For the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association and the Southern Independent Booksellers Association, there’s strength in unity. After joining forces in 2020 to host New Voices New Rooms, a virtual conference, the associations concluded their second successful in-person iteration of the event on August 11 in Arlington, Va. And it looks like there’s no going back.
“I wonder now how I used to do this alone, even though I did it alone for more than 25 years,” says NAIBA executive director Eileen Dengler.
“Our booksellers really love getting to know the other organization’s members,” adds SIBA executive director Linda-Marie Barrett. “They have a lot of similarities, but they’re learning some different ways of doing things that they may not have heard about in their own circles.”
Dengler and Barrett say they’ve developed a system that works well despite the regional divide. NVNR’s in-person debut in August 2023 drew 200 booksellers to Arlington. This year’s conference drew 250, a 25% increase.
“Our two teams really work well together,” Barrett says. “They have different skills in what they bring, and it’s helped us spread the workload. Together, we can pull off things that I think would be hard to pull off as an individual regional.”
The two associations bring different strengths to the mix. NAIBA, which runs a professional bookselling school, is especially strong in the education realm—thus Dengler oversees that track; SIBA, meanwhile, was well-known for its consistently vibrant author lineups, and Barrett coordinates that programming. Every panel pairs a NAIBA bookseller with a SIBA bookseller, so, as Barrett explains, “booksellers see themselves in the programming, but also get to work with booksellers from the other organization.”
At the same time, each association continues to collaborate with its own membership on programming, to ensure their needs are being met. “Linda-Marie asks her members what they want, I ask my members what they want,” Dengler says, adding that 2024’s NVNR featured some “region-specific events.”
From the Heartland
That the NVNR collaboration is working is no surprise to members of the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association (MIBA) and the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association (GLIBA). The two groups have hosted the joint Heartland Fall Forum together since 2012. This year’s event, set for Oct. 6–9 in Milwaukee, Wis., will close out the regional trade show season.
Booksellers initially expressed unhappiness with the 2012 announcement that MIBA and GLIBA were switching to a joint trade show, forcing leaders from both associations to promise they would resume individual fall shows if things did not work out. Heartland had almost 400 booksellers in Minneapolis for its first joint show, a solid showing, but with a slight hitch: only 20% were GLIBA members.
More than a decade later, GLIBA executive director Larry Law says the attendance numbers have “leveled out” between the two associations, although they still tend to fluctuate according to where the show takes place, as the conference location switches back and forth between the two territories. But the show has come into its own. This year’s conference is expected to draw large numbers from both organizations, as many Wisconsin stores belong to both and Milwaukee is only a 90-minute drive from Chicagoland.
As with NVNR, there’s a division of labor: GLIBA takes the lead on education, while MIBA leads on author programming. The two also take turns organizing parties and tours, depending on the location of the show. Both groups have seen spikes in membership recently, says MIBA executive director Carrie Obry, and need to consider how to expand Heartland’s capacity. To that end, a steering committee with members from both boards was formed to “help staff create a vision for the future of the show.”
There are other challenges, too. Both directors admit moving the show around makes things more complicated. “Every year, it’s like relearning doing the show, because it’s in a different city, and nothing is the same,” Law says.
Nevertheless, the collaboration is worth it. “It’s a model that’s truly successful,” Obry says.
