Dozens of booksellers gathered at Spring Book Show to  discuss a variety of topics including store traffic, the economy, and maximizing sales.

Ideas for Attracting Store Traffic
Use Twitter to make friends, not for the hard sell.  High Give:Ask ratio.
Use Get Caught Reading!
Keep sign-up sheet for Emails at Point of Purchase area.
Use Facebook!
Exploit B2B!  Reach out to schools, non-profits, gift shops, museums, realtors, libraries, etc.

Making the Most of Each Customer; Maximizing Sales, Creating Repeat Customers
Advanced Hand Selling – Place the book in the customer’s hand and take the book out of the customer’s hands, both create ownership and sell books.
Offer a ‘money back guarantee” book; get the staff to agree on pushing selected staff picks.
Sell to any & all that enter the store to sell you.

Getting the Customer to Return, And Bring a New Customer
Give automatic local discount based on zip code.
Daily Word Challenge – game where a purchase must be made to play; win something from the “fabulous prize box”, in this instance filled with mini candy bars.
In the case of used books, have receipt show how much has been saved.
Host an in-store Ereader Class inviting customers to bring in their e-readers and demonstrate how to buy books from your website.
Print off bibliographies for your customers of their favorite writers or genres.

Other Ideas
Post on Facebook when you get in a large quantity of books.
In Search of a Great Idea!
Post pictures of books on quirky subjects.
Get on email list of other bookstores.
Make your emails relevant.
Gifts Galore for Bookstores
Do “If you like this, then you’ll like this…” signs.
Design bookmarks with other local business logos & coupon to place in other businesses.
Create Gift Registry for new baby, bride, housewarming, etc.
Offer services such as SAT Tutoring
What Booksellers Want!

Booksellers Benefits Package from SIBA.
SIBA Membership Dues Form

From a Savvy Bookseller

By Heather Hebert, Children’s Book World

We are about to head into the time of year when fall galleys start flooding into our stores.   It always starts out nice and organized and then inevitably the galleys completely overtake your office, your back room, your storage area.  Your instinct is to get rid of them, but wait,  DO NOT GET RID OF YOUR FALL GALLEYS until you read this first.  We have been running a program for the last twelve years that brings customers in repeatedly, builds a sense of community, generates tons of goodwill and  it costs nothing, and takes next to no time set up and run.  It is our read and review summer program for children, tweens and Young Adults.

Every summer we take most of the fall galleys we receive put them in crates according to age group (3rd- 5th grade, 6th -8th and YA).  We then send out an email inviting our customers to read and review these ARCS for us.  Each child is allowed to take out one book at a time and keep it for up to two weeks.   A one page review sheet is given with each book.  We do not want this to feel like homework so we keep the questions light and simple.  They can either be answered with pretty much one sentence (or even one word) such as , “would you recommend this book to your friend?”  and some of the questions are even in scale form, such as “rate this book on a scale of 1 to 10 – one  being awful and 10 being totally awesome!”  Everytime a book and review are turned in, a dollar store credit is given.  At the end of the summer, these credits can be redeemed.