Bookselling

Bookselling News
Staff -- 10/2/00

Tucson Book Vets Open New Bookstore
Sunny Outlook for Florida Distributor | Books and Books Moves
...Plus, Wells Discovers Northwest Territory


Tucson Book Vets Open New BookstoreWhen the Book Mark in Tucson, Ariz., closed in early 1999, readers mourned the loss of the city's last independent general bookseller. At the time, some of the Book Mark's booksellers began formulating a plan to open their own bookstore, and more than 1,000 customers asked to be notified if the employees were able to pull it off. Several weeks ago, those customers were notified that Reader's Oasis would open on October 2.
Co-owners Charlene Taylor
and Jeff Yanc before the
books arrived.
Originally five Book Mark booksellers tried to get financing to open a new bookstore (tentatively called Book Mark 2) but were unable to get bank approval. That's when Charlene Taylor entered the picture. Taylor, co-owner of the mystery bookstore Clues Unlimited since 1996, decided to leave that bookstore and joined with three former Book Mark booksellers--Lynn La Plant, Jason Shults and Jeff Yanc--to tighten up their budget, rework their financial plan and win the approval of the bank to open Reader's Oasis.
"We're not directly competing with the chains," Taylor told PW. "We're going to be a broad but niche bookstore. We're not carrying business and computer books." Books in the new store are arranged in six sections: Fiction, History & Biography, Art & Music, Children's, Local Interest and Inner World (which is the store's clustering of categories such as psychology, alternative medicine and self-help). The store is also focusing on regional and small presses.

While the old Book Mark had a Borders and B&N within three miles of it, Reader's Oasis has a more central location with a five- to-eight-mile buffer between it and the superstores. The partners are happy to be located in Rancho Center, one of the city's oldest strip malls, which recently underwent a major facelift. The 2,500-sq.-ft. bookstore's innovative design has five-foot-tall pale gray bookcases perched on top of two-foot-tall cupboards. "The bottom two feet is usually wasted space because people have such a hard time seeing those shelves," said Taylor. "Or once they get down to see what's on those shelves, they can't get back up. So we've raised the shelves and are using the cupboard bases for stock."

The co-owners have planned their grand opening celebration for October 14. Longtime Book Mark supporter Barbara Kingsolver has already donated a signed, bound galley of her forthcoming Prodigal Summer (HarperCollins, Nov.) for an in-store prize drawing. The store plans to have five local authors signing during the celebration.

All four owners will work in the bookstore and, according to Taylor, "We'll probably hire some part-time help in November unless we need them sooner. Right now we've had a number of people approach us volunteering to help us unpack and shelve books. People are that anxious to get us open!"
--Kevin Howell




Sunny Outlook for Florida DistributorRonald Ted Smith, president of BookWorld Services Inc. in Sarasota, Fla., which represents nearly 150 publishers ranging in size from two to 500 books a year, reported that at the end of August, "Sales were up 26% year-to-date, compared to last year. They are in the $15 million to $20 million range."

Smith attributed BookWorld's sales jump to several changes instituted over the past year, including a switch from commission reps to 10 in-house sales managers serving the U.S. and Canada. "We took a hell of a gamble," Smith said, referring to the higher cost of maintaining an in-house rep force. But, he said, "They are the reason we are so far ahead of last year." He also pointed to the company's shift in warehousing facilities from Sarasota to a 75,000-square-foot facility in more centrally located LaVergne, Tenn., home to Ingram.

In addition, Smith gave kudos to BookWorld's nine-month-old subsidiary, Christian Distribution Services (CDS), which was established shortly after Thomas More Publishers signed on. After starting with two publishers in January, CDS now represents 23 houses.

In other news, Smith announced that BookWorld is looking to create a similar New Age-oriented Health and Wisdom subsidiary. For now, he said, "We'll just let it ride. It will be a separate section of the BookWorld catalogue in spring 2001."
--Judith Rosen

WellsDiscovers Northwest Territory
In early 1999, when Diana Wells made the tough decision to close her business, the Traveller's Bookstore in New York City's Rockefeller Center, she did it with fight-back flair. Her final window display was a large map of Manhattan that pinpointed the locations of all the independent bookstores that had closed in the past few years, victims of Amazon.com and growing chains. The New York Times took notice and ran a long story on the store's passing.Though now nearly two years and 2,000 miles away, that event typifies the energy Wells brings to independent bookselling and no doubt helped the ABA choose her to become the first Book Sense marketing representative at large.
Depending on the success of this year's pilot program, the ABA is considering placing regional traveling reps around the country. Reps will introduce Book Sense to stores who have not yet participated and to help those already on board with online assistance, insurance, bestseller-list filing and other related business.
ABA's COO Oren Teicher told PW that the Northwest was chosen for the one-year pilot program because it contains every kind of bookstore, from highly urban to remote locations of varying sizes, as well as due to the Northwest's number of active members.
Wells, who recently relocated to Eugene, Ore., began her work in June by sending introductory e-mails to 40 of the largest stores in Oregon and Washington. Since then she has traveled through the Seattle area as well as to Spokane, Portland, and the Willamette Valley area, visiting more than 45 bookstores. From Oregon and Washington her trail will branch out to serve stores in Idaho, Montana and Alaska.
Wells told PW, "Booksellers are responding enthusiastically. I think the format of vendor-to-rep is a very good model, and the fact that I was a bookseller makes owners feel that they have insider advice. I act not only as a conduit of information from the ABA to them, but perhaps more important, take information back to New York about what is working and not working in the stores." Northwest stores can contact Wells at diana@bookweb.org.
--Barbara R ther



Books and Books Moves

Kaplan (with beard) and staff
outside their new location.
Mitchell Kaplan, owner of two Books and Books, in Coral Gables and Miami Beach, Fla., has his hands full these days. As one of the original founders of the 17-year-old Miami Book Fair International, he still oversees as chairman of the board. Fortunately, the November 12-17 book fair is running on target, because Kaplan is in the process of moving his original 18-year-old bookstore to a new location in Coral Gables.
"Annual sales have steadily increased to the point where another expansion was necessary," Kaplan, an ABA board member who has also served on SEBA's board, told PW. He had originally planned to expand his original location, until a vintage 9,500-sq.-ft. Mediterranean-style structure became available almost directly across the street. After being architecturally retrofitted as a store with 6,200-sq.-ft. of bookselling space (more than doubling the current space of 2,900 sq. ft.) and a café in an open courtyard, the new home of Books and Books is now set to open in late October or early November.

The atmospheric one-level structure was built in 1927 for doctors' offices and is listed on the Coral Gables Register of Historic Places. While the building's original tile floors, tall beamed ceilings and a fireplace in one of the six rooms have been retained, the flavor of Books and Books' original site has been duplicated as closely as possible.

"We'll have the same dark floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and staff our customers are used to," said Kaplan. "But we will now be able to offer them more." The café, for example, will be the stores' first, and the newsstand located off the courtyard will offer a wider selection of national and international newspapers and magazines. The store is also enlarging its children's section, as well as art, architecture, design and photography. "We will be adding more special events. In fact, with more rooms in the new store, we'll be able to have up to three events simultaneously if we want to."

So why has Books and Books grown while independent stores in general seem to be fighting a losing battle against the chains and the e-bookselling giants? Kaplan thinks his store's growth mirrors that of South Florida's community of writers and the Book Fair. "There are many more writers working here than there were when Books and Books opened," he said, "and we've been supportive of them just as they have supported us." Visits by publishers and authors during the book fair have also burnished the store's renown nationally.

Indeed, in David Rieff's investigative Going to Miami (Univ. Press of Florida), he cites Books and Books as "an admirable store, a place to decompress." And the Miami Herald has called Kaplan's enterprise "a metaphor for the South Florida literary scene."
--Bob Summer