In speaking with two of the leading lights of the english book world, two of my neighbors in brooklyn. One is johnny campbell, the other is jessica the noodle of the green light bookstore in my neighborhood bookstore. Welcome to both of you and thank you for taking the time to speak. I want to talk shop with you guys give people inside baseball about our new lives as independent book people. We will start with you jessica. What has this doneto your business . It a lot really fast, right west and mark its been a real reinvention over the past six or eight weeks. Midmarch there were a couple of days where we were like we need to consider closing . Suddenly it was like yes, you absolutely have to and you also need to send everyone home and in that week of transition, i think march 21 we close the doors and walked away from the bookstores that was terrifying because we didnt know what was going to happen next. I feel like we were in a fortunate position that weve already had a really wellestablished website and an ecommerce website though we were able to fulfill orders on line. Therefore a little while we try to people have people pick up curbside but we were able to haveordered a green light bookstore. Com and have them shipped from childrens warehouse , our wholesale supplier so we can still fulfill those orders and immediately we saw a bunch of , there were a lot of online orders and we startedshipping people over to that. And were able to have people have that for work. But we didnt have, we spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out how long this was going to last and what we were going to do and for a little while we were paying people to stay home. But we are not a business that has the cash flow or reach or the resources to be able to do that for very long so there was one really terrible day with a lot of crying where he had to lay off about 30 people. About 30 booksellers because they worked on the salesfloor and theres no sales floor. We didnt have any work for them and some people are calling it furlough and we absolutely hope that we can hire those people back but he wanted to call it unemployment so that they can apply for benefits. Apply for unemployment so they could get funds from the book industry. Charitable foundation orwhatever was available to them. So it was a horrible wrenching decision to happen it. But like, we felt it was the best thing we could do for ouremployees. Then we had kind of a Skeleton Crew of people working, everybody from their home mostly unfulfilling those ecommerce order and we would like to better fulfill all these now because theyre going to dry up immediately. But they didnt dry up, and continued sustainably and its grown so we have a team of maybe six people fulfilling online orders. Just day after day, sending them to ingram and getting them shipped out. And another thing we had to do immediately as we canceled all our events obviously that was even before we close the store and then very quickly and to figure out howto convert those Virtual Events. So we were able to do that almost everything in late march and april and may, but we had already scheduled. We were in honor the bookings we had and turn them into Virtual Events somewhere hosting a most every night of the week on zoom webinar, there like life conversations that are maybe an hour long people can login and just view them and ask actions or whatever those have been successful. Its been fun. So theyre working hard working, were still trying to crack the of and we both translate into book sales and sometimes they do and sometimes they dont they are only for us to stay engaged and where doing a lot of new things to do that. Since people cant come in the stores their life can we bring the store to them that we started a video series called and someonefrom home, its like rebecca and i and some of our staff talking about books they love. You have one manager to be in the store and they do these Instagram Stories where they just walkaround the store and like show you whats on the shelves. Were doing funds of social media as everybody does, we were able to hire some people back to do some digital marketing. There is a ton of engagements and people are still really supportive of independent bookstores so our sales for april were down like 40 percent. But that better than 90 percent. And so our payroll is much smaller than it was sort of a precarious attainability right now. At the point where we are starting to like think about next steps so its really pliable. Hairraising. We will get to the next steps in a minute but whats your side of this . Whats happening in your Publishing House . And kaushik like all other Book Publishers and booksellers to. Like jessicas been saying, weve been really ramping up our social media. Selling books direct. Trying to be creative, trying to be creative about things. Its been a strong. Sales are way down. But its sort of like jessica was saying. Down 40 percent is betterthan down 90 percent. While that sounds obvious , its like the difference between lifeand death for a small business. And so were treading water is sort of the best you can do. Its still early quite frankly. I have not looked too closely at our april numbers yet. Ill be doing that in the next week but ive been trying to like not trying to face it too much but it has been kind of a real struggle. We had to let go of one staff person andthat was heartbreaking. Because he was dedicated to a kaushik, doing great work. And it was just a matter of realizing for me, a matter of been kind of hoping there was a way to make it through this situation without having to let go of any staff people and are not yet so hopefully ill get through it without having only let go of one person not more but it would be foolish to think i know whats going to happen. My hope to get through it without letting go of any staff people, i just woke up one day and realize even when we stop social distancing as much, were going to be looking at a broken economy. And so we need to kind of like shrink down and that was when i realized i had to let go of someone. Was because our new reality is going to be a shrunken reality. I dont know how shrunken is going to be. But that was just this moment, realizing its not just a matter of getting through the next two, three, four months. Its a matter of getting through, so our economy recovers, i dontknow if were talking aboutmid2021, late 2021 , early2022 , who knows. And as both of you know andas everyone watching knows , this is unfolding on a day by day, week by week basis for all of us. We dont know what june hold for us. Or all we know right nowis what the first week of may holds for us. And i dont know about your warehouse but in our warehouse is notprocessing returned yet. Thats the thing im trying to forecast. Just to add on to what ive been saying and on the more positive level weve been doing a bunch of exciting things that are social media and when are others who have new books coming out. Theres definitely some positive developments happening and in terms of positive development, hearing what jessica just said i already feel eight percent better than idid 10 minutes ago. Im going to make her talk some more. Give that up to 16. Jessica was talking about some of the new things shes doing and i know she let them out that i want to hear about what youre also doing some great stuff , particularly with your Author Interview series on the kaushik website. You for asking about that. Im doing a weekly interview series with others both kaushik authors and nonkaushik authors. These are sort of quarantine q as, where calling them and their men to the not overly serious, im trying to keep things light and mixed humor in wherever possible, a very fun interview with ciara jones. And an excellent interview with jennifer egan. Ricardo cortez, these are the interviews that ive already posted and coming up very soon is an interview with marlon james which it is outrageous and rrated read the interview was done by my 12yearold son in the case of marlon. And were getting a great response to these interviews and were doing other things as well. But that perhaps the highlight and across our social media, instagram, facebook. Youtube. Twitter. These interview series is being held up across our social media. I know youve been ramping up your social media as well. Have you had to ship what people are doing or, whats it like having thestaff working from home . Its confusing. Its sometimes exciting,often confusing. Everybodys of course working from home. I will say my whole staff, i dont know that weve ever worked harder than what were working right now because in addition to alldoing our jobs we are also reinventing the wheel. Its kind of hilarious that every book publisher and every bookseller is continuously reinventing the wheel without even, without being able to share notes too much, we are sharing notes as youknow dennis, we are in touch with you. And other publishers, but nobody has that well already so were all sort of doing the same work at the exact same time. Its been really difficult on all of us, particularly our publicity and Promotion Department cause we cant do regular book mailings so promoting the book instead of doing the mailing of 200 books as one by one reaching out to different media sources. At the same time, my Publicity Department which is Suzanne Lawrence and Alex Wertheimer in addition to doing all their work there obviously doing all this extra social media work so its like an impossible amount of work for all of us particularly the publicity team. As if publicity wasnt hard enough in the first place. Exactly and as it they werent burning their candles at both ends tobegin with. But i have an incredible staff. An incredibly dedicated staff and im lucky and im running them ragged. Which is hard, but its a desperate time. Get back to some of the new stuff people are doing. Jessica, you are doing a lot of Virtual Events as youve already described but theres even more than that. You got this thing coming with the 92nd street ythat i think is amazing, can you talk about that . Featuring a Melville Houseboat for one of our first selections. That was actually, it was, i think partnerships have always been important to us and even more so now where were like how can we pool our resources and do Something Interesting and the 92nd street wagon reached out three or four months ago about maybe partnering on a book club of some kind or getting our signed First Editions Club to their book through subscribers or Something Like that and obviously thats kind of fell by the wayside. But i circle back and is there anything that would be interesting about this now . Is there any version of this that could exist and they were like actuallythat would be amazing. The wine is intentionally trying to work with Small Businesses and independent bookstores sort of getting with us and with kitchen arts and letters, they started doing these virtual so they wanted someone from three like to lead the discussion which we havevirtual discussions. Bus customers or attendees for them in a row and a payoff is a contract that includes all four of the book. Them and then they get the login to go into this and have a discussion led by somebody knowledgeable about the book. So rebecca and i decided we could do this we split up so posting to and im posting. The suggestion of the wine was what we do Something Like , we can go anywhere but we can go anywhere we want with books so we get this global tour. So we your books to study iran, there a south american and a like a european and asian, i forget there intentionally international. So thats kind of thetheme they came up with. Theres a travel book club is travel book club and theyre doing the same thing with kitchen arts and letters are there doing interactive cooking kind of classes along with what the book is saying. So that break in terms of partnership and i think its also indicative of the way work we are starting to think about how these online and translate in the book sales. And like the ticketed events idea is something that everybody trying to figure out, like you were saying johnny, everyone is reinventing the wheel and you cant just take someone elses best practices because everyone is figuring it out simultaneously so were talking to multiple different publisher trying to figure this out at the same time that we are we do need to we have seen theater and we havent refunded those tickets yet. How do we create something thats worthwhile for people or do we just have to refund everything and start over were all figuring all that i think the 92nd street model is one that would work. Weve seen a good response already. Its a solid platform that kind of thing obviously and so were enthusiastic to see how itwill work out. Fantastic. I wish you well with you and thank you for including a melle mel outfit. Are you publishing to the moment . Are you looking at acquisitions right now mark are you looking at things to address the moment specifically or somehow work with whats going onnow . Is this impacting your acquisitions at all . We slowed our acquisitions way down. As i said, im trying to really shrink a little bit, not a lot but usually a little bit and so we published about 40 books a year. And it would be great to get that closer to more like 35. So were looking at very very few new books right now. Having said that, were all Book Publishers of every day im looking at people reaching out to us. Are you getting more submission than ever now . I am. Thats been really interesting because we noticed we are getting fewer. Which suits us just fine but one thing i will say is that we tend to not necessarily jump on books about highly topical things there are exceptions on our list. We did a tom hayden book right when the iraq war came out but to me the idea of books around covid19 is, im not drawn to this. Ive been proposed by 16 anthologies because tillerson akashic as their famous noir series so people have said covid more, but based around cities, not based on whats happening today. Its a city or geography based series but im really perplexed at this idea that every fiction writer is experiencing covid and talk about the three of us reinventing thewheel , every fiction writer is going through this traumatic experience and im not looking forward to reading the fiction that comes out of covid and im not interested personally in books, obviously its important and our Society Needs to wrestle with this and akashic publishes fiction, nonfiction, art books but in terms of our being hurt, i think about as literary fiction and im just worried about all these action writers being put through the same funnel. Two words lockdown memoir. That is our future, john. Itscoming at you. Go ahead. I was just going to say i think writers, a couple of writers ive talked to her having the samekind of reaction. Im not looking to do that. Anytime soon. How can i avoid it . Right from their lives. Sure, it translates into some form or something but alright. The great writers are whatever how it impacts them is going to be wonderful and amazing. But im more worried about the writers who arts at that toptier, literary level command of their voice, etc. Im worried about what mediocre writers aregoing to be doing with this. It will be like war and novels. Its usuallya few years after a war ends before you start seeing the fiction about it. Of course now were in a war that never ends but maybe it will take a while before we start being how this impacts fiction anyway. I think wewill see a lot of nonfiction from this. Theres got to be. Nonfiction, the world has to figure this thing out and books are an incredible tool for people to try to figure out what the hell is going on. Whats Melville House doing, youguys have a reaction to topical event and what are you working on . We signed a coronavirus book about a psychiatrist and it was about how to keep her head together, it was a short pamphlet and we are giving all the proceeds from it but it was just a book that an irish publisher did that i read and i said we gotto do this. Its a beautiful thing about this dont panic, keep it together. You can do it. Though thats what we crash but we are taking a step back and also doing fewer acquisitions and trying to think about what the nonfiction is goingto be about this. And we have the same concerns about the fiction. I want to ask you whats selling . Im sure youre selling a lot of childrens books now that everybodys home with the kids and i also know that right now that is actually a really, thats the biggest selling thing going on in our industry but what else is moving . Are you seeing any trends . I feel like we are selling a lot of childrens books across the board but does not like anyone big stand. Its like everything from classic to recent, not bestsellers. And i think rebecca is better at identifying these kinds of trends that i am rebecca is my coowner was the buyer for greenlight and we were talking the other day and she said before this had been seeing such a shift towards nonfiction and the books that were really being talked about and the events that were working well because it was so strange with our Political Climate and everything. Now we are seeing a shift back tofiction. Because so much nonfiction just doesnt seem that relevant right now. If youre not talking about this weird world, it doesnt seem relevant but fiction always seems relevant and its somewhere else to go beside your own room. So thats been an interesting thing to watch. It had been a big nonfiction swing and now its going back the other way. Industrywide by the way ive seen some current stance onthis. Nonfiction is waydown , listed down, backless is a. Nationwide, i dont know about. I think thats the challenge for us to make sure that we are putting the new titles there because we want authors to continue to have careers also the backless is easy to sell. The stuff thats familiar. And comfortable. Thats a lot of whats appealing at the moment. I just bought this for greenlight. Once a very potter boxed set, im hearing. When i interviewed marlon james because hes writing fantasy now, he said he talked about it being a good time to be a fantasy writer because he can just leave this world and then he talked about the difficulties, psychological difficulty of stopping writing and then reentering. Coming back through the wardrobe you dont make me but ive been recommending Ursula Le Guin whole earthsea collection. That seems like a different world. Fantastic. Ive gone way longer than i meant to cause you guys are just so interesting but your last question for you both which is what new thing are you doing to cope with your situation, that you think youll take into the Bright Future ahead ofus, knock on wood. What will you be . I think Virtual Events are going to be around for a long time. I think even when we are able to get back into our store, were not going to be hosting big gatherings for a lot longer. And it seems like people are getting comfortable with this and it actually opens up a lot of possibilities we didnt even have before like geography is no obstacle to posting an author. The capacity is much less of an obstacle. We can host ive hundred people easily onany given week day. Hopefully that evolved into something more interesting when we can actually send people sign books for the streaming from our store but i think thats something thats going to say anywhere also find it useful in bringing authors to school. We can have an author visit this like four or five Public Elementary School in brooklyn all getting to interact with this offer on a given day and we could never make that work work office time for our staff time or whatever to do that. It was a physical traveling thing but we can do it if its virtual. So im hoping you are able to translate that into increasing acceptability in some ways and positive way for a while. Thats great and i think margaret would near this, didnt you avirtual book tour way back when . I feel like people were ready for that. I hope so, how about you johnny, what are you doing now thats new you think will continue doing after this is all over . Along the lines of what jessica said, more Virtual Events with our authors and what jessica said, youcan cover a lot more ground. An author can now do a National Tour in a way that was never before possible. And im not saying thats easy to do or that for an author you can set up a bunch of events and theyre all going to be successful its easier to swallow an unsuccessful event only eight peoples are not and you havent left her house area thats better than having traveled to some city to do a reading 40 people. But for me, also the main thing is just im enjoying this Author Interview series that im doing. And right now im thinking i will continue doing it even when, even after the quarantine is over. Because its really interesting to talk to people while theyre in their own home. And its covid that sort of gave rise to this akashic suddenly you realize well, i can interview an author at any time. And theres this accessibility that was always there, but there is a different light shining on it now. That may keep shining on it even after you are not social distancing anymore area. Lets hope so, lets hope so. Thank you both for speaking with me today. And i really wish you nothing but the best for your really wonderful businesses. Good luck with this and stay safe. Thanks denison. Thank you for hosting this, not just this conversation the other conversations youre doing. These conversations are needed and important and ive learned a lot from this conversation already. And yes, the eight percent me feeling better has jumped to 16 percent based on what jessica issaying and also just getting to look at you guys. Thank you both. Be well. Having lived through a loss of confidence in our institutions, a wave of cynicism has left us unable to trust what we are told by anyone who calls themselves next it becomes very difficult for us to write a challenge like this. Our first reaction is to say no, theyre lying to us to read it there only for themselves and a lot of our National Institutions got to take on the challenge of persuading people again that they exist for us, that they are here for the country. Sunday, june 7 at noon eastern on index, live conversation with father and American Enterprise Institute Seller youve all of it. His most recent book is a time to build. Other titles include the great debate and a fractured republic. Join the conversation with your phone call, tweets, texts and facebook messages. Watch in depth with you all 11 on book tv on cspan2. Tonight on book tv in primetime, New York Times economics reporter and were no quarter on racism in america. Cd looks atawardwinning authors and their books. Shoshana zubov examines the growing business of collecting and selling consumer data. The book publisher random house asked several of their authors such as david brooks, westmore and to give virtual commencement addresses to the graduating class of 2020 and evolutionary biologist neil stephen was at the na from prehistoric fossils. Training. President black family. You can purchase the book directly from a cappella books. Theres a link to the right of the screen and a a link providd on the Atlanta History Center website. As were talking we invite
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