The American Booksellers Association recently held their annual meeting and offered the latest stats on membership. The organization lost 80 members to closures in 2020; for context, membership currently sits at 1,700 stores in 2,100 locations. Since January 2021, 107 members have been added, 23 of them BIPOC. Keep in mind that ABA membership includes many different types of retailers, including used bookstores, specialty stores, gift stores, museum stores, chains like Half-Price Books and Hudson, pop-up bookstores, events-only operations, and so on.
Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch pointed out (subscription required) that if one looks at ABA membership numbers from 2019, there’s been a significant decline—about 17 percent—in store locations. (No membership figures were made available in 2020 due to the pandemic.) President Bradley Graham blamed the lower figures on a change in counting methods and criteria for membership. Today’s ABA membership is roughly equivalent to the membership reported in 2015.
Echoing what we heard in two recent panel discussions of booksellers—that it’s no longer tenable to operate on an outdated business model that doesn’t account for the existence of Amazon—ABA CEO Allison Hill said at the meeting, “We’re having conversations with publishers as strategic partners. … We’ve been talking to economists about our model and what it would take to support a livable wage and long-term sustainability. We’re working on the future of ecommerce and what the most robust solution for the stores looks like.” Pete Mulvihill at Green Apple said the stores need more margin, comparable to what Amazon and the big chains receive. This would mean 10 more points (a 55 percent discount). For more on the ABA town hall, see Shelf Awareness.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
