Long before Steve Bercu of BookPeople started his Texas campaign to "Keep Austin Weird" and Liz Murphy of the Learned Owl began speaking out against mall sprawl in Hudson, Ohio, Jim McKee and Linda Hillegass of Lee Booksellers set out to educate their patrons in Lincoln, Nebr., about the benefits of shopping at independently owned local bookstores. It was a project born of necessity: Lee's two locations suffered a precipitous 37% drop in sales t after Barnes & Noble opened its doors in this college town in 1994.
"We had to sit down and figure out 'Who are we?' and 'What are we trying to do?' We realized that we were local and that we could provide the customer service only a local business could provide," Hillegass recalled.
"It was never a 'Buy local' campaign," Hillegass told PW. "We've never said, 'We're local, shop here.' It's always been a 'We're local, we can provide friendly, personal, great customer service' campaign."
But, first, they had teach their community the basics.
"There was a surprising lack of awareness," Hillegass explained. "A statistics class at the university did a survey that year and found out that people did not know we were locally owned. At about the same time, a professor told a class to buy a book from Barnes & Noble. When a student in the class who worked at our store suggested that people might buy the book from a local business like ours, the professor argued with her. He claimed Lee Booksellers was not locally owned, but was part of a chain."
"We had already realized that, in order to stand up to Barnes & Noble, we had to set ourselves apart," she continued. "But how could we do that, if people didn't even know the difference between a locally owned bookstore and a chain bookstore?"
McKee and Hillegass got to work. First, they redesigned their store's promotional materials. They commissioned a prominent local cartoonist with a distinctive style and a regional following to design a snazzy new nameplate for the store newsletter. The new design included caricatures of the two owners' faces. At the same time, the co-owners added the tag line, "Lincoln's own bookstore since 1979," to their store logo. They also became one of the beta-testing stores for Book Sense, which they continue to support.
The Power of Local
The bookstore focused on local authors when setting up and advertising in-store events. These events included Friday night readings by local poets. The weekly poetry readings drew an average 45 to 50 people to each reading. When U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, who's from Nebraska, visited, 167 people packed the store. "The local literati would show up in full force. Friday night became like cocktail party night here at the store," Hillegass said.
"Focusing on the work of local writers showed us the power of the local author," Hillegass told PW. "It's not just celebrities, it's the people who aren't as well known, but who have family and friends in the community, who will bring customers into the store."
Subsequently, Hillegass was asked to lead discussions about books on local radio station KFOR every few weeks. "It was amazing, people would come in, and ask for books I'd recommended on the show," she said. "They would recognize my voice. I don't do the show any more, but we're still placing ads on KFOR. We read the ads ourselves. People recognize that we're doing them ourselves. It brings them into the store."
A decade of emphasizing their ties to the local community must be working: Lee Booksellers is thriving. The bookstore has two locations: there's its 5,000-sq.-ft. flagship store in Edgewood Center and a 2,600-sq.-ft. store in the Piedmont Shops area. In 1976, the couple started J&L Lee Co., a small house that publishes two or three regional titles annually. The 40-book backlist (which includes Lincoln: A Photographic History) is sold in the stores and through regional wholesalers. Last year, the bookstores' gross revenue was $2 million, easily eclipsing pre-1994 gross revenues.
Last month, when Lee Booksellers celebrated its 25th anniversary in business by throwing a big party, 300 people showed up to help salute the milestone.
"It's hard work—we have to emphasize that we are locally owned every single day, in every single thing we do," Hillegass said. "The chains have been here for 10 years—but we're still here, 25 years and counting."
