Working together

Over the past week I've had a number of email conversations with booksellers who are either interested in making their bookstores a focal element in a bookstore tour program, or in offering a program that sends their customers on tour to visit other stores. I think that the key message to customers may always be to somehow combine these two ideas: to ensure that whenever booklovers take such a bookstore-centered vacation or daytrip that they feel there are independent booksellers working together to both send them off and to receive them warmly. That booklovers feel cared for by independent booksellers working in teams.

Also, as I've tried to wrap my mind around the Bookstore Tourism ideas as a for-profit model, I keep coming back to the commercial concept that Tourism is a gigantic, and very robustly expanding industry, whereas sales at bookstores have been barely holding steady for the past couple of years, and even seem to have slightly declined this past year. This appears to be proof that bookstores are not now viewed as tourist destinations! But I do not think there is any meaning to this except that the people who run the tourism industry are by and large not book people. I think that the fact that Literary Travel as a genre of holiday-making goes back at least as far as Herodotus -- and the existence of plenty of Authors' House-Museums and Literary Walking Tours of this city or that -- proves that people who travel are often book lovers. It's the people who run the tourist industry who are missing the boat so far, not providing a sufficient variety of energetically marketed, sophisticated literary travel-packages for what is in fact a very large potential market segment of travelers.

So bookstore tourism -- constructed in a manner that earns money BOTH through bookstore-owners sharing fees with tour operators like BiblioExpeditions AND directly through bookstore book sales to the traveling booklovers -- could tap into a large nascent tourist market segment, and have a substantial impact on the financial viability of the bookstores that participate both on the sending end (marketing to customers, suggesting they go on a tour together) and the receiving end (inviting groups to come visit).

And this will be my aim with BiblioExpeditions. To have a measurable financial impact on the viability and business success of any bookstore I assist in developing this aspect of their action in the marketplace.

If we booksellers have a hard time making a profit by selling books, we've all learned that at least we can make more profit selling sidelines. But what about the possibility of making more profit taking a cut of a tour-operator's bus-ticket fee, when a tourbus brings a customer through our doors as part of an entertaining daytrip outing that includes perhaps a morning at one bookstore, a lunch at an Authors'-House Museum cafe, and a dinner in a neighboring town where there's another bookstore or two?

It should help us all to have a foot in the Tourism Market.