables or booths before reaching the Author Promotions area.

There will be authors signing their new books, authors talking about what they will do when they visit a store for an appearance, an author/bookseller/librarian panel discussion about working together, a series of authors talking about their experiences with libraries, etc. etc. I don't know the exact details yet, because I don't know how much space we will have nor what kind of authors will be made available to us, but we have some ideas and I expect that we (PNBA staff) will plan some interesting stuff. The idea is to arrange it so that the attendees will have to walk passed the exhibitors still there on the second day to get to the author presentations.

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Q: Who will still be around (on the second day of exhibits), and when are author events planned besides day two?

A: Again, we don't know exactly how many booksellers will stay, but with added author events (and NO signing on the show the first day), we hope it will be a good crowd. Besides the author events on except for the autographing on the floor on Tuesday, which we will not do. There will be a new Autographing Party on Monday night; on Tuesday morning, we'll have the Book & Author Breakfast (with four authors, all books pre-signed). Then Tuesday afternoon, after the show floor has closed, we'll have some autographing, and THEN the Author Feast, featuring twenty authors visiting six different tables of booksellers to talk about their new books.

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Q: I don’t really know why booksellers go (to the show). Is it education, free stuff, socializing, or ordering?

A: The booksellers with whom I talk tell me that they LOVE connecting with the reps, most of whom they no longer see in their stores. They also connect with books that they may have missed for whatever reason; find new sidelines that they could use in their stores; attend the education sessions to get new ideas for their stores; gather good info about books that they may have not thought worth their time; and meet authors whom they may want to invite to visit their stores. The author connections are huge for some of our booksellers. Yes, they like the free ARCs, too!

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Q: Can you serve good free coffee all day and make the lunch buffet so good nobody would leave for the typical 2-hour lunch?

A: If we can afford better coffee, we will have it! We heard a lot of complaints about the coffee at this facility last year, so I'm looking into hiring a high quality coffee vendor. They're not cheap. Making the lunch buffet "good" is actually a lot more challenging. We're talking hotel food here, but we will try. We are encouraging librarians to visit the exhibits between their educational sessions, so we hope that the lunch time will be crowded with librarians. Again, we'll see.

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Q: Why not extend the Tuesday trade show an extra hour, from 8:30 am to whatever?

A: This is difficult, but I appreciate the concept. We have found that we cannot start our Book & Author Breakfast before 8:00 am, or the attendance numbers decline. We want to encourage attendance at the Breakfast, so we don't open the show floor until AFTER the Breakfast ends, about 9:30. It may be easier for us to keep the show floor open later, say until 5:00 pm, but that would cause problems with the dinner event that follows, the Feast of Authors. We rely a lot on bookseller help to produce that Feast, and they need to be there early to work with the authors. I will study the options.

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Q: One question regarding authors on the floor for Tuesday: Can we have our authors there for informal signings?

A: SURE!! You can continue to do whatever you want to do in your own booth, or table, or whatever. Just so it doesn't drown out (loud) or crowd out (people in the way) the others around you.

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Q: Will you continue Buzz Books as that has proved quite successful for us?

A: Oh, YES, very definitely. And, we hope to add several more events like it. The second day really will be more of an Author/Book Promo Day.

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Q: I do think that with smaller exhibit space we will especially need an area for tables and chairs for people to sit and talk, and booksellers to look through catalogues, etc. I can't see protracted discussion at exhibit areas without complicating the area for other exhibitors.

A: Yes, we're aware of that issue, too. It's going to be difficult on Tuesday, the first (and main) exhibit day. The space is very limited. We are hoping to have some areas for sitting and relaxing, eating lunch or whatever, but they may be OFF the show floor, in the lobby or back hallway. It will certainlynot be ideal.

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Q: I'd love to get my authors into better contact with booksellers and hope that there will be plenty of opportunities.

A: Exactly: it's author/bookseller and author/librarian connections that we plan to facilitate.

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Q: Why have the dates been changed from an end of the week show to a beginning of the week show?

A: We prefer end of the week, that is, Thursday through Saturday, but the Holiday Inn at the Portland Airport was already booked for those days when we inquired. The only days close to our preferred were the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday earlier in the week, so we took them for 2008. Our 2009 contract, in the same facility, is for Thursday - Saturday, September 10-12.

About seven years ago, PNBA conducted a survey of both sales reps and booksellers, asking whether they preferred weekend or weekday shows. Surprisingly, the results were overwhelmingly "We don't care!" We received about 60 responses from booksellers and only three had a preference, two for the weekend and one for weekdays, each saying it was harder to find replacements to "mind the store" on their non-preferred days. We received about 40 replies from reps, and they ALL preferred week DAYS, not the weekend. Those who commented, said they did not want to have to work the weekend, if they didn't have to!

We have held a few shows on weekdays during the last few years, and the turn-outs indicated no lower attendance because of the fact that those shows were held during the week. If we can get a better deal, or if our preferred dates are not available, we feel OK signing for week days, but we still try to get dates late in the week, if we can.

Educational Seminars Needed for PNBA

PNBA is planning to emphasize "Booksellers Working with Librarians" at the organization's fall show this year, which will be held at the Portland Airport Holiday Inn and Conference Center, on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, September 15 -17.

PNBA booked the entire hotel, including all of the break-out rooms for all three days.

BPNW has been invited to create educational sessions for authors and/or small press publishers at the show that focus on working with libraries.

If you are a member of BPNW and would be interested in creating such an educational session, please e-mail bpnwnews at aol.com.

"I am interested in hearing from BPNW whether you find this program interesting and potentially attractive to your members, and whether you and your colleagues would like to propose any specific educational sessions that you will produce," wrote PNBA director Thom Chambliss in a recent e-mail.

"PNBA is non-profit and cannot pay you for your sessions, and we will not charge attendees any additional fees to attend your sessions. As usual, anyone with a show badge will be free to attend any sessions of their choice," he added.

Bookstore News: Moving, Opening, Closing

From our friends at PNBA comes the following news about three Northwest bookstores:

Santoro’s Books is on the move and needs help. The Seattle store, currently at 7216 Greenwood Ave. N., shifts one block north to a new location next to the 74th Street Ale House. Owner Carol Santoro would love to hear from anyone interested in moving a box of books, packing or helping to reshelve in the new store. Call her at 206-784-2113. The store plans to close the old location on May 29 and reopen in the new space by June 4.

A new bookstore opened in Ocean Park, WA: Adelaide's Books & Coffee. "Not only has the coffee house portion of the store already settled into a routine spot for the retired neighbors to linger," owner Cyndy Hayward said in the May PNBA newsletter, "but more exciting has been the brisk sales of books. I honestly had presumed that the coffee house would subsidize the bookstore, but quite the contrary has happened so far."

Eugene’s Books without Borders closes in May. Billed as the city’s littlest independent bookstore, Books without Borders will hold a Last Hurrah Party on May 24 at 6 p.m., with local author signings and live music by local band The Ineffectuals.

PNBA Outlines Changes to Fall Show

We received the following letter on May 5 from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Please feel free to leave your comments about these changes.

Dear PNBA rep, publisher and author members,

We are making some very big changes to the fall show this year, and some of it may be confusing to you; so I am writing now to explain the changes, and to ask for your input on ways to help smooth the transition.

As background, last year's show in Bellevue was not well attended. We decided to move the show back to the Portland area, where we historically have had our best attendance.

We also have heard from many of you, and from some of our bookseller members as well, that the exhibits have been too spread out, with aisles much wider than we need and exhibitors too far away from each other. At the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, we used the entire exhibit hall, which was 35,000 square feet, down from 60,000 square feet that we were renting in the Oregon Convention Center. Many of you told me that that 35,000 sq ft space was still too large for our needs.

A large group of you have also suggested (some rather firmly) that we should cut the exhibit part of the show back to one-day, because the traffic in the last several years cannot justify two days. At the same time, many of you have asked that we not produce author events on the show floor during the exhibits, because of the sense that it drew customers away from your exhibits. Finally, in recent years many publishers have shown more interest in sending authors to the shows than they have in exhibiting.

To meld all of these interests into one new show is complicated, and will require adjustments for all of us. This 2008 show will be a trial effort for all of us; I hope that you will all be excited about the changes, and hopeful that they will re-invigorate the shows and our members. Here are the basic changes:

1) The next two fall shows (2008 and 2009) will be held at the Holiday Inn at the Portland Airport, whose Columbia Conference Center has only 15,500 square feet of exhibit space. Not only does this size require that we shrink the aisle space, it also means that our basic tables will be six feet long, not eight feet, and a basic booth size will be 8' x 8', not 8' x 10', as they have traditionally been each fall. (We did use six foot tables at most of our spring shows.)

2) PNBA will save some money using this independent exhibit hall, compared to the amount we spent at the OCC and the Meydenbauer. Therefore, we are reducing the cost of the table and booth space.

3) We are encouraging most vendors to exhibit for just one day, Tuesday, September 16. Those of you who tell us that you really need that second day (mostly independent reps, whose customers often pick up a catalog one day and come back the next to place orders) may sign up for two days, but will pay an additional fee for the second day, and will need to reserve your exhibit space much earlier than the vendors who will exhibit for only one day. After the two-day exhibitor deadline, I will have a short time to lay out the exhibit floor, to determine exactly how much space, in what locations, will be available for other uses on the second day, Wednesday, September 17. Only after those determinations are made will I be able to plan, promote, and schedule the other uses for those spaces.

4) There will be no author autographing on the show floor on the first day of exhibits, Tuesday, September 16. After the Book & Author Breakfast in the morning, there will be no author events and no educational events for booksellers until after the show floor closes Tuesday afternoon at 4:30. The emphasis on the show floor on Tuesday will be completely on the exhibitors. (I would love to hear any of your ideas about what PNBA might do to enliven and promote the exhibits.)

5) The second day of exhibits will now become Author Promotion Day, with those few exhibitors who paid extra for the second day sharing the hall with a diversity of author activities. In addition to the traditional author autographings, we will have authors meeting booksellers to discuss what types of presentation the authors might make when they visit stores, panels with authors discussing how booksellers can help promote their books, and seminars with authors and booksellers discussing how we can all work together to promote book sales. We will scatter the author events throughout the hall, to encourage booksellers to walk passed your exhibits on their way to the author events. And we will plan the author events so that they will not overwhelm the exhibitors who will be writing orders and talking with your customers.

6) We will be inviting a larger but limited number of librarians to attend the show (maximum 100), offering them free education on the first day of exhibits (Tuesday, the 16th) and complete access to the exhibit hall on Wednesday, the 17th. A main "theme" of this year's show will be "Booksellers and Librarians Working Together." I expect that the librarians will share our booksellers' interest in an Author Promotion Day.

As I mentioned earlier, I am anxious to hear from any of you with suggestions about how to make this new venue and schedule work best for you, the exhibitors, and for our booksellers. I will seriously consider any ideas and, if there are no problems with timing, space or expense, we will incorporate them into this year's event. If they are good ideas with problems that cannot be solved before this year's show, staff will discuss them after this show, in hopes of incorporating them into future events. If you have any questions or concerns about the new schedule, please contact me within the next two weeks, that is, before May 16. After the 16th, I will compile all of the concerns and post them, with our responses, on PNBA's web site, so that you may all share them.

To help you understand more completely what we envision for this year's show, we have posted several documents on our web site as pdfs. The links to those documents are at the end of this letter, after my signature.

Thank you for your consideration, patience and participation. We've got our fingers crossed, and hope that these changes will be well-received and will provide you with a re-invigorated show, well worth your time and effort. The PNBA Board has made it very clear to me that the most important consideration for the show is that it remain a valuable opportunity for booksellers to learn as much as they can about the industry and how to sell more books. With your help and enthusiasm, I believe that these changes will keep us working toward that end, and will provide us all with the best regional industry tradeshow possible.

Sincerely,

Thom

Thom Chambliss, Executive Director
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association
214 East 12th Avenue
Eugene, OR 97401-3245
T: 541-683-4363
F: 541-683-3910
E: thom@pnba.org
W: www.pnba.org
2008 Show: Monday - Wednesday, September 15 -17.