More than half a century ago, Thomas Merton wrote, "We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest."
I was thinking about Merton last weekend while at the New England Independent Booksellers Association Trade Show in Providence, R.I. I stayed at the Westin Hotel, which is connected on one side to the Rhode Island Convention Center and on the other to the Providence Place Mall, a multi-level, 170-store tribute to sensory overload that is described on its website as "the ideal venue for tour de force shopping excursions."
The NEIBA trade show, by contrast, seemed an utterly civilized alternate universe. People were having quiet conversations about books. There was "product" on display, but it would have been a stretch to call what was happening there a calculated plan to "excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension." It was downright bookish. Words mattered.
At the Friday author breakfast, novelist Tom Perrotta said, "I like to work in microcosm." And legendary Knopf editor Judith Jones shared her at once simple and complex decision-making process decades ago when she acquired Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking: "If there's me, there must be others. And that is the hunch editors go on anyway."
It is the hunch we all go on. Bookstore owners, buyers, events coordinators and frontline booksellers also work in microcosm, taking the deluge of information coming their way and fashioning from it the tighter personal narratives of business plans, orders, events schedules, handsells. At the NEIBA show, these professional readers studied the titles on display, searching for the books that might cause them to think, "If there's me, there must be others."
On Friday afternoon, I was on a panel, "Doing Digital Right," moderated by Len Vlahos, ABA's director of education and director of Booksense.com. Joining us were Heather Gain, Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, McNally Robinson NYC, New York, N.Y.
We discussed bookstore blogs and email newsletters, MySpace and Facebook, Shelfari and LibraryThing and much more. We talked about investing precious time in Web marketing, about trusting staff and about the act of faith involved in working with online strategies that might not pay obvious, immediate benefits. We spoke, as we all often speak, of using the Web to enhance a bookstore's inherent strengths.
Jessica, whose personal blog about bookselling, The Written Nerd, has been thriving for years, shared her thoughts on in-store and out-of-store blogging. "It's just another way of doing the things we do well," she said.
Heather explained how Myspace and Facebook are playing an increasingly important role in opening lines of communication between bookstores and patrons, particularly younger readers, and how Harvard Book Store's MySpace site encourages connection with the large student population in the Cambridge area.
Ultimately, what we talked about was giving bookstores an online voice.
When Judith Jones said, "If there's me, there must be others," a little lightbulb shined for a moment over my head. If you were at the author breakfast, you may have noticed it.
I thought about how I choose the next book I'm going to read, a ceremony that has a lot to do with "voice." In the first few pages of a book, I consider two important questions: Is this is a special place? Do I want to stay here for awhile.
If there's me . . .
During our panel, Len Vlahos discussed the concept of Web 2.0, and the participatory nature of online life now, the ongoing conversations with unlimited potential. "I think people are looking for a blend of professional and amateur information," he said.
There are so many ways to accomplish this, and most of them do look like conversations. When I highlighted some bookstore websites during the panel--destinations like breathe books, Beauty and the Book and Wordsmiths--I was trying to show that the conversation already works well for some bookshops.
Doing digital right is not necessarily doing digital expensively or complexly. Doing digital right is showcasing your bookstore's voice online, and trusting that if there is you, there must be others.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)