The newly formed Canadian Independent Booksellers Association (CIBA) is hitting the ground running. In this podcast episode, we sat down to talk to Doug Minett, the Executive Director, to learn how it came about, what initiatives they’re tackling in their first year, what they see for the future post-COVID, and what they’ll need to do to be successful.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
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Transcript
Ainsley Sparkes: Welcome to this month’s episode of The BookNet Canada Podcast. I’m your host, Ainsley Sparkes, the Marketing & Communications Manager at BookNet.
Canadian independent bookstores are top of mind for us here at BookNet Canada as we prepare to launch our second State of Bookselling survey to booksellers across Canada to gauge the scope, health, and challenges of indie bookselling.
Our first survey in 2018, What’s in Store: The State of Independent Bookselling in Canada, set the benchmark and through that survey we learned that one third of respondents (33%) were not a member of any publishing or business/retail associations in 2018. But there was interest in such associations for booksellers. One respondent commented: “We live in Canada where we no longer have a national association of booksellers. We need our publishers and all booksellers — small, medium, and large — to get behind a major push to bring back a national association of booksellers. That means we have to all work together.”
Fast forward to 2020 and the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association (CIBA) is formed. We were interested in knowing more about it so we asked Doug Minett, the Executive Director of CIBA, to tell us how it came about, what their plans are for the first year, what they see for the future, and more.
Doug Minett: So my name is Doug Minett. I'm the Executive Director of the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association. I worked as an acting Executive Director for a number of months when I was a member of the founding board of the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association, also known as CIBA, to keep it a lot simpler to talk about it. And so basically my background, I was a bookseller starting in 1973 when I was a co-founder of The Bookshelf in Guelph, Ontario, which later morphed into a bookstore café, the first one of its kind in Canada in 1980. We added a movie theatre and a bar in 1987. We built Canada's first online bookstore in the mid-'90s and sold that to Indigo. And so I've had, sort of, an ongoing both bookselling and tech interest in the industry. So I was a founding director of Canadian Telebook Agency and BookNet Canada. And I was the guy who ran the ISBN agency when we switched from ISBN 10 to ISBN 13. And I was the guy who rolled out EDI for Canada in the...I guess that was the early '00s.
I basically took over for some people who had been working on this. And I tip my hat to them. In, I guess it's 2018, there was a group of people that BookNet I know was assisting and helping to get some booksellers from across the country together to look at starting a new booksellers association because the old Canadian Booksellers Association, aka CBA, had started in, you know, in the early '50s, actually and it only died in the...I can't remember the exact year, but around 2010. And I think what was likely that had the writing on the wall for the old CBA was the fact that they lost the glue that held, not just that organization together, but held the book industry together in Canada. And that was the old Booksellers Convention. Without that organization, the viability of a bookselling association was basically zero, you know, or let's say it couldn't do much, you know, without a partner.
Yeah. So I got involved in the CIBA thing basically in 2019 when I attended a conference, the Bookmanager Academy. I wanted to go out and talk to Michael's people, Michael Neil, that is, his people. And I wanted to see what the software was like, and I wanted to meet some of the users of his software. So that's the reason I was at that gathering. And I ended up having some fun conversations with some of Michael's tech people and as well as a bunch of booksellers from across the country. Now, remember, I'm retired at this point. And so I'm just sitting around and drinking wine with a bunch of booksellers. And so, anyway, so I talk with them a bit and I agreed to meet with a number of them who were coming to the Giller that fall in 2019.
And so I had brunch with a bunch of them from across the country. As a takeaway, I said, "Look, send me what you've done so far. I'll have a look at it, I'll write an overview about it, and you can see what you think." And so basically what my overview said, which I delivered to the group, which were from across the country, you know, it was informal, nobody was elected, but...So I delivered to the group in January my report. So I analyzed why CBA was not viable. I talked about why indie booksellers are important, everything from the More Canada report to the importance they have in terms of urban development for the cities that they operate in, the communities that they operate in. So I presented this to this ad hoc group of people from across the country. There were about 10 or 15 of us. And so we had a look at that.
And then, so I think they agreed with my findings for the most part about what I said was viable and what wasn't. And then in early May, I proposed, "Why don't I do a survey of potential bookselling members. We have to decide exactly what this organization is gonna do." You can't just say, "Oh, we want a bookselling association” without knowing what the hell you want to do. So I said, "Okay, I'll write a survey." So I wrote a survey and within 3 days, I had 100 responses back. So people were basically saying what they cared about. And so I reported back within a week to this, you know, they weren't really a board, but my ad hoc group of people and said, "Okay. This is what we've learned."
So, you know, I'll give you a few of the basic things. So about 100 people responded. I would say about 60% of them had been in the business for more than 20 years, which left the rest of them as relatively newcomers. And in terms of people who had only been in business or under 10 years, that was only 25%. And then the other thing that I asked - which I found was kind of interesting because it was quite different from the age of the bookstore versus the age of the bookseller - so the people who were in the biz, all of a sudden it skewed way younger, you know? So, in other words, people who had been in the business, their stores might've been really old, like places like Monroe's or whatever, or places like The Bookshelf in Guelph that is run by my kids, you know, but the number of years of the bookseller was much less.
And so we got a pretty good sample size from across the country. And I found out what organizations they belonged to now or had ever belonged to. So like the CBA, Retail Council of Canada, and the BC Booksellers, the Atlantic Indie Booksellers, the ABA Booksellers, and others, and then I asked them how many of them had ever attended the Bookmanager Academy because I wanted to get a sense of, you know, how active people were. And what I found is a very large percentage of the people had attended a Bookmanager Academy either in 2015, 2017, or 2019. So in other words, it suggested, you know, for the people who were still in this business an activist space. And then I asked them also, how many of them went to buying fairs and publishers events, and like about 70% said that. I was shocked to find that 30% of them actually went to the ABA events, either the Winter Institute or the annual event that they had.
And then I basically broke down the next group of questions into professional development, marketing, government relations, buying group opportunities, supplier relations, or book trade communications. And remember, this survey was done in the midst of the beginning of COVID-19. And not surprising, communications was really at the top. People wanted to talk with one another, you know, it was pretty clear. It was also pretty clear that things like shipping, you know, the cost of shipping loomed large because many of the people that I was surveying had to pivot virtually instantly to being online booksellers mainly. So all of a sudden they were bumping their heads into those things, the realities of online selling.
And then basically I talked to them about what were they looking for in professional development, whether it was marketing skills, financial skills, technology skills, all that stuff. And so without going into all the nitty-gritty details, which I did share back to the bookselling community, basically my final question was if we formed a new association with the following fee schedule, how many of you would join? And 49% said yes, so 49% of 100 people. So CIBA, as of today, after less than 3 months of operations has 75 bookstore members. So it exceeded what was promised in this survey. It's quite remarkable. And not only that, CIBA also has 41 publisher and sales agency members and 12 NGOs. So clearly, the desire of the industry was huge.
Ainsley: So you heard from them, so now what kinds of things are you acting on? What are you moving forward at the beginning?
Doug: Well, everything that we talked about in the survey, like, I mean, I guess maybe we aren't terribly original, we just are following that. We're following what we've been asked to do. So I'll give you some examples of things that we were involved in even before we had been funded. So we actually reached out to booksellers in Quebec about shipping because one of the things I mentioned to you earlier was that shipping loomed really large for booksellers. You know, trying to ship books at 9 to 10 bucks a book is not really viable and you aren't gonna get customers to pay for it. Whereas, we determined by the good offices of BookNet and the Canadian Urban Libraries Group that they would be willing to act as a gatekeeper to get independent booksellers from Quebec and the rest of Canada into the book rate. And just to compare you, that 9 to 10 buck cost of shipping a book, if you don't have book rates, it's $9 to $10 versus $1.5. So it's massive. It's huge. But we started reaching out to various groups very early on because even though we had no money and no staff, you know, I was doing it as a volunteer, you know, it was okay, "Let's pedal to the metal."
So Jean-Benoît Dumais, in particular, from Les libraires in Quebec was hugely instrumental. So Noah and I spoke with him a bit and then Jean-Benoît and I worked with Katherine Fafard from the Quebec Booksellers. And CIBA actually led the charge to write a bilingual document, which we submitted to the Ministry of Finance in time for the budget. And so basically, we were doing lobbying with the Ministry of Finance, with Heritage, and we were also working on back channels with Canada Post to determine their willingness. We were talking to people at CULC, the Canadian Urban Libraries Council, about their willingness to, you know, help us out and act as a gatekeeper and get us in the tent for book rate. And so, you know, so that was a big one, you know, getting involved in that.
Another one we were involved in early on, again, before we actually had any money in the bank, we were working with senior policy people at Department of Canadian Heritage on the distribution fund, which was rolled out. It wasn't rolled out officially, initially for booksellers, but it morphed into something with a huge bookseller factor because basically it was designed to help with cash flow for distributors, you know, because they maybe weren't getting paid as quickly as they should have been by publishers. And it also was rolled out as cash flow for publishers because the distributors weren't paying the publishers.
But some brilliant people at the Department of Canadian Heritage said, "Well, that's all well and good, but we don't want all that money to just end up stuck between the distributors and the publishers. What if instead, we fed some of it back to booksellers?" And to me that was brilliant. A brilliant idea. So the design of the program ended up with...the distributors for sure, got to keep, I forget what the percentage is, 10% to 15% over and above money that they would have to give the publishers, their publisher clients, but the rest of it had to be fed back to booksellers.
And so what did that result in? It was fantastic because we did a survey of booksellers about a month ago and 50 booksellers responded and a huge percentage of them bought more books from Canadian indie publishers than they'd ever bought before. I mean, so in other words, this program ended up supporting distributors, publishers, and booksellers, and ultimately authors because it meant that books that were being funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage, you know, in the CBF, the Canada Book Fund, was now also, it was making sure that those books, you know, ended up in the retail marketplace. And, in fact, 50% of the booksellers who responded to that survey said that they gave special exposure to the books that they ended up buying as a result of this program. So there's another example of one we've been working on. CIBA is out there working with everybody, you know, and nobody else would have really fit in that role if you think about it, only an organization like what we do.
Ainsley: So you mentioned that the work on the distribution fund with the Department of Canadian Heritage helped indie booksellers get their books front of store in quite a few retailers. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about diversity in a bigger picture and how it relates to book retail. So how are Canadian retailers and your members meeting the marketplace's demand for content that more widely reflects the Canadian population?
Doug: Yeah. Definitely. You know, the Black Lives Matter issues and issues of indigenous books are clearly very big. And if you go to the CIBA website, you'll actually see graphics on there where we talk about that. And there clearly is, you know, a huge interest in that among indie booksellers. You know, we picked up on that almost right away as a group. In fact, one of the interesting things is Michael Neil from Bookmanager has worked with us quite a bit in sharing data from his organization because he, like BookNet, you know, keeps track of sales data from the members' stores and he's got a couple of 100 stores that he gets data from, but he noticed that right away, you know, the...And I'm sure BookNet is as well, so all the Black Lives Matter titles, very, very important.
And we will...in fact, that is a focus of us. Part of our grant application to Heritage did have to do with a responsibility that CIBA has to increasing the exposure and the sale of a diversity of books, you know, in particular, Canadian books, obviously, because, you know, that's what the Department of Canadian Heritage is responsible for, but all kinds books that are not just the bestseller mainstream stuffs. I just like to talk about an initiative that is being rolled out in the next week or so. It's ShopLocal, it’s ShopLocal API, because one of other things, by the way, that when CIBA did its grant application to Department of Canadian Heritage, we quoted from a localism report that had been presented last January, you know, a year ago January at the ABA Winter Institute, where the guy who wrote it talked about the re-emergence of indie booksellers in the U.S. and it had to do with localism, you know, connection to your market. In other words, having really intelligent, creative inventories that aren't just bestsellers is a very important part of localism and local bookselling. But the new ShopLocal API has been developed by Michael Neil at Bookmanager. It's available for free to any sales agency, publisher, anybody who wants to use it. And it's very cool because basically if you implement this API, you can see, for a particular ISBN, who in your proximity has stock of it, or has it on order.
Ainsley: Now I'm gonna ask you to think a little bit further into the future and tell me your prognostications for what you think the independent bookstore landscape is gonna look like post-COVID and what your members are gonna be facing and how you're gonna maybe help them through that with the CIBA initiatives.
Doug: Okay. So when we put together our grant application, we talked to Canadian Heritage in general terms about professional development of all kinds, as I said before, tech, you know, financial expertise, strategic planning, all of that stuff. And we've already hit the ground running, rolling bits and pieces of these out as we go. But what we've decided to do is we are going to develop a complete curriculum for bookselling and the curriculum will be from cradle to grave. You know, basically, people who have never been in the biz. And so we're gonna talk about it from the perspective of what the heck a bookseller does, what expertise it requires, how you would ever get in the business? What does strategic planning look like? What does financial literacy look like? What does retail literacy look like?
Okay. So that's if you've never been in the game, if you wanted to start it now. By the same token, you work from the other end of the spectrum, those bookstores that are, you know, 40-plus years old, you know, who have people who have been at it for 20 years, but, you know, they never really were properly trained in some of that stuff. You know, they just sort of...they worked their way up the ladder and they might own the store or whatever, but if you were really good, if you wanted to push the envelope, what would that look like? So we're going to work the course materials from both ends, experts to people who weren't even in the game. So really, in answer to your question, what I'm trying to say is, I think we can raise all boats by increasing, first of all, the connection between people because there's ultimately a social as well, increasing connection among booksellers, and everybody learning new tricks.
Ainsley: That sounds like a large, large undertaking.
Doug: You got that right.
Ainsley: So one of my questions was what does CIBA look like in five years? So where do you see CIBA in five years? And how are you imagining that you'll measure success for CIBA?
Doug: Well, that's really hard to say, you know, in as much as CIBA got its first member, I think on the 24th of December and didn't get another one until the 7th of January, you know, and here we are, the 22nd of March. So it is kind of hard for me to say, and remember, I'm an old geezer, I've been at this game for a million years, so I'll be long gone. But what I would say is why I agreed to take this job on, because originally we were just gonna hire somebody, but because I had developed the survey, I had done the outreach to people, I had done the outreach to Heritage and other NGOs and people in the industry, I felt because I've been around the block a few times, it might be useful to have an old hand to help get it going.
And I was very lucky to get our core group of people who were actually operating CIBA right now because they're all really good. And so basically, I guess I would like to see a continuation of that. And I guess CIBA will have to reinvent itself. You know, when we come out of COVID, there'll be more in-person stuff, but one of the interesting things about COVID, in some ways, COVID made CIBA possible in the first place, because it was pretty easy to pitch Heritage that the reason why they had to approve CIBA, despite the fact that it didn't meet any of their rules for funding, is because Zoom and virtual pulling together of an organization was all of a sudden not just possible, but it was common. Everybody was used to it.
And I would argue that, you know, going forward, we're gonna see a combination of Zoom, but then there's gonna be more wine drinking in person as well. You know, at some point or other, I think we're gonna be more in the same room more often, because what BookNet and CIBA share is we are at the nexus where various parts of the industry come together. In fact, we're all stronger by virtue of that. So, for instance, you know, you think about CIBA, like, I mean, you know, I now have regular meetings with certain publishers, you know, every couple of weeks, I have regular meetings with the ACP, I have regular meetings with More Canada, I have regular meetings, you know, with Heritage. And the people in Quebec reach out to me when they need a number from my perspective, I reach out to them, vice versa. So, you know, I think that collaboration which has been afforded by virtue of Zoom will continue, but we'll add onto it, you know, physical proximity.
Ainsley: So I have one last question, which is how do retailers and industry partners get involved?
Doug: They can email me, they can call me, they can email any of our team whose emails are on the website. I encourage them to join. I encourage them to reach out. In fact, it was really interesting early on when we just had a handful of members, you know, there were some booksellers who were concerned that our membership rules were too restrictive. And so they reached out to us. And in the case of...One thing, we didn't change the rules, but in the case of another consideration, we did change the rules. We made it so...One of the things that I realized by doing research on BookNet Canada's website is how small a lot of our Canadian indie publishers are. They're really tiny. They're often much smaller than the bookstores that they're selling to. And, you know, that's an eye-opener if you're unaware of it.
So basically we changed the rules. We made it so it was, you know, less expensive for small publishers to join. And we listened to certain booksellers who wanted to have certain other rules changed a bit. We listened and we decided we were happy with our rules, you know, and that bookseller, after reaching out and talking to the board, they were quite pleased that they were heard. And so, yeah. So, yeah, reach out to us. And every first meeting we have with any bookseller, or any publisher, or any NGO, it's sort of like, “You folks have ideas? You approach us” because we are inventing this organization right now.
Ainsley: Well, that's great. It sounds like there's a lot of potential for the association to really help the Canadian book industry in all fronts.
Doug: Yeah. That's the plan. So even though it's a bookselling, you know, association, it's more than that. It's a book industry association. Yes, our primary focus is bookselling, but that just happens to be our area of expertise. But that's why we're working with publishers, and sales agencies, and NGOs about, "Okay, how do we make this stuff work, really?"
Ainsley: Thank you Doug for joining us to talk about CIBA. We’re looking forward to seeing the impact it will have on Canadian bookselling as well as the broader impact it might have in the Canadian publishing industry as a whole.
As I mentioned in the introduction, we’re about to launch our bookselling survey in the coming weeks, so if you’re a bookseller, please keep an eye out for that and send us your responses — we’ve made it shorter and easier to answer this year. If you’re interested in the results, we’ll be releasing the report later this Fall.
Before we go, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that BookNet Canada staff, board, partners, and our makeshift podcast studio, 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. Thanks again to Doug Minett for speaking with us this month and of course, thanks to you for listening.
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