Given the growth of Amazon.com, should children's booksellers today concern themselves with having their own Web sites? "Absolutely. Booksellers have to be on the Internet," says Carol Chittenden, owner of Eight Cousins Children's Books (www.eightcousins.com) in Falmouth, Mass. "Any booksellers who think otherwise have to ask themselves how they shop, and it becomes painfully evident."
Len Vlahos, director of the ABA's BookSense.com program, on the other hand, responds with an emphatic "maybe." From his standpoint, a mere presence on the Internet is not enough. "A Web site is the kind of thing, if you build it they will not come," he says. "It's like anything you do in your bookstore—you have to market it."
Slow Internet connections—many smaller stores and stores in remote areas are forced to rely on dial-up services—and limited staff can combine to make going online easier said than done. Clearly, the question of having a Web site is not so simple. What's a children's bookseller to do? Close down the Web shop, if they already have one? Or, open one, if they don't? And what is the goal anyway: to sell books and sidelines, or is a Web site more of a marketing and communications tool?
Sales Matter
At one end of the brick-and-click bookselling spectrum is Powells.com, the Internet outpost of Powell's City of Books in Portland, Ore., and the most successful independent on the Net. Week after week Powell's promotes its Web site in national publications like the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review as a place for voracious readers seeking an independent alternative.
"We went online in 1994, and now our Web site makes up a third of Powell's business," says Georgie Lewis, who handles marketing and content for Powells.com. "The kids' books are huge, just like in the store. The children's section has been ranking about second and third the last few weeks in our weekly sales reports. Before then, it had been consistently fifth or sixth."
Powells.com has strong national recognition; only 15% of its online customers are from the Pacific Northwest. Most log on from the East Coast and the Midwest, according to Lewis, who notes that remainder titles account for 20— 25% of the store's online children's book sales. If there is any doubt about just how much Powell's has invested in its Web presence, the opening of its new 60,000-square-foot warehouse (its second) next month, should lay that to rest. Together the two facilities will enable Powell's to stock close to 1.5 million books. Powells.com employs 50 staffers, including seven programmers. Its electronic newsletter, which it mails out twice a month, has 250,000 subscribers, and it regularly partners with Salon.com and the Atlantic Monthly, among others, to get fresh content. Currently it is in negotiations with Mothering magazine.
Another store with a large physical presence on the Web is Tattered Cover (www.tatteredcover.com) in Denver. But unlike Powell's, the Tattered Cover's goal is to use its site, which is part of BookSense.com, to build in-store traffic. "We really try to support the ABA in every way we can," says director of marketing Heather Duncan, who is enthusiastic about the ABA's newest Booksense.com program, which enables stores to post their inventory quantities online. "That's one of the complaints our customers had: they wanted to look up books on the Web and then get into their car and come down. We upload the inventory every night. We try to be accurate every morning at 8 a.m."
Unlike Powell's, Tattered Cover has a skeletal online staff of only two—a graphic designer and Duncan—who both have in-store duties as well. "We try to change something on the home page every day," says Duncan, who estimates that it takes about eight hours a week to keep the site looking fresh. Updating the store's 40—50 events each month, which are posted online, takes several hours. In addition, Tattered Cover e-mails its newsletter to 9,000 customers, posts a PDF file of its literary quarterly, and puts its Web address on all its print materials, from bags to bookmarks. Even so, Duncan acknowledges, "as much as our site does sell books for us, it's minuscule." Still, she adds, "it pays for itself."
For those for whom sales don't quite cover the costs, BookSense.com is offering a helping hand with its co-op reimbursement program, which it began testing this spring. In August it will sign on more stores, with still others in September. The idea is that each month booksellers who contract to be part of the program will be able to choose from among seven to 12 themes (five books per theme) that are available for co-op. Stores can earn $50 per book (with a maximum of $500/per month) for titles that they agree to stock and feature in-store and online. The ABA will take care of the billing and charge the store a handling fee of 15% of the total amount claimed.
"We're not anticipating that every store will use it every month," says Vlahos, who plans to include children's-themed books throughout the year. So far, three publishers have signed on for the test—AOL Time Warner, HarperCollins and Harcourt—and the ABA is in talks with others to come on board when the full program rolls out this fall.
The Medium Is the Message
For Steve Auditore, co-owner with his wife, Vicki, of Blue Kangaroo Books (www.bluekangaroobooks.com), which opened less than a year ago in Danville, Ill., the purpose of a Web site is not to sell books. "We don't see it as a commerce-generation tool," says Auditore, who financed the store with profits from the sale of the market research company he built, which specialized in Internet-related businesses. "Our Web site is an integral component of how we communicate with our customers. We're a very small store, 1000 square feet. Our two primary demographics are wealthy grandparents and a ton of teachers in a 30-mile radius, and the way we touch them is electronically," he says.
Auditore describes himself and his wife as "very benign spammers," who e-mail 2,000 newsletters every Friday, many to school staff whose names he culled online. "We know of the 2,000 that go out, 700 click through if we feature a book," he says. "We'd die otherwise."
Although Blue Kangaroo signed on with BookSite for its e-commerce program, like Vlahos, Auditore emphasizes marketing. "If there's a message I'd give to any business, it's that it won't do any good if you don't get any people there," he says. He uses postcards as "an analog corollary" to digital communications, mailing out notifications to customers who bought a book by a particular author or illustrator when their next book comes out.
For some online children's booksellers, one of the biggest assets on the Web is not only the ability to communicate with their customers quickly and cheaply, but to make new connections. That's the case with Storybook Cove (www.storybookcove.com) in Hanover, Mass., according to Webmaster and attorney Joanne Bibeau, whose sister Janet owns the store. "Certainly it's not working in terms of taking orders," she says. "We're most positive about people looking at the site."
Radio Disney Boston found the online store and approached them about doing a promotion. Since Storybook Cove already encouraged young customers to review books for its newsletter, the two settled on "Pick It or Kick It?" for children ages 14 and younger. Kids submit their book reviews to either the online or the physical store, and at the end of each month the best review is selected in each of three age categories to air on Radio Disney. The winners get to tape their reviews, tour the studio and take home lots of goodies.
Storybookcove.com has also been a boon for the store's book fair business. The sisters put together a printed booklet listing available titles by grade and an order form, then post detailed book descriptions, numbered just as they are in the booklet, on the Web site. "We give a few hundred booklets to the school, so that the kids can mark the books they're interested in," Bibeau explains. "Then their parents can look them up online."
Storybook Cove only takes one copy of each book on book fair day(s) and delivers the orders directly to the classrooms within a week. Although schools were leery of the new system, they actually made more money this way—and Storybook Cove didn't have to do a lot of unnecessary ordering and returning.
Similarly, at Mrs. Nelson's Toy & Book Shop (www.mrsnelsons.com) in La Verne, Calif., owner Judy Nelson notes that she gets very few individual orders over the Net. "A lot of people use the site as a way to find out about our business," she says. Although it's slightly more expensive, she chose to have a self-authored BookSense.com site, because she wanted her site to stand out. "I would like to have some of the features that the BookSense.com template offers," Nelson says. "But I didn't see a way of having the Web site look like a fun children's Web site."
For book fairs, she has also found the Web site invaluable, and posts PDF files of book fair planning packets, local authors and illustrators, book lists, and recent award winners and nominees, including the California Young Reader Medal and the Lamplighter Award, which is chosen by the National Christian Schools Association. Nelson has begun distributing an e-newsletter, which she will post online. "We recently decided to give up our print newsletter. Things out here are very tight," she explains. "We're trying to get people weaned to look online. We purchased a mass mailing program for just under a hundred dollars that will link with BookSense. Then people can ask to be on the mailing list or taken off."
Seeing Double
Rather than create their own sites from scratch, some children's bookstores have chosen a middle route: their own Web site and a BookSense.com site for customers who want to shop online. This 50-50 approach has worked well for Hicklebee's in San Jose, Calif.—www.hicklebees.com and hicklebees.booksense.com. "The store started with Hicklebees.com," says co-owner Valerie Lewis. "My sense is that when my customers want to find me, they're going to type in Hicklebees.com. I want everything to be easy for them. My online presence is one of the biggest marketing tools I have, so it should be easy."
Lewis views the BookSense.com site as an entirely different bookstore. Although most of Hicklebee's online sales are for signed books connected with events, BookSense enables Hicklebee's to be a general, rather than a specialty, bookseller, and to encourage customers to order adult books as well as children's titles.
As Carol Schweppe, who takes care of the Hicklebee's Web sites, points out, it's relatively inexpensive to maintain Hicklebees.com: $40 a month. She posts the store's events on both sites and finds that having a digital camera (and software to use it) is a plus. Not only does she photograph events and post them on the site, but she's trying to get customers to look online for news of upcoming events. The store's online notices for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix were particularly effective, bringing in a few hundred new customers on the big night.
All for Kids Books & Music in Seattle, Wash., uses a similar system, although, unlike Hicklebee's, which keeps both sites separate, www.allforkidsbooks.com has a link right on the home page to allforkids.booksense.com. Dennis Fitzgerald, a former reporter and editor, who is marketing coordinator for the store, takes care of both sites. Like Schweppe, he keeps his digital camera at the ready during events. In addition to posting photos online, he occasionally takes a picture of a customer with the author, prints it, and has the author sign the photograph while the customer is still in the store.
"We look at the Web site as an opportunity to let people know who we are," Fitzgerald says. "It doesn't pay for itself. We're working on billing out co-op. We're part of the BookSense.com co-op program, and we plan to do reviews for the regular Web site and get co-op for them." Although redesigning the store's regular site took a lot of time, now that it's done, Fitzgerald estimates he puts in between 10 and 20 hours a week to keep it current. Many of the store's pages have pictures and descriptions of past events and author interviews, as well as upcoming ones. The BookSense site is a lot less time-consuming.
Eight Cousins (www.eightcousins.com) is one of the few bookstores, specialty or no, to have its initial Web site donated. "I knew we needed to do it," says owner Carol Chittenden. "I had a staff member who took courses in Web design. She said, 'Could you be my term project?' " That was three years ago, but with a dial-up connection, Chittenden didn't have much incentive to change the basic site. Not only was her connection slow, but she couldn't get credit card authorization and be online at the same time. This month Eight Cousins switched to DSL, and Chittenden is meeting with BookSense.com to see if she can afford to have it and link the two sites together. "I would like to support BookSense.com as an alternative to Amazon.com," she notes. "In time, if we keep at it, we can make serious inroads."
Getting back to that question—Is it worth it?—every one of these booksellers would answer with a resounding "yes." But with one proviso: don't expect the Web site to take care of itself. "I think of the site as having one more employee," Chittenden says. "If you never take the time to train it, supervise it and encourage it, you're not going to get your money out of it."
