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| The opening reception at Winter Institute in Baltimore | |
Consider the last five locations for the American Booksellers Association's annual Winter Institute: Minneapolis, Minn.; Memphis, Tenn.; Albuquerque, N.Mex.; Baltimore, Md.; and, for Wi16, my home office in upstate New York.
Yesterday morning, as I watched the inspiring bookseller tribute video, the welcome message from President Obama, and ABA CEO Allison Hill's introductory remarks, it was hard not to think back to Wi15 and how little we knew about what lay in wait for us in a matter of weeks. Despite a tough, tough year, however, here we are again, if virtually.
In his Wi15 breakfast keynote, "Reinventing the Store: Achieving Growth in the Face of New Business Risks," Ryan Raffaelli had told us: "History is littered with winners and losers of reinvention.... For the past 15 years, I have been working with companies that have been faced with technological shock, but they've had to step back and say, how are we going to reinvent when the world tells us that we either have to hold on or let go."
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| Ryan Raffaelli at Wi15 (photo: bookweb.org) | |
Business risks? Shock? Reinvention? Fuhgeddaboudit. By January 2020, the world was already whispering threats in our ears. We weren't quite ready to listen yet, but our ears were ringing soon enough.
"Exploration is about learning," Raffaelli continued. "For many organizations it's difficult to do both because the folks who live on the exploitation curve start to resent the people who are thinking about the new curve."
By March, everybody was suddenly careening around a blind "new curve" called Covid-19. Quickly shedding the fashionable theme that indies were "not just surviving, but thriving," all energy and attention focused back on survival. At Wi15, there had been no keynotes about coping with a global pandemic; no roundtable discussions on transitioning to full-time online operations with home deliveries and curbside pickups; no education sessions on face mask enforcement or plexiglass shield construction.
When Raffaelli discussed his upcoming white paper, "Reinventing Retail: The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores," this wasn't quite what he had in mind. Or maybe it was.
Earlier this week, Brilliant Books, Traverse City, Mich., shared a glimpse back at that time from an indie bookseller's perspective: "In the process of reorganizing articles on our website recently, we rediscovered an article from last February, written about a month before the pandemic changed everything. In hindsight, it's almost cute.
"We talked about the slow days of winter after the holidays without any idea that soon, days with no in-store customers and only website and phone orders were about to become the norm. While that adjustment was hard enough for us, the bigger and scarier change was the abrupt extension of the uncertainty we usually only feel in winter. Now, here we are again, a year older and wiser and with no more certainty about what's next, and a whole new concept of what a slow winter's day can feel like.
"Today, as a business, we're still okay. Today, the lights are on, the staff are all employed, and we're still shipping books around the country. Tomorrow, we'll probably be okay, too. But there's no room for error. We talk sometimes about the pandemic being a marathon rather than a sprint, but even a marathon has a clear endpoint. This doesn't. The best we can hope for is a slow return to something a bit more normal, and throughout it all, we need you to stick with us."
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| At last year's WI, Emily Russo, co-owner of Print: A Bookstore in Portland, Maine, introduced Jennifer Finney Boylan. | |
On the final day of Wi15, keynote speaker Jennifer Finney Boylan advised that if "you want to open people's hearts, if you want to inspire passion and fire and resistance, there's no other way to go about it than by writing books, by publishing books, by selling books. I would be shocked if there were not plenty of days when many of you, many of us, have simply felt worn down by our working lives....
"I'm here to remind you that sometimes the frustrating work that we do makes a huge difference. In a world of bullshit, it is an act of defiance, an act of resistance and an act of love. So, from the bottom of my heart, on behalf of all the authors who are represented by the thousands and thousands of books all of you help to bring into the world, I just want to say thank you. The work we do may not seem glamorous sometimes, but truly, on a good day, we really are all in the business of saving souls."
In 2007, around the time of Wi2 in Portland, Ore., I wrote: "Publishing industry headlines are still rife with closing indie bookstores and evolving technology that may threaten the very existence of 'fiber-based' texts. Should we be afraid, like medieval peasants terrified by the prospect of what army or disease might be coming over the hill to annihilate their village next? I don't think that way. It is, as it always has been, the end of some worlds and the beginning of other worlds. The peasants adapt to survive."
I can't help thinking that even Mr. Raffaelli might have underestimated indie booksellers' ability to reinvent their retail model again and again and again.
With that in mind, Happy Wi16!
--Robert Gray, editor