(Bookstore) Retail Promotion Ideas

Both courtesy of Shelf-Awareness, the online website and e-newsletter for the book industry.

1. Cool, fertile idea of the day: Chapter 11, the Atlanta, Ga., area bookseller, is selling gardening, landscape design, outdoors titles and more at the Southeastern Flower Show at the Georgia World Congress Center through Sunday. It's also coordinating book signings by more than 20 gardening authors.

2. Making lemonade out of lemons. (I've always wondered why Kramerbooks never does special displays related to big demonstrations, as hordes descend on Dupont Circle before and after. Of course, the old Common Concerns, lefty-oriented bookstore, had a big problem with theft.)

Cameron's Bookstore, Portland, Oregon.

From S-A:

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey has become an object lesson at Inkwood Books, Tampa, Fla., where the book is the focus of what co-owner Leslie Reiner calls the "truthiness display." At the center of a table toward the front of the store are copies of the disgraced memoir surrounded by a range of adult and children's titles about lying and the truth. Above the table is a sign with a phrase taken from The Four Agreements: "Speak with integrity."

"Most people have been amused, and no one's been bothered," Reiner told Shelf Awareness. "It was all everyone was talking about. The store created the display as the truth about Frey's lying began to come out and a shipment of A Million Little Pieces arrived. "We thought we would never sell them," Reiner said. Once the staff began to work on the display, they used books already on the shelves to fill it out.Truth is this is one creative, humorous way to piece together something constructive from the situation.

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