Why We Do the Winter Catalog - A Letter from Executive Director, Hannah

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

If you’re anything like me, you can’t believe it is already the first week of June. Time has flown by as we gathered during our Spring Forums and prepared for the coming Summer and Fall months. Those of you who attended our Spring Forums might have attended our Catalog Session in which Claire Bone, owner of Wild Sisters Books & Co., and I presented on the importance of the Catalogs – not just for your stores, but for CALIBA as a whole. We talked about the key reasons to participate and brainstormed ways stores can use this tool to their advantage. The CALIBA staff has been sharing these tips and tricks with you via our newsletters and e-blasts since the Summer Catalog orders opened. 

Now, we are a week away from the Winter Catalog Orders closing (June 15th!) and I want to share an integral part of the presentation for those of you who were not able to attend:

Why We Do Catalogs

1. To provide you all with a high-quality, low cost, tool to help you sell books and get people into your bookstores during the summer and winter months. All the tips to help you do that have been shared various ways and gathered on our website here. 

2. To help our publisher partners sell their books of the season. The titles submitted are most likely the big books of their current or upcoming lists. Each book in the catalog paid to be featured. We all know, at this time, that budgets are tightening every year, so the fact that a book is in our catalog means that it has the heavy backing of the publisher. When you’re looking at the titles in our Winter Catalog, think, why is this book here? Is it the publisher’s award winner? Is it a big named author? Is it a timely title? Is a back list title with a new edition or a movie coming out soon? These questions can help you discover ways to hand sell that title! 

3. To support the CALIBA organization. The catalogs are a major revenue generator for CALIBA. At our Spring Forums I shared the following graph. It includes the breakdown of CALIBA’s 2024 income. You’ll see our Forums and Fall Fest, The Golden Poppy Awards, our Publisher Promotion sales, our Membership Dues, and in light blue, our Holiday Catalogs (which includes income from both Summer and Winter Catalogs). The catalogs were 30% of CALIBA’s income from last year, tied for biggest revenue stream with Fall Fest. I encourage you to check out the full presentation, which also includes the breakdown of our expenses for each of these programs. There you’ll see that the pie slice expense for Holiday Catalogs is barely visible. That’s because it was 0.92% of our expenses. We can’t say that about any of our other programs! 

At this point, you might be thinking, if bookstore participation in the catalog is either free or relatively affordable, then where does the money come from? Publisher participation. The money that publishers pay to feature their titles in our catalogs supports CALIBA. Bookseller support and participation in the catalogs in turn, support the publisher and CALIBA. 

At this time, there is no easy way for us to track catalog sales for the titles included. For example, it’s hard to say because X publisher included X title in our Winter Catalog that it sold X number of copies or became a bestseller. So what’s the next best thing?

How do we prove to our publisher partners that their continued participation in CALIBA catalogs is worthwhile? Bookstore participation. The more CALIBA bookstores participate in the catalogs the more reason publishers have to participate.

I can say, “80% of CALIBA bookstores are behind this program. All together X number of catalogs were ordered and shared. Combined our stores’ online catalogs received X number of clicks and views.”  These are the numbers we can use to continue to encourage our publisher partners to participate and budget for our yearly catalogs. One thing Claire said during our presentations really sums it up well: “When [CALIBA bookstores] stop using the opportunities [publishers] give us to promote their titles, they’ll stop providing them. We are the Return on Investment.” So this really is a chance for us to show our publisher partners how strong CALIBA is, to remind them that California’s Indie Booksellers are the original influencers and it’s a smart business decision to back us. 

So if you are on the fence about the catalogs or have yet to order your Winter Catalog (deadline is June 15th!), I hope you read this and feel more confident in the decision to participate. If you’d still like to talk some things out, shoot me an email, give me a call, or pop into my upcoming office hour sessions (on June 12th at 9am or 2pm). We are in this together and I am happy to brainstorm ways you can utilize the catalogs. 

Best wishes,

Hannah Walcher

Executive Director of CALIBA