"I'm like any other 26-year-old--a 26-year-old with a Starbucks tour."--Ishmael Beah, quoted in a Los Angeles Times story about A Long Way Gone, his memoir of his childhood as a soldier in Sierra Leone that was chosen by Starbucks for its book program.

Len Vlahos, director of BookSense.com, writes:
 
In response to "Online Alliances: Deal With the Devil or Pact for Profits?" Kate Whouley's coverage of a discussion on the NEIBA listserv, I'd like to clear up a few misstatements of fact regarding BookSense.com.
 
BookSense.com is an e-commerce solution, developed by the American Booksellers Association for its members and launched in November 2000. (For a good overall understanding of BookSense.com, I would refer readers to Robert Gray's three-part series, published in Shelf Awareness last year, beginning on November 14.)
 
The key issues raised in the article are how BookSense.com handles fulfillment and how BookSense.com handles affiliates (in particular, authors).
 
Regarding Fulfillment:
 
All stores that participate in BookSense.com have the option to have orders filled directly from the wholesaler to the consumer. Such an order ships with the store's name on the box and packing list. In other words, the participation of the wholesaler is transparent to the consumer.
 
But even for stores that do elect to use wholesale fulfillment (which includes all but a handful of participants), only 10%-15% of orders ship from the wholesaler. The vast majority of orders are filled directly by the store, either as in-store pickups or shipments by the store to the customer. We feel that this multi-tiered approach to fulfillment--store and wholesaler fulfillment, shipments and in-store pickup--puts BookSense.com Web sites on an even, if not slightly better than even, footing with online competitors when it comes to fulfilling orders.
 
Further, participants in the BookSense.com program have the option of uploading inventory data (quantity, price, location in the store) twice a day. This presents the consumer with an "On Our Shelves Now" inventory status. The stores that participate in this program also have the option of placing their own inventory first in the fulfillment cascade. So if a title is in stock at the store, the store, not the wholesaler, has dibs on fulfillment.
 
Regarding Affiliates:
 
The BookSense.com project has two ways of attracting and serving affiliates:
 
1. Each BookSense.com participant has among its tools what we call a "local affiliate program." This program gives booksellers the ability to track sales originating at an affiliate Web site and then to compensate those affiliates accordingly. Approximately 100 of the 220 stores that participate in BookSense.com use the affiliate program, and those stores have relationships with a total 1,140 affiliates, generating well in excess of $100,000 in sales over the past few years.  
 
Some booksellers have used this tool with great success. Notably, St. Helen's Bookshop, St. Helen's, Ore., has a relationship with Chuck Palahniuk's fan Web site to fulfill requests for signed copies of that author's works, and since 2002 the store has fulfilled requests for more than 3,000 units. Inkwood Books, Tampa, Fla., was the exclusive site for signed copies of American Soldier, the memoir by General Tommy Franks, fulfilling orders for more than 400 units.   
 
2. For affiliates that do not link to an individual store, BookSense.com manages a "national affiliate program," encouraging Web sites that feature books or book-related content to link to www.BookSense.com, the program's hub site. But rather than link to the BookSense.com home page, many of the more than 2,000 national affiliates choose, wisely, to link to a specific title.
 
The purpose of our hub site is to aggregate and redistribute traffic to stores that participate in the Book Sense program. So when an affiliate Web site links to a specific title, rather than direct the consumer to a generic Book Sense page, we direct him or her to the product page of the desired book at his or her locally-owned, independent bookstore. This requires one (and only one) extra step for the consumer, which is to enter a zip code. Once we have the zip code, we send the consumer to the Web site of the BookSense.com store that is closest and display the product page for the book in question.
 
For example, if you were browsing books on the Paris Review's Web site, you might come across this title: Women Writers at Work. Click the "Order Now" button, and you'll be greeted with a message about shopping locally and asked for your zip code. From there, you go directly to the book in question at your local bookstore.
 
The national affiliate program, which is meant as a safety net to capture affiliates not participating in the local affiliate program, has generated just under $100,000 in sales (separate from the money generated by the local affiliate program) over the past four years--sales that would otherwise have been lost to independent bookstores.
 
Promoting the national affiliate program and encouraging authors and other purveyors of Web sites to participate is a larger job than the BookSense.com staff can do on its own. To that end, we developed a template letter for booksellers to use when making this request of authors and publishers. That letter can be viewed online.
 
The ABA has continually invested in BookSense.com, and over the years the product has grown in its scope, utility and success. While the Web sites are first and foremost marketing tools, participating stores have seen continual growth in online sales, with the largest percentage of growth occurring this past holiday season. (We attribute this recent growth to the vast improvements made to the BookSense.com search engine in winter 2006.)
 
That said, we know that there are myriad ways BookSense.com can improve, and we're always actively seeking feedback from our members. (We conduct both an annual users' group meeting at BEA, as well as an annual meeting of our BookSense.com Users Council, a group of volunteer booksellers that advise us on the future direction of the program.) I encourage you to suggest that any ABA member with questions, suggestions or thoughts about BookSense.com contact me directly at len@booksense.com.
 
We look forward to the dialogue.  

Inc. Magazine continues its series on the effort to turn around Kepler's Books & Magazines, Palo Alto, Calif. Part 2 focuses on meetings held in late 2006. Among the highlights: a sense that high-tech saviors were having trouble applying their skills to saving a low-tech business; an analysis of Kepler's markets and potential markets by Michael Hoynes, former ABA marketing director, and his presentations to both the board and staff; talk about changing the store culture to make staff more aware of business issues and make them better salespeople--and at the same time, empower them more. One major problem for people working night and day to help the company: "compassion fatigue."

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Today is technically the last day of PGW. Tomorrow the company will be known as Transition Vendor, and the switch of many publishers to distribution by Perseus formally begins.  

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Reuters has an overview of the announcements this week by Random House and HarperCollins to let customers browse their books online, much as Google and Amazon allow the practice. The Random House initiative, done through a service called Insight, will also allow users to add material from its books to personal pages on MySpace and elsewhere and to a retailer's Web site.

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In late June, Borders plans to open a 21,532-sq.-ft. store in Tustin, Calif., in the new District at Tustin Legacy lifestyle and entertainment center. The million-sq.-ft. project is located at Jamboree Road and Barranca Parkway.

In May, the Borders store at the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, N.J., will move to a new spot in the shopping center, closer to a movie theater that is under construction. The new store will have 23,868 square feet of space.

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Barnes & Noble has approved a quarterly cash dividend of 15 cents a share, payable on March 30, payable to stockholders as of March 9.

 

This morning on the Today Show, Jennifer Trachtenberg offers advice from Good Kids, Bad Habits: The RealAge Guide to Raising Healthy Children (Collins, $21.95, 9780061127755/0061127752).

Also on Today: Catherine Crier, author of Final Analysis: The Untold Story of the Susan Polk Murder Case (HC, $27.95, 9780061134524/006113452X).

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Today on Good Morning America, the second of two-part feature with Lee and Bob Woodruff, authors of the memoir In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing (Random House, $25.95, 9781400066674/1400066670). The Woodruffs' lineup today includes NPR's Morning Edition and Fresh Air.

Also on Good Morning America: more from Dr. Mehmet Oz, co-author of You on a Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management (Free Press, $25, 9780743292542/0743292545).

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This morning's Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., has the theme women's history and features two interviews:

• Laurie Stoff, author of They Fought for the Motherland: Russia's Women Soldiers in World War I and the Revolution (University Press of Kansas, $34.95, 9780700614851/0700614850)
• Nikki Brown, author of Private Politics & Public Voices: Black Women's Activism from World War I to the New Deal (Indiana University Press, $29.95, 9780253348043/0253348048)
  

The show airs at 8 a.m. Central Time and can be heard live at thebookreport.net; the archived edition will be posted this afternoon.

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Today the Diane Rehm Show draws out Allen Shawn to talk about his memoir, Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life (Viking, $24.95, 9780670038428/0670038423).

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Today on the View: Angela Bassett and Courtney B. Vance, co-authors of Friends: A Love Story (Harlequin, $24.95, 9780373830589/0373830580).

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Nina Jablonski, author of Skin: A Natural History (University of California Press, $24.95, 9780520242814/0520242815).

 

Wellesley College English professor Frank Bidart has won the $100,000 Bollingen Prize in Poetry, awarded by Yale University for the best book published or lifetime achievement. The judges called his poems "eerie, probing, sometimes shocking, always subtle--venture into psychic terrain left largely unmapped in contemporary poetry," according to Bloomberg. Bidart's works include Star Dust (FSG), Music Like Dirt (Sarabande Books), In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-90 and Desire.

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The finalists for the 2007 Brontë Prize, which were culled from "more than 400 love stories published in North America in the past year," are:

• Angels Fall by Nora Roberts (Putnam)
• Bee Balms & Burgundy by Nelson Pahl (Cafe Reverie Press)
• Finding Noel by Richard Paul Evans (S&S)
• Tear Down the Mountain by Roger Alan Skipper (Soft Skull Press)
• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (Algonquin Books)

The winner will be announced on Thursday, March 15.

Appropriately Marc Gobé, a brand image creator and head of Desgrippes Gobé, saw our story about Daniel Pink's presentation at the ABA's Winter Institute (Shelf Awareness, February 5, 2007) and wanted to add to the discussion about how booksellers can better present themselves and the books they sell.

Gobé has explored issues of design and retail and reaching customers in Emotional Branding and Citizen Brand. His brand-new book, Brandjam: Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design (Allworth Press, $24.95, 9781581154689/1581154682), continues the theme of explaining "how design puts the face on the brand and creates an irresistible message that connects buyers to the product in a visceral way."

A native of France who lives in New York City, Gobé maintains that retail and brand experiences tend to be felt by customers either in the head, heart or gut. Most bookstores, he said, offer a head experience--focusing on having a cool, logical selection of titles, with "clean shelves and lots of choices . . . an academic, intellectual approach," often designed for people who know already what they want to buy. Booksellers tend to see and present books in a "narrow, business-like way." He finds this counterintuitive because unlike most other products, "books have personalities, they're exciting, they're sulphurous, they're dangerous. Books have always been attached with emotions and are the most emotionally transforming things."

Other more mundane products are presented, he argued, with the kind of emotion that are intrinsic to books. For example, Victoria's Secret is essentially a store that sells bras and panties, he said, but the company "makes shopping in it into something sensual and clearly enticing. They recognize that women want to enjoy their own femininity and have a sense of freedom and express their own sexuality."

Bookstores should "crank up the emotional interaction between people and the product," he went on. "Books can be absolutely essential in defining a customer, in stimulating them, driving them to new ideas, expressing who they are. Books define people the way clothes and fragrances and shoes do." (And bras and panties, too.)

Bookstores could easily offer a heart or gut experience, he went on. As an example of the heart experience in book retail, he described his favorite bookstore, a small shop in Paris on the Boulevard Saint-Germain that's "always crowded" and popular among intellectuals. It has "the best selection" of philosophy, economics and "some of the more brainy types of titles," Gobé said. "It's a place where I find topics and books that are totally amazing." Recently he visited and discovered a book about the industrial revolution that "I read and was so enthusiastic about," whose subject he had no interest in before seeing the book. "My sense is if I go there, I will find a book I can't find anywhere else" and a style of book that "will stimulate my mind. I have never been there and not bought something."

By contrast, a gut experience is full and stimulating, "more a lifestyle" experience. One example would be a combination bookstore/café/movie theater, as in some small towns, or if Starbucks were to add a "really interesting" little bookstore in its cafes. "One could go there, buy a book, have a coffee, listen to music and have a total experience," Gobé said.

Many chain stores (he has consulted with Barnes & Noble on a concept store) "have the right formulas," and do well in offering a wide range of books and allowing customers "to get a bunch of books, a sandwich, coffee and listen to a speaker," Gobé said. But the chains "fall short on not knowing how to package offerings according to dominant social or lifestyle themes. They are still very regimented in the way they present books."

Smaller bookstores, he said, can be competitive and "have an opportunity to be more exclusive in their point of view in contrast to the massive offerings of Barnes & Noble. They can compete with their personal vision and understanding of what's really exciting and stimulating in literature and books."

Most people like to read, he continued, but they are "faced with massive amounts of offerings. They need editors, like fashion or food editors. Booksellers should say that out of all the stuff being published, we stand for these 30 books." The store and displays and environment should tell customers, "What you get shopping with us is a certain vision of what's interesting and powerful that you should know about. Even if the ideas are sometimes conflicting, they are relevant." Not surprisingly, he is a big fan of staff recommendations.

A concrete first step for any bookstore to take is "to manage windows as an experience," as Gobé put it. "Take several books on the same theme and make a huge statement about those books. Make it a display that says this is something everybody has to know about. Having a single focus on big ideas will drive people into the store."

Inside the store, it's "really important to break down shelves and instead of presenting books by categories, find themes that are relevant to people's lives."  For example, the Harry Potter phenomenon is, Gobé said, part of "a return to the era of mystery" and gothic. As a result, a suitable display around Potter time should be "all gothic. The front of the store should be gothic." The approach should resemble that of fashion stores, which, when teal is in vogue, make "the first 15 feet of the store teal."

Overall stores should "bring a sense of home and warmth and personal interaction that makes you linger in the store, sit, have coffee, meet with some friends, listen to a speaker," Gobé said. Then the store becomes more than "a retail environment" and like "a social rendezvous." He added that if a customer "can feel and touch and be stimulated by an environment, by a design," a retailer has achieved his goal.--John Mutter