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Today I just want to pass along two items from today’s Shelf Awareness newsletter. The first is about Houston, and the second is about the bike business! (You can read all of today’s issue, and more, at the Shelf Awareness website).

In the latest segment of its Houston by the Book series, the Houston Press profiled Brazos Bookstore and Jane Moser, who “manages the day-to-day operations, scheduling appearances, and–most importantly–buying the books. While she admits that it indeed is no picnic, it’s a job that clearly brings her a good bit of joy.”

In 2006, when previous owner Karl Kilian was ready to step aside, Moser, who had been a children’s bookstore owner, was one of 25 Houstonians who “came together and formed an LLC and bought the store. I was one of the people who worked on the deal to get it together…. I had been a customer of this store for years, and knew the owners. So when it came up that they were trying to put a deal together, none of the people who bought it wanted to run it. They just wanted to save it.”

Moser added, “Everybody loves the idea of a strong, independent bookstore in town. People like the idea, but now we’re in a changing age, and people are going to have to support the sale of physical books as well, or we’re going to lose these opportunities for meeting the authors, etc. That serendipitous experience of walking in a bookstore and seeing a book you didn’t know you needed, or meeting an author you didn’t know about before, or seeing another book by an author, or seeing a cover that just grabs you–those are things that just aren’t yet possible online.”

Christopher J. Zane will be the opening plenary speaker at the American Booksellers Association’s Day of Education at BookExpo America on Monday, May 23, Bookselling This Week wrote. Zane is a 29-year veteran of the retail bicycle industry who bought his first bike shop at age 16 and has built Zane’s Cycles into one of the largest retail bicycle stores in the nation. “His unique approach to marketing includes strategies that stress continual learning, the lifetime value of a customer, guerrilla marketing, and cost-controlled customer service,” BTW reported.

As the morning plenary speaker, Zane will share insights on the lifetime value of one customer to a store’s bottom line, and discuss unique approaches to customer relationship marketing, understanding the psychology of today’s customer, and acquiring the tools to build lifetime relationships in the B2C and B2B markets.

Filed under: miscellaneous | Tagged: bikes, book stores |