Notebook: (1) Small Biz

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Holiday window at our Winter 2024 Partner Bookseller, Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn

Booksellers bring in around 20 percent of their annual sales during the holidays, an absolute live-or-die moment ensuring their survival for the year. In 2020, when all bricks-and-mortar retail was mortally threatened by the pandemic, and book production and distribution were further menaced with supply-chain blockages and delays, booksellers mounted a vigorous campaign to convince readers to buy books for their friends for the holidays early, to buy gift cards that would front-load the season with cash-on-hand, and to look to bookstores for other sorts of gifts as well. A Goliath-pestering advertising firm called DCX collaborated with the American Booksellers Association on a multi-city anti-Prime-Day installation called Boxed Out (see our Notebook of the time) to remind book buyers and passersby that, while local small business were reeling under the pandemic, the tech giants were raking it in, redoubling their existing advantages over their relatively lilliputian local rivals.