The Elliott Bay Book Company and Me

For the past few years, several American Booksellers Association staff members have spent a few days in December working in members' stores. These visits have been a fantastic way to better understand bookstore operations while witnessing firsthand what it's like in the store's pre-holiday frenzy. You may have read Meg Smith's report about her experience at Changing Hands in Tempe, Arizona, in Bookselling This Week a few weeks ago; or the report Len Vlahos filed a year ago from Maria's in Durango, Colorado. On previous trips, I've visited with booksellers at The King's English in Salt Lake City, Utah, and The Regulator in Durham, North Carolina. Each time, I've come back exhilarated, a little exhausted, and full of all kinds of ideas and observations about how we can make ABA more useful and relevant for our members.

This year, I was thrilled to have the chance to work at The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Washington. Ever since I wrote about my experience at The King's English during the 2005 holiday season, Elliott Bay General Manager Tracy Taylor has been after me to come to Seattle, an invitation she has reiterated each time we have seen each other. At BookExpo America, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association trade show, and the Winter Institute, Tracy kept cajoling me to come to Elliott Bay for the holidays. She refused to take no for an answer, and I was lucky she didn't!

The Elliott Bay Book Company is a wonderful bookshop. In business for more than 35 years, Elliott Bay is a big store, with 22,000 square feet of selling space, 37 full-time employees, a remarkable event schedule, and, an inventory to die for. The store is located in a magnificent space in Seattle's Pioneer Square. Four big rooms, very high ceilings, lots of exposed brick walls, and a series of balconies, lofts, nooks and crannies, all combine to make the store's interior interesting and inviting.

Pioneer Square has its challenges. While it has a fair number of restaurants and galleries and has undergone some revitalization in recent years, it is the oldest part of downtown Seattle, where parking can be a problem and many of the buildings are still in transition. Like many big cities, Seattle has been inundated with chain competition, and Elliott Bay did go through some difficult years. But under owner Peter Aaron (who bought the store from founder Water Carr in 1998), the business has stabilized and has, in fact, shown some modest growth.

In accepting Tracy's offer, I told her that I only wanted to come if she'd put me to work, doing whatever I could to be helpful. I told her that the one thing she'd probably not want me to do (if she ever wanted to see those customers again) was to have me anywhere near the holiday gift-wrapping station! To my delight, Tracy took me at my word, and within, minutes of arriving at the store on the Wednesday before Christmas I was busy receiving, stickering, and sorting the newly arrived books into their holding "tanks" to be brought down to the selling floor.

Elliott Bay has a rotating staff schedule in which the entire staff performs multiple functions during any given workday. The result is that everyone (and I mean everyone) ends up doing a shift at the cash register, at the information desk, and on the floor. In addition, most of the staff are also responsible for a specific section of the store, so everyone is also spending time shelving, straightening, and re-shelving. At first, the schedule seemed hopelessly chaotic; but, after a few days, it became clear that the constantly shifting staff created a highly engaged and astonishingly informed group of booksellers.

The combined book knowledge of the Elliott Bay staff is remarkable. The staff was special in many other ways as well. They have mastered the art of being helpful and responsive without being intrusive, and the lengths they went to in order to ensure that customers left happy were a sight to behold. Whether a customer was looking for a $7 paperback or a $100 art book, everyone got the same caring and thoughtful attention.

The mantra at Elliott Bay is that, after a customer has inquired regarding where to find a certain section or a specific title, the bookseller gets up, walks that customer to the section, and helps her find the book -- engaging in conversation along the way. And, if the book is not in stock or, as occasionally happens in a store of this size, if you just can't find that title (or a suitable alternative), the bookseller offers to order it or to call neighboring stores to try to locate a copy. Seattle is blessed with many independent bookstores, and, a list of those stores with phone numbers and addresses is readily available for the entire staff to try to assist the customer.

The store was particularly abuzz with the news that one of its managers, Jamil Zaidi, had been selected by the producers of the Today Show to appear in a segment with three other independent booksellers to offer some 11th-hour holiday gift recommendations. Jamil did really well on the show, which aired on the Friday before Christmas, and the entire staff was pleased at the national exposure Elliott Bay received.

Jamil's appearance reinforced for me the power of the media, as a number of customers came to the store over the next few days asking for the titles he had recommended (30,000 Years of Art, by the editors of Phaidon; The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss by Claire Nouvian; Enclosure by Andy Goldsworthy; and Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations by Vincent Virga and Library of Congress).

One really nice feature in the Pacific Northwest this holiday season was that Partners West continued to take orders from bookstores through Saturday afternoon, December 22, and Partners sent its truck out to make deliveries on Sunday, December 23. As a result, even as late as Saturday afternoon, if a title was out of stock and if Partners had it, you could still tell the customer that you could get the book before Christmas!

Elliott Bay's incredible inventory notwithstanding, some customer requests were hard to fill. My favorite unfulfilled requests were for a Zulu phrase book and a copy of The Complete Guide to European Picture Frames. I don't know how booksellers functioned in a pre-Google and Wikipedia era. Every computer terminal at Elliott Bay has full Internet access, and I found myself often consulting those sources to try to be of help. My proudest use-of-the-Internet moment came when a customer asked about that male author whose name she couldn't remember, who appeared on a recent Jon Stewart show talking about the role of religion in American life. Within seconds, I was on the Daily Show's website, and, within another minute, I had a copy of Jon Meacham's American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation in the customer's hand. Of course, that computer jockeying was dwarfed by the speed in which so many of the Elliott Bay staff were able to immediately answer customers' questions.

Elliott Bay has an excellent staff recommendation section, and, like a lot of stores, it clearly was the bestselling section in the store. The store creates its own holiday catalog, and it was clear that regular customers were coming in looking for titles that appeared in the catalog. After reviewing the titles in it, I understood just why I was selling so many copies of Transit Maps of the World.

During the four days I was there, the store was full of customers virtually all of the time. Even a few famous customers. Sherman Alexie, a Seattle resident and an Elliott Bay favorite, spent several hours doing his holiday shopping -- and good-naturedly paused to sign copies of his new book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The Elliott Bay staff was particularly thrilled to report that Sherman Alexie's book outsold the new Harry Potter in the store this year. (With sales reaching 640 copies.) Talk about successful handselling! Long-time Elliott Bay buyer Rick Simonson introduced me to Congressman Jim McDermott, who was also doing his holiday shopping. I couldn't have been happier to see that Rick had handsold the congressman a copy of Stacy Mitchell's Big-Box Swindle.

I can't say enough about the Elliott Bay staff -- they were just amazing. After I got back to New York, I told them in a e-mail that, over the next month or so, whenever they found something shelved in the wrong place, discovered a title stickered improperly, or heard the complaints from a customer about a dumb recommendation, they should just blame me! I also told them that, despite all the legitimate issues these days about the long-term survival of independent bookstores, I was convinced that spending four days at Elliott Bay would restore anyone's confidence in the importance and viability of bookselling!

The four days went by incredibly quickly, and, before I knew it, it was 8:00 p.m. on Saturday night. My stint at Elliott Bay was over. I said my farewells to the staff on the evening shift, collected a nice bag of gifts left for me by Tracy and Holly Myers, another long-time Elliott Bay staffer, and off I went into the rainy Seattle night.

by Oren J. Teicher, American Booksellers Association Chief Operating Officer, January 2, 2008 

Our Shelves Aren't for Sale: Independent Book Selling in the Mega Store Jungle

A book-club member attending one of our recent presentations remarked, "Surely the chain stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders aren't affecting your business--you are such an institution..." Momentarily I was stopped dead in my tracks; I wanted to share my true thoughts, but I did not want to sound bitter or defensive. It is a difficult subject to tackle, especially for someone who has made bookselling her career. I pride myself on purveying a hand-picked selection that provides enough variety to fit everyone's reading tastes. I also cherish my personal relationships with our customers.

Are we being affected by the chains? You bet, but more importantly, everyone is being affected in ways that most people neither know nor understand.

I recall about five years ago, before the large chain stores had located in the Seattle area (twelve have opened in three years), that during the holidays I was unable to restock a popular fiction title through our normal channels. When I called to investigate what had happening in the distribution pipeline, I was informed that it was a title that "the chains had high hopes for, so they had bought out much of the printing." Therefore the publisher was not going to print more copies, fearing the horrendous returns they risked from the chains' big buy. (Unlike most retail goods, books are purchased on a time-sensitive, returnable basis.) This meant that particular title was only available at a chain store during the critical holiday shopping period. Fear of returns is why the smaller presses were reluctant to sell to the chains initially. Independents buy for one store only and know and interact with their clientele. Chains buy from a central office for national distribution, buyers in their central office who have no direct relationship to their customers. Independents buy only what they realistically think they can sell during a given period of time; generally only a small percentage of their purchases are returned unsold to the publisher. Not so with the huge mega-chains, who are rumored to have as high as a 40 percent return rate. So a small press, struggling to publish good books and keep financially afloat, by selling to the chains risks being drowned with the vast volume of printing coming back to their warehouses six months later.

At ABA, the national book convention in Chicago this year, I learned of an independent bookseller who was employing a technique used by the chains: selling the prime display spaces in their store windows, on their tables, and on their shelves to the highest bidder. Ever wonder why, when you go into a chain store, the displays look just like all the other chain store displays? This positioning is bought and paid for by publishers who influence book-placing decisions with hefty monetary incentives. That independent store felt this revenue source was their only way to survive in light of the increased competition and higher discounts that chain stores were being granted. These discounts, said to be as much as 15 percent higher than those granted to independents, can therefore be passed onto their customers in the form of lower book prices than the independent can afford to offer. These practices caused the Federal Trade Commission to initiate legal action against six of the largest publishers in the U.S., charging them with illegal price discrimination.

Please, kind reader, also bear in mind the corporate stance adopted by these mega-chains when it comes to controversy, such as the marketing of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses or Ervin "Magic" Johnson's book on AIDS a few years ago. Books that some readers may find objectionable, the chains often do not order, or they pull them from their shelves when attention is drawn to them in what they consider a negative light. Eventually this is bound to influence what will and won't get published in the first place.

Are lower prices worth the extinction of the independents? I don't think so. When you go into independent bookstores you see a unique collection of books that represents the sum of hours and hours of individuals book-buying with you in mind, creating locally a mosaic of books geared toward your reading interests and incorporating the knowledge that diversity is a wonderful thing, the basis of a strong democracy, not something to fear and squelch. I love telling new staff members that one great thing about working at Elliott Bay Book Company is the opportunity to make an unknown book of quality stand out, the ability to put a lesser-known title into the hands of readers, and to develop relationships with patrons who may share a common interest. This is independent bookselling at its best, not based on a memo originated from far away dictating sales goals for a particular title and which titles must be carried and where in the store they must be displayed. We buy independently, we read, display, and write here in Booknotes about books we enjoy and believe in--we do not sell this selection process to publishers by accepting money for book exposure.

I love it when our patrons bring in their out-of-town guests and tell them that this is 'their' bookstore; I watch them beam with pride as they reveal room after room of possibilities, a collection of books that represents almost twenty-five years of slow growth and the dedication of an evolving staff who have all contributed to this collection.

I urge you to remember that Elliott Bay Book Company can only survive with the support of readers, like you, who are willing to support our unique selection on a regular basis. If you value a strong and diverse institution, with a wide choice of offerings and ideas, we cherish your support.

by Kristin Kennell, Former Elliott Bay Book Company Manager, 1997 

The Changing Face of Bookselling

Recently, Tiina and Steve from Fjord Press, in West Seattle, came in to tell a glorious tale. It began when they came to hear a reading by English author Penelope Lively. When the reading was concluded, they spoke to her, told her about their enterprise and, almost in jest, suggested that if she was ever looking for a smaller house to publish her work, to give them a call. Some months later, when Lively approached the large publishers with a short story collection, HarperCollins told her they "did not feel able to take on these short stories," so she called Fjord. We are now stocking their beautiful paperback edition of Five Thousand and One Nights. What was Harper's loss, is their, and the reading public's gain. Incidents like this one illustrate both the important role of small publishers in bringing out works considered less commercially attractive by the big industry conglomerates and the role of the independent bookseller in bringing these ventures to the reading public.

HarperCollins has also canceled the contracts for one hundred "mid-list" titles, leaving one to ask who will publish these hundred manuscripts? Harper recently closed BasicBooks division, and as I was reading some of this imprint's important titles this summer, several reviewed in this issue, I wondered: in future, just who will publish these writings? Who will dare venture into these uncertain waters?

When I wrote an article called "Our Shelves Are Not for Sale," [see above] detailing some of the issues facing independent bookstores in America, I didn't dream it would become one of the Booknotes' most requested reprints. I therefore felt another article about the book industry and its changes might be appropriate.

Certainly, when my career in bookselling began in the mid-seventies, many publishing companies were owned by families, not by a handful of media conglomerates. These houses had stable, venerable editors, who read manuscripts carefully, made suggestions, changed words, read for content, and caught inaccuracies. I, like many other readers striving for the highest literary quality, grieve the loss of these things. For the most part, the old editors are either gone, replaced by younger, less- experienced people at a lower wage, or are being employed in other tasks. Huge unchecked errors appear in books, not to mention pesky typos that survive into double-digit printings of even the most classic books. It is a disheartening state of affairs.

I worry greatly not only about what is being published, but also, and perhaps more importantly, about what is being passed over, and on what grounds editorial decisions are made. Are these choices based on the art of writing or on the bottom line as perceived by people who may scarcely read at all? As people's time becomes more precious and reading takes a back seat to demanding careers, television, and computers, books are getting shorter. If I present a book that is three hundred pages long to even an accomplished reader, I may be greeted by a look that implies I have lost my mind. Readers wanting to feel the accomplishment of having finished a book are increasingly willing to put aside the pleasure of savoring a long read for an extended time. Sadly, the average American reads only one book a year.

This year, Publishers Weekly has reported that, nationwide, only 18% of the books sold in America are now purchased in independent bookstores (down from 32% in 1991). We have already lost hundreds of bookstores in America that were family-owned; some had been in business for over twenty years. With each closing, we lose access to a cultural resource, a place in which books have been gathered by individuals with local knowledge, book lovers appealing to the community of people they see and interact with daily. Of course there are titles we don't carry, so our inventory is constantly evaluated and adjusted reflecting daily customer requests. Contrast this to the nationally centralized buying system that determines what is stocked at the chain stores and wholesale clubs. What could replace a store such as ours if we were forced to close due to financial hardship? It has taken us twenty-five years to assemble this unique combination of books we offer. Independent, idiosyncratic, community-responsive booksellers are a cultural resource of simple, but profound value. While there may be satisfaction in going to the shelf and finding the computer book you want, greater pleasure awaits, when within the same store, you find a friend's poetry book on display or a cookbook from the tiny country you just visited on holiday. These are subtle, yet complex joys missing from the mass-produced chain stores that offer identical inventory at each location. Publishers feel crushed between a rock and a hard place, too. The mega-retailers are abusing the industry's liberal policy of returns, which allows unsold books to be sent back by the store to the publisher for credit if they do not sell within the year. The reason for this is ironic: the changing face of book retailing has caused them to direct their focus away from family-owned independent booksellers like Elliott Bay, who return a modest number of unsold books, and concentrate their efforts on the big retailers who return books by the pallet. It has been suggested within the increasingly worried industry that a cap be placed on the number of purchases eligible to be returned. The more books come back, the more money is tied up, and fewer opportunities are extended to new authors, new voices, and those books deemed "riskier" projects. The small publishers can't afford to ignore the "big" retailers, but they can't afford to get their books back again six months later. Currently the large chains are trying to dictate to publishers what should be published and even how large the print runs should be. This, too, appears to be a delicate balance. A local wholesaler (a book distributor supplying books to stores, acting as a middleman between publisher and bookseller) went out of business during the past year; one contributing factor to its demise was its recent focus on meeting the needs and demands of the large retailers, forsaking the smaller stores that had, for decades, been the bread and butter of its customer base.

For years, Elliott Bay has promoted smaller publishers by hosting their writers, encouraging our staff to read their lesser-known books and, in turn, hand-selling these titles to our patrons. We pride ourselves on taking an unknown book and making it a best-seller in our store. At Elliott Bay, books that most stores wouldn't bother carrying can become top sellers, because staff members ferret out obscure titles and place them in the hands of new readers.

Recently the New York Times Book Review decided to link all their on-line reviews appearing on the Internet directly to the Barnes and Noble Web site for fulfillment. Independent bookstores nationwide, who had for years contributed their selling statistics to the Times for that newspaper's best-seller list, have discontinued this practice in protest at this corporate wedding. The New York Times has said it honors the contributions made by independent booksellers and relies on our statistics to keep accurate best-seller lists, but it is just these lists that make up the bulk of books these unconventional retailers discount.

The picture isn't all bleak. On the optimistic side, we are still a lively cultural gathering place whose reputation is growing as it receives ever wider recognition. We are still selling books, both to familiar customers and friends who have bought their books from us for years and new readers who choose to support a store with a broad variety of books and a staff familiar with what lies behind their covers. Even Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, has been quoted saying that when he wants to browse, he comes to Elliott Bay, for the selection, creaky floors, and the wafting coffee smells that originate in our cafe.

This year has brought some fabulous first novels into bookstores, and we have rejoiced at the publishing of books that were out of print for years. We applaud the new (and old) small publishers who are bravely trying their hand at old-fashioned publishing, regardless of the dire predictions and bottom-line watching elsewhere. As we at Elliott Bay enter our twenty-fifth year of bookselling in Seattle's Pioneer Square, we are perennially thankful to those of you who are customers, who have helped us to keep our collection of books alive with your support. The audiences for our readings never cease to amaze our visiting authors, and for this, also, we thank you. Supporting our independent community booksellers is a gift we not only bestow on ourselves, but one to preserve for the next generation, who deserve the access to the myriad reading materials from all sources that, through the continued dedication of book lovers, we still enjoy.

by Kristin Kennell, Former Elliott Bay Book Company Manager, 1997