Departures and Arrivals

Well in just the last couple of days I've had conversations with three bookstores that want to be destinations for BiblioExpeditions, and two bookstores that want to be points of departure: sending their customers off to visit other stores. This is exciting.

The point-of-departure criteria are key, right now. I need to understand the market for bookstore-tour riders. The easiest and most fruitful approach at this moment may not be libraries and Friends of Libraries groups, as I'd first thought. It may be universities. I may find much higher concentrations of people who buy books there. After all, library-advocates operate in a world where books are free, or nearly free. You borrow them, or, you buy and sell them for VERY cheap prices at annual used-book sales that raise funds for library operation. But at universities, and in collegetowns, the buying of trade books at mainstream prices is a huge fact of life, and everyone is writing, too. Publish or perish. These are bookstore customers.

So I'm going to be looking at universities and colleges as initial points of departure, for, initially, Greenwich Village bookstore tours -- in particular, colleges in Connecticut and Massachusetts, since I currently live in Amherst, MA (I run the store at Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, which is on the campus of Hampshire College). I think I may be able to run the first of these within two months -- I'll try to run one every Saturday, to begin with, from a rotating set of departure points.

Depending on demand, and on what I learn from riders, I'll either proceed to develop more, different tours, to different destinations, or I'll increase the number of departures for the Village, or, I'll add more points of departure.

This week I'll be talking with Nancy Bass, owner of The Strand, in NYC, to discuss her ideas about how to make these trips to the Village as interesting and attractive as possible.