Kids and their grandparents shop at the bookstore all the time. Often the grandparents are babysitting, but sometimes they come to the store to scope with the grandkids for birthday presents. This can be a very interesting shopping experience to witness.
Yesterday a lovely grandma and her two charges came in. The boy, Jackson, is turning five in June. They spent a long time looking at a wide range of books. Jackson vacillated between a Star Wars book and a “book about the layers of the earth.” I have to admit, I love it when kids come in, especially ones as young as Jackson, with such specific interests. We had lots of books of for him to look at. Then Grandma did something interesting.
She suggested that she get him one book, Rocks, Fossils and Arrowheads, right now and save the How to Speak Droid  for his birthday. Jackson looked at her and said, “How can I not remember that book?” That was an excellent question. At only four and eleven twelfths (as we determined) he very smartly knew that his memory was excellent. He assured us that no matter what fun things he did between now and his birthday he would know the book was coming to him and it wouldn’t be a surprise, so why not just get it today?
I likened this period of delayed gratification for a little kid to being home all day and making something yummy in a slow cooker: after an hour of cooking you smell yumminess and have to wait seven more hours to eat dinner. Grandma had a good solution after Jackson put on a prodigious display of his memory — he rattled off a list of everything, and I mean everything, he got for Christmas last year, which wowed everyone in the store: she gave him both books. She said she’d give him one less book for his birthday.
If I were her, I’d already have forgotten how many books I gave Jackson, and I’d come back without the grandkids and get him a big ol’ stack for his birthday.
 

I’ve been thinking a lot about small business, its advantages and disadvantages, its role in community, and its role in our cultural point of view.
Many people love the personal aspects of a small local business; they like being known and recognized, they appreciate a shop understanding their likes and preferences. They also appreciate that a local shop’s owners and employees understand, support, and are part of their community. These shops see families come and go, kids grow up, move out, come back and bring in their own children. Small businesses rejoice in their customers’ successes and comfort them in times of sorrow. They ARE the community in which they swim, and there is an Our Town kind of magic in that level of participation, investment, and engagement.
On the other hand, anonymity is impossible in a small business. For one thing, the clerks know what you’re buying. Now, the truth is that we don’t care — in the negative sense —about what you’re buying. So many transactions happen during the course of the day we wouldn’t have time to be  even if we were inclined to, which we aren’t; indie booksellers are fervent advocates of free speech and the rights of reader privacy. And honestly, we won’t even remember what you bought from one visit to the next unless we’ve had a memorable conversation with you about that specific book. And sometimes not even then. But the lack of anonymity can be challenging for a shy customer.
Also, people have moods, and both customer and storekeeper can have a bad day and not hide it as well as they’d like. One bad exchange at a small business can mean the loss of a customer — and possibly that customer’s friends. With an online purchase, the impersonal nature of the transaction distances customers from the vendor. So, someone who hears a terrible thing about the business practices of or inhumane worker treatment by a giant corporation might tut-tut about the news article but continue to shop with that big business. There’s a disconnect.
Small businesses are charming (and occasionally frustrating) exactly because they rest entirely on small groups of individuals with unique quirks and foibles, expertise and passions. We’ve been lucky that our own staff turnover is very low — though high school students will  insist on graduating and going off to college, drat it — so customers have a chance to enjoy continuity in the store over years and get to know our diverse particular strengths. As in any retail establishment, customers gravitate toward the staffers whose reading tastes they best connect with, although I am so gratified to hear praise often about our whole staff. “Everyone here is so helpful!” people will tell me and Josie, and it gladdens our hearts. I actually think the best thing we have ever done as small business owners is to hire well. In small business, staff is everything.
In a very small business like ours, when one colleague is out sick, the whole ship is affected. Fortunately, the very nature of small business means that staff members quickly become family. People pitch in, take extra shifts, pick up the slack for one another. On the rare occasions a truly difficult customer comes in, we play back-up for one another; whichever of us has the most inner resources to deal with a situation steps up to bat. We also laugh and cry together, celebrate all the personal triumphs and mourn losses together. Small businesses are a microcosm of our community.
For some, the nature of corporate retail is comforting, if only in its universal predictability. Those retail spaces are slickly designed and sometimes feel restfully impersonal and disconnected from our own lives. As a customer myself, I don’t always want a conversation with a sales clerk, and we try to train our staff to respect people’s varying levels of wanting help versus wanting to be left alone. But mostly, people coming in to shop at a small business do want at least some assistance, and are so grateful when they find engaged and resourceful people on the other end.
I don’t mean to canonize small businesses; there is always room for improvement, and not everyone in retail is cut out to be working face-to-face with customers. But you can bet that anyone involved in a small business is working extremely hard, juggling about 1200 balls, and cares about every aspect of that business and its customers. The very personal nature of small business is its backbone and fiber and sinew, its humanness and vulnerability, its Herculean strength and its Achilles heel. We wouldn’t want our world to be a cookie-cutter nation. Small businesses are full of personality and punch, and I love being part of one, warts and all. Maybe especially because of the warts.

Do you have a small business in your community that you can’t imagine doing without? Feel free to share an anecdote about your favorite small store here.

I had to come out of my blog ‘vacation’ to post about a form of fantastic activism that fills my heart with joy. When creative people see a need and turn it into action, amazing things happen. The conversation about the lack of diversity in children’s books and in the publishing field itself has reached a groundswell, and this week, the We Need Diverse Books campaign was born. I think it may just be the tipping point we have been hoping for.
In the interest of spreading the word as widely as possible, I’m simply going to reproduce the entire useful text of the campaign’s appeal so that you all can pour your efforts into supporting it as you like. Authors and illustrators, editors and booksellers, teachers and librarians are all getting involved. Here at ShelfTalker, we will of course continue to blog about this topic, and will step up our efforts to introduce you to fabulous books featuring main characters of color and diversity of all kinds.
Here’s a link to my World Full of Color database, highlighting more than 1,000 children’s and YA books featuring main characters of color where race is NOT the driving force of the story. Feel free to share this with anyone who might find it helpful: parents, educators, librarians, kids.
Let’s fill bookshelves across the country with a world full of color! Our children deserve it. They need it. We all need it.
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All of the following text comes from the WE NEED DIVERSE BOOKS CAMPAIGN Tumblr:
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Recently, there’s been a groundswell of discontent over the lack of diversity in children’s literature. The issue is being picked up by news outlets like these two pieces in the NYT, CNN, EW, and many more. But while we individually care about diversity, there is still a disconnect. BEA’s BookCon recently announced an all-white-male panel of “luminaries of children’s literature,” and when we pointed out the lack of diversity, nothing changed.
Now is the time to raise our voices into a roar that can’t be ignored. Here’s how:
On May 1st at 1pm (EST), there will be a public call for action that will spread over 3 days. We’re starting with a visual social media campaign using the hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks. We want people to tweet, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, blog, and post anywhere they can to help make the hashtag go viral.
For the visual part of the campaign:

• Take a photo holding a sign that says “We need diverse books because ___________________________.” Fill in the blank with an important, poignant, funny, and/or personal reason why this campaign is important to you.
• The photo can be of you or a friend or anyone who wants to support diversity in kids’ lit. It can be a photo of the sign without you if you would prefer not to be in a picture. Be as creative as you want! Pose the sign with your favorite stuffed animal or at your favorite library. Get a bunch of friends to hold a bunch of signs.
• However you want to do it, we want to share it! There will be a Tumblr at http://weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/ that will host all of the photos and messages for the campaign. Please submit your visual component by May 1stto weneeddiversebooks@yahoo.com with the subject line “photo” or submit it right on our Tumblr page here and it will be posted throughout the first day.
• Starting at 1:00pm (EST) the Tumblr will start posting and it will be your job to reblog, tweet, Facebook, or share wherever you think will help get the word out.
• The intent is that from 1pm EST to 3pm EST, there will be a nonstop hashtag party to spread the word. We hope that we’ll get enough people to participate to make the hashtag trend and grab the notice of more media outlets.
• The Tumblr will continue to be active throughout the length of the campaign, and for however long we need to keep this discussion going, so we welcome everyone to keep emailing or sending in submissions even after May 1st.

On May 2nd, the second part of our campaign will roll out with a Twitter chat scheduled for 2pm (EST) using the same hashtag. Please use #WeNeedDiverseBooks at 2pm on May 2nd and share your thoughts on the issues with diversity in literature and why diversity matters to you.
On May 3rd, 2pm (EST), the third portion of our campaign will begin. There will be a Diversify Your Shelves initiative to encourage people to put their money where their mouth is and buy diverse books and take photos of them. Diversify Your Shelves is all about actively seeking out diverse literature in bookstores and libraries, and there will be some fantastic giveaways for people who participate in the campaign! More details to come!
We hope that you will take part in this in any way you can. We need to spread the word far and wide so that it will trend on Twitter. So that media outlets will pick it up as a news item. So that the organizers of BEA and every big conference and festival out there gets the message that diversity is important to everyone. We hope you will help us by being a part of this movement.

• diversity
• poc
• poc authors
• change
• BEA
• Bookcon
• weneeddiversebooks

I usually get ready early for Book Expo, mapping out my educational sessions and which publishers I’d like to visit. This year I’ve looked at the schedule and something feels missing to me. I pondered for a while and looked at the ABA website more thoroughly and noticed that this year seems more about networking and less about education.
I missed BEA last year and didn’t go to Winter Institute because the store couldn’t afford the airfare to Seattle. So, this BEA I’m ready to dig in and go get some education. Hell, after missing these events, I’m even ready for another go-round with the infamous-always-offered 2% Solution class where we all learned that if we just managed our finances 2% better through cost of goods sold, maximizing returns, etc., our stores would succeed. What’s become clear to me is that this year is BEA is more about meeting the folks behind the scenes in the publishing world. This makes sense, but it does make things harder.
Here’s my issue: it seems now that Winter Institute has really taken off, so  this is where the bulk of the ABA educational opportunities lie. To some degree this makes sense. Better to have three totally focused days on education, rather than divide our time between education and trying to see the vast show floor. But, as someone coming from a small store with not a lot of staff, who wants some education mixed in with looking at new books, having two things I need to leave work for seems unfair and expensive. Since leaving the store in January is hard for me for a variety of reasons, I always feel like I get more bang for my buck by going to BEA.
I was perusing the session lists and one session in particular caught my attention: The Future of Bricks and Mortar Bookselling. I was thinking this might offer some hands-on ideas that I could use back at home. I noticed that there’s not one bookseller on the panel: there is someone from a publisher, from Kobo, the book buyer from Target, and the head of ABA. This sends a message that perhaps the organizers of this session have conceded the future for bricks and mortar stores is dim at best.
There are other sessions that have caught my eye. As always the chance to meet with publishers is a great hook of BEA and this year there are several good chances. ABA’s Meet the Editors seems like a great opportunity to talk with the folks responsible for the trends we see on our shelves. And it would be great to get a sense of what’s coming down the pike in the next year or two. The ABC/CBC Illustrator Studio Tour is always fun. I love seeing how artists work and what their studios are like. It’s always magical to me to spend time with them. The session about the James Patterson’s Bookseller Pledge hold appeal insofar as I’d like to know how to get a grant, since the application process seems vague at best.
Perennial favorite session include the Speed Dating session and the Author/Illustrator Tea, where booksellers get to meet authors and illustrators. I’ve been in bookselling for 18 years and I never tire of meeting these talented people. Editor’s Buzz panels for Young Adult books and Middle Grade books is enormously helpful. I love finding out what they’re excited about and why.
There is a session on social media and Hootsuite, and since I don’t even know what Hootsuite is, I’m thinking maybe I should go. The other session that looks good is the Common Core Update. I think we all need this one as there is still confusion in my area about how the Common Core is actually working in schools.
So, booksellers, are you going to Book Expo this year? If you are, what about it excites you?