Archive for May, 2008

News from BookExpo

May 30, 2008 at 1:57 pm · Filed under Booksellers Diary ·Tagged , , , ,

I’m in LA for BookExpo, staying on the 14th floor of the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel. Here’s a photo of the view from my window with the famous Hollywood sign in the way back. The reflection on the church tower is the lamp from hotel room.

View from my hotel window

I’ve spent the day in educational sessions, learning how to be a better bookseller. It’s been exciting to be here as an bookstore owner, in addition to my usual role as bookseller. The American Booksellers Association is made up of independent bookstores, and everyone here is very supportive of and excited for new bookstore owners.

I attended the ABA’s annual Celebration of Bookselling reception last evening, and the ABA launched IndieBound, a program that they hope will bring together booksellers, readers, independent retailers, local business alliances and other who believe that healthy local economies help communities thrive. We’ll let you know more about the program as we learn more about it, but it sounds exciting!

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Unpacking Boxes for Store Opening

May 28, 2008 at 1:48 am · Filed under Booksellers Diary ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Another day of unpacking, among other things. It’s challenging to come up with a logical way to organize the books — I think it will be something that changes as we discover what works and what doesn’t work.

Ellen worked on shelving the books for our youngest customers, but was somewhat distracted by all of the new board books we’ve ordered. Of course, even the books we’ve known and loved for years look bright and new, just out of the box!

One surprise today was a package from Candlewick with a little Maisy playhouse that we’ve set up in the window at 1555 King Street. They sent it to us because we ordered a lot of Maisy books, including many old favorites, and a new one in which Maisy goes to a museum.

We also got in our order of DK Eyewitness books, so I was able to fill up our spinner rack, and it looks great! There’s one about the Olympics which tells how athletic competitions are timed within fractions of a second, what special materials are used to make a modern swimsuit, which sports were included in the ancient Olympic Games, and who has won the most Olympic medals. There’s also one about ancient China, which might tie in well with the Olympics this year. For those of you who haven’t had enough of the primaries, there’s a brand-new title: Eyewitness Vote! And another current events favorite — Eyewitness Oil. Many of the books in the Eyewitness series now come with a CD of clip art from the book for use in school reports and a wall chart kids can hang on their bedroom wall.

I spent the day trying to get everything wrapped up for my trip to BookExpo in Los Angeles tomorrow. I’m taking my camera with me, in the hope of getting photos of authors and illustrators to post on the blog. And of course I’ll see all sorts of new books and games and toys as well, and will be placing orders for the store. I’ll let you know what I find…

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Hello world – Hooray for Books!

May 26, 2008 at 3:12 am · Filed under Booksellers Diary ·Tagged , , ,

There’s a new bookstore in town! Well, almost…

First of all, I’d like to introduce us: I’m Trish Brown, and my partner in crime is Ellen Klein. We’re opening a (mostly) children’s bookstore in Old Town Alexandria, right where the wonderful A Likely Story used to be. Ellen and I both worked at ALS, and were very sad to see it close, so we decided to take the plunge and open another children’s bookstore, which we’re calling Hooray For Books!

We’ve been working hard for months, jumping through countless hoops to get together everything we needed to open the store. We’ve met with landlords and bankers, lawyers and CPAs, graphic designers and credit card processing firms, sales reps and more lawyers, and now we’re ALMOST ready to open!

It’s been very exciting to see the books arriving in the store and now to FINALLY be putting them on the shelves. If you walk by 1555 King Street, you can see a rack of Melissa & Doug wooden puzzles in the window, as well as a bookcase of foreign language books. We’ve placed big orders with all of the major publishers and are now trying to fill in with some of the smaller, less well-known publishers. We’ve also ordered from Crocodile Creek, eeboo, Madame Alexander, Klutz, Peaceable Kingdom and a lot of other non-book suppliers for games, puzzles, plush and toys.

We’re hoping to have what’s called a “soft” opening by the weekend of June 7, and our GRAND opening is scheduled for June 21. We’ll keep you posted as we finalize our plans.

If you have any suggestions for us, please let us know! We want to know what YOU want in your local bookstore, so send us your ideas for books to order, authors to host, events to plan, and anything else you can think of to tell us!

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