We’ve just hosted the Annual General Meeting of the Christian Group of the Booksellers Association in Carlisle. Sounds a little stuffy…no way! It was a real privilege to host 25 retailers and 3 representatives from the BA. We spent Tuesday afternoon giving them a guided tour of our facility in Carlisle, from marketing to customer services, the offices and through to the warehouse.
It was really helpful for our folk in Carlisle to meet and spend a little time with booksellers, particularly in customer services, where both booksellers and our team, who talk regularly on the phone, could now meet in person…
Today sees the the BA Christian Booksellers Group gathering at STL HQ in Carlisle for its AGM tomorow. The timing, regrettably, is such that I can’t be there, but I take this opportunity to wish all who do attend a very worthwhile meeting: I look forward to hearing what transpires. Who will make up our new committee? What will STL have to say for themselves?
Yesterday I tweeted Steve Mitchell (@SCRMitchell) — head honcho at Wesley Owen and a member of the STL blog team — to find what’s happening with their blog, which hasn’t been updated since the Message from Keith Danby was posted a few weeks ago. Steve tells me that we can expect some updates after today’s and tomorrow’s meetings and assures me that the issues being raised in the comments will be addressed: watch that space.
I was also up until midnight beating my head against the brick wall of STL’s incompetence, attempting to reconcile my invoices with their latest statement and their postings at batch.co.uk: the phrase “dog’s breakfast” barely begins to cover it. It took me approximately 20 minutes to whizz through all my other suppliers invoices; then almost 3 hours to work through STL’s, and I was still left with over £500 of unreconciled invoices and credit notes.
The problem is exacerbated by STL’s failure to make use of the batch claims system. For those who don’t use batch, allow me to explain: batch has a very straightforward way of dealing with invoicing errors. You call up the invoice onscreen, identify the problem item, select a reason for your claim (wrong item supplied, incorrect carriage charge, wrong discount etc) and hey, presto: that item is magically removed from your invoice total, allowing you to pay the remaining balance whilst your supplier deals with the claim.
STL, on the other hand, insist on doing their own thing, raising a separate credit note whenever they screw up and then reinvoicing. Sometimes the credit notes cross reference the original invoice; sometimes they don’t. As I said: dog’s breakfast.
This is not a criticism of those wonderful folk in STL’s customer services department who are continually working their socks off, who remain unfailingly polite as they attempt to pick up the pieces in the midst of the ongoing chaos. Janette Ivison and Michael Swan in particular deserve recognition for their good humoured and efficient responses whenever I raise a query: my thanks to both of them and to those working with them. The problem is that the queries I constantly find myself raising should not be necessary in the first place.
Today, I shall attempt to reconcile the rest of my STL invoices and credit notes. It may or may not work, but it will almost certainly take most of the day. I am close to despair and seriously considering boycotting STL as a supplier.
It’s a tricky business getting to grips with new media, especially when you’re dealing with a two thousand year old story — always assuming, of course, that Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol, actually does take up the plot where The Da Vinci Code left off rather than lose it completely.
But this post isn’t about Dan Brown’s lost symbol: it’s about the book trade’s lost opportunity at this year’s London Book Fair — about twitter and the humble hashtag. It’s about a failure to seize the day or, more precisely, the twittersphere — the dynamic, live and interactive world of millions of prospective book buyers. Not, I hasten to add, to lay accusations or blame at anyone’s feet, but rather to help us think ahead, to help us find a way to do better next time and in other places.
“What’s a hashtag?” you ask. Easy: it’s a word with a # in front of it. Like this: #LBF; or this: #LBF09; or even this: #LIBF. Essentially it’s a key word chosen or created to link related tweets, which allows people to track a particular topic; and if everyone tweeting that topic uses it, it takes off, to become a trending topic: a topic in twitter’s top 10. Then more people join the conversation and so it grows. Used intelligently, a hashtag is one of the most powerful tools in a new media maven’s marketing toolbox. Allow Mari Smith [1] to explain:
Dan Brown enters the story on Monday, 20th April, the first day of the fair. Or rather, he should have entered the story. According to this week’s Bookseller (lead news story, p.3), the Random House announcement of a publication date for his Da Vinci Code sequel The Lost Symbol was Monday’s “main talking point at the first day of the London Book Fair.”
Except it wasn’t: I know, because I was there, listening and talking and tweeting my way around the place, and the first I heard of it was when I received my copy of the Bookseller on Friday.
I admit that I was there with my own agenda as a Christian bookseller: but how is it possible that an announcement of what is more or less guaranteed to be the biggest publishing event of 2009 — impacting both the mainstream and Christian marketplace — could simply pass me by? My mistake, it seems: I was interested in this year’s London Book Fair, so I was tracking #LBF09 rather than the generic #LBF, and I was following @theBookseller as my source of news.
But the announcement entered the twittersphere via @PublishersLunch at 4pm under #LBF and whilst a few people RT’d (retweeted) it, the Bookseller’s twitter announcement didn’t appear until 5.26pm — and was posted with neither a hashtag nor any other mention of the Fair (also strange: the Bookseller’s news report of the announcement doesn’t mention LBF either).
London Book Fair at Earls Court - Warwick Road Entrance
Now the party’s over
and everyone’s gone home,
each one to their own world
and you are left alone…
The words of a half-remembered Christian rock song, but they seem to fit. The London Book Fair is over for another year: everyone’s gone home; or if not home, back to business as usual. Was it worth it?
I didn’t sell anything; I didn’t buy buy anything except a coffee; but for me, as a bookseller, even more specifically as a Christian bookseller, it was definitely worthwhile. Because, to take Grant Leboff slightly out of context, it’s not about the books, it’s about the experience; more to the point, it’s about the people. More about Grant Leboff later.
I started my visit on Monday with breakfast (deluxe canapés, coffee and bucks fizz: gratefully received) at the English PEN Literary Café, where I had the privilege of meeting the project’s Director, Jonathan Heawood, who explained briefly what the organisation is all about.
ECPA Collective, London Book Fair 2009
From there, it was off to find the ECPA (Evangelical Christian Publishers Association) stand to catch up with Michael Covington, ECPA’s Information & Education Director, to arrange collection of sample product from the ECPA Collective at the end of the fair. Unfortunately, come Wednesday afternoon when I returned, the vultures had got there first: it seems that the last afternoon at LBF tends to degenerate into something of a free for all with scavengers going around and grabbing anything and everything that’s left behind as the stall holders split the scene. Michael had found himself more or less fighting people off as they tried to help themselves without so much as a by-your-leave. Nonetheless, I departed with two boxes of books which have been gratefully received by folks at LST, so my thanks to Michael and to those ECPA members who generously donated their wares.
Back to Monday, however, and on to the BA stand, where I’d hope to be able to leave my exchanged Book Tokens. Unfortunately this wasn’t possible: the BA were unwilling to accept the risk of loss between Earls Court and BA HQ in Victoria. If anyone from the BA happens to read this, perhaps you’d like to consider providing a Book Token drop off point at LBF as a service to members, please?
Jane Gregory kindly walked me through the new web-based electronic gift card system that’s due to replace the old paper tokens later this year. On the BA’s demo set-up it worked splendidly; then I asked the billion dollar question: would it work on a Mac? The answer was no: Macs, Jane explained, don’t support the system. Wrong answer: it’s not Macs that don’t support the system: it’s the BA that doesn’t support Mac users. I ask myself, in a world where ageism, racism and sexism are not acceptable, why is OS-ism so blithely tolerated? Why are Mac users ostracised by the Booksellers Association? Apparently I was only the second Mac user Jane had encountered so a shout out to Mac users:please contact the BA and tell them you want to see support for Macs in the new Book Tokens scheme!
Next came a whistle-stop tour of the stands: my annual visit to Marston Book Services, first to thank them for their excellent service over the past year, and second to ask them when they’ll be joining batch.co.uk, to which I received the same answer they’ve been giving for the last four or five years: they’re in discussions with batch and yadda yadda yadda… How long, O Lord?
For anyone who may have missed the news in the trade press, Marston and Orca have now merged; this year’s fair saw them sharing a single stand. I said that I hoped the merger would see Marston lifting Orca up rather then Orca dragging Marston down. “Is there a problem with Orca?” came the response. Oh yes, dear people, and the entire British book trade is now looking to you good people at Marston to sort it out. I do hope you know what you’ve taken on: you’ll find some discussion here.
Lion Hudson, London Book Fair 2009
The time flew by and I whizzed my way around the main hall, Earls Court 1, a friendly wave to the folk at Lion Hudson, stopped off to open a DVD account with Gardners (who refused to be drawn on whether or not they’d ever recovered the money owed to them by St Stephen the Great Bookshops following J Mark Brewer’s ludicrous attempt at filing for bankruptcy in the USA last year), danced my way past the MacMillan stand where I picked up a proof copy of Peter James’ forthcoming novel, Dead Tomorrow, and on to Hodder to collect a proof of Gerald Seymour’s latest, The Collaborator. Proofs seemed to be in short supply this year: normally I leave with at least half a dozen; this year, just the two.
Grant, I think, successfully persuaded most of us that old ways of marketing are dead. Social networking, he explained, represents the biggest revolution in communications since the invention of the printing press. The printing press made communication possible one to many; TV and radio have continued that trend; but online communications have changed all that and given us many to many communication. That turns the entire model upside-down: we, as sellers, are no longer in control of the information available to our customers; and what we’re selling isn’t the books but the experience. It isn’t about the books: Amazon have that sorted; but what Amazon can’t provide is the experience and space, the human interaction. We can; and if we’re to survive, we must.
There’s more, much more: twitter, for instance, with songbirds at both the Bookseller and Booktrust merrily tweeting their hearts out whilst the staff on their stands seemed blissfully unaware at the mass of cyberactivity going on behind the scenes. For my personal blow by blow — albeit somewhat disjointed — account of the day, see my twitter feed under #LBF09. If you’re one of the many in this trade of ours who hasn’t quite worked out what twitter is yet, do please try to get up to speed before #LBF10 comes around next year; and if you intend to tweet the event next year, please make a note of that hashtag now.
My thanks to everyone — the team from the BA, the Reed Exhibitions people and the Earls Court staff as well as all the exhibitors — who conspired to make #LBF09 |#LBF such a worthwhile experience. We may be in the midst of a depression, but this trade of ours is decidedly and distinctly alive and kicking. See you next year, I hope!
Sex. It’s a subject that Christians seem notoriously reluctant to talk about except when they’re condemning it. Yet our sexuality is at the core of who we are, defining the way we think of ourselves and how we relate — or fail to relate — to others. It defines us, disrupts us, has the potential to destroy us.
But when we accept it, when we begin to see our sexuality as God’s gift, as something good, everything changes — everything must change. No longer a weapon to dominate others; no longer a tool to manipulate people; but rather, part of a relationship to be revelled in.
This week, Donna Freitas at Publishers Weekly presents a roundup of forthcoming titles offering both Christian and Jewish perspectives on this inevitably hot topic:
In my work as a scholar, I write about sex and religion all the time—for college students—and pride myself on the ability to engage even the most explicit questions on the subject. When books for this article began arriving in my lobby, without thinking, I ripped open the first package to find it filled with explicit, faith-based sex manuals—which I then quickly carried upstairs and stashed under the couch.
Turns out, I’m more prude than I thought.
Apparently, sex is not only a gift from God, but it’s a hot gift—if you work at it—according to Dr. Les Parrott’s Crazy Good Sex: Putting to Bed the Myths Men Have About Sex (Zondervan, May).
“Faith perspective books either deal with sex and crisis—topics like porn and adultery—or see sex through a clinical, mechanical lens. Faith-based sexuality is so often portrayed as a burden and not a gift, as something that needs to be fixed or brought before God and disciplined,” says Dudley Delffs, senior v-p and publisher of trade books at Zondervan, about the decision to publish Parrott’s newest title. “Parrott offers us something else—he’s a tried and true voice, a guy who can write to average men about sex and intimacy. He makes sexuality clean and natural and wholesome, something that God intended for good and constructive purposes.”
And yes, clean, natural and wholesome includes “passion and ‘hot monogamy’ with your spouse,” Delffs adds.
James Edwards is professor of biblical languages and literature at Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington in the USA. His book, Is Jesus the Only Savior?, is a significant and well-written work of apologetics, rooted in New Testament scholarship, in which he responds in the affirmative to the question that provides the title. He wrote it with two types of reader in mind: Christians whose faith has been disturbed by pluralistic approaches to the person of Christ, and non-Christians who are open to considering the question. The argument, occupying twelve chapters, debates the issue from a range of perspectives and builds a comprehensive case for the uniqueness of both the person and the work of Christ.
In the opening chapters Edwards surveys the historical issues surrounding the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, including the various ‘quests’ of the historical Jesus, the Jesus seminar, the trustworthiness of the documents of the New Testament (which constitute the almost unique source of our information about Christ), and the extent and reliability of our knowledge of the Jesus of history. In the following chapters, which are at the heart of the argument, he considers Jesus’ own consciousness of his divinity and the nature of his saving work.
This is followed by a consideration of the various challenges to the notion of a unique saviour. Thus, against the argument that the contemporary world is unique in its awareness of a multiplicity of faiths, Edwards points out that the world of the first century church was little different and that absolute claims for the person of Christ were as problematic then as they are now.
He goes on to respond to the prevalent climate of moral relativism, which makes the notion of a saviour from sin meaningless, and explains the necessity of Christ’s atoning work. He discusses the challenge that postmodernism presents to the idea of absolute truth, while suggesting that Christians may have something to learn from some postmodern perspectives. And he deals with the argument that religious exclusivism poses a threat to world peace and should be abandoned in favour of soteriological pluralism.
Finally, in the last two chapters he discusses other religions, and rejects the idea that they are all in essence the same. However, Edwards also claims that the Bible’s approach to them demonstrates some ambiguity, and he takes an agnostic view as to the situation of those who have never heard the gospel.
In general Edwards’ argument is persuasive and energetic, supported by telling illustrations and solid reasoning. He maintains a conservative evangelical stance, although his interpretation of some biblical passages and themes is open to question, especially perhaps his discussion of other religions. Overall he gives a strong and contemporary defence of the uniqueness of the person and work of Christ, as well as strong grounds for confidence in the historical foundations of New Testament faith. If there is a criticism it would be that at times Edwards seems to be attempting too much within the compass of a relatively brief book, with consequent dangers.
Dr Keith Ferdinando is the author of The Triumph of Christ in African Perspective: A Study of Demonology and Redemption in the African Context (ISBN 9780853648307 / 0853648301, Paternoster, 1999). He taught mission studies at London School of Theology for several years before returning to Africa full time in 2006 to continue his work in theological education there with AIM International at the Faculté de Théologie Evangélique au Rwanda.
London Book Fair, Earls Court - Warwick Road Entrance
9am, Monday April 20, 2009, sees the opening of this year’s London Book Fairat Earls Court. If last year’s fair was anything to go by, it promises to be well worth a visit, abuzz with booksellers, publishers and a vast array of other book trade people meeting, competing, drinking coffee, buying, selling, drinking more coffee, networking, talking — and, of course, twittering: if you can’t be there, make sure you follow @TheBookseller for the latest news as it happens.
Or, to be more precise, it’s out of the bag. Last week saw the launch of the government’s Get a Bag Habit scheme, an attempt to get all of us thinking greener when it comes to that scourge of the city and the countryside, the ubiquitous plastic carrier bag.
There’s more information available from the BA/PA Environmental Action Group website green4books and the BA are encouraging all members to get involved by registering at recyclenowpartners.org.uk and using their retailer toolkit.
At LST we’ve adopted a policy of charging 5p for carrier bags, as well as having our own LST-branded cotton carriers available to buy. Whilst it’s only a nominal charge, it’s having the desired effect of making people stop and think about whether they really need a bag.
What’s your policy and how is it going down with your customers? What suggestions would you offer to other booksellers wanting to reduce their carbon footprint? And given the plethora of books that have now been published on environmental issues, which would you recommend? One of my personal favourites is Church House Publishing’s excellent littleHow Many Light Bulbs Does It Take To Change A Christian? — well worth keeping in stock.
CLC regards all staff as missionaries: positions are unpaid but accommodation, utilities and council tax are covered for full time workers. Beyond that, you’ll need to raise your own support.
Full details from CLC, on the JobSearch noticeboard or in the magazine, of course: available from most Christian bookshops.
RT @notbovvered: Storehouse, Watford's Christian Bookshop, is looking for a new manager: details on the Christian Gateway Watford... htt ... 2 days ago
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