April 22, 2016
Indie bookstores are back and they’re celebrating
Independent bookstores are alive and well. To prove it, small sellers across the U.S. will be celebrating with special events and deals connected with the second annual Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 30.
The idea behind Independent Bookstore Day is pretty simple. Dissuade consumers of the notion that there is only one (Amazon.com) — maybe two (Barnes & Noble) — place(s) to go when they want to buy a book.
Independent bookstores are “not a dying anachronism,” as the organization’s site reads. “They are living, breathing organisms that continue to grow and expand. In fact, there are more of them this year than there were last year. And they are at your service.”
According to the American Booksellers Association, sales at independent bookstores were up over 10 percent last year.
To celebrate their continuing success, Indie bookstores have joined with publishers to offer a variety of exclusives, including “Anthony Bourdain’s Perfect Burger Print” and “Raymie Nightingale” by two-time Newberry Award winner Kate DiCamillo. Ms. DiCamillo will be in the Twin Cities area for a book signing at Common Good Books on April 30.
In all, more than 400 stores across the U.S. will participate in the event. Canadian booksellers will run their own event on the same day.
Discussion Questions
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
How have independent bookstores managed to succeed in a market dominated by large players Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble? What lessons can other small businesses take from the success of indie bookstores?
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Ryan Mathews
Founder, CEO, Black Monk Consulting
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Independent bookstores have joined together to create a “brand” that emphasizes their differences and personality from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The positioning has been effective in convincing shoppers that they can get a better experience through the independents.
The independents have also galvanized the author community to support them with special book signings and even exclusive products that are only available in independent stores. These techniques can be highly effective in other industries, such as grocery, where independents must compete against large rivals with better scale and more widely-known brands.
There is one phrase in the above article that makes ALL the difference in the success of independent bookstores.
“and they are at your service.”
Focused on the customer.
When a retailer decides to really concentrate on servicing its core customer base, things start to happen. Things like getting great authors to commit to exclusives. Things like banding together and taking a stand in the market based on differentiation. Things like staying true to their “hedgehog” concept.
These things are noticed, appreciated, felt and loved by shoppers. So they become connected, emotionally. Feel something, do something. The customers take the business from good to great.
Any small (or large) retail business can learn from these things, if they are creative and brave enough to start and stay focused.
I would say it comes down to four things: engagement, community, specialization and service.
The best independent bookstores, like my local favorite Book Beats in Oak Park, MI, find different ways to engage readers as individuals and as communities. These may be readings or lectures by local, national or international authors, poetry slams, discussion groups and/or book clubs and even art displays or musical programming.
Next, they make themselves an indispensable part of the communities they operate in and their inventory, at least in part, clearly reflects those communities.
Specialization is also a key. Book Beat, for example, specialized in a number of areas from children’s literature to art. Of course their selection is broader than two categories, but they go deep in certain categories.
And finally, there is service. A great bookstore is one that knows your name when you come in and — maybe even more importantly — knows exactly how to seduce you with a new book they’ve been holding for you or, “just want to make sure you’ve seen.”
So what can other businesses learn from indie bookstores? I think that’s simple — know who you are, who your customers are and give them both what they want and what they didn’t know they wanted until you pointed it out, and size really doesn’t matter.
You didn’t link to an article in the New York Times which focused on Shakespeare & Co. but also mentioned McNally-Jackson. Both stores are much more focused on repositioning around the experience. Shakespeare also refocused in terms of inventory management, use of space, adding technology and adding non-book elements.
Obviously, there is a market for “the third place” and among people not so price sensitive on book purchases.
The lessons for other retailers are narrow. People who buy books buy books more frequently than they make other types of purchases. (E.g., people eat every day so food sales both out-of-home and for in-home consumption are much better for retail sales than apparel or furniture, which people buy infrequently.)
There’s room for bookstores as part of smaller commercial districts, maybe not so much in other retail categories, depending on the size of the district and how much it is regionally appealing, plus the rents, etc.
Record stores are going through/have gone through the same metamorphosis. And that is the old Sam Walton idiom, “it’s easy to compete with us, just do what we don’t do.” Which means having interesting things you aren’t confronted with on line, like people’s opinions, great associates a cool store vibe and of course, coffee!
I also think you’ll see more of this across a lot of categories, but I don’t think we’ll ever see the level of physical retail we’ve seen over the last 30 years again. We were clearly over-stored and it was a painful blessing to have someone like Amazon put an end to that, IMO.
There seems to be little acknowledgement in the press that “browsing” is a tremendous value to consumers. Most people I know partition their use of the different reading material channels to fit the values they seek.
In reality, it’s no surprise that people mix it up — and that leaves an outstanding place for independent bookstores. So this isn’t a surprise.
What seems to have happened to the large bookstores is that they were dependent on the profit from sales of books that easily shifted to Kindle. In a sense, Kindle did to bookstores what Craigslist did to newspapers by stealing classified revenue: Cut out a key profit required for making their margins.
It also makes sense that digital reading seems to have stabilized at about 40% of book sales. Clearly that was enough to put Borders out of business.
When you think independent, you think specialized and/or absent from the masses. So it is with independent bookstores. As already stated, indy bookstores create compelling “third spaces” for consumers which is an ever growing attraction. Pair that with an independent’s ability to carry a very targeted mix of selections and personalized service and all of a sudden, you have a new recipe for success.
I’ll be the first to frequent the “big box” sellers, but sometimes get lost in a sea of trinkets, trash, greeting cards, and toys on my way to a customer care kiosk with no one standing in it, waiting to be told that they can order my best seller and have it shipped to me as they are currently sold out….