Working Groups to Promote Brainstorming at Wi7

The American Booksellers Association’s new Wi7 initiative to promote networking and brainstorming begins at next week’s Winter Institute with 22 groups of diverse booksellers discussing concrete ways to improve a model bookstore. In December, attendees received their working groups assignments via e-mail, along with the name of the group’s facilitator, and an e-mail address for the members of the group to communicate in the days leading up to the institute. The 22 groups, made up of about 20 people, were selected to create the most diverse pool of booksellers — each group ideally representing the 500 Winter Institute attendees. To provide a further opportunity for booksellers to get to know the members of their group, at Wi7’s opening plenary session, at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, January 18, in the Grand Ballroom, booksellers are asked to sit with members of their group. (Tables will be arranged alphabetically by group name.)

“I think it’s going to be an interesting, fun, and illuminating exercise,” said Dale Szczeblowski, owner of Porter Square Books, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Szczeblowski will be one of the bookseller facilitators to lead a group through ideas to cultivate the model store.

“The creation of this working group programming is a direct response to feedback and input from member booksellers, who told us that a very important part of the Winter Institute for them is the opportunity to meet, talk, and share ideas with colleagues from all over the country,” said Dan Cullen, ABA content officer. “This year, we’ve added a bit more structure to this peer interaction, and we hope it will be a thought-provoking yet fun exercise in bookseller brainstorming.” 

Booksellers will receive a short briefing memo for the working group assignment with background about the model bookstore upon checking in at the Wi7 Welcome Desk.

While all of Wi7’s Wednesday and Thursday educational sessions will provide important information and industry perspective to both inform the Friday afternoon group strategy session and guide booksellers when they return to their stores, the Wednesday afternoon sessions — ABACUS: A Road Map to Profitability; The Census and Your Town: Reading Demographics; and Book Stats: Industry-Wide Analytics — are designed as a sort of core curriculum. Each session will be repeated three times, at 1:00, 2:15, and 3:30 p.m., so that all Wi7 attendees have the opportunity to go to all three panels, in whatever order they wish.

Booksellers will gather for their working group activity on Friday, January 20, from 10:30 a.m. – noon, in the room whose name was provided on their individual working group memo. There, the bookseller facilitator will lead each group through a number of proposed questions and exercises.

“I initially envisioned it to be a basic brainstorming session, but it’s going to be a lot more than that. I think it’s going to be a lot more useful,” said Szczeblowski. “I think we’re all sort of struggling with what our bookstore is going to look like in the next few years and how it’s going to change. I don’t think this will necessarily answer that, but we’ll get to hear from a range of booksellers and work the collective braintrust.”

In a final session on Friday, from 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom, Dan Sheehan, vice president and general manager of Ingram Content Group, will summarize all of the afternoon’s innovative work and add insight and analysis.