The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review surveys several local independent bookstores that, it has discovered, face strong competitive pressures.
"It's difficult, difficult, difficult," Margaret Marshall, owner of the
Penguin Bookshop in Sewickley, told the paper. "We're not thriving,
we're surviving. The only reason we stay in business is because I'm in
Sewickley and I know these people." Marshall works closely with the
Sewickley library, "which draws in a lot of their target
demographic--children."
At Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, owned by Mary Alice Gorman and
Richard Goldman, "author premiere parties and book club meetings
along with offerings such as coffee, tea and puzzles have helped drive
business, but the mysteries that line store shelves remain the central
selling point," the paper said.
Strikingly 30% of store revenues come from online sales. "We get a
great deal of out-of-state orders from there," Gorman said. "We
discovered that we needed to find little niches to enhance sellability,
and that's what we've done."
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Sales in the past two months at HMV, the owner of Waterstone's and purchaser of Ottakar's, have declined, Bloomberg
reported. The company, which is a major movie, music and book retailer
in the U.K., said that the number of shoppers declined because of the
World Cup.
Sales at Waterstone's stores open at least a year dropped 6.1% during
the past nine weeks. Overall at HMV, sales at stores open at least a
year fell 10%, "led by a 17% drop at HMV music stores in the U.K. and
Ireland." The company blamed the World Cup as well as competition from
supermarkets and online retailers.
According to Bloomberg, HMV "expects about 10
million pounds ($18.4 million) of cost savings from its acquisition of
rival bookstore chain Ottakar's Plc in the 2008 fiscal year. The
takeover of the 141-store chain should be earnings enhancing, before
integration costs, this fiscal year."
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The group that wants to open a community bookstore in New Paltz, N.Y.,
that would fill part of the vacuum left by the closing of Ariel
Booksellers may yet succeed, the Times Herald-Record reported.
The group has given up on the idea of creating a cooperative store
because of a lack of money and anyone to manage it full-time, so it is
working with Tom Terwilliger, owner of Mandobooks textbook stores in
Binghamton and Cortland, N.Y., to set up a store.
In what he called "a marriage of convenience," Terwilliger would
provide "capital and know-how" and the group would offer "goodwill and
entrée to the New Paltz retail market," according to the paper. The
"biggest hurdle" is finding a downtown storefront.
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With some help from the city government, a group of local Portland, Me., businesses has launched a buy local campaign that the Portland Press Herald
profiled on Tuesday. The paper quotes Stuart Gersen of Longfellow Books
and Allan Schmid of Books, Etc., both leaders in the campaign.
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Biblio.com and Biblion Ltd. have relaunched both biblion.com and biblion.co.uk. In April (Shelf Awareness, April 7),
the two companies said that they would work together to "redevelop the
current online strategy" of Biblion, the U.K. rare-book bookseller with
a store in London that had shut down its Web site for a time.
Biblio.com, with headquarters in Asheville, N.C., will manage the sites
while Biblion Ltd. is handling marketing and public relations in
Europe. Biblio.com provides the technology for two other online
booksellers, www.iobabooks.com, and www.biblioz.com, and has indicated that it wants to provide technology services for other similar companies.
Biblio.com has signed more than 200 sellers to list their books on the
Biblion site, mainly under www.biblion.co.uk. More than 300,000 books
are now available for purchase on the site.
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DCist.com
serves up the news that three people have taken over Politics and
Prose's coffee house, formerly run by Sirius Coffee, and have renamed
it Modern Times. The group, known as Coup d'Etat Coffee Co., plan to
refurbish the space in '20s art-deco style and expand the dinner menu.
They're being advised by James Alefantis, general manager of Buck's
Fishing and Camping, the restaurant and bar up the street.
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Mark Levine, who has more than 30 years of experience in book sales and
editorial, which he calls "an uncommon mix," has founded Mark Levine
Book Editorial and Marketing Services, which offers a range of services
in fiction and nonfiction to authors and small- and medium-sized
publishers. Services include shaping a manuscript; judging suitability
for publication; line editing; general editing; packaging; working with
agents, publishers and distributors; sales strategies; sales tools;
selling points. "Marketing does not start with the publication of a
book," he commented. "Indeed, it should start even prior to the point
of acquisition by its publisher."
Levine was formerly sales director at Holt and St. Martin's, an editor
at St. Martin's and most recently marketing director and editorial
appraiser at Beaufort Books. His education background and interests are
particularly strong in American history and African American history,
and he has helped establish many novelists during his career.
Levine may be reached at 264 Ninth St., Suite 4-O, Jersey City, N.J. 07302; 201-653-5453; cell 201-424-5949; leevyne@aol.com.
