Category Archives: innovation

June 08, 2016   Stacey   book storage, books, creativity, fun, ideas, innovation, inspiration, organizing, Stacey  
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The bookshelf project: part 2

After posting about the recent arrival of my long awaited built-in bookshelves, and getting some great feedback from our readers, family, and friends, I finally embarked upon the multi-hour project and wanted to share the end result (still a work-in-progress) here:

To give you some more information about the strategy (and it was discussed extensively before the project began as well as throughout the endeavor!), I’ll share how it all played out. We started by unpacking books from boxes as well as taking off of shelves from my office one copy of each of the books I’ve sold during my almost eighteen years at DGLM.

We then labeled the shelves with post-its indicating which category of books would go into which shelves. The broad sections include adult fiction, cookbooks, illustrated/craft, practical nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, and children’s. For categories where we had more books, we used more shelves. For the cookbooks, we divided them into sections: general, vegetarian/vegan, and baking and then alphabetized them within the section. Then we filled in the two top shelves with foreign editions of my titles.

We mixed the style of display with horizontal and vertical and left a few books standing up and facing out, and then filled in some blank spaces with decorative touches and picture frames. At that point, we’d filled ten of the fourteen sections, and the other four sections we used for additional cookbooks, miscellaneous awesome books (Hamilton!), and my beloved large and growing collection of books signed by the author, which includes mostly children’s books (I’m that person who will go to an author event with or without my children to get a signed book!) and a few celebrity titles.

I have a lot more books that I’ve read and collected over the years, but I didn’t want to pack the shelves too tight so I could leave room for more of my own titles to fill in. At some point I’ll get another large bookcase which I’ll put  in a different room to house  the others, but for now I’m happy my living room bookshelf project is finally complete.

Please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for changes or improvements!

June 03, 2016   Amy Bishop   Amy, art, audience, covers, creativity, innovation, social media  
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Books with a side of awesomeness

I recently stumbled upon an Instagram account called @bookbento, that’s run by Read it Forward, and then fell in love with its content. It satisfies pretty much every part of me that loves books, good design, pretty knick-knacky things, and the many Instagram filters available. Essentially, @bookbento pairs a book (recent ones include THE ASSISTANTS by Camille Perri, THE GIRLS by Emma Cline, A LITTLE LIFE by Hanya Yanagihara, and ME BEFORE YOU by Jojo Moyes) with items that match elements of the book, set against a striking background. For example, THE ASSISTANTS was paired with a typewriter, a day planner, two pencils, and a cup of coffee. This Instagram makes me want to go out and read all of these books immediately, proving that good visuals can be important!

With social media becoming an ever important way to reach an audience, I think something like @bookbento is an incredible way to draw readers in and maybe convince them to go out and buy a copy of the book. It’s aesthetically pleasing enough that viewers might stop for a closer look, and the elements surrounding the book hint at what might be inside. There were a few books that I certainly Googled afterwards, to see a summary, and then put on my “to-read list.”

What other clever social media accounts about books have you found? What effect do you think they have on both avid readers and readers who might only pick up a book or two a year

March 30, 2016   Stacey   booksellers, business of publishing, culture, fun, independent bookstores, innovation, road trips, selling  
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Coming soon to a bus near you!

Not in a while has an article made me smile the way this one did earlier this week in the New York Times. Booksellers are getting creative in finding new ways to reach readers, and it’s working! Not only is Ann Patchett’s Nashville indie bookstore doing well, it’s expanding its storefront in addition to taking books on the road for sale on a portable bus! It seems like such a simple thing, and yet it’s innovative as well. Go to where the people are rather than waiting for the people to come into the bookstore, not such an easy sell anywhere with so much available online and for delivery in 5 minutes or less.

As if I didn’t already love every single thing about Ann Patchett, just one more thing to swoon over. The store’s name, Parnassus, actually comes from Christopher Morley’s 1917 novel “Parnassus on Wheels,” about a middle-aged woman who travels around selling books out of a horse-drawn van. So it’s fitting that they are now taking the “bookstore on wheels” concept literally.

I was thinking as I was reading this charming article about bringing books to the masses that it’s really not that different than what Scholastic has done all these years for children’s books. They schlep busloads of books and set them up in schools across the country where parents, teachers and kids can shop in the comfort of their own gym, and a portion of sales gets donated back to the school. I personally buy a majority of holiday gifts each fall at the Scholastic Book Fair, and I’m so thrilled that next year I’ll have one of my books for sale there – Cecilia Galante’s THE WORLD FROM UP HERE. And this year, they’re doing a bus tour called Summer Reading Road Trip with events all over the country so they’re getting on the “buswagon” too. Who doesn’t love a good road trip?

Scholastic Summer Reading Road Trip

Scholastic’s is a brilliant and a successful sales model that I think is unique, although are there other “bring the books to the buyer” methods I’m not aware of? What are other ways you can think of to get books into readers’ hands? Books on a bus is so fun, I’m seriously thinking about renting a bus to sell books this summer! Ok, I joke, my lifestyle so does not allow for such a thing, but I love the idea of it so much. One can dream.