BOSTON, Mass. – Here’s good news for bookstore owners and managers looking for ideas on how to survive in the current economy.
Gayle Shanks, outgoing president of the American Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent book stores, will share her ideas on how to meet challenges and survive in the current recessionary economy.
Shanks will speak at the Great American Bargain Book Show (GABBS), which will be held at Boston’s Hynes Convention Center on Aug. 21-22. She is scheduled to speak at 8:30 a.m. on Aug. 21.
Shanks has been a bookseller since 1974, when she and a friend opened a tiny 500-square-foot used book store, Changing Hands, in Tempe, Ariz. The store moved twice and grew to 12,000 square feet and now carries new and used books and lots of gift items.
Shanks, who has a degree in English literature from Arizona State University, never imagined that she would have a career as a bookseller, but once the store opened she never wanted to do anything else. She spends her days ordering books, recommending books and creating a community gathering place where authors come nearly every day of the year to read from their work. The children’s section, one of the largest in the state, includes books and educational toys for children and teens.
Shanks plans to tell independent bookstore personnel from the Eastern Seaboard attending her presentation how they can make their stores more profitable.
According to Shanks, success depends on booksellers offering customers a mix of new books, used books, gifts and remainders. She recently told Bargain Book News, a newsletter covering the remainder book industry, that other activities that can mean the difference between surviving and having to close include having a strong offering of children’s books, continuous marketing activities, holding authorless events, making the bookstore a gathering place and source of free entertainment and judicious use of email newsletters.
The Great American Bargain Book Show caters to wholesale buyers from brick and mortar and online stores looking for new overstock, remainder and bargain book product and gift items.
ABOUT GABBS: The Great American Bargain Book Show is one of the three largest remainder shows in the United States, staged annually in time for retailers to buy inexpensive stock for marketing during the holiday season. The show is organized by L.B. May & Associates of Knoxville, Tenn. Further information at www.GABBS.net
