This month’s episode is tailored to booksellers. In it, we go over some key things you should think about before facing the peak of the holiday bookselling season, as well as a series of tools, products, and resources from BookNet and other organizations that can help you take your business to the next level now or beyond the gifting season.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
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Further reading/listening
BookNet Canada products and services mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
Nataly Alarcón: Hello BookNet Canada podcast listeners, I’m your host, Nataly Alarcón, the marketing associate at BookNet. Welcome to our November episode. This year has been incredibly challenging for everyone, and booksellers are no exception. But even though things have been rather difficult and quite different from the recent past years, booksellers have come up with ways to keep their businesses afloat, some of these initiatives and stories have been shared in our Weathering the COVID-19 storm blog series. By the way, the links to this blog series and all the tools, resources, and products we’ll mention today are listed in the episode notes.
And that’s exactly what we’ll be talking about in this podcast episode: bookselling, what BookNet Canada can do now and any time of the year to support you, and of course, the holiday season, also known as the busiest time of the year for any kind of retailer.
At the end of October, we published a blog post entirely dedicated to bookselling and the holiday shopping season. In case you missed it, these are some of the things we think will help you be successful during this busy and unprecedented time.
The first is communicate. Whatever strategies, changes, promotions, innovative ways of bookselling you have in mind will only be successful if you keep customers in the loop. So, use the tools you have to communicate and engage with them. Some key things your customers should be able to easily find about your bookstore are:
Business hours
Shipping costs, delivery zones, returns and exchanges policies
Measures put in place due to COVID-19
Contact information
The second is review. Take some time to sit down and read all the information included in your website, social media, and any other medium such as Google Maps you use to communicate information to your customers. Make sure it’s all up to date. Think like a customer who knows nothing about your business, what would you like to know? Take notes and take action.
And the third is prepare to sell. Check inventory status often, reach out to your supply chain partners, ask if anything has changed on their end, are fulfilling times longer due to the pandemic? In what ways are they supporting businesses like yours?
Our blog post, which again will be linked in the notes of the episode, includes a list of resources that can help you tackle some of those more challenging items of the preparedness plan. Organizations such as Digital Main Street are actively supporting retailers in Ontario with all aspects related to marketing and technology, the Retail Council of Canada has also a wide number of resources on their website, companies like Google and Instagram have created easy guides to help you take full advantage of the features their products have to offer.
On that note, BookNet Canada also has a series of tools and services that can be useful to you now and beyond the holiday shopping season. So let’s quickly review what each one of them can offer.
Let’s start with SalesData, BookNet’s national sales tracking service for the Canadian English-language trade book market. With SalesData you can see what’s happening in the Canadian trade print market, and the best part is that access is free when you submit your point-of-sale data. With SalesData you’ll be able to see what’s in demand, discover new books for your store, analyze book buying trends, access gap analysis reports to see if you're missing out on potential sales, and much more.
Then there’s LibraryData, BookNet’s national library collection and circulation analysis tool, which is also included with SalesData. LibraryData allows retailers to examine their performance in context with library circulation, as well as identify books that are popular in public libraries that you might not be carrying yet.
CataList, BookNet’s online catalogue service and order management tool. When you sign up to CataList which by the way, it’s also free, you’ll be able to browse digital catalogues from publishers that serve the Canadian market, get notified when updates are made to the books you’re interested in, create and export orders, create and export custom catalogues, and more.
Now, moving onto the more technical bits. BookNet also offers a service called Pubnet EDI. Pubnet EDI streamlines ordering, invoicing, and returns, while improving communication with publishers. Once you’re all set up, your computer will handle the drudge work of the data entry and data exchange involved with ordering, shipping, and payment processing. Something great is that to access this service you’ll only need to make a one-time payment of $50, that’s it. And if you ever encounter an issue or have any questions about Pubnet EDI, there’ll be someone to provide customer support any business day from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. ET.
Now, to talk about BiblioShare, BookNet’s quality-controlled data aggregation and distribution system, I’ve invited BookNet’s Project Manager & Retailer Liaison, Tim Middleton to tell you more about what this product has to offer and all the marvellous things he and his team can do for you. Over to you, Tim.
Tim Middleton: So to wrap your head around what we call BiblioShare, I think one of the best ways is to look at some solutions that have incorporated our web services that run off of our database. Of course, I can't show them to you on a podcast, but if you get a chance, check out some of these, you may already be using them but don't know, and maybe don't care where the data comes from.
Of course, there’s CataList that uses BiblioShare data and is also one of the best examples of the great things you can put together with this framework. There are also a bunch of publisher websites like Playwrights Canada, Arsenal Pulp Press, Coach House, and more whose solutions built by ReaderBound incorporate the BiblioShare web services. And of course, 49th Shelf is a great example of an awesome platform that leverages the data from BiblioShare to help people discover more Canadian authors.
More recently, we’ve had a number of Quebec based solution providers integrate their offerings with BiblioShare data. One great example is the ecommerce platform Les Libraries who are using BibliosShare data for their English language title data. Their solution has been widely applauded in the Quebec independent retailer space and has done fantastic for the indies ecommmerce channel.
Web services or APIs, I’m not going to split the hair on those two things, are generally the best way to access data in an efficient way – at least for online applications.
Our web services include the ability to "look up" a cover for a book, or the metadata for the book, or say some images from the inside of the book, or an excerpt of the book – well, you can start to see the trend. Anything that is available in a digital format is what we’re trying to make available for end-users, like retailers.
But few retailers want to know the details of these services unless they have a technical leaning and don't mind fussing around with some code to get what they want. We understand these needs of the average retailer who wants to get online and start selling. It’s needless to point out all of the solutions out there for the digital entrepreneur or long time retailer who just wants to get online. There’s WordPress with WooCommerce. Oh, and I should mention that we do have a plugin for Wordpress that returns what you can think of as a biblio light record – cover image, title, author, subject, price, format, pubdate. It has been updated to work with the Wordpress block editor as well as some security updates recently, and over time its remained true to its original purpose which was to allow bloggers a quick way to pull a snippet of data for a blog post about a title.
But then of course there is Wix, Bigcommerce, Lightspeed, Google tools, the list is endless but one that we all know is seeing its time in the sun is the Shopify platform.
We built a Shopify App a number of years ago and have provided this basic App that pulls in data from our BiblioShare web services, and populates the basic product fields in a Shopify product as well as makes available extra metadata in the Shopify metafields, so it’s really integrated into Shopify.
Since the pandemic, it’s almost trite to say that interest in Shopify for retailing has been huge. That holds true for bookselling as well, bookselling with Shopify. Our App is still available for free from us. The interest and use of it has seen some pretty significant increase.
And I shouldn't forget to say that along with a bunch of other POS systems we also have built-in reporting from Shopify if a retailer wants to participate in our BNC SalesData panel of retailers.
Finally, just to sum up, I’ll mention that you can request a token from us to access any of our web services or to get our App for Shopify, or our WordPress plugin. All of these services or solutions pull data from BNC BiblioShare in which we have over 3.5 million records of data, 2.9 million cover images, hundreds of thousands of interior images, and a growing dataset of excerpts and guides. We also have data for about 135 thousand titles where the title has a Canadian author. So, just like 49th Shelf, you can have a list that shows you who is considered a Canadian author in Canada. It’s a great resource for anyone looking for that list of Canadian titles.
And our services do get some pretty heavy usage. Since the beginning of March, which to me is a good watershed date to use, we received and processed 361,844 new title records and on top of that nearly 2.5 million records had data updated in them. That’s a lot of data processing coming in. Going out we’ve seen the same sort of thing, a lot of demand for the data! Just in October, our web services were hit in total 6.6 million times. For me, it’s just amazing to see this much data being managed and sent all over the place with miraculously few problems. So, I hope that we can help you, if you’re a retailer, to learn how to leverage the data, maybe we already have something you can use. Thanks, Nataly. Back to you.
Nataly: Thank you, Tim. As you can see, there are multiple resources, tools, and organizations out there ready to help you take your business to the next level. And that’s not all, in our blog you’ll often find posts about bookselling trends, changes to book standards and metadata, interviews with fellow booksellers, and more. We also have a wide number of research studies available, most of them for free or at an affordable rate, that will help you understand better the market and reader. And last but not least, it’s our Let’s Sell Some Books newsletter, in this weekly newsletter we share short, digestible nuggets of insights, industry updates, market research, and much more.
And that’s all we have for now. As mentioned earlier, all the links are listed in the episode notes. From all of us here at BookNet, happy holidays, we hope you have a successful bookselling season and a happy 2021. Got questions? Feel free to drop us a line, our contact information will also be listed in the episode notes,
Before we go, we’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that BookNet Canada staff, board, and partners operate upon the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, Wendat, and Huron indigenous peoples, the original nations of this land. We endorse the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and support an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space-making in the book industry. And we hope that our work, including this podcast, helps to create an environment that supports that shift. We'd also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support through the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
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