SOUTHERN INDIE BESTSELLER LIST
For the week ending 4/28/2024

Edelweiss Collections:
(sort by "Catalog Order" to see each list according to rating)

Hardcover Fiction | Hardcover Nonfiction | Trade Paperback Fiction | Trade Paperback Nonfiction | Mass Market | Children's Illustrated | Children's Interest | Children's Series

Read This Next! is meant to be a list of buzz-worthy books, and that is especially true of the May Adult list, where some of the books have not just several, but over a dozen VERY enthusiastic reviews.

RTNext! Bookseller Resources:
Edelweiss Collection | Flyer | Flyer Front (image)

What SIBA Booksellers have to say:

Exhibit : A Novel by R. O. Kwon
Sexy sentences, startling images, complicated characters and unexpected moments of tenderness flesh out Kwon's impressionistic peek inside the art world and the people who inhabit it.
– Rachel Knox Tombolo Books St. Petersburg, Florida

Cactus Country : A Boyhood Memoir by Zoë Bossiere
A lucid and tender coming of age memoir of class and gender expression. With an enjoyable ease, Zoë Bossiere vividly paints the Tucson desert, the colorful residents of the trailer park which gives the memoir its title, and the search for understanding and acceptance.
– Luis Correa Avid Bookshop Athens, Georgia

Swiped : A Novel by L.M. Chilton
Swiped is a delightful Rom-Com-Murder Mystery. I thought I had this one figured out at least three different times, but boy was I wrong.
– Nancy McFarlane Fiction Addiction Greenville, South Carolina

The Ministry of Time : A Novel by Kaliane Bradley
Bureaucracy meets time travel in Kaliane Bradley’s brilliantly imagined and hugely entertaining debut novel. What starts out being quite lighthearted fun - as the expats grapple with such modern concepts as Spotify, germ theory, online dating and feminism - gains depth to become a commentary on colonialism and power.
– Jude Burke-Lewis Square Books Oxford, Mississippi

Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy
This is such a loving, moving story told with such skill and heart, i can’t wait to reread this tiny tale perhaps many times. Anyone who reads it will never look at a mouse or an octogenarian the same way.
– Nancy Pierce Bookmiser, Inc. Marietta, Georgia

And don't forget about the March/April Read This Next! Kids List:

RTNext! Kids Bookseller Resources:
Edelweiss Collection | Flyer | Flyer Front (image)

Current Read This Next! books and what SIBA booksellers have to say about them can always be found at The Southern Bookseller Review

One of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance's (SIBA) major goals for 2024 is creating community, and to that end, they have launched social media scavenger hunts on Instagram to connect member stores with readers, increase social media engagement for participating stores, and increase subscribers to The Southern Bookseller Review.

This week, the scavenger hunt theme is "Southern Indie Bookstore Bingo," where readers click through Instagram posts of 24 stores and The Southern Bookseller Review to fill bingo squares. Once they view all the posts, they fill out a form to be entered into a drawing to win a $100 gift card to the participating store of their choice. The scavenger hunt model allows readers to discover new indie bookstores while gaining social media followers and engagement for participating stores. Thus far, more than 50 readers have completed the scavenger hunt, with most also subscribing to The Southern Bookseller Review. Participating stores have also seen a climb in Instagram engagement, seeing an average of 175 likes on each post as of the writing of this article. 

SIBA launched the first social media scavenger hunt in February to promote the 2024 Southern Book Prize nominees. 17 member stores participated, and more than 300 readers completed the scavenger hunt. All participating stores saw a significant increase in social media engagement, including some who bumped their follower count up by 300+ organic readers.

Member stores are excited about this new initiative and eager to participate. Lucile Perkins-Wagel, owner of Blinking Owl Books in Fort Myers, FL, shared about February's scavenger hunt, "It was a fun and easy way to bring more traffic to my store's Instagram page, AND to highlight a really cool SIBA program! I would absolutely participate again."

SIBA plans to do social media scavenger hunts for major events, such as the Southern Book Prize, Indie Bookstore Day, Bookstore Romance Day, and Banned Books Week.

Yes it is already time to order your Winter Catalogs! Don't miss out on this major SIBA benefit and key tool in making your 4th quarter a success. The Winter Catalogs land in stores the first week of October. They are 16-page, professionally-designed, full-color pieces with 100+ books featured. They are created to be easy to slip into customers' bags and include as newspaper inserts. SIBA member booksellers receive the first 7000 catalogs absolutely free of charge, with the option to order more at cost.

Included in the catalog program:

• Free shipping to stores or drop shipping to newspapers
• extra boxes of 500 catalogs available at cost
• Opt in store imprinting, at a discounted cost for SIBA Bookstores
• Opt in saturation mailing to your chosen zip code/mail routes
• "Concierge Service" available to help build your store's order
• Free online digital catalog for store websites
• Professionally-designed digital and downloadable marketing assetts and store signage

Plus, store that place orders for the Winter Catalog get to participate in the Catalog Cover Contest to select the 2024 catalog design. Last year's design was created by Caldecott-winner Doug Salati (Hot Dog)

The deadline for saturation mail orders is June 1, and for all other orders is June 15th. But don't wait, Catalog Ordering is open now!

RAMP has designed a streamlined ordering page to make the process easy-peasy. If you have ordered any RAMP products since 2020, your store account is already active. If not, creating an account takes just a few minutes: Click here

Visit RAMP for more detailed information, or to download the marketing kit.

Linda-Marie Barrett:
Reading: The Husbands by Holly Gramazio. A woman's attic is a portal through which husbands appear and disappear, one after another. Each new husband brings a different set of past life experiences. Reading this reminds me how each decision, and each person we meet, can create so much unexpected change in our life's journey.
Listening: To peaceful nature sounds around my home and in the woods behind.
Watching: Continuing Death in Paradise, with side trips to cozies in England and Malta.

Candice Huber:
Reading: In my effort to educate myself, I'm currently reading Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe. I'm also still in the middle of Running Close to the Wind. These books balance each other out well
Listening: Almost finished Can't Spell Treason Without Tea, and I've really enjoyed it. It's squarely in the cozy fantasy genre (I mean, there is literally tea and books), and I think lovers of Legends & Lattes will also love this!
Watching: I've binged through two seasons of The Wire so far. I can see why this was such a pioneering show! Can't wait to see what Omar does next.

Nicki Leone:
Reading: I finished Godden's lovely book about cloistered life In This House of Brede, although not, as planned, on the plane returning from vacation because I had barely fifteen minutes to get across the Charlotte airport to make my connecting flight. ("CLT, said SP to me later, is the anti-Brede.) I still have The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown (Daniel Blake Smith) and Flights (Olga Tokarczuk) in my currently reading stack, but they have been briefly superseded by Letters from New York by Helene Hanff, which I forgot I had ordered from the Slightly Foxed people, but was waiting for me when I came home from vacation. Don't you love when that happens?
Listening: My bird song identification skills vanished when I returned home, and I am reduced to recording the birds I hear from my back deck and playing them at my Merlin app. With doubful results.
Watching: I play British mysteries and old scifi shows in the evening when I'm trying to catch up with the day's email. Having been gone for over a week, the email backlog is pretty extreme, so I've got Supernatural running since it has like fifteen seasons and was filmed back when "a season" was over twenty episodes. Plus, Felicia Day as Charley Bradbury!

SP Rankin:
Reading: I told Alison at Cleary's Bookstore on Saturday that Table for Two, Amor Towles's splendid new collection of short fiction, would be in my reading list this week and I can confirm that I am indeed reading it AND marking my place with my Cleary's bookmark.
Listening: Don't Forget Me, Maggie Rogers's (the theme of my list this week is "s's," which I like to do because it bothers people) new album that I think I will be listening to all summer.
Watching: Returning to my 2024 project of works from women directors I haven't watched before led to Agnès Varda's One Sings, the Other Doesn't from 1977, which places its main characters squarely in the women's liberation movement in France without becoming preachy or abstract for even one single second. It will, however, make you unbearably nostalgic for the 1970s (even if you didn't live through them but particularly if you did) so fair warning.

Andrea Richardson:
Reading: I'm in a bit of a TBR-Induced panic attack - I have so many I want to read right now and don't know where to start. I did read an early copy of Kate McKinnon's Middle Grade debut last week (The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science) and I am madly in love with it.
Listening: A virtual conversation between Salman Rushdie and Suleika Jaouad that their publisher hosted - it's fascinating!
Watching: There aren't a ton of new shows that have grabbed me lately, so I am watching old episodes of Bachelorette in my downtime. I'm on Jojo's season at the moment.

The Spring New Voices New Rooms Owners Retreat met on April 11th to share ideas and plans for Independent Bookstore Day on April 27th. IBD is just around the corner, but booksellers created a list of things stores can to quickly to help make the day more fun and a success:

Things you can do quickly:

• Pull old inventory (that can’t be returned) and make up mystery book bags and bundles. Or wrap them individually as mystery books (note whether adult / kids; fiction, non fiction). Have fun with how you categorize, for example: “Mysteries with animal investigators,” etc.

• Set up in-store education to customers about Libro.fm (provide a tablet/iPad as a listening station) and Bookshop.org.  Tip: Indigo Maiden on Faire can create stickers. Put a QR code on them that leads to your Libro.fm account.

• Give away ARCs for larger purchases

• Do games:  Indie Bingo (From Brave + Kind Bookstore), Be An Independent Bookseller for the Day: have customers alphabetize ARCs, etc.

• Do tiered giveaways. Depending on what you spend, you get certain levels of swag and ARCs. Have a prize box filled with publisher swag, ARCs, etc. Give away tote bags to larger purchases.

• Involve kids with story times or scavenger or treasure hunts in the store. Hide dragons or skeletons let kids tell you how many they found.

• Involve staff to show off their talents. Let their bands play at the store, or sell their art, etc. Invite local artists to sell their wares.

• Invite a food truck to come.

• Invite other pop-up retailers to be in your store that day.

• Free tote bags (create your own fun ones) are big incentives to get people to spend more money)  Recommended vendor: Tote Bag Factory.

• Give away $5 gift cards on future purchases for sales of $100+. This will generate future sales and foot traffic.

• Have staff create personal bundles of books and merchandise for sale, that have a “vibe” that reflects the bookseller’s personality. Market as “Buy the (Insert Staffers Name)”

• Give away food!  But avoid powdered donuts and other messy items.

• Decorate with balloons. Consider a bubble machine in front of your store.

• Post your plans and “day of” experiences on social media.

Things that take a little more planning:

• Passport programs – DelMarVa does a month long program that kicks off on Independent Bookstore Day. Consumers have a month to visit 17 bookstores. Georgia’s Bookshop Hop. Chicagoland Bookstore Tour. 

• Involve other organizations, like pet adoptions/animal rescue shelters.

• Link into Earth Week, Children’s Book Week, or Readathon.

• Involve coffee shops, restaurants, breweries, wineries (or your own café) to have a literary theme, renaming items on the menus for they day, or to pair books with food or beverages.

• Create a Standee for photo ops; kissing booth with pictures of super heroes for photo ops, and they get Hershey kisses.

• Create your own merchandise that can also be used at other times of the year, such as faux leather journals (Amsterdam Printing), tshirts (Bonfire). You don’t have to rely on IBD merch to be on the map.

• Launch your customer loyalty program on IBD. Advice: determine your goal (is it to gather emails and mailing addresses, encourage repeat business, or fill in slow sales periods?) then create a program that has appropriate incentive levels. (Sample from Let’s Play Books.)

In a perfect world (and IBD wishlist):

• Bus tours that would stop at bookstores and fun destinations. 

• Better official IBD merchandise from authors and publishers that is unique to this day 

Many stores reported Independent Bookstore Day was their best non-holiday sales day of the year last year. And although balloons and bubble machines were mentioned above as fun and easy idea, the general advice was that booksellers should not feel compelled to decorate the store or overwelm themselves with special preparations. Do enough to make the day enjoyable for the staff and the customers, but not so much it gets in the way of sales. Be mindful of your space limitations when dreaming up your IBD plans.

Registration is now open.

SIBA's 21-Day Racial Equity Challenge will take place from May 6th to May 26th. The Challenge is a self-guided program open to any member of the book industry. Challenge participants receive daily emails that contain prompts for reflection, discussion, and action. The prompts are also posted at a dedicated blog, along with resources and links in support of each day’s prompt and topic. Resources are actively curated to be relevant to contemporary issues.

The 2024 edition of the 21-Day Racial Equity Challenge includes updated material and resources added to address recent topics facing booksellers and members of the book industry, including the proliferation of book banning legislation, hostility targeting bookstores and bookstore staff, and heightened emotions in response to world events. A new searchable library of resources presented in the Challenge will also be available to participants, along with guidelines for bookstores to host the 21-Day Challenge within their own communities.

Why twenty-one days? SIBA’s 21-Day Challenge is designed specifically for its member booksellers and draws its format and many of its resources from the 21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge created by Food Solutions New England (FSNE), a regional collaborative network organized to support the emergence and continued viability of a New England food system that is a resilient driver of healthy food for all, racial equity, sustainable farming and fishing, and thriving communities. We are so grateful for their extraordinary work creating this program and making it available to other organizations.

Register here 

Trope Bookshop, also known as “the Smut Bus,” is a romance bookshop on wheels in Charlotte, NC, owned by Katie Mitchell. Trope is the product of a second chance romance with reading +  #Booktok + corporate burnout. Katie opened the doors of the bus, affectionately known as Green Girl, in October of 2023. 

Katie fell back in love with reading during the COVID lockdown, and that combined with discovering the world of Sarah J Maas inspired the idea for Trope Bookshop. Initially, Katie dreamed of a store front for the romance-only bookstore, inspired by the work of The Ripped Bodice, but the cost of real estate was simply too much. Katie’s friends encouraged her to keep the dream alive, so she began to look into mobile options. A few weeks later, she acquired the “Green Girl” and began renovating. 

Trope Bookshop is a place where all love is welcome, encouraged, and sold, from classic rom coms to enemies to lovers, to romantasy, to Katie’s personal favorite, Mafia Romances. Katie hopes that when customers visit the book bus they find a warm, welcoming, and fun experience shopping for their next book boyfriend.

Since opening, Trope has launched a Smutty Bookclub that meets once a month, partnered with other local Charlotte businesses for indie author book signings, and more. Follow Trope on Instagram @tropebookshop to see all their upcoming bus stops and field trips around the Queen City. 

(Asheville, NC) SIBA is pleased to announce that the revised Bylaws presented in early March have been reviewed by its membership and as of March 31, 2024 have been approved by a quorum of 25% of SIBA member bookstores. They will go into immediate effect.

View the revised Bylaws

Revisions of the organization's Bylaws were begun by the SIBA Board in 2020, partly to bring the organization into compliance with North Carolina law when it relocated its central office to Asheville, North Carolina, but largely in response to ongoing feedback from its membership. A growing consensus from SIBA bookstores at annual meetings and town halls indicated the organization needed to adapt to better represent and serve independent bookstores in the SIBA region in a rapidly evolving industry.  The last revisions to SIBA's Bylaws occurred in March 2010. 

The most significant change in the new Bylaws adopted by the SIBA Membership this month is an expanded definition of a "Core Member Bookstore," which now includes pop-up and online store models.

The previous definition was as follows: "Independent, privately-owned, commercially-zoned bookstores with a retail storefront and physical headquarters in the Company’s region are eligible for core membership."

The new updated definition is more inclusive of a broader range of business models and reads:

"Core membership is open to any independent, privately-owned legal entity actively engaged in the business of bookselling in our region (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA). The bookselling venue may be physical, online, recurring pop-ups or mobile but physical books (including e-books and audiobook versions) must represent more than 50% of overall revenue.” 

Core Members are voting members of the organization and must be represented by the bookstore’s owners, authorized representatives, or key staff. The Bylaws also allow for interpretation by the SIBA Board of Directors in the event of a dispute. 

The Bylaws allow for an expanded board, from five members to seven, to better represent the SIBA region at the board level. An additional Secretary-Treasurer Officer has also been created to comply with North Carolina law.

SIBA posted the Bylaws for member review on February 28, 2024. Voting opened on March 5 and closed on March 31st. Legally, under North Carolina State law, a quorum is considered to be 10% of the voting membership. SIBA reports that member engagement in the Bylaws review process and ballot was very high, with 32% of current SIBA members (representing 69 bookstores) voting and 89% of ballots cast in favor of the new Bylaws. 

In a letter to SIBA members, incoming Board President Julia Davis (The Book Worm Bookstore, Powder Springs, GA) noted that updating the Bylaws had been a major project of the board for several years,  "I am confident that 2024 is going to be filled with great and exciting things for SIBA members including more opportunities to gather together (whether virtually or in person). 

The SIBA Board invites comments and feedback regarding the Bylaws and is happy to answer any questions members may have.

For more information, visit sibaweb.com. 

As we approach the end of the month, SIBA is making a final appeal for bookstores to participate in the 2024 SIBA Census. The information SIBA receives from the census is vitally important for the organization's strategic planning. The SIBA Census is used to:

• Develop innovative and meaningful events and programming.
• Design creative marketing and promotional opportunities for bookstores.
• Advocate on behalf of independent bookstores to industry businesses and organizations.
• Create meaningful member communications and news to make them even more valuable.
• Strengthen SIBA's core commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

The last four years have seen many changes for bookstores in the SIBA region. They have responded to challenges with creativity and resilience by developing new business models and strategies to stay successful. Over 100 new bookstores have joined SIBA since its last census in 2022, a testament to the deep importance of independent bookstores to communities in the South.

Please take a few minutes to fill out the SIBA Census for your store, especially if you joined SIBA after 2022. Your input is an important part of the portrait of Southern independent bookselling the SIBA Census seeks to create.

Take the SIBA Census

Contact Nicki Leone at nicki@sibaweb.com if you have any questions.