PW: Web Sales Rising for Independents

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Web Sales Rising for Independents
by John High -- 2/1/99

Booksellers find Web rings help attract customers to their sites and stores.

Four Bay Area independent bookstores have stimulated strong community outreach and increased sales, both on the floor and through online sales, with the creation of a collaborative Web ring. The Booksmith of San Francisco (www.booksmith.com), Cody's in Berkeley (www.codysbooks.com), Capitola Book Cafe of Capitola (www.cruzio.com/~bookcafe.com) and Printers Ink of Palo Alto (www.pibooks.com) joined together to create a new high-tech way to promote author tours and to enhance the independents' presence online.

Due to the collective's most recent project, a virtual tour of Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary from Simon &Schuster (News, Sept. 14, 1998), the Booksmith alone sold 300 signed books since November, and Printers Ink has sold all of its 100 signed copies. "That's 10 times what we would have normally sold," noted Gary Corduan of Printers Ink, the ring master and the concept's initiator.

The medium provides the kind of thinking that will help independent stores survive into the next millennium. Although Printers Ink is closing its Palo Alto location at the end of March due to rising rents, its Mountain View, Calif., store will remain in business. The Web ring has helped the company combat the competition from Amazon.com and B&N (both in-store and online).

Corduan got the Web ring idea after visiting Madonna's Web site and then seeing Anne Rice read at Dark Carnival to an excited audience of fans decked out in costumes. "Think of the book tour as a pop tour -- a show," said Corduan. "You have photographs, book excerpts, tour diaries.... The motion-picture industry creates an audience for their films. Why can't we do the same thing online for publishing?"

Thomas Gladysz of the Booksmith came up with the idea of approaching Simon &Schuster for the Thompson tour. Gladysz told PW that the site's listing receives prominent in-store display for floor shoppers, as well as exhaustive marketing via the Internet: submissions to search engines, postings to news groups and notices to each store's e-mail list.

For Thompson's Rum ring, the Booksmith site received more than 4000 hits in two months and sold five times the number of books the store would have sold without the Web ring collaboration. More than half of the store's 300 copies were sold online.

Once the site is up, it can stay online indefinitely, with each store continuing to contribute to the material buyers find there. This is exactly what happened with Printers Ink's first Web creation. Corduan set up a site in 1995 featuring Riverhead's catalogue, since the new imprint didn't have its own site at the time. Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation became a popular chat site, prompting Corduan to develop a space specifically dedicated to the author on the Printers Ink website. She wrote in, posted messages for readers of Prozac Nation, even did an online review for a new Bruce Springsteen album. Everything snowballed from there.

When Wurtzel's Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women was published last year, Doubleday had her slated to read at Cody's, the Booksmith, Capitola Book Cafe and Printers Ink. Corduan saw an opportunity and called the other stores, inviting them to join together to create the Bitch ring.

That's when the Web ring was born. Each store's site was linked, offering information on the book, the author, her writing and her musings, with each store contributing to the contents of the sites. The stores even posted Wurtzel's responses to post-reading Q&A sessions.

When the group contacted Simon &Schuster about doing a Web ring for Hunter S. Thompson's new book, they discovered that the author was not slated to read at any of the Web ring stores. Corduan told PW that it was Pam Duevel, Thompson's publicist at Simon &Schuster, who came up with the breakthrough solution of giving the stores signed bookplates in exchange for a Web promotion. Each store submitted a request for the number of books it thought it could sell, and roughly 600 copies were distributed to the four stores with the free signed plates.

Thompson personally selected the material from The Rum Diary for the ring's online postings. Each of the four stores carries separate chapters, giving the online shopper a unique chance to piece the chapters together while surfing the Web ring. The online shopper can also browse through Thompson's handwritten notes, radio interviews, photographs and letters, digital photos from other readings, even the author's responses to fans' e-mail questions. And every store links to the other stores' sites.

Unfortunately, just after the Web ring was up and running, Thompson's national tour was canceled. But the Bay Area stores got their signed copies anyway, in essence creating a virtual tour without the real one.

Both Printers Ink and the Booksmith have since been contacted by Simon &Schuster and by Random House for other projects. "We're definitely developing a relationship," noted Gladysz. "They see what we can do. Now it depends if the author is right for us, what we're going to get out of it." The four stores may work together again or even branch out nationally.

The Printers Ink website will remain in place after the closing of the Palo Alto store. "Bookselling as we know it is changing," Corduan said. "It has to be treated differently. The Web ring is one way for booksellers to combat the challenges. It is a medium that is inventing itself as it g s. Amazon has not exhausted what can be done on the Web. We have to get independent booksellers back in the game."
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