It’s taken time for the book industry to recover from the 2008 Great Recession, but at this year's Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Fall Discovery Show, those struggles were in the rearview mirror.
Total attendance at the show, held October 12-14 at the Renaissance Denver Stapleton Hotel, hit 601. The turnout was the largest one recorded since executive director Laura Burnett began running the show in 2011. Of the over 600 attendees, 350 were booksellers, which is nearly double the number that attended the event in 2015.
Among the new attendees this year were Annette Avery, who opened Bright Side Bookshop in Flagstaff, Ariz., in February; Chelsea Green and her sister, Jessica Tresp, who are in the midst of a $50,000 Indiegogo campaign to open Bibliobar in North Dallas, Tex.; and Jessie Smith, who will take over the Book Haven in Salida, Colo., in March.
A return to submitting orders to all but the largest houses was another sign of post-recession strength. Julie Shimada, children’s book buyer at Maria’s Bookshop in Durango, Colo., was one of a number of booksellers who placed orders, in her case nearly 20. “Orders don’t have to be dead,” Derek Lawrence, head of Imprint Group, said. “When the regionals changed to discovery shows, the emphasis moved to getting galleys. In the last few years, I see it going back, the reaction to the recession.”
The chances to interact with authors has long been a draw of MPIBA—and this year was no exception. “I’m interested in the authors,” Joanne Walker Matzenbacher of Bookworks in Albuquerque, N.M., said. For her, the kick-off event, a children’s breakfast with Peter Sis (Robinson, Scholastic), Jessica Brody (The Chaos of Standing Still, Simon Pulse), and Shannon and Dean Hale (The Princess in Black and the Mysterious Playdate, Candlewick), was “fabulous.” A number of booksellers wiped away tears during the Hales’ impassioned speech about why books for boys and girls should not be stereotyped. “Reading helps us learn empathy," Shannon Hale said. "If we’re shielding boys [from books featuring girls], they’re not learning about half the human race.”
MPIBA included a full day of education with how-to sessions on store branding and back-office operations. Other sessions covered book fairs (and how to use them to your financial advantage) and working publishers on promotional efforts (beyond coop).
As with all the regionals, MPIBA hosted a session created by the ABA to encourage booksellers to improve their bottom line. At the talk, ABA senior program officer Joy Dallanegra-Sanger and board member Valerie Koehler, owner of Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, presented tips on how indies can sell more backlist.
In the end, it was the tone of the show that excited publishers and booksellers. “The energy at this show is just nurturing,” Kirsten Johanna Allen, publisher and editorial director of Torrey House Press in Salt Lake City, said. “There’s so much about bookselling and publishing that’s challenging. It’s a welcome boost.”
