Dear Booksellers,
I’ve talked to many of you this week and there were a few things on your minds: Valuable Info for Stores Reopening How to handle the question of sanitizing books for reopening is one of the most frequently asked questions right now. Some stores are removing books that have been touched from the shelves for a few days before putting them back. Some stores are attempting to wipe books down after they’ve been touched. Some stores have considered providing gloves, or only letting staff wearing gloves touch books. The CDC has reiterated in recent days that they do not believe the virus spreads easily via surfaces. We’ll continue to research the topic and keep you updated but in the meantime, the Institute of Museum and Library Services hosted a session with Dr. David Berendes and Dr. Catherine Rasberry from the Centers for Disease Control for libraries back in March that offered some valuable insight about books and cardboard, how to keep staff safe, and what to focus sanitizing efforts on. And for more information, check out ABA’s Resources for Reopening page. Possible Good News About PPP Many bookstores that received Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) money are struggling to understand and meet the requirements for their PPP loan to be forgivable. I’ll reiterate my refrain that communication is the best thing you can be doing for your business right now. In this case, communicate with your lender. Have a conversation sooner rather than later about your understanding of the requirements and what you’re doing to meet them to ensure that you’re on the same page as your lender. In the meantime, stay tuned. There’s a ways to go but yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the Paycheck Protection Flexibility Act. If passed into law as is, it would give businesses up to 24 weeks to spend PPP funds and still have the Small Business Administration loans forgiven. The legislation extends the time period to pay back any unforgiven portion of the loan from two years to five years and allows businesses whose loans are forgiven to delay payment of payroll taxes. Further, the bill includes additional exemptions to the reduction in loan forgiveness for not maintaining employee levels if certain criteria are met. It would also reduce the requirement that 75% of the money be used on payroll to 60%, allowing more of the money to be spent on other expenses. However, it is important to note that even with the reduction to 60%, loan forgiveness may still be reduced if you do not rehire your employees and maintain pay. While this bill doesn’t solve all of the problems with PPP, it is a step in the right direction. Contact your Senators NOW to tell them to quickly pass the Paycheck Protection Flexibility Act! The eight-week period for many businesses is running out, and small businesses need to be able to plan for the future. Uncertainty surrounding current PPP guidelines is making planning next to impossible. Pass the Paycheck Protection Flexibility Act today! Your email to them can be as simple as stating those facts. Racism in America The top five selling books on IndieCommerce and IndieLite the last few days have been: How to be an Antiracist; White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism; Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor; So You Want to Talk About Race; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This bestseller list is a sign of hope for humanity, and at the same time, not nearly enough. This was a painful week for our country and I can’t begin to know the pain for our booksellers of color. Our thoughts are also with our bookstores in Minneapolis. There is so much more to say as a human being, but as CEO of ABA I just want to restate ABA’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and our belief that anti-racism is part of that commitment. ABA will continue to develop programming and services to live up to that commitment. To borrow from Eleanor Roosevelt’s statement about peace, it isn’t enough to talk about anti-racism or believe in it. We must work at it. ABA is here for all of you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. We are an incredibly creative, resilient, supportive industry. We’ll get through this, together. Best, Allison
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Ingram and Consumer Direct Fulfillment (CDF) Orders
Just a quick reminder that if you have problems with your Ingram CDF orders, you should not be contacting Ingram directly. CDF orders are actually processed using the ABA’s Ingram account so if you run into any issues with those orders, you need to contact IndieCommerce support at [email protected] and we will contact Ingram on your behalf. Please include detailed order information in your email to the support team. Processing Online Orders Faster One of the big issues with processing a high volume of online orders is the amount of time it takes to manually transfer those orders into your store’s POS system. Over the past few months, quite a few IndieCommerce and IndieLite stores have reached out to their POS vendor and IndieCommerce requesting an automated solution. The good news is that we’ve now got three POS vendors that allow integration with IndieCommerce. These include:
Browsers Causing Problems When Updating Your Website Recently users have reported experiencing problems adding and editing content, specifically with adding books to booklists. Page hangs on ‘Please wait…” and fields that normally populate do not appear. This has been experienced with multiple recent web browser updates, specifically ones based on Google’s Chrome browser. These are the problem browsers:
The Chromium team has acknowledged this problem as a regression and are working on a fix, though it is not yet clear whether that fix will be released in weeks or months. In the meantime, Firefox (FF) and Safari (for Mac) are the two browsers that do not seem to experience this issue (or, at least there is less occurrence of it). It is recommended that members switch to using the newest version of FF or Safari until the Chrome issue is resolved.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to email us with any thoughts, questions, or suggestions. The IndieCommerce teamFor past editions of IndieCommunication, visit this page. To our valued partners, Like everyone in the publishing industry, we've been having ongoing conversations about how to support the bookselling industry during the time of the coronavirus. We've been thrown a huge plot twist and we're all writing the next chapters together. For everyone's safety, we've decided to postpone this year's Heartland Fall Forum until 2021. We're sticking with the same venue, so we'll be able to convene again October 20-22, 2021 at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch. Our annual celebration is always a major highlight of our year, and we are eager to see you all again under the banner of Great Lakes bookselling, where we can raise a glass, meet loads of authors, and learn from each other in person. Until then! In the meantime, we're eager to bring the book industry more opportunities to connect, learn new ways of doing business, and discover books and authors. When we laid out everything Heartland offers, however, it became impossible to try to fit it all into one short span of time, so we're moving forward with a creative mix of extended programming. Welcome to Heartland Summer! During the months of June, July, August, and September, we will offer an ongoing array of events – education, rep picks and author events - all virtual and easy to attend and enjoy. It will be sustained by an exhibits page on our website that hosts our summer content while also allowing publishers and industry members to bring you the show specials, creative assets, ARC request forms, and the necessary forms of connection we usually provide. In October, we will host a bigger virtual celebration, including a Heartland Booksellers Award celebration and the Heartland Book Club. To accommodate all schedules every event will be recorded and made available to all members to view and enjoy at their convenience. We will announce our schedule very soon. In the meantime, if you have education topics or presenters you would like included in the programming please email Larry Law at [email protected]. If you are a publisher or rep interested in participating in our monthly Rep Picks sessions please make sure you are added to our database of reps by emailing Larry Law at [email protected]. Sign-up forms will be going out soon. If you have authors you know you'd like to put on our radar, especially for keynote spots, please email Carrie Obry at [email protected]. The goal is to deliver key pre-pub opportunities that allow us to do business together at a time when we really need it, while also opening up the fall schedule to host a bigger celebration of bookselling in the Great Lakes region. Thank you for your support and we'll be in touch very soon as we create the infrastructure to make our plans a reality. Short and sweet today. Let’s talk about sales:
ABA is here for all of you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. We are an incredibly creative, resilient, supportive industry. We’ll get through this, together. Best, Allison IndieCommerce
Best, Allison Dear Booksellers, Now that #SaveIndieBookstores has ended, ABA is gearing up for the next indie campaign. We’re excited to spread the word about Sourcebooks and Shelf Awareness’ #ReadIndieForward, a pay-it-forward movement to help independent bookstores. This initiative is all kinds of good—the industry supporting one another, everyone sharing their love of books, readers buying books from the indies, and people connecting with the people they love. Here are the details:
What A pay-it-forward movement supporting independent bookstores by gifting books to friends and family. Who Everybody! Booksellers. Bookstores. ABA. Shelf Awareness. Sourcebooks. Other publishers. Authors. Readers. Customers. Everyone can help spread the word to #ReadIndieForward. When The next 8-10 weeks. (As shipping times are delayed right now, start early!) How It Works Step One: An individual buys a book from their favorite independent bookstore and sends it to a loved one. Step Two: They post to social media with #ReadIndieForward, tagging the independent bookstore they bought the book from and the person they’re sending the book to. Step Three: They encourage the person who receives the book to #ReadIndieForward, too. Step Four: The person who receives the book posts on social media when they get the gift to say thank you. They can tag the sender and the indie bookstore. Step Five: The recipient can the start the whole cycle again: #ReadIndieForward. How Bookstores Can Help Spread the word. Turnkey, downloadable social media assets and ads are available at ReadIndieForward.com! You can personalize with your store’s logo or just upload the images to your social media or your website. You can even put your own spin on it and encourage customers to buy books that support local authors or diverse authors. Why Because #ReadIndieForward is exactly what we all need right now: something to connect us, and something to look forward to. ABA is grateful to Sourcebooks and Shelf Awareness, and all of the other publishers and authors who we know will get on this bandwagon. #SaveIndieBookstores raised over a million dollars. This time, let’s sell over a million books! ABA is here for all of you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. We are an incredibly creative, resilient, supportive industry. We’ll get through this, together. Best, Allison P.S. We didn’t want to wait to share this resource for booksellers beginning to reopen their stores: Here’s a handy list of tips for keeping your staff and customers safe, as well as a list of where to source related COVID-19 supplies.
The Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix Virtual Book Club scheduled for Wednesdays in May is completely sold out (great news!) but the waitlist is long and we want to ensure that as many people as possible can attend. Please encourage customers who have signed up but do not plan to attend to cancel their reservation through Eventbrite, which will then automatically register the next person in line on the waitlist. Store Status: Please update! Please update your store status! Open? Closed? Closed with curbside service? Selling online? This information helps us update publishers, wholesalers, and shippers, and find ways to support you. If your store is closed, the alternate address you provide may be used for ABA shipments and/or publisher galleys. You can fill out the form (it takes just three minutes) and also see the results. (Note: This information will be public.) Bookstore Images: Please send us photos! We want to see you! Please send [email protected] photos of your stores. We want to see what your stores look like right now and hear a little bit about what’s going on. Content and photos may appear on an updated #SaveIndieBookstores website and/or be used on ABA social media. Technology Meetup: Please join us! The May 14 Technology Meetup, to be held at 1:00 p.m. ET, will look at services and tools that are helping booksellers manage the new ways of doing business that many are having to adjust to. Advance registration is required. Fundraising: Please check out this new vendor! Satisfactory Printing, one of ABA’s business affinity partners, is a locally owned and operated screen printing and design shop based in Athens, Georgia. They offer complimentary graphic design for T-shirts, tote bags, hats, enamel pins, and more, and a way to sell that merchandise directly to your customers. ABA is here for you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. We are an incredibly creative, resilient, supportive industry. We’ll get through this, together. Dear Booksellers,
Today’s update is an urgent request from ABA’s advocacy team. I’m turning this over to them, and I appreciate your attention to this important matter... We need you to take action to support the Small Business Expense Protection Act. On April 30, an IRS notice declared that businesses that qualify for PPP loan forgiveness cannot deduct wages or other business expenses they paid for with forgiven PPP funds. A new bill would reverse that IRS rule. On May 6, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators introduced the Small Business Expense Protection Act, which would clarify the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) so small businesses can deduct from their taxes expenses paid with a forgiven PPP loan. The bipartisan group consisted of Senators John Cornyn (R-TX), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Tom Carper (D-DE). Please reach out to your Senators and Representative to express your support for this legislation. Tell your lawmakers: “Support the Small Business Expense Protection Act to reverse the IRS’s misguided ruling prohibiting businesses from deducting expenses associated with PPP loans. This IRS guidance is the opposite of what Congress intended when crafting the CARES Act. Small businesses that receive PPP loans should not be penalized with an unexpected tax bill when they receive urgently needed federal relief. I urge you to support this legislation so expenses paid with a forgiven PPP loan can still be deducted from small businesses’ taxes. This is much-needed to make sure small businesses have the liquidity and help to get through these difficult times.”To find contact details for your federal lawmakers, go to www.usa.gov/elected-officials. Thanks in advance for your outreach! ABA is here for all of you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. We are an incredibly creative, resilient, supportive industry. We’ll get through this, together. Best, Allison P.S. Please let us know if you hear back from your legislators! Dear Booksellers,
Many states are beginning to open back up. Stores may find themselves in the challenging position of figuring out if, how, or when to open to their staff and/or their customers. ABA is researching information to assist stores in this process. Although this list is still in progress, we’re sharing the information we have so far to assist both those who need it immediately and those who are starting to look toward the next steps. ABA recommends that stores not only adhere to legal guidelines about reopening, but also keep in mind CDC guidelines and your best judgement and instincts about what’s best for your store, your staff, and your customers. These are challenging decisions in challenging times, and each store needs to make their own very personal decisions around reopening. May we continue to support one another through the next phase. In the meantime, here are some best practices and guidelines, gathered from multiple sources, to consider for reopening, partially or fully, depending on your circumstances:
ABA is here for you. Please reach out if there is anything we can help with. We are an incredibly creative, resilient, supportive industry. We’ll get through this, together. Best, Allison |
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