The holiday season kicked off at Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor, Mich., last Wednesday with an annual five-day sale that has been a pre-Thanksgiving tradition at Nicola's Books for more than a decade. "The logic is that you're not competing with all the big Thanksgiving sales at the malls and to try and get people to commit their holiday spending dollars to you before they go anywhere else," said owner Nicola Rooney.
Everything in the store was 10% off, excluding periodicals and items benefiting nonprofits. Titles featured in the Great Lakes Booksellers Association (GLBA) holiday catalogue were 20% off. The GLBA titles, including staff favorites like Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, are heavily promoted in the store: Rooney had each page in the catalogue blown up to poster size and hung throughout the store above a display of the books it pictures.
In addition to announcing the sale in an e-mail newsletter, Rooney sent the GLBA holiday catalogue to 10,000 people on the store's mailing list. Overall, sales for the five-day period were down from last year, "but not brutally so," noted Rooney. There was a slight increase in sales of cards, chocolate and calendars.
Because of the economy and credit crunch, this season's theme at Nicola's Books is gift-giving with "spinoff benefits." Said Rooney, "With all the different ways we have for purchases to go towards worthy causes, we're definitely promoting the 'buy gifts that give to others' approach."
This includes sidelines, an area in which the store typically does a brisk business but has lately seen a decline. "Books are bearing up quite well, but sidelines have been hard hit," Rooney said. Popular items include World of Good's fair trade merchandise, particularly scarves and other textiles, and brightly-colored mittens made from recycled silk by a women's co-op in Nepal.
In the store's December newsletter, Rooney presents "Seven Habits of Highly Compassionate People." Among her suggestions are purchasing a locally-crafted Mott Children's Hospital teddy bear, with all proceeds going to the hospital, or buying a book for an underprivileged child as part of the store's Angel Tree program. Shoppers who donate a book receive a 20% discount on that title, along with 10% off their total book purchase. Rooney hopes to match or even exceed the 200 books collected last year.
Another suggestion on Rooney's list is stopping by the store on Thursday, December 18, to meet Allan E. Ansorge, whose story "The Alternate Plan" is included in Dying in a Winter Wonderland, an anthology of holiday-themed crime fiction. All publisher profits from the book are being donated to the Toys for Tots Foundation.
The Nicola's Books rewards program allows customers to aid the community without dipping into their wallets. For every $150 spent on books, they receive a $6 coupon that can be cashed out on the spot, saved for a future purchase or all or part of it can be donated to one of three local non-profits--Washtenaw Literacy, the Salvation Army or the University of Michigan's Exhibit Museum of Natural History. Every donation is matched by the store.
Nicola's Books is giving back to customers with two in-store holiday promotions. For every $100 spent at the store in December, shoppers receive a free "surprise" book, already wrapped. They can also fill out an entry form to be eligible to win three gifts: a large, plush Corduroy bear or Peter Rabbit or a signed and numbered pen-and-ink illustration from Matt Faulkner's The Night Henry Ford Met Santa.
Rooney expects this to be "a tough season" made more difficult because this year there are fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas than usual. "Every year people leave it later and later to buy gifts," she said. "What's going to be the cliffhanger this year is whether they are going to come out in force."--Shannon McKenna Schmidt