The Winter Institute Take-Home: A Bookseller's Chronicle

Jessica Stockton, events coordinator at New York City's McNally Robinson Booksellers (and bookseller blogger extraordinaire), files a full account of the second annual Winter Institute, in Portland, Oregon, from the opening reception to the plane flight home.

By Jessica Stockton

As a bookseller attending the second annual American Booksellers Association Winter Institute, I don't think I can even try to express the totality of the event. But maybe that's appropriate for two reasons. The theme of this year's Institute was how to differentiate yourself from the competition. And keynote speaker Daniel Pink emphasized the importance of "story" in the contemporary marketplace. As an employee in a large urban bookstore, an events coordinator, a book blogger, and a potential future bookstore owner, I can only offer the story of one person's experience at the Winter Institute. But inasmuch as my experience was a wonderful one, with consequences I will continue to see evolving, I think my story may apply to pretty much every bookseller who attended.

The preconference festivities began with a reception at world-famous independent bookstore Powell's on Wednesday night. Having just gotten off a plane from the East Coast, I was still reeling a bit from travel, as I think were many of those who gathered there (except for members of ABA's Board and Booksellers Advisory Council, who were reeling from a long day of planning meetings).

The evening reception was the perfect place to see who had arrived, greet old friends and meet new ones, and marvel at the grand scale and super-cool aesthetics of Powell's. Like seeing Michelangelo's David, experiencing Powell's isn't diminished by how much you've heard about it. We were treated to a tour of the back offices, and I later returned to explore the store itself and was constantly astonished by how well such a massive store worked, and how much it retained the things that are great about independent stores: personality, staff who are real book people, creativity, adaptability, and tons of great new and used books.

As the reception wound down, I found myself in the company of a group of Powell's employees headed out on the town -- a theme that would be repeated throughout the three days of the Institute. The Powell's crew did a bang-up job of showing us out-of-towners their beautiful city and keeping us entertained. As usual at ABA events, the only frustration was the inability to do and see everything, which was exacerbated by the beautiful weather in Portland during our stay.

And the institute hadn't even started yet! Thursday morning found us gathered in the ballroom of the Portland Doubletree, sleepily enjoying breakfast with our fellow booksellers, after which Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind (Riverhead), took the stage to talk about the evolving marketplace and the emerging importance of right-brain thinking in business. Suffice it to say that I felt he reinforced everything I think about the strengths of indie bookstores and backed it up with numbers. All in all a satisfying breakfast!

By the time he was finished, it was time for lunch, during which ABA CEO Avin Domnitz reviewed with us the results of the ABACUS survey of independent bookstore finances. The results, when broken down, were thought provoking, with reason for both optimism and caution. Did you know that while profitability for ABACUS reporting bookstores is slightly down overall, profitable bookstores have seen their numbers edge upward? And here we all were in a room where those successful bookstores were trading ideas with others that are struggling, making the idea of an indie bookstore upturn in profitability -- indeed, a whole indie bookstore renaissance! -- seem entirely possible.

Next came educational sessions. I chose the one that most terrified me: "Understanding the Basic Financial Documents." As Avin walked a roomful of right-brain thinkers through the Balance Sheet, Operating Statement, and Cash Flow Statement, my heart literally pounded with terror, but I came out of the room feeling like I could at least speak the language that banks, accountants, and investors will expect from a bookstore. As Avin said (and I paraphrase), this is the basic stuff that makes the important stuff possible.

I have to mention that ABA managed to alleviate some of the frustration of limited time and unlimited programming by supplying each bookseller with a huge ring binder, filled with the handouts from every session offered. This not only made it easier to take notes in a session, it means I can go back and more or less teach myself "Making Magazines Profitable" or "Handselling: Customer Service With Results." A notebook with the conference schedule and lots of blank pages also made it more likely that all this good stuff would make it home with us!

I chose next to attend "Design 101," where a graphic design expert walked us through the basics of designing or redesigning a logo and entire "visual identity" targeted to our specific audience. This segued nicely into my favorite session of Friday, "How to Be the Story: Developing and Implementing a Public Relations Plan," in which ABA media relations wizard Meg Smith laid out the basics of good PR and then had us brainstorm ways to get across our "key message" to customers, publishers, staff, and media.

As with the following session, "Above the Treeline: Advanced Class," I found that the idea-trading with other booksellers was just as valuable, if not more so, than the information coming from the front of the room. As I've heard ABA staffers say many times, there's nothing better than getting booksellers talking around a table together, and the sessions created a space for that interaction even as they provided us with tools for better conversations.

I've skipped ahead in my story, though; in between there was Thursday night's author reception, where I got galleys signed by Nathan Englander, Frank Deford, and the much-buzzed-about Aryn Kyle (her upcoming book, The God of Animals, I had heard was the hit of the Sales Rep Picks). I briefly attended a dinner hosted by publisher MacAdam/Cage, but had to leave early to help host the Emerging Leaders Reception late in the evening. (Check your back issues of BTW for more on Emerging Leaders, an exciting project designed to mentor and create community for young booksellers who are the future of our industry.)

I'd been asked to join a new Emerging Leaders Council, made up of younger booksellers who will be determining the goals and needs of the project going forward, and we met earlier in the day with the founders of the project to talk about that transition. At the evening reception, though, a room full of bookselling "kids" had drinks (provided by the bookselling consultants Donna Paz & Associates), met each other, and sat around those tables again to talk about what we want from our community and our industry. You'll be hearing more about that new agenda soon, I'm sure.

At this point it all begins to run together, as any series of intense events will do. A further highlight of my own experience was the New Media Lunch, where representatives from the world of audio books, creative online publishing, and Google talked freely about their impressions of the new digital environment. (Summary: books aren't going away, and our ability as booksellers to "filter" the glut of information for consumers is increasingly valuable; but there are new ways we can reach out to our customers and "add value" to what the digital age offers and we can't afford to ignore -- including blogging, "bundling" audio or e-books, and others.)

Amidst all this I managed to spend some time with bookselling friends from my own region, explore the city a little, and have a number of great meals. When I made my way to the airport on Saturday morning, loaded down with a bag full of galleys and that much-marked-up three-ring binder, I felt stuffed with experiences, connections, ideas, new enthusiasm, and gratitude for this community of which I find myself a part.

At the breakfast on Thursday morning, ABA President Russ Lawrence of Chapter One Books in Hamilton, Montana, joked that someone once told him you'd never get more than a 100 booksellers to agree on anything. He then asked us to look around, at the maximum capacity crowd of 500 booksellers, all of whom had agreed on the importance of being here at the Winter Institute. I admit I got a little choked up looking around at my colleagues: owners, buyers, frontline booksellers, events planners; urban, rural, and suburban stores; 500-square-foot stores and 20,000-square-foot stores; people that have been in the business for 40 years, and people just thinking about starting a bookstore (more than 30 prospective booksellers were there, by most estimates).

I felt moved by the spirit of optimism, of renewed dedication to our craft, of determination to hone our strengths, of willingness to help each other, of joy in each other's company and in our wonderful work. I can only speak for myself, but I imagine a lot of other booksellers at the Winter Institute might have been feeling the same thing.