This month we’re bringing you a small taste of a Tech Forum presentation with booksellers from Little Ghosts Books, Cross & Crows Books, Cedar Canoe Books, and Analog Books Inc. where they share insights into their bookselling journeys, collaborative strategies with various partners, and their approach to online vs. in-person bookselling.

(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)

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Transcript

Adaobi Nnaobi: Welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast. I’m Adaobi Nnaobi, the Marketing & Research Associate and the host of this month’s episode. In the last few years we’ve spoken to various booksellers who launched their bookstores during the pandemic about what motivated them to start a bookstore, what challenges they encountered, and how they established themselves within their communities and forged relationships with their customers. This month we wanted to share some highlights from a recent Tech Forum session about new booksellers who are adapting, engaging, and thriving. The session featured Chris from Little Ghosts Books, Nena Rawdah from Cross & Crows Books, Chandler Jolliffe from Cedar Canoe Books, and Penny Warris from Analog Books Inc. Tim Middleton, BookNet’s resident Product Manager & Retailer Liaison moderated this panel.

In this podcast episode we’re pulling out the part of their conversation that focusses on marketing for booksellers, their takes on consumer behaviour in unstable economic times, and the not-so-obvious costs of running a bookstore. So, are you a new bookseller? Are you thinking about opening up a bookstore? Or, are you just super curious about what goes on in the bookselling world? Well, here is a small taste.

Tim Middleton: We just wanna see, are there any innovative marketing experiments or collaborative campaigns that you've been involved with, with publishers, local businesses, other retailers, anyone else? So any stories you have around these types of experiments? And who gets to go first? Penny.

Penny Warris: So for us, what we found is rather than spending our advertising budget on traditional advertising, paper, radio, even Facebook or social media, we actually have set out a budget and we decide to spend that budget on fundraisers for the community. So one of the biggest marketing things we have that was a total fluke is we have a bookstore cat. His name is Hugo. He's definitely the most famous cat in Lethbridge. And everyone comes to visit our cat and buys a book after they visit the cat. But literally, people come in and say, "Oh, I'm just here for Hugo." And we're like, "Yeah, we get it."

So as a result of that, we work with some of the local cat rescue places. We've done fundraisers for all kinds of stuff like the Ukrainian refugees, that sort of thing. Every year we have Hugo's birthday and it becomes this big, massive party and sales day. So what we do is we, Orange Shirt Day or Indigenous Peoples' Day, we take portions of what we sell and we donate that back to the community. And what we find is the community, as opposed to wanting a 30% off, they are thrilled if we're going to give 30% to a cause or whatever, and they come and they spend way more money than they ever would.

So that's been a really, really good collaboration for us. It's made us part of the community much quicker than we would have been if we were giving a 30% discount. And it's also a good marketing for ... The press loves that sort of thing. So we've been getting a lot of free press based on that, either through traditional press or through online. So give your money where it counts.

Tim: Yeah, that's an awesome idea. Who would like to go next? Chandler, we'll kick it over. Oh, no, we'll kick it over to Chris.

Chris: So we do a number of things. There is an annual short horror film festival that happens at the local theatre, so we donate prizes, we hook up authors to talk if they have a relevant book, and they give us sort of ad space in front of the movies which is very fun. And it's genre folks so it's in our wheelhouse. We teamed up with the online-only romance-only bookstore this year. So we ran a festival called Love, Death & Other Words where we were a book fair that went to different breweries and it was only horror or romance. And that was very fun and they didn't charge us for pop-up space and we got a little bit of advertising but also got to tour around a bit.

And then we do a thing called spooky marketplace and anyone who does handcrafts that are spooky in nature comes about every other month and sets up a table in the bookstore and basically runs a craft fair. It doesn't cost them anything to do this. It's just an opportunity for us to connect with other people who like the macabre sort of deal.

Tim: Sounds like fun, lots of fun. Okay, Chandler, we'll take it over to you.

Chandler Jolliffe: Yeah, some of the stuff that's been really effective for us has been local business partnerships, especially with breweries and restaurants in town. So we'll do events in their space and try and do even, like, boozy book clubs and things like that, especially if you're trying to target sub 40-year-olds for book clubs. Alcoholic revolved events tend to go a little better. Especially we have a couple of really nice local breweries with great spaces that they give us.

One of the effective things we've done with local businesses is we make them a deal when we do events where they give us their space for free, and in return, we include a drink ticket in the price of the event. And this has saved us piles of money in event rental space. And we do it on nights when a lot of the local spaces in town would otherwise be quiet or unbooked, and so it's kind of a win-win. They get business on a night they would otherwise be quiet and we get free space since our store is not actually big enough to host events in.

The other thing we did a lot of this year that was really helpful was local markets. Muskoka is a hodgepodge of a bunch of different towns, sort of three medium-sized towns, then a lot of very small communities. And none of them have a new bookstore except us in Huntsville. And so whenever we can, we go and do street markets, farmers markets when they'll let us in. And not only do these events tend to actually be pretty great sales events all on their own. People are pretty hyped to see books amongst the carrots and corn. But they also just act as great marketing. And a lot of people redirect from those events and actually come and shop in-store. So that's been really, really great for us and something I'm hoping to do a lot more of in the coming years.

Tim: Nena, what's your experience like in the early days?

Nena Rawdah: I wanted to kind of second what Penny said about sort of in-store book fairs for a cause. Those have worked incredibly well. And, you know, for the economics of it, if you sell more books, you're able to pay more bills even if you're giving a chunk away off the top. You know, the math works. And also noting something that Chris said about neighbouring businesses. We used to do in my old neighbourhood in Portland sort of an annual crawl where people got a passport from our local Main Street Association to visit the neighbourhood independent businesses of all sorts. And just having that many bodies moving through was always good, always helpful.

So I'm hoping to maybe help start something like that here in my current neighbourhood in Vancouver, where there are tons of independent businesses on our strip, Commercial Drive. Other than the bookstores, we don't seem to talk to each other all that much. And that could be better. And that could be used to our benefit. So I've only been here six months. So I'm the new kid and I don't want to act like a new broom, but I'm hoping that will come about.

Tim: That seems like a really good direction to go in. I know you can do it. Okay, so this is for everybody. Have you noticed the current economic environment having an impact on how much people are spending on books?

Chandler: I would really quickly say no. I'm sure on a macro level, it will have some impact, but books are, for most people, a luxury item. And if you're super price-conscious, you're probably shopping Amazon or ebooks anyways. So I find our buyer at least is, like, someone who's already comfortable paying a higher ticket price for a book and maybe is a little less economically sensitive. We also may be in a weird spot because Muskoka is a mix of being quite wealthy.

Tim: That's true. Chris? Oh, Penny.

Penny: I would echo Chandler in that people are still buying the books and they're still supporting local. What I find is that they're coming twice now to do it. I feel like it's kind of like cutting the doughnut in half and then eating both sides of it. They might come and buy one book, but then they'll show up three days later and buy the second one that they were thinking about.

Tim: That's a good observation. Chris?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I find that people either are saving it up and then doing a big one, like, you know, doing a big shop, or they're cutting the doughnuts. So I notice I either see people less often or more often depending on their proximity to the store or their appetite for online shopping. So the people who are buying books are still buying books.

Tim: Nena, do you have anything? I can ask the next question.

Nena: I think I'm a little too new to really have a strong feel, although I do have people who come in one time and buy a book and come in the next time and apologize for not buying a book . They're so cute.

Tim: Well-mannered.

Nena: They do mention their paycheque. And, you know, things are tight. And, oh, the rental market. So, yeah.

Tim: Yeah. Got to eat, put a roof over your head, and then read. Okay, what are the costs associated with running bookstores that people might not necessarily think of, asides from rent, the cost of orders, etcetera? Anything? What do some of those expenses look like?

Penny: I would say time, and that you don't get to read books anymore because you're too busy running your store. Everyone thinks we stand around all day and read books. I read way more books before I was a bookseller.

Tim: Yeah, that's true. Mythbusting right here.

Chandler: I would just quickly say association fees. There's a lot more associations I'm a part of and pay a fee to than I expected. And it's all the random tools like email tools and stuff like that that you don't think about. Email's not that random, but there are more obscure ones, for whatever reason, we've ended up paying for. That kind of stuff are the biggest surprises. And printing. I just do a lot of printing.

Nena: Taxes. Plan ahead. Have a savings account for your sales taxes. I had done bookkeeping for another small business for a little while, so I was forewarned about this. My old state in the US didn't have sales tax. But I think that's something that can creep up on people if you don't really think about it. And then, you know, you get to the end of the quarter and you have a $2,000 bill. And so, know that that's coming.

Adaobi: This is only a small part of our session with these wonderful booksellers. Watch the full session on the Tech Forum website and learn what inspired them to become independent booksellers, their competition in the bookselling space, the best collaborators to help them meet their goals, and more.

I’d like to acknowledge that BookNet Canada's operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations (which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie), and the Métis, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan, and Windsor. We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose land you are listening from today. Moreover, BookNet Canada endorses the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry.

We'd also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support through the Canada Book Fund. And thanks to you for listening.