In a turbulent time, "the vitality of independent bookstores was undeniable in 2024," Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, said at the ABA's annual meeting yesterday. The ABA's membership grew nearly 18%. As of May 15, 3,281 locations are operated by 2,863 member companies--almost doubling in the past five years. Altogether, 314 bookstore businesses opened in 2024, of which 60 were BIPOC-owned and 21 Black-owned. The majority of the new businesses have storefronts; other formats include online, mobile, and pop-up stores. This marked the fourth year in a row that more than 200 bookstores opened. Thirty-seven bookstores closed in 2024, and 81 have opened so far this year. Another 274 provisional members are in the process of or considering opening a bookstore.

Hill emphasized that this growth has been occurring "despite significant challenges: the usual ones like thin margins, rising costs, and Amazon's chokehold on our industry, and more urgent threats that shook the very foundation of your work as the right to read and access books faced sustained, coordinated attacks."

Allison Hill

Related to that, the ABA doubled its free expression team, "created a hotline for members facing harassment, published The Right to Read Handbook, and offered essential sessions to equip members with the tools and resources needed to defend their right to free expression."

The association also had the largest Winter Institute and Children's Institute in history, and the most successful Independent Bookstore Day. Among other things, the organization put a focus on financial matters, conducting cash flow sessions at the regional association shows as well as financial literacy education and individual financial counseling.

Hill added that the ABA delivered on its mission--to help independent bookstores survive and thrive--"with financial responsibility, staying on budget and receiving a clean audit."

New president Cynthia Compton of 4 Kids Books & Toys, Zionsville, Ind., and MacArthur Books, Carmel, Ind., who has been treasurer, gave the 2024 financial report, noting that operating revenue for fiscal year 2024 was $7.6 million and expenses were $9.3 million. The ABA ended the year ahead of budget and received a clean audit report, she continued. The association's ratio of programming expenses to administrative expenses was 75:23, better than the benchmark of 70:30. The ABA draws from its investment portfolio, currently at $26.5 million, to help fund its operations; about 20% of revenue comes from membership.

Outgoing ABA president Tegan Tigani of Queen Anne Book Company, Seattle, Wash., called the past year "challenging. The turnover on our board mirrors turnover many of us are seeing in our stores; our industry is experiencing high rates of burnout and churn. While our hearts and imaginations are limitless, our time, energy, and resources are constrained. The country has literally and figuratively been on fire, and the state of constant emergencies has taken a toll. As Cynthia said in a recent conversation, 'everyone in this room is doing way more with way less.'

"When I catch up with booksellers across the country, I see that we are weary. Whether from reworking a school order to fit the parameters of a new budget; from testifying (or merely waiting to testify) in the Texas House or before Congress in D.C.; from unpacking shipments and repacking damages; from training new booksellers and taking on extra shifts; from hosting events; from serving on committees or panels or the board to help keep our industry strong; from cleaning up the neighborhood after a flood, a fire, a tornado, or a blizzard; from spending extra time on the phone with a customer who needs a friendly voice; or from any of other the ways, big and small, that booksellers care for each other and our communities--we are tired. But I also see that we are determined, and we are strong."

Noting that Allison Hill recently marked her fifth anniversary as ABA CEO, Tigani thanked her for all her efforts on behalf of the association and its members, saying, "Allison has provided our organization with vision, structure, teamwork, and momentum that have allowed ABA to deal with current challenges and to anticipate future ones. Her focus on the ABCs (ABACUS, Batch, and Counting our sales) is helping us prove our impact and improve our performance. She effectively leads a committed and growing staff of all-stars distributed around the country. She maintains impactful partnerships with organizations like Media Coalition, PEN, the League of Women Voters, Authors Against Book Bans, Bookshop, and more."

Tigani and Hill also thanked board members who left during the year or whose terms are ending, including Jenny Cohen, Jeff Deutsch, Danny Caine, and Kathy Burnette. She welcomed new president Cynthia Compton, and co-vice presidents Jake Cumsky-Whitlock of Solid State Books, Washington, D.C., and Diane Capriola of Little Shop of Stories, Decatur, Ga., as well as new board members Brein Lopez of Children's Book World, Los Angeles, Calif.; Talia Whyte of Rozzie Bound Co-op, Boston, Mass.; and Paul Hanson of Village Books, Bellingham and Lynden, Wash.

And Tigani noted "a bittersweet milestone": the retirement this coming August of ABA CFO PK Sindwani, whose "reporting has been a miracle of clarity, which on its own is enough to make a board eternally grateful. But he contributes to every board meeting well beyond spreadsheets and graphs."

For her part, Hill thanked Tigani for "her compassionate and dedicated leadership that was extraordinary." Hill thanked the ABA staff, too, and observed, "In a world increasingly driven by billionaires and algorithms--and in an industry threatened by the politicization of books--the passion, purpose, and authenticity of independent bookstores matter more than ever. We are honored to serve and support you in this vital work." --John Mutter

Community Forum
Reiko Redmonde of Revolution Books in Berkeley, Calif., called for the ABA to "speak out and take a stand" against the ongoing rise of fascism in the U.S. and shared parts of a statement written in support of Palestinian poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha. Redmonde invited other ABA members, as well as the organization itself, to sign the statement. 

Cynthia Compton

In response, Compton referred to the statement issued by the board in Bookselling This Week on March 6, and reiterated the ABA's condemnation of all attacks on bookstores, particularly on those that have chosen to highlight Palestinian books and authors, and the organization's belief that all "stores have the right to stock, staff, promote and host authors and ideas that they believe in." Hill acknowledged the Palestinian voices that are being silenced and the activists who are being punished, and she noted that booksellers are an "incredibly powerful" force in the fight against rising fascism.

Prior to the community forum, the board had received a number of letters from booksellers regarding its and the ABA's stance on Palestine. Compton noted that the board has received "a tremendous amount of feedback" from members. It has been varied, with some members wanting the board to make a statement "on one side or another" and others wanting there to be no statement at all. Ultimately, she said, the board has elected to let the work it does supporting stores on the ground "speak for us."

Asked how tariffs will affect book prices, Hill said that the "short answer" is that it remains to be seen. The ABA has completed most of its annual meetings with publishers and the responses "have been mixed." There is a lot of concern about consumer confidence and how rising prices will affect consumers, and some publishers, particularly those with significant nonbook revenue, have been impacted more than others. Some publishers are anticipating rising costs due tariffs on things like ink, while others are in a "wait and see mode" and intend to absorb costs in the short term. Overall, Hill remarked, the ABA got the impression that publishers are aware that the industry is up against a "willingness to pay," with the question being "how much more can you charge for a book before you see a decline in sales?" Rising prices would also have significant impacts on access to books.

Compton added that one of her bookstores, which is a children's store, has already been impacted "really significantly," particularly by the tariff costs on toys. The continued uncertainty is making it "very, very hard to plan for Q3" and is forcing her to "rethink almost everything I'm doing in that particular store this year."

Board member Brein Lopez discussed the ongoing processing of migrating bookstores to Indiecommerce 2.0 and stressed that Indiecommerce 1.0 will eventually be discontinued. He encouraged booksellers who have not yet migrated to 2.0 to reach out to the ABA and start that process. Hill could not give an exact date of when Indiecommerce 1.0 will go away, but she said the ABA would ideally like to migrate everyone "before the end of the year." If bookstores don't sign-up, the ABA will eventually have to "force it," which the organization does not want to do.

Touching on ongoing upgrades and improvements with Indiecommerce 2.0, Hill said that the ABA has been exploring what AI functionality could mean for booksellers. She acknowledged it as a "controversial topic" while also recognizing that in an industry "challenged by labor shortages and inefficiency," it could be very beneficial as a tool.

On the subject of the ABA's lobbying for new legislation that would create competition amongst credit card processing vendors, Hill said "the fight goes on." ABFE director David Grogan said there will be a vote in the first week of June that could see a credit card fee reform amendment attached to a larger bill, and he noted that banks are lobbying hard to stop it, which is a good indication of how impactful the bill would be.

Responding to a question about damaged shipments, Hill said the best thing booksellers can do is send pictures of the damaged books and their packing slips to the ABA when they are received. Board member Lisa Swayze said she has had some success reaching out directly to customer service representatives as well as sales reps, and Compton stressed that booksellers don't have to wait for the annual publisher survey to give this information to the ABA.

Touching again on the annual visits with publishers, Hill said the industry is "anticipating a challenging fourth quarter," and there were discussions of additional discounts, extended dating, and pricing. There was also a lot of concerned talk about the rising generation of readers and what that means for both the industry and society. --Alex Mutter

Mon Coeur Books, a romance-focused bookstore, opened May 20 in Canton, Mich., Hometown Life reported.

Located at 42823 Ford Rd. in the Canton Corners Shopping Center, Mon Coeur carries a wide selection of romance titles for both teens and adults. Plenty of sub-genres are represented, including contemporary romance, romantasy, YA romance, LGBTQ+ romance, and more. Alongside books customers can find an array of apparel and book-related gifts. As the store finds its footing, it will begin hosting author events and book club meetings.

Prior to opening Mon Coeur Books, owner Carolyn Haering worked as a creative director for a variety of advertising agencies in the Detroit area. She told Hometown Life that while the work was "rewarding and a lot of fun," she eventually wanted to slow things down and decided to open a bookstore. She hopes Mon Coeur Books becomes a hub for readers in the Canton community.

"I really hope people come here and they can talk to other people who like the same books and create that sense of community," Haering said. "We have places for people to sit and hang out and chat or meet friends. I just really want this to be a really fun gathering place for people who love love."

BookTrust and the Waterstones Children's Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce have launched Reading Rights: Books Build a Brighter Future, which calls for national provision so that every child has access to books and reading from their earliest years. It also calls on national and local leaders in early years, health, education and culture to come together to make reading a part of daily life for every child in the first seven years of life. A copy of the report can be downloaded here.

"Britain is not an equal society. Around 4.3 million children are growing up in poverty," said Cottrell-Boyce. "I started the Reading Rights campaign to highlight this indefensible inequality, but also to say that we can do something about it. We have an astonishingly powerful tool in our hands--shared reading. If you've been read to, as a child, by someone who cares about you, you have been given an enormous, invisible privilege. If you haven't been given that privilege, then you've been left with an enormous mountain to climb."

The Bookseller noted that research from BookTrust contained in the report showed that among low-income families only 40% say a bedtime story is part of their normal routine, 28% do not find reading with their child easy, while 21% lack confidence in choosing books their child will enjoy, and 38% don't read with their child due to lack of time. 

The five key areas of action have been identified for their potential for change include workforce training; policy, guidance and frameworks; access to books; sharing high-quality research and evidence; and multi-agency leadership.

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In Australia, National Simultaneous Storytime, which ran on May 21, showed the country "is a reading nation--at every age," according to the Australian Library and Information Association, which organized the event, Books + Publishing reported. The 2,204,658 registered participants from about 16,632 locations read The Truck Cat by Deborah Frenkel, illustrated by Danny Snell, during the day.

Despite its name, National Simultaneous Storytime was an international event: in addition to Australia, participating countries included Aotearoa New Zealand, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Mauritius, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, the U.K., the U.S., Vanuatu and Vietnam.

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Cool idea of the Day: On social media, the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association posted: "We're absolutely loving these special notes from Thistle Bookshop and Cafe's [St. Catharines, Ont.] visitors during #CIBD2025 weekend. These readers encapsulate the meaning of stories in less words than we could ever fit within the character limit. As book lovers, why do stories matter to you? Let us know in the comments! #regram."

Thistle Bookshop had asked: "Why do stories matter to you? And wow (owen wilson voice)... you showed up. We received so many thoughtful, heartfelt responses during the Canadian Independent Bookstore Day campaign, and we truly loved reading every single one. The first card is our giveaway winner (congrats!!), but honestly, we wish we could hand out sweaters to everyone who took the time to reflect and write one of these. We're just so glad to be part of a community that not only values stories, but takes the time to express why they matter." --Robert Gray

Author Lynn Freed, who was "celebrated for her mordant and keenly observed novels, short stories, and essays," died May 9. She was 79. Freed "captured in fiction and memoir her elegant father, her fiercely ambitious mother, and their theatre company and exuberant household in Durban [South Africa] in the 1950s and 1960s," according to her obituary, which noted that the "texture of home, the longing to leave and the yearning for the world left behind, and the fraught relationship between the writer and those who fed her imagination were among the subjects she explored with exquisite honesty and a finely tuned voice."

"The real world of my childhood," she wrote, "a large subtropical port on the Indian Ocean, with beaches and bush and sugarcane and steaming heat, a strict Anglican girls' school, massive family gatherings on Friday nights and Jewish holidays, and then my parents' theatre world... this world did not exist, not even peripherally, in the literature available to me." 

Freed was the author of seven novels, including Heart Change (1982; republished as Friends of the Family in 2000), Home Ground (1986), The Bungalow (1993), The Mirror (1997), House of Women (2002), The Servants' Quarters (2009), and The Last Laugh (2019). She also published a collection of stories, The Curse of the Appropriate Man (2004), and two volumes of essays: Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home (2005) and The Romance of Elsewhere (2017). 

Freed first came to the U.S. as a high school exchange student with the American Field Service, then returned in 1967 after graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She earned a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University. As a teacher of literature and creative writing, she was Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis and also a member of the core faculty of the MFA program at Bennington College.

"We are all deeply saddened by the news of Counterpoint author Lynn Freed's passing," Counterpoint Press posted on social media. 

Narrative magazine posted: "We’re mourning the death of Lynn Freed. Recipient of the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and as well as two PEN/O. Henry Awards, Lynn published many stories and essays in Narrative and each is a gem, marked by her singular voice and spirit."

Village Books and Paper Dreams, Bellingham, Wash., is welcoming new operators of its café: Jennifer Worthley of It's the Sweet Things, a bakery that specializes in cupcakes and other pastries, and Bryan Matamorosa of Bry's Filipino Cuisine. The two businesses elsewhere in Bellingham will continue to operate, and the pair will develop a new menu and logo for the Village Books café that will focus on "beverages and treats, and light fare of Bry's bowls." Pictured: Village Books owners Paul Hanson (l.), Kelly Evert (2nd from l.), and Sarah Hutton (r.) with Worthley (c.) and Matamorosa (2nd from l.).

"Get hooked on a new book." That was the chalkboard message in front of Wonderland Books, Bethesda, Md., which noted: "Our bookseller Caley Kovananth looks out the door at our fun fish-themed sidewalk sign."

At Bloomsbury USA:

Peter Perez has joined the publisher as academic associate director of publicity. Perez was previously at the University of North Carolina Press.

Omuni Barnes has joined the publisher as national accounts manager, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. Barnes was previously at National Book Network.

Help Your Teenager Beat an Eating Disorder, Third Edition by James Lock and Daniel Le Grange (Guilford Press).

Today:
The Briefing with Jen Psaki: Chasten Buttigieg, author of Papa's Coming Home (Philomel, $19.99, 9780593693988). He will also be on MSNBC's Weekend tomorrow.

Apple TV+ has released an official trailer for the second season of The Buccaneers, based on the unfinished novel by Edith Wharton, which was published posthumously in 1938. The eight-episode series premieres globally on June 18, followed by one new episode every Wednesday through August 6.

The Buccaneers stars returning cast members Kristine Frøseth, Alisha Boe, Aubri Ibrag, Josie Totah, Imogen Waterhouse, Mia Threapleton, Christina Hendricks, Guy Remmers, Matthew Broome, Josh Dylan, Barney Fishwick, Amelia Bullmore, Fenella Woolgar, and newcomers Leighton Meester, Greg Wise, Jacob Ifan, Grace Ambrose, and Maria Almeida.

Written by series creator Katherine Jakeways, season two is directed by William McGregor, Rachel Leiterman, John Hardwick, and Charlie Manton. Jakeways, Emmy winner Beth Willis, and BAFTA Award winner Susanna White serve as executive producers. The Buccaneers is produced for Apple TV+ by The Forge Entertainment, a Banijay U.K. company.

Dawn Macdonald won the C$10,000 (about US$7,215) Canadian First Book Prize, awarded annually by the Griffin Poetry Prize, for Northerny. The prize also includes a six-week residency in Italy in partnership with the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Burton will be invited to read from her book at this year's Griffin Poetry Prize readings on June 4 in Toronto.

The judges called Northerny "a blast of crisp Yukon air. Funny and fresh, unexpected and daring, it understands 'the personal is heretical,' and glories in that fact. It's a rush, a relief, and remakes with impishness the notion of what a poem can be."

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Finalists have been selected for the 2025 Firecracker Awards, sponsored by the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses and given to "the best independently published books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry and the best literary magazines in the categories of debut and general excellence." Each winner in the books category will receive $2,000--$1,000 for the press and $1,000 for the author or translator--and each winner in the magazine categories will receive $1,000. The winners will be announced on June 26.

See finalists in the five categories here.

photo: Leah Jing Mcintosh

André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam (Kaya Press, May 20, 2025), won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. It blends memoir, fiction, family history, and philosophy in a saga of the Vietnamese diaspora. He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia.

Handsell readers your book in 30 words or less:

Moving from 1930s Hanoi through a series of never-ending wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Cambridge, and Melbourne, Anam is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism, home, and belonging.

On your nightstand now:

I've been thinking a lot about the experience of living in a time of crisis--indeed, of being on the precipice of a catastrophe that one can't quite see coming. Partly for that reason, I picked up Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain--it seemed to me that this novel set in an exclusive health resort in the Alps, on the eve of the First World War, might speak to our times. I've also been reading Patrick Chamoiseau's brilliant, shape-shifting Texaco--I happened to have read a lot of Martinican writers last year (Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, and Aimé Césaire) so it seemed a kind of natural progression to read one of their inheritors. Finally (I always have three or four books--at least--on the go), I've been reading Thuân's Chinatown, an incantatory, surreal monologue by a Vietnamese mother stuck on the Métro in Paris, caught in spirals of remembering and imagining the past.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Growing up in a Vietnamese-speaking household, I often felt like I discovered incredible, life-changing books on my own that no one else had really heard of--until I later found out that the book was a well-known classic. The Narnia books were a good example of that. But one of my favourites as a child had a reverse trajectory: I knew that Mark Twain was very famous, and assumed that his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte was a classic like Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn--but even today I struggle to find anyone who's heard of it, let alone read it.

Your top five authors:

Alexis Wright--her novels, from Carpentaria through to The Swan Book and most recently, Praiseworthy, have redefined what it means to write fiction on and about the Australian continent. In a totally different but parallel way, Viet Thanh Nguyen's body of work has opened a universe of doors for diasporic writing--scholarly, fictional, and memoiristic. Svetlana Alexievich's oral histories transformed what I thought oral history could be--so much so that she inspired a project I worked on for a number of years called Behind the Wire, which documented the lived experiences of people in Australia's immigration detention centres. Thanks in large part to Alexievich's work, we realized that the stories we were working on could be--and had to be--so much more than testimonies of suffering. Meanwhile, I am haunted by W.G. Sebald's melancholy. On E.L. Doctorow--see below.

Book you've faked reading:

The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin--if you've ever picked up a physical copy of The Arcades Project you might understand why I haven't read it cover to cover. It's not just that it's a hefty tome, but it was never finished, so the published volume is really a posthumous collation of notes, organized haphazardly like an archive that's been rearranged by a sudden gust of wind. Still, I have taken a lot from wandering aimlessly through it, as one might have wandered through the arcades Benjamin describes--in fact, Anam more or less ends with a quote from Arcades--but I don't think I will ever comprehensively read it. But perhaps that's the point.

Book you're an evangelist for:

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Book you hid from your parents:

I'm not sure that I actually ever hid any specific book from my parents. But there was a point at which my reading started to take me very far from my Catholic upbringing. So while books like Albert Camus' L'Étranger might have been lying around in plain sight, their contents--and the doubts they induced in me about my faith--weren't exactly up for discussion.

Book that changed your life:

The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow. I studied The Book of Daniel at university and had never read anything remotely like it before: it combined the stylistic and theoretical pyrotechnics of the postmodern writers I was drawn to as an undergrad, with a sharp political edge and deep well of feeling. I ended up writing my honours thesis on it, and it was never far from my mind as I wrote Anam--which is also the story of a (grand)son trying to understand a family history entangled with political crimes, imprisonment, and the Cold War.

Favorite line from a book:

"To each his character, to each character his mask." --Aimé Césaire, A Tempest

When I'm not writing fiction, I'm a legal academic--so I am always fascinated by the resonances between law and literature. One such resonance is in the idea of the persona--the mask that a human being puts on (or has put on them) to play a character in a story, or that an individual wears to be able to appear before the law (which we call "legal personality"). I think both law and literature are haunted by the suspicion--always repressed--that perhaps there is, after all, nothing under the mask.

Five books you'll never part with:

Anna Burns, Milkman
Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic
Brian Castro, Shanghai Dancing  
James Joyce, Ulysses
Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

George Eliot, Middlemarch.

A vibrant, enchanting world of dark saints, magical contracts, and unshakeable fate emerges in Italian novelist and comic book writer Giovanni De Feo's first novel in English.

The 18th-century Neapolitan village of Lucerìa pays reverence not only to the Catholic saints of the waking Day world but also to seven unusual Saints who live in the dreamworld of "the Night that is just on the other side of Lucerìa." The village is also the home of eight-year-old Oriana Siliceo, a blacksmith's daughter who dreams of the day she and her twin brother, Oriano, will inherit their father's smithy. Then Oriano is nearly trampled during a parade held in honor of Saint Anthony, patron saint of smiths. Oriana asks the statue of Saint Anthony to save him, but help comes instead from the magic of a Night Saint called the Duke of Under-earth. Soon Oriana meets him in person at a local fair, where he sells her a handkerchief that can unfold into a mansion for the price of a task: sneak into the Secret Market of the Dead and retrieve the Duke's stolen blacksmith hammer from the wily Dreamarquise of Cats, a normal cat in the waking world who becomes magical in dreams. Oriana's journey into "the Night that belongs to dreams, storms, and the unquiet dead" leads her to a market where the dead sell cursed destinies to the unwary living. Oriana's adventure there is perilous, but the true fight of her life comes years later when she learns the Smith's Guild will recognize only her brother as their father's heir. Oriana issues a challenge that will determine the smithy's fate, and with all of the Day, including her family, standing against her, she must embrace the Night to find her true destiny.

This meditation on the twin powers of destiny and choice as well as the indomitable human passion to create comes wrapped in layers of whimsy, folklore, and darkness. Oriana's dedication to her craft runs counter to societal expectations as well as her formidable mother's ambitions for her, but her spirit and audacity carry her through each time a stumbling block is placed in her way. The community of Lucerìa, where Oriana and Oriano's bet becomes a flashpoint for conflict between young women and old ways, is as intricately realized as the fantastical Night with its talking cats, wondrous creations, and fool's bargains. The Secret Market of the Dead reads like a lucid, impossible dream and should enchant fans of Erin Morgenstern and GennaRose Nethercott. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Shelf Talker: A 17th-century Neapolitan girl stumbles into the magical world of the Night in this vibrant novel based in Italian folktales.