If you ordered imprinted Winter Catalogs, they are shipping to your newspapers and store addresses now and will arrive soon.

Tips to make the most of your Winter Catalog:

• Put a pdf of the catalog on your website.
• Add the titles to your IndieCommerce site.
• Order all catalog titles and keep them in stock.
• Mail to customers. Include the catalog in book shipments.
• Place in other retail outlets.
• Stuff in bags, hand out at your events and other community events.
• Ask staffers to choose a title they think will do well and have a competition to see which title sells the most copies. The winning bookseller gets a gift certificate or prize.
• Build a store display. Carry the theme throughout the store with mini displays in different sections.
• Use the Shelf Talkers sent in your boxes of catalogs to visually connect the book on the shelf to the catalog in your customer's hand.
• Show us your displays! Send photos of your Winter Catalog displays or Winter Catalog tips to share with other booksellers to info@mountainsplains.org.

--Dan Cullen, American Booksellers Association senior strategy officer, speaking at the MPIBA's general meeting

So there I was a couple of weeks ago, sitting in a room filled with energized booksellers at the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association's Fall Discovery Show. There was good news--15 new bookstore members, 221 booksellers in attendance--and animated conversations among bookstore owners who were (Dare I say it?) feeling pretty good about the book trade.

But just for a moment, like a passing dark cloud, I recalled an author lunch during the 2008 MPIBA show in Colorado Springs. I'd been sitting at a table with several booksellers who were discussing how much longer they could reasonably justify staying in business. "Bookselling in Challenging Times" was one of the education sessions that year.

The times, as our latest Noble Lit Laureate has often reminded us, are a-changing. Education sessions at this year's MPIBA show featured options like Profiting from Non-Profit Partnerships; Increasing Book Sales at Events; Diversity Through Merchandising; and The Mathematics of Bookselling. Raising your bookseller game, rather than just surviving it, was a predominant theme. The exhibit hall was active and interactive. That 2008 survivalist mentality seemed a distant memory, a bad dream.

No small part of that change has been booksellers' evolving engagement with the Internet. A Social Media for Frontline Booksellers session reminded me that even a decade ago, such discussions were often about convincing half the room that a store website might not be the worst idea ever. Now these sessions drill much deeper into the finer points of social media strategies as an everyday part of operating a 21st-century indie bookstore. Convincing booksellers that they should be involved seems almost as outdated as inventory cards.

At the social media session, Jeremy Ellis of Brazos Bookstore, Houston, Tex., said,
"One of the secrets about bookselling is that everybody sells the same books, but nobody has you. You are the unique thing. The real product of an independent bookstore is the bookseller.

That's the only thing that's truly unique. And so, being yourself as much as you can be on these platforms conveys your real brand. It has nothing to do with the logo; it has nothing to do with your color scheme. Your brand is the promise of who you are."

So where do we go from here? At the Reading the West Book Awards Luncheon, Eliot Treichel, winner of the children's category for his YA novel A Series of Small Maneuvers, shared some life-altering words of wisdom from his first whitewater kayaking instructor, who counseled:

Expressing gratitude to the MPIBA and indie booksellers, Treichel recalled spending his first year of college in Missoula, Mont.: "I was lonely and homesick and all of that, except that a few blocks from my dorm was this bookstore called Freddy's Feed & Read, which became a second home to me. ...

When I consider that 2008 Bookselling in Challenging Times education session, and all that has happened since in our chosen field, I can't help but think the best advice is at once the simplest and most complex: "Two deep breaths, then go."

--Robert Gray, contributing editor of Shelf Awareness