A Letter from ABA CEO Allison Hill

 Dear Booksellers,

I’m on my soapbox today, with good reason. Despite our best efforts Amazon is once again sponsoring the Small Business Administration’s upcoming National Small Business Week. This news would seem to belong in Shelf Awareness’s April Fools’ edition, but it’s all too real. As are the continued consolidations and closings in our industry. I believe Small Press Distribution’s closing after 55 years of distributing independent presses is the latest casualty of Amazon’s stranglehold on the book industry, and its extinction hurts the entire ecosystem of indie authors, presses, bookstores, and ultimately readers.

It’s more important than ever that ABA keeps fighting against consolidation in publishing, anti-competitive practices in the marketplace, legislation that favors corporations over small business, and government agencies that lose sight of their mission and allow their training and support for small businesses to become marketing opportunities for these businesses’ biggest competitor.

With these goals in mind, two of our top priorities at ABA right now include the FTC lawsuit against Amazon, and support for the Credit Card Competition Act that supports competition amongst credit card service providers (and could drastically reduce your credit card processing fees if signed into law). Don’t be fooled by the consolation prize of the recent Mastercard/Visa settlement; we want the big win! Please help our advocacy work on your behalf by sharing your experience with how swipe fees impact your business by emailing [email protected] by April 19. Your testimonials are incredibly helpful to our lobbying efforts.

Another top priority is support for Black booksellers and responding to the 

concerns raised by some Black booksellers around Winter Institute. We want everyone in our membership to feel valued and supported and we’re continuing to do the work to ensure that. This work is always in progress, so we appreciate the Black booksellers who spoke up to bring issues to our attention and to remind us that our commitment must always be evident in our work, not just our words. I’d like to invite Black booksellers who want to share their concerns, needs for support, ideas, and/or questions with myself, Ray Daniels, ABA’s Chief Communications Officer, and Joy Dallanegra-Sanger, ABA’s Chief Operations Officer, to a virtual forum for Black booksellers on Thursday, April 18 at 5:00 pm ET. I also welcome your emails. Members can find ABA’s work in support of representation, inclusion, antiracism, equity and access on BookWeb. The work so far this year is posted here.

In the coming weeks ABA is preparing for our annual meetings with publishers to advocate for the interests of all indie bookstores. Thank you to those who helped inform our agenda by filling out our annual Publisher Survey. Agenda topics include the need for extended dating; more Spanish language books; additional discounts like we saw during the pandemic; the need for publishers to adopt Batch; the importance of racial representation in staffing, books published, and marketing dollar spend; distribution/fulfillment issues, particularly for BIPOC bookstores; damages; and more. The bigger conversation will be about the significant threats to the sustainability of the industry: a decline in reading, book bans, rising costs, liveable wage, and the labor shortage, to name a few. This is a critical juncture not just for indies but for the entire book industry to shift to a long view and start preparing for the future.

Here in the present, the fight against book bans and challenges continues. Whether book bans are happening in your communities or not, they are impacting what’s being published, who can see themselves in books, who has access to books, and the continuing decline in reading. We all need to be in this fight. ABA’s Advocacy Associate Manager, Philomena Polefrone, will continue to keep you updated about our ongoing work both in BTW and on ABFE’s social media.

Please also check out the IndieCommerce.org blog next week for important updates about the IndieCommerce 2.0 project and other e-commerce news. The ABA Board has approved additional funding for this project to help expedite store site migrations before the end of the year. Like any construction project, this one has had its share of delays. We remain committed to this critical project.

This letter has been all business but I know the world is heavy on your minds. Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East. Anti-trans legislation. The upcoming presidential election. To name only a few (and admittedly in shorthand.) That’s a different letter. And a different position. We all have different roles right now, different positions to play. As human beings our position is to speak up. As a bookstore, you may see your position as being an activist bookstore. For others, your position as a bookstore may be providing shelter in this storm. ABA’s position as your trade association is to help your bookstores stay in business. As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into ABA just doing that every day.

And just like you, we’re feeling the enormity of the issues we all face in the world and the humanity that often feels at stake these days. But we are buoyed by your work in your communities and focused on our position to support it, preserving ABA’s resources to support you, your stores, and your right to free expression so that you in turn can play your positions.

All of the positions are necessary right now. May we recognize that regardless of the positions we play, we’re all on the same team.

I hope to see you at Children’s Institute or at the summer/fall regional shows. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if any of us at ABA can be of assistance.

—Allison