Events Retreat Puts Booksellers, Authors, Publicists to Work

This week, more than 50 bookstore owners and event managers convened in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, for the “All About Events” retreat, hosted jointly by the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association and the New England Independent Booksellers Association.

Kicking off events on Sunday, April 12, Jamie Brickhouse, a longtime publicist and founder and CEO of the speakers bureau redBrick Agency, offered insights on author events from his many years in the book business.

“Hemingway was right: less is more,” said Brickhouse, both in terms of the quantity of events scheduled in a particular region and the format of an event in a store. Brickhouse shared his “recipe” for a successful event: have the author speak to the audience for three to five minutes, read for five to 10, talk for a few more minutes, read again for five to 10, then end the event with a question-and-answer session. “Be clear with the publicist and the author about the format of your events and what works for your store,” said Brickhouse, “because most authors really do want that kind of direction. They want to know what’s expected of them.”

Sunday afternoon’s panel of speakers discussed why booksellers should host events, how to work with publicists and authors, and the importance of publicity kits and author request grids, among other topics.

The panel featured Lara Phan, senior manager of account marketing at Random House, and Matthew Ballast, vice president and executive director of publicity at Grand Central Publishing, as well as booksellers Hannah Moushabeck of Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Massachusetts; Maribeth Pelly of BookTowne in Manasquan, New Jersey; Jan Hall of Partners Village Store in Westport, Massachusetts; and Susan Coll of Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C.

Politics & Prose is growing its events program, both in-store and offsite, said Coll, as it is in the process of taking over the bookstore operations at five Busboys and Poets locations throughout the city. “We had to really step back and think about what we are trying to achieve with these events,” said Coll. To answer that, six bookstore staff members held a retreat to discuss the objective of hosting events. Top on the list was the goal of community building, along with maintaining relationships with publishers and their authors, bringing a worthy subject to a conversation, and ensuring the bookstore’s name and presence in the community is upheld.

Odyssey Bookshop’s children’s events are also about building community. “Events give us a direct look into our customers’ most important relationships, which are with their kids,” said Moushabeck. “Having a child associate your bookstore with happiness and fun is better than any advertising you can buy.”

Partners Village has found surprising success in authorless events, both with formal, sit-down high teas and events as casual as bringing in packs of animals — rabbits, guide dogs, even alpacas — for children to visit with. “The real purpose is bringing the community in,” said Hall.

For BookTowne, publicity kits are key to catching the eye of publicists. Pelly shared BookTowne’s one-sheet, which is updated yearly, that gives an overview of the store, recent successful events and their sales and attendance, nearby offsite event venues, driving times from major cities, local media channels, and schools and colleges in the vicinity. “It’s worth investing in that document if you’re looking to build events and be known to the publishers,” Pelly said.

Publishers send authors out on tour for a number of reasons, said Phan, and tours can even be based simply on the publishing house’s excitement for a book or an enthusiastic request by a bookstore.

Ballast agreed. “If a store is particularly passionate about an author, we will consider trying to find money to send them,” he said, adding that a phone call from a bookstore’s sales rep to the publicist can really tip the scales and get a desired author to an indie bookstore.

“It’s important to look at publicists as your partner for events” and to accept the publicist’s advice, recommendations, and requests ahead of an author event, Ballast said. “The responsiveness of a store to those requirements is something we love and encourages us to keep going back to those stores again and again.”

Ballast and Phan both stressed the importance of filling out seasonal author event grids for each publisher, though several booksellers expressed their uncertainty as to whether the grids were utilized, especially considering the amount of work that goes into filling them out. “We take them very seriously,” assured Ballast.

The event proposal portion of the grids is particularly important, said Phan, and what publicists are looking to see is how enthusiastic a store is about hosting a requested author. In just a paragraph or so, include the potential for book sales and audience numbers, the plan to reach readers outside of the traditional social media and newsletter approaches, possible community partnerships, options for offsite and ticketed events, and anything that might set your store apart from another nearby, said Phan.

Sales figures aren’t the only element of a good event, and many authors, if they have an excellent experience at a store, will want to go back. “There’s so much about the author experience,” said Ballast, “and publicists are finding that that independent bookstores are taking care of authors better than the other options out there.”

Following Sunday’s education session, booksellers teamed up over dinner to use their newfound strategies to coordinate events around one of 10 assigned authors, who were on hand to provide suggestions and assistance. On Monday morning, the booksellers shared their plans for author events.

For Trevor Pryce, who wrote The Amphibians’ End (Abrams, October 2015), the team of booksellers planned a scavenger hunt that would have children using the book’s map to search for hidden frogs to earn stamps at neighboring businesses or organizations, all culminating with an in-store event with Pryce.

An event with Rinker Buck, author of The Oregon Trail: An American Journey (Simon & Schuster, June 2015), would include a conversation with the author about what readers would put in their wagon box — in addition to the gallons of water for the mules — if they were to travel the trail in a covered wagon. In-store visuals would include a wagon box itself on display.

The bookseller team working with Nancy Krulik, author of The Magic Bone: Dogs Don’t Have Webbed Feet (Penguin Kids), planned an event that would let kids explore the world with crafts and snacks representing the places the dog visits throughout the Magic Bone series. Examples included making paper crowns in London, enjoying chocolate in Switzerland, and learning to use chopsticks in Japan.

Booksellers also planned events for Brilliant Beacons: An Illuminating History of America’s Lighthouses by Eric Jay Dolin (W.W. Norton, April 2016); Freeman’s: Arrival, edited by John Freeman (Grove Atlantic, October 2015); Barefoot to Avalon by David Payne (Grove Atlantic, August 2015); The Mystics of Mile End by Sigal Samuel (Harper, October 2015); The Yeti Files: Monsters on the Run by Kevin Sherry (Scholastic, September 2015); The Wilson Deception by David O. Stewart (Kensington, September 2015); and Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg (Hachette, June 2015).