And if they have any ideas i can still. Speaking today with the team, the brain trust behind the industries leading trade magazine for in the books, publishers and particularly bookstores, selfawareness, jenn risko the cofounder and publisher, john mutter the other cofounder and editorinchief, and bob gray an editor and columnist for shelf. You no doubt read his columns. He is basically a bookstore correspondent, wandering bookstore correspondent making you feel like you are in america is great in the bookstores and seeing whats really going on from the inside. Welcome, guys, its really an honor and pleasure to see you all. You all looking basically the same from last time i saw you with i think was with institute. January. Yes. Seems like a lifetime ago, doesnt it . Its good to see everybody. I have to say, shelf to me seems to have become even more important obligation then it was before. Really kind of a lifeline for indie booksellers in particular to see whos making it, how they are making it. To hear their stories. Some really great work going on but also this might be the worst moment for Media Companies and publications in my lifetime. Jenn, publisher, hows it going . Businesswise we are doing okay. Its shocking considering i read a statistic in at age just yesterday that said most ad agencies are proving to be 75 down. Its just shocking. We are trending nowhere near that. When this first went down we had a few publishers cancel and then the bulk of the publishers we pushed their ads to the fall because they push so many of their big books to the fall. Now we see a little bit of budget cuts here and there but we are incredibly lucky in this way. I think there is a little abi think the publishers are thinking, do i need to market my book to a bookseller if they are not really interfacing customers in their stories . I would say that might be one of the most important times ever to get your book into the hands of a bookseller because they will be either selling online or curbside or in their store shortly enough. I suppose theres an argument to be made that ads might be more important than ever for publishers. Media is shutting down elsewhere and we are getting less coverage for books on those ads might be more important. John, how many books are published every day . Your giving me a quiz question. Sorry, we said no math. Thousands . Yes. Thousands. Thousands of books are being still published every day, how do you make yours shine . How do you make yours stand out . Especially with the surgeons of self, i cant say shelf because of selfpublishing. How is yours going to stand out . Its not like people are not reading now. We are reading like crazy now. They are. And we are seeing the numbers sustain. You go up the last year which is amazing to me. John, what a time to be covering your be right now. Stores and despair, stores closing, other stores putting on heroic efforts. What is it like covering the independent book trade right now . Ive been covering independent bookstores for several decades now and theres never been anything like this. Theres been traumatic periods but its more of a general thing and its not so threatening. For us its just that ai liken it to going to a show like Winter Institute or book expo doing intensive coverage for three, four, five days, and unlike the shows, you finish, you take a break, you retain your sanity and go back to normal. Now its like covering a show, its pushing about three months. There seems to be no let up theres like a tsunami of news and the stuff that just continues and continues and continues. Its been really stressful. The kind of stories we are doing started some change in them i remember the first Couple Stores that closed we highlighted them and made a big deal about it and then everybody pretty much closed. How stores are opening and people are dealing with this. Even though some of the focus is changing, it still this sort of wave of everyday so much news and not that long ago sometimes bob and i would be scrounging around trying to find new stories for the next mornings issue theres nothing like that anymore. Its more like, we got 12 stories, which seven should we run and which ones should be safe . Thats more or less its more like it feels like even on the weekends im doing a lot more work than i used to do. Not that i was totally off on the weekends but its just an awful lot of work. Can you talk about how you are doing or shelf is run remotely you guys work remotely under your abunder normal circumstances. On the editorial, yes. We joked that we been perfecting social distancing for 15 years. Careful what you wish for. Bob, what is it like for you reporting right now you can even get a bookstore . Its more about paying attention to whats happening. It was much more nationally before this hit. Im seeing so much more general Media Coverage of international bookstores. Theres always coverage of publishing in the industry but sort of Human Interest a bookstore in morocco or bookstore in italy or the International Side changed. A lot of what i do in my little hobbit here is really scanning social media looking at newspapers from all over the country all of the world like john said, you serve or sometimes looking for crumbs in the store somewhere that was reopening or just opening or something and now its a combination of all of these general media people discovering bookstores are newsworthy because of what they are doing in the face of covid but also there is a wide expanse of restrictions of what is wisconsin doing today . How is the bookselling near and whats happening in wisconsin versus somebody in arkansas and especially with social media. Its fascinating to see, i will have something put together in the afternoon and go back in the evening and the rules have changed. Ive noticed some very delicate language concerning booksellers and places where facemasks are political badges of some kind. It seems like thats been a new area of sensitive reporting. Are there other things like that that are kind of surprisingly touching touch eat matters now . I will say that just thinking today a lot of stores open monday. A lot of states had june 1 reopening phase, whatever phase that particular state was in and the masks are one part of whats become a constant monitoring of human interaction. Do people react to only allowing six people in a store at a time . If six people are in there and three our family, why cant i go in there . They are together, isnt that a unit . Theres a certain debate about, everything is about the rule. Mike heres the rule and why am i being excluded . Right. Its madness. Its interesting. Interesting madness, yes. [laughter] in the way a car crashes and interesting. You still look when you drive by. There you go. What are you hearing from your readers about your reporting . Either of the two writers. One thing that struck me is, we have a lot of bookseller readers around the world. We have generally in the past focused on the u. S. But as bob was saying, were doing more and more International Coverage and im getting like just this past weekend i got an email from an australian bookseller just to me personally saying thank you for writing up in so much detail about whats going on in all the bookstores around the world because im getting ideas, or situation is different in certain ways but in other ways its very similar and im getting ideas from selfawareness i wouldnt got anywhere else. I would agree theres a certain practical aspect. I did a column about plexiglas barriers a week or so ago. I got a significant amount of mail from booksellers saying im so glad to see what it looks like. I keep reading about plexiglas barriers and being able to link out to booksellers of how they are actually putting these things in place. The information is funneled in a way. Right. Jenn, id like to speak about how you are responding to the new world. If you are starting any, shelf is extremely Innovative Organization as far as how it interacts with bookstores or ada. Can you talk to me about that area of your life. Are you trying new things . Yes. Everyone that works on the show has worked in a bookstore. We are all kind of medicine grambling her brain trying to figure out the best way we can help our bookstores are indies and publishers sell more books. I can say that while ago if you recall the Winter Institute before last there was a lot of buzz going on about preorders. We took it to task and started to figure out how we could help the independent bookstores with preorders. We been working on this product for a while but once the pandemic hit, we ratcheted it up to as soon as possible our thinking was if we can help them if we can help at least one start getting preorders sales, thats a new bucket of money for them and i cant think of a better time to have them get new money and not that you will enjoy this at all but it would probably take sales from amazon. A bonus, i dont know, kind of fun. Publishers wanting to get the amazon preorders up so that on publication day you have this quick large sale when that goes live. Right. For the times reporting. Exactly. Youre smart enough to realize maybe the publishers didnt which is that those preorders can come from anywhere. This has been a process of just teaching the consumers that they need bookstores and possibly book readers everywhere that stephen king that they live for all yearround just as easily get it from their neighbors at the bookstore. That will be a message that we have a preproduct now that will help the independent bookstores bring that message home. We can already see that selling books for them we never had a product more quickly adopted by the book industry than ever. We Just Launched the month before last and now weve got 77 stores in lake 410,000 bookstore customers that read it. Thats terrific. We did that and help the regionals put together some reading issues that they will be coming out with the western regionals of khalifa, and the pm ba. We hope the ada immediately with the next indy abto special messaging on every single newsletter which every single bookstore that participates in say we are doing curbside and you can come in with only x amount at a time. Weve just been pivoting as much as possible and really trying to choose what we can do to help bookstores survive during this time. And john and his team getting them the information is paramount all that. Now they know what can help them and then we try to give them products to continue to help them. Fantastic. How do you see these products, these initiatives going into the future . The preorders obviously will continue but are you doing things differently now and you think this is a good thing we learned how to do this and keep doing this in the future . John and i were just talking about this yesterday but we are talking about the shelf is the term 15 abshelf is about to turn 15 a couple weeks, will talking about the last crisis which is the financial crisis and how in 2008 and we were how old then . Three years old still trying to figure out if we could by ourselves wine. Nonetheless a meal. At the time that that occurred i think the Publishing Industry no longer wanted to spend 25,000 30,000 on a print package we benefited from that time of stress. During this time we are trying to see it as the same way for a scary as this is without a doubt this is much scarier than the financial crisis. Its a time of opportunity every eye we can get on the preorders page on behalf of the independent bookstore every independent bookstore customer that has learned to just order online from them we could see the numbers right now people are learning how to order online from their local independent. You are saying the other day about how a lot of independents were really embracing online sales. A lot of them are learning simply how to do that. I spoke to several booksellers who were just overwhelmed they had a decent website for example but nowhere near this volume. Even simple things like they dont have envelopes or packing material. Keeping up with different business. You think thats gonna stick around after this is over . Go ahead. I was just going to say as soon as you learn you can order a book just as easily from independent bookstore and you have a soul i would hope you keep doing that. I think its one of the Silver Linings of the crisis because as Everybody Knows the trends for the past 10 to 15 years was for more and more book sales to go online. Theres only one company that has been taking advantage of that which is amazon. For a variety of reasons some of them have done online sales pretty well in the past but most of them are sort of they offer it but its not a big deal and then we did some stuff about stores and websites that didnt have ecommerce just informational website still. I know the ada hired several other people because they were overwhelmed with booksellers going to them and finally saying, we wanted an ecommerce site. I dont think that the indies are going to go in the settles down or whatever happens hopefully its soon youre there or go back to ignoring online sales component for sure. I think theres also going to be a long time before a lot of people are comfortable being out. Vulnerable people. Older people and we are probably talking months and years if theyve learned to buy online from indies during this madness its a habit maybe they will keep i dont know if anybodys even quantified how many people started ordering from indie who had never really visited them especially when amazon decided the books were nonessential early in the game. I think that cost amazon certain chunk of the marketplace. Im not worried about them im guessing they will probably survive this. We can order a book from your local indy and get delivered in a couple days. Thats what i wanted to do i wanted to start like a milliondollar ad campaign thats like welcome to the upside down world where you can get books quicker from your local independent then you can from amazon. Ive been saying this because i heard a certain mucky muck in the big publishing world say it, crime is a crime anymore i think that to some degree is true and you have to think a certain percentage of that is permanent. Again and again ive seen indies reporting there selling a ton of backlist when it got hired to get. Thats exactly what we are all seeing. Fiction is up its like a flip of a couple years. Back up to what used to be 50 of your business. You will have trouble selling fiction. Very interesting. We are lucky that we have things like bookshop in ingrams direct to home in place. Bookshop really has good timing. The Winter Institute now its there and its great and its working. I dont know if you can really predict what booksellers are going to keep from this moment or not but can you tell me what you are hearing about what they are selling . I know for a while it was all kids books and abbecause people were having to homeschool. That has slowed down. What kind of stories are you hearing about what booksellers are writing on now . I was just thinking we can throw it out there it would be interesting i think for me to see how nothing was more publicly then puzzles i saw more pictures and social media of booksellings stack of jigsaw puzzles. Im not sure i can predict those quarantine people will retain that. I think we have something, maybe going to be running in tomorrows issue about a story that they announce they are reopening and they said we are going to stop selling puzzles and they had a huge display of puzzles they just want to get rid of so they can get books back in. Sort of like the coloring book. Right. [laughter] what about socks . Are you getting reports on stock sales absocks sales . I saw recently something that talked about the indie Commerce Platform talking about a number of antiracism books peeking over the weekend. In fact, when you are talking about how does the shelf innovate what we changed didnt we just change the editorial here today before the George Floyd Murder we had a lead editorial written and it was going to run and i think next week suddenly with every thing thats happened in the past week we just realized the moment is now. Until we move things around. Its all about antiracism books that you can read. Yes. We highlight backlist titles and white fragility became a number one bestseller in a matter of a few days. It was originally published two years ago. We highlighted that also in todays issue. We were able to pivot very quickly. Because shelf for readers gets up to half a million independent bookstore customers. We had regular messaging in their however one can support their local bookstore. We think its really an important lesson to be driving home to everybody that reads it. I know for the political books that melbourne ab Melville House publishes is the indie that drives them. They are often difficult books, even if they are timely. I think right now we can see them really turn on a dime in a way that we published in 2016 we published a book called antipop. The history of what it is. It exploded yesterday. Just exploded. The author was on every television show. Thats a fouryearold book now. I feel like things are kind of reversed. The industry, that wasnt the publisher going out and getting the publicity. That was something happening that booksellers said, i got the title for that booksellers with good depths of memory for backlist. I guess the last area i want to talk about is just the shelf of the future. Because i think john was saying this thing is good to have a very slow lies until they come up with the cure maybe even then it will be slow. You are doing Different Things now, some are working, you keep them. What you see, whats the question . How has your role changed and how will it go forward. Editorially bob and i have both touched on some of the changes that we made in the past three months and i think some of that is going to last we done regular daily surveys of booksellers and what they are doing, what the issues are like and i can see, its not that we didnt do surveys before but this is sort of like almost like rolling surveys and i can see doing that for a long time and not just about pandemic related things but in general. It adds a certain depth to the Editorial Coverage we have that i really like. In a similar vein weve traditionally covered individual stores and stories a lot of time, Stores Opening or stores moving or one of the things i think has been really good in a very bad time is looking at an issue or thing with the perspective of several stores in the same article mike six different or a Different Stores