Since the start of the pandemic, booksellers from around the country have experienced significant issues with Seattle-based virtual box office company Brown Paper Tickets. Some stores have not received payment for events that took place almost a year ago, while others are faced with complaints from frustrated customers waiting on refunds that are the responsibility of Brown Paper Tickets. Communication from the company became sporadic and vague, with booksellers unable to get clear answers on the status of their refunds.
As a result of a lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Washington State in September 2020, Brown Paper Tickets entered into an agreement yesterday to fully refund all event organizers, as well as customers who purchased tickets to canceled events. The company will have seven months to refund a total of roughly $9 million, and as part of the resolution Brown Paper Tickets will have to provide monthly updates on its progress.
Ticket purchasers or event organizers do not have to file a claim to receive the money they are owed. Brown Paper Tickets will reach out directly to arrange refunds, and recipients who live in Washington State will receive a letter or e-mail from the Attorney General's Office. About 90% of the people who are eligible for refunds are ticket holders who are owed less than $50 on average. Event organizers, meanwhile, are owed substantially larger amounts.
Valerie Koehler, owner of Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, Tex., reported that she is still owed $13,000 for two large events the store hosted just before the initial wave of Covid-19 shutdowns in March 2020.
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| Jason Reynolds at Blue Willow's event last year. | |
The events featured Jason Reynolds and Cassandra Clare, and Koehler and events coordinator Cathy Berner used Brown Paper Tickets to handle ticket sales. They'd had a working relationship with the company for more than two years and preferred them to other ticketing companies like Eventbrite, but after the city and state shutdowns began, communication went from "regular e-mails to nothing" and payments had still not arrived.
She and Berner realized that the company must have been "having some serious issues," and let the issue "stew" for a couple of weeks. But, after a long delay and still no response from Brown Paper Tickets other than a single "rather vague return e-mail," Koehler eventually contacted the office of the Washington State Attorney General. In addition to the lawsuit mentioned above, a number of other legal actions were filed against Brown Paper Tickets over the ensuing months, including a class-action lawsuit, of which Blue Willow Bookshop is a part.
Earlier this year Koehler reached out to the American Booksellers Association, wondering if they'd heard similar complaints from other bookstores. The ABA put her in touch with a group of indies who reported similar problems, and after an initial meeting in early March, Koehler hopes to find more booksellers who have experienced the same issues and see if "we have the collective mass" to do something.
While she is unsure yet exactly what the options are, "we just want to make it right for people." (Booksellers who have had similar issues with Brown Paper Tickets can reach Koehler at girlboss@bluewillowbookshop.com.)
Last March, Boswell Book Company, in Milwaukee, Wis., canceled its upcoming events because of the pandemic, and store owner Daniel Goldin recalled that most of those events were relatively small, free events, with customers able to purchase a book in advance if they wished. Two of the canceled events, however, were large-scale events requiring purchases in advance.
One was a sold-out author event with Elizabeth Gilbert, while the other was a "huge event" with Madeleine Albright that was a fundraiser luncheon for the League of Women Voters. The cost of a ticket for that event, Goldin continued, included a book and a "pretty substantial donation" to the League of Women Voters.
When those events were canceled, it became the responsibility of Brown Paper Tickets, not Boswell Book Company, to refund customers, and while some customers have been able to get refunds on an individual basis, many have not. This has put the bookstore in an uncomfortable position where a large number of customers believe that Goldin and his team owe them their refunds.
For the smaller canceled events, he noted, many of those ticket buyers were regular customers and in general have been more understanding. The Elizabeth Gilbert and Madeleine Albright events, however, drew many first-time customers who have not been so understanding. Goldin has done his best to smooth things over with those customers, and although the Gilbert tickets were eventually refunded in October, the Albright event continues to hang over the store.
He hears from a number of those customers regularly, and some have said that they will not buy anything from the bookstore until the issue is resolved. In other circumstances, he added, he might consider covering the cost of refunds for the sake of customer goodwill, but the cost of the Albright tickets was so high that that simply isn't possible.
Ginny Wehrli-Hemmeter, events coordinator for Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville and Downer's Grove, Ill., said that prior to the pandemic, the store had worked with Brown Paper Tickets for around five years and "really loved" working with them, yet that relationship deteriorated very quickly after the pandemic began.
The last big in-person event the store did was with Erik Larson in the first week of March. Normally, the store would receive a check from Brown Paper Tickets a week or two after hosting an event, but the check for the Larson event did not arrive until the end of the month, and then it bounced.
There was also an event with Glennon Doyle scheduled for March 13 that was canceled on March 11, and while that event didn't take place, the bookstore did eventually get the books from that event out to everyone who purchased tickets with the help of the book's publisher. By June, the store got paid for that event, though it took "almost constant" communication with Brown Paper Tickets on the part of Wehrli-Hemmeter and Anderson's comptroller, and there has been no regular communication from Brown Paper Tickets since June.
Anderson's has still not been paid for the Erik Larson event, and the majority of customers who purchased tickets to a canceled event with Jim Carrey have not received refunds. Those big celebrity events, Wehrli-Hemmeter pointed out, often attract people who are not regular customers, and they "were not exactly understanding."
Another layer of frustration has been the loss of the store's working relationship with Brown Paper Tickets. Anderson's Bookshops has had to find a new ticketing partner for events, and the store is now accepting payments only under stringent guidelines. Said Wehrli-Hemmeter: "We can't get burned again, and we can't let our customers get burned again." --Alex Mutter