The 2009 holiday season had more than its share of harsh realities, including reduced consumer budgets and cautious or uncertain book buyers. But that didn’t stop independent bookstores from making the best of the holiday season—and in some cases great success—with thanks to Suzanne Collins, handselling, and National Public Radio.
Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., devoted more space to children’s this year, and not just shelf space, but floor space for children to hang out. It is definitely paying off. “For many months,” said co-owner and children’s buyer Carol Stoltz, “children’s was definitely doing well, whereas the adult books were down.” By the end of December though, the store was up overall and kids’ were up even more.
Classics were strong there. Given the store’s location, Make Way for Ducklings is a perennial bestseller. The Sterling classics, both the abridged and unabridged, sell well, and Porter Square even sold several copies of the pop-up edition of The Little Prince.“My one enthusiastic surprise,” Stoltz said, “is that The Book Thief continues to be an amazing seller.” Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea for children is also still selling well.
Many of her strongest sellers for the year, predictably, were series like The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, Wimpy Kid, and Twilight. Stoltz says that she didn’t have many problems keeping books in stock, although she did spend a lot of time chasing Lucy Cousins’s Yummy, and Life-Size Zoo also sold out.
For Claire Benedict, co-owner with her husband, Robert Kasow, of Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, Vt., “It was a better Christmas than last Christmas, but it was not dramatically better—it was marginally better.” Her experience mirrored that of many New England booksellers. “Children’s books always remain very strong. I think they were stronger this year. People always buy for their kids, but are still a little cautious with their money. In Vermont, we don’t have the highs and lows of the economy, but we certainly feel it. People who come in are very devoted to shopping local. People get it here. Without that attitude we wouldn’t be here.”
A snowstorm that swept up the East Coast affected sales the weekend before Christmas, but many stores were able to make up much of the difference in the intervening days. Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., which was in one of the hardest-hit areas, was forced to close early on both the Saturday and Sunday before Christmas because of a 20-inch snowfall. Even so, said Dara La Porte, manager of the children’s and teen department, “We really had a good season. We were down a small percentage, and if we had not had that snowstorm, we would have had a spectacular season.”
In October 2008, Politics & Prose added a teen section, PG-15. One Christmas later it proved its worth. “That section did really well,” said La Porte, who attributed at least 50% of children’s hardcover sales to it. K.L. Going’s King of the Screwups and Don Calame’s Swim the Fly were among the section’s bestsellers, once La Porte figured out how to handsell them to grandparents. Other strong sellers included Francisco X. Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World, Kristin Cashore’s Fire, Patricia McCormick’s Purple Heart, and Siobhan Vivian’s Same Difference.
The store also did well with picture book hardcovers; the two biggest for the season, La Porte said, were Jerry Pinkney’s The Lion & the Mouse and Jon Scieszka’s Truckery Rhymes. Loren Long’s Otis, Jeanne Willis’s The Bog Baby, illustrated by Gwen Millward; Jim Aylesworth’s The Mitten, illustrated by Barbara McClintock; and Candace Fleming’s Imogene’s Last Stand,illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, were also popular.
La Porte said that video did about half of what it had in 2008 and books on tape two-thirds, while books on CD were “pretty much flat.” And she expressed surprise that Christmas-themed books did much better this year than last.
At four-year-old Cornerstone Books in Salem, Mass., book buyer and events coordinator Beth Simpson said the Christmas season was busy. “We had a lot of dedicated, passionate book buyers,” she said. “People were talking about buying books as gifts and shopping local. At the same time, we didn’t have as many casual books-as-gifts buyers.”
Books for children books are one of the store’s top performers, Simpson said, and that held true this holiday season. “Board books flew off the shelf. For picture books we’ve seen a switch from hardcover to softcover because of price. YA has been a quieter area for us.”
Children’s classics, which were moved into a new section last spring, were standouts for Christmas. “The Little Prince pop-up was hugely popular,” Simpson said. “Our children’s classics outperformed picture books two to one, even though they have one-third the shelf space. When people don’t have a lot of money to spend, they go back to the classics.”
Elsewhere Around the Country
According to Jennifer Laughran, children’s events coordinator at Books Inc., an indie chain in the Bay Area, the holidays “felt just as busy as always. We definitely had as many customers. Maybe they were a bit more conservative, but people were still buying.”
Particularly strong sellers at Books Inc., Laughran said, were Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me and Jacqueline Kelly’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate in middle-grade fiction, while All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon, illustrated by Marla Frazee, dominated the picture book category. Laughran also found an unexpected winner in the reissue of Alistair Reid’s 1958 Ounce, Dice, Trice, illustrated by Ben Shahn, which sold out only a few hours after Daniel Pinkwater touted the title on NPR. Laughran said that Books Inc. was forced to take “tons of special orders,” and luckily, their reorder arrived two days before Christmas.
Not every store was able to restock high demand titles with as much ease, however. Changing Hands in Tempe, Ariz., according to store manager Cindy Dach, was one of these stores. With the movie release of Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief around the corner in February, Dach found herself running out of Percy Jackson titles long before the holiday rush ended. So she decided to open up Percy Jacksonboxed sets and offer them to customers at a discounted price—assuring parents and grandparents that if they bought the boxed set now, “they wouldn’t have to come back to the store three days after Christmas to buy the next title in the series.” It worked.
Other big sellers for Dach included Jeff Kinney’s ever-popular Wimpy Kid series and Stead’s When You Reach Me (“we loved that book right after BEA,” Dach said, “and it had a reawakening around Christmas, which made me very happy”). Calling teen sales over the holidays “off the charts,” Dach happily reported seeing “a much broader reader who shopped in the teen section,” suggesting a move away from vampire books as the be-all, end-all of teen literature.
A few hot items were not enough to make 2009 a big holiday season for everyone. For Leslie Rainer, co-owner of Inkwood Books in Tampa, Fla., despite the popularity of their pre-wrapped holiday staff picks, “sales were down, unfortunately. Interestingly there was only maybe one fewer sale per day, according to the computer, but the dollar amount per purchase was definitely down.”
Although Reiner had success with YA novels like The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, and picture books like Yummy by Lucy Cousins and Never Smile at a Monkey by Steve Jenkins, Reiner observed that people were buying fewer books, and the books they were buying were less expensive, attributing this to the still-stagnant economy. “People here are conservative,” she said. “Our county is one of the hardest-hit in terms of unemployment and Florida is one of the worst states right now. Many of our parents have lost their jobs. People do still tend to buy for kids even if they don’t buy for each other, but people were definitely looking for the deals.”
At BookPeople in Austin, Tex., overall December sales were significantly stronger than in the previous year—up 10%, according to children’s buyer Meghan Dietsche Goel. She was pleased to see children’s sales hold even with last year, despite a dropoff in sales for the Twilight series. Like Cornerstone, BookPeople does well with classics during the holidays, and sales for the pop-up The Little Prince as well as Fantastic Mr. Fox were brisk.
Other standouts included local author Jacqueline Kelly’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, which sold well all year. Unfortunately, the store ran out before Christmas. They also had trouble getting When You Reach Me back in until just before Christmas. Margaret Mahy’s Bubble Trouble, illustrated by Polly Dunbar, also didn’t come back in before the holidays. Goel attributes the run on the Stead and Mahy books to a feature on NPR. “For us,” she said, “NPR is the big mover of children’s books.” In the teen category, both Catching Fire and Fire sold well, but Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan was especially strong, as were steampunk novels from Echelon Press.
Sarah Bagby, owner of Watermark Books in Wichita, Kans., reported strong children’s sales this holiday season, which isn’t surprising as the store sponsored a holiday book drive to benefit The Opportunity Project, an early education center for children living in poverty. Customers could buy any one of nine hardcover titles to donate to the children there. Watermark sold 400 copies of the nine titles. “One reason it was such a success is parents who could afford to buy the books would buy them—these books are not castoffs, but are books beloved by children,” Bagby explained.
Justine Stahlmann, co-manager of the Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul, Minn., reported that even though a monster snowstorm blew into the Twin Cities right before Christmas, sales were on par with last year, with two titles by local authors topping the list. Kate DiCamillo’s The Magician’s Elephant, illustrated by Yoko Tanaka,sold 88 copies in December and 500 total, while The 12 Days of Christmas in Minnesota by Connie van Hoven, illustrated by Mike Wohnoutka, sold 82 copies in December and 369 total. Stahlmann insisted the store could have sold many more copies of the latter title if they had been able to procure more copies after they ran out.
Titles with Christmas themes sold well this year at the Red Balloon, including Christmas Magic by Lauren Thompson and Jon J Muth, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Gail de Marcken, and Fancy Nancy’s Splendiferous Christmas by Jane O’Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser. Other picture books that sold well included The Lion & the Mouse and All the World. For older readers, the bestselling chapter book was Ivy & Bean: Doomed to Dance by Annie Barrows and Sophie Blackall; The Hunger Games and The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate also moved briskly.
Looking for a Deal
Regardless of whether sales were up or down, one thing that almost all booksellers reported was that people were searching for bargains. These included everything from mid-December coupons at Books Inc. (which did “very well”), to the pre-packaged holiday picks at Inkwood Books (“it’s quick and they trust our judgment”), to the Grinch’s appearance at Changing Hands in Tempe (70—80 people showed up in 2008 to take pictures with Seuss’s famous curmudgeon, while more than 350 showed up this year), to the free plush toy that came with a Dr. Seuss purchase at 57th Street Books in Chicago. Changing Hands’s Dach noted that her store, which carries used as well as new books, saw an increase in used book sales for the first time during the gift-giving season. “It’s no longer a taboo to give a used book as a gift,” she said—especially when parents and grandparents are making efforts to be “green” and to save money.
Because Cornerstone’s community is very cost-conscious, the store began honoring Barnes & Noble and Borders coupons last year. In addition, its weekly e-mail blast includes a coupon for 20% off one item. “It became clear last holiday season that things were going to be challenging,” Simpson said. “You always have to be thinking about competing with the big retailers. We can’t compete on price, but we can show the value of shopping with us.”
Kris Vreeland, children’s buyer of Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, Calif., also noticed a decrease in the sale of hardcovers, and felt customers had a more selective eye. “They wanted more support from staff, more feedback, more handselling. They were being much more careful.” Despite this caution, Vroman’s did very well with a number of titles, including The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, as well as The Magician’s Elephant. Local illustrator Marla Frazee helped make All the World a big hit among area parents and grandparents. And both Changing Hands and Vroman’s sold out of Ounce, Dice, Trice in a matter of hours after the NPR interview aired.
While customers were conservative when it came to purchases, indie booksellers generally reported that their customers seemed upbeat. Angela Sherrill, children’s book buyer at 57th Street Books, felt that “customers were generally very happy to be shopping with us. They tell us how much they love the store and appreciate our expertise and services.”
Dach agreed and felt that a big part of this attitude had to do with a newfound, or rediscovered, desire to support local business. “It was very apparent that customers were very conscious about the Local First movement” this season, she said, “and that translated into a lot of foot traffic for the store.”
Vreeland said that “people were in a really good mood, and staff was up and optimistic. There was a lot of energy going into making the season a successful and positive one. Even if it wasn’t quite the dollars it had been in the past, overall it think it was a very positive season—just in terms of how people felt, and I think that’s always a good sign.”
