Children's Features

Thinking Outside The Box
Judith Rosen -- 12/11/00
Children's booksellers share some tips on successful promotions and events


Bank Street Bookstore in NYC brought
in Arthur for its 30th anniversary.
Out-of-the-box thinking is not just the preserve of large corporations; it's something children's bookstores have been doing for a long time. To find new ways to display backlist titles or to lend the same cachet to children's books that adult books have, children's bookstores have to be flexible in their approach to marketing and promotion. Sometimes it's a matter of listening to customers; other times, necessity is truly the mother of invention--when it comes to newsletters, displays, and events. As 2000 draws to a close, PW asked booksellers from large stores and small to share successful marketing experiments from the past year.
Promotion, Promotion, Promotion
For Elly Gore, children's book buyer for all six Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisc., "the major thing we've done is discount the New York Times top five picture books and hardcover chapter books 40%. We started at the end of July, when the Times announced that it would have a children's bestsellers list."

The Schwartz stores, which are general bookstores with prominent children's sections, have discounted the NYT adult fiction and nonfiction lists for a number of years. When the Times children's bestseller list began, the stores experimented with displaying the children's bestsellers side-by-side with the adult ones. In addition, they gave them prominent placement in the kids' departments, put discount bookmarks in each one and singled them out in the store newsletter and in newspaper ads. As a result, said Gore, "there was truly a major change in children's sales."

At Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville, Tenn., children's manager Ginger Knight found an unusual way to fill display tables during the long wait for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. "In June, when there was a big lag in books, we did a table where we put up baby pictures of the staff and mentioned our favorite books." Not only did Knight's own childhood favorite (Daniel Pinkwater's The Big Orange Splot)and other backlist titles start moving, but the photos sparked lively conversations among staff and customers trying to match pictures with booksellers.

Knight also revamped Saturday morning story times with the help of local actress and theater instructor Vicki Foltz. On Saturdays, the Nashville store introduced Lunch Box Theater, which included Foltz in a one-woman production of Amelia Bedelia, and her students in scenes from The Phantom Tollbooth and a Dr. Seuss compendium. "We did it on Saturday so parents could bring their kids. Parents could buy lunch at our café or bring their own," explained Knight.

In New York City, 30-year-old Bank Street Bookstore found that even seemingly jaded city folks will come out for events, if the line-up is full enough. "We usually do events more sporadically. We might do two or three a month," said manager and buyer Beth Puffer, who upped the ante considerably by scheduling two or three events per week in late September through early November to mark the store's birthday. "We found that having a fuller schedule for our 30th anniversary was better. I think we got much better attendance than we normally do because of all the events, and we tried three teacher nights." At New York Is Book Country in September, Bank Street Bookstore launched the birthday celebration with 15 authors in one day. An appearance by Pete Seeger and Paul Jacobs, authors of Pete Seeger's Storytelling Book,was so popular that it was moved to the larger Bank Street College Auditorium. In-store events with Eric Carle, Jon Scieszka and Marc Brown's Arthur character also drew strong attendance.

She credits part of the success to Bank Street's use of one-to-one and e-mail marketing. "We found people who had bought other books by the authors coming to our bookstore, and we sent them flyers," said Puffer, who sent announcements to the store's e-mail list of 500 customers.

All the News That's Fit to Print--or E-Mail
Sarah Wood-Prince, co-owner of Children in Paradise Bookstore in Chicago, touts the effectiveness of online marketing. "We changed from having a paper newsletter to our online newsletter. Our customers are always asking for books by age. At our Web site, we started highlighting books by age, and I can't believe the run on books posted on our site." Each listingincludes a recommended age range. Based on the number of people who have signed up, the store's customers look forward to e-mail book news. According to Wood-Prince, "We leave a sign-up sheet at the register, and people are more willing to give out their e-mail address than their home address."

Storybook Cove in Hanover, Mass., mails out 5,500 to 6,000 newsletters three times a year. This year, said owner Janet Bibeau, "we added jackets, and it helped. We used to just do book blurbs. People never came in asking for the books before we added jackets."

Now those who do come in to shop can get an automatic 10% discount on every book they buy when they fill three frequent-buyer cards. Bibeau said that she got the idea when she noticed how many shoppers' wallets are filled with frequent buyer cards from the competition. This year she decided to do something about it. "If you complete three cards, you become a 10%-off customer all the time. It's kept some of the loyalty, as other places open around us," she noted.

"The main thing we did this year," commented Pat Christensen, owner of four-year-old Children's Book Express, which is located in a Victorian house in Denton, Tex., "is we did a lot of listening to our customers--not even what they said to us, but what we heard them talking about among themselves." After learning that customers were looking for more store news, Children's Book Express posted the information about upcoming events and new titles that is contained in the newsletter on a wall outside the store. "We take a big sheet of poster board and put it up for people to read on their way in or way out. We found that people will stop to read it. That works real well for us," she said.

Christensen has also added bulletin-board aids like growth charts to her product mix, and occasionally uses them on her poster-board signage. "There was a teachers' store in town that closed," she explained, "so we have brought in more teacher items." As a result, a lot of church groups and parents, as well as teachers, make special trips to her store. "We tie the bulletin-board aids into book displays and cross-merchandise them," she added.

For Dale Spector, co-owner of Yellow Book Road in La Mesa, Calif., which specializes in the school and library market, "it's not so much that we did different things this year as we did more of them." It seems to have paid off, because, as Spector noted, 're going to have a banner year this year." Among the things she has tried is taped book talks for media techs, as many school librarians are now known. Although Spector prefers to have media techs come to the store for presentations, taped presentations are also effective. "In one instance, I went to the high school and they taped it, so it could be reused with other media techs," said Spector. At another school, the media tech videotaped her talk and divided it into two-minute segments that are being aired throughout the year as part of the school's video morning announcements.

At Flying Pig Children's Books in Charlotte, Vt., co-owner Elizabeth Bluemle thought up a way around the store's relatively small, 900-sq.-ft. space. When she needs a large site for a Katherine Paterson or Steven Kellogg event, "we rent a tent and put it up next to the store," said Bluemle. "The co-op we get for the author pays for it." She then has the added advantages of having the customers come to her extended store and only having to haul books next door.

As Bluemle, Christensen, Puffer and the other booksellers have found, small changes can make a big difference. It's the new twist on a regular store event, improvements to a long-time newsletter and enhancements of customer loyalty incentives that help pay the bills at the end of the day--and contribute to profits at year's end.