HEARTLAND FALL FORUM

How to Heartland 2021: Notes for Bookseller Attendees

Hello Heartland booksellers!

The last time we were together in person, it looked like this, a happy band of booksellers unleashed on the bookstores of Cleveland, Ohio in 2019. What's the collective noun for a group of booksellers? A stack, a signature... an army?

Here in 2021, we're still separated by the undefinable parameters of a pandemic--but at least we're facing it together. Here are the highlights of Heartland 2021, an all-virtual event designed to capture attention spans in a time when virtual events are flourishing, while also complementing the wide array of industry resources already in place.

We're adding content to our website on a rolling basis. Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when new features are added, as some of the links below are placeholders for now.
GLIBA newsletter sign up / MIBA newsletter sign-up

Streamlined registration
Register at our website and you're in. There will be no need to save registration links for each individual event. After you're registered, you can simply come back to our website to join any one of our events. Register to attend -->

Floating dates
Heartland's 2021 events will happen in the months of August, September, and October and will be scheduled as they are produced. We are striving to offer fresh and unique content in every event we create. View our current schedule -->

Exhibits unboxed, content unleashed
The book industry has already offered amazing virtual exhibit spaces this year. We're aiming to complement that work by delivering a diverse cross-publisher experience for our booksellers by "unboxing" exhibits and delivering your content directly to you. How will we do that?

Fresh author events. Every author event we host will be a fresh experience our attendees can’t get anywhere else. View our author events -->
Brand-new Book Room. Our new Book Room will be a vibrant hub for new title discovery, highlighting a title’s regionality, as well as that author’s live event placement (if applicable). Click around to discover the many ways to explore the titles publishers are promoting this fall 2021 and winter 2022. Check out the Book Room -->
Rep Picks. We’re unleashing the Rep Picks you know and love by offering pre-recorded content that lets us showcase individual titles and reps across all our platforms. Check out Rep Picks-->
Education. We're offering a series of educational opportunities that connect us to the industry speak to the times. Check out our education -->
Meetings with publishers. One of the benefits of a flourishing virtual world is the ability for any booksellers to schedule a meeting with a publisher. Schedule a meeting -->
Show specials. The ones you know and love, updated annually to bring you discounts at a super important time of the year. Use our show specials -->

PS: Mark your calendar for our return to an in-person show. We'll be celebrating the 10th anniversary of Heartland on October 12-14, 2022 at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch.

How to Heartland 2021: Notes for our industry partners

Welcome to a new year of Heartland, crafted to be responsive to the needs of the bookselling industry. We've made some changes to our programming to best capture attention spans in a time when virtual events are flourishing, while also complementing the wide array of industry resources already out there. We're excited to shake things up and bring unique resources to our Midwest booksellers.

First, mark your calendar for our return to an in-person show. We'll be celebrating the 10th anniversary of Heartland on October 12-14, 2022 at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch.

Until then, here's whats new for 2021.

Streamlined registration
Register at our website and you're in! There will be no need to save registration links for each individual event.

Floating dates
Heartland's 2021 events will happen in the months of August, September, and October and will be scheduled as they are produced. We are striving to offer fresh and unique content in every event we offer by being responsive to your ideas, authors, and schedules. Be creative with us!

We're placing authors on a rolling basis, so pitch ASAP to get premiere event placement. Last day to pitch authors is July 9.

Seasonality
Due to the pandemic, last year, we compressed the timeline of discovery, as booksellers' hands were full responding to their stores' unique needs during shutdowns. This year, we're expanding the timeline, but perhaps not quite as far as it was pre-pandemic.

Guideline: We ask that the majority of titles we promote in Heartland 2021 be published this calendar year. For marquee authors and big-budget titles, we will accept titles published in January-March 2022.

Exhibits unboxed, content unleashed
This year, the book industry has already offered opportunities to create amazing virtual exhibit spaces. To complement that style of outreach and take it a step further, we're aiming to create a diverse cross-publisher experience for our booksellers by "unboxing" exhibits and delivering your content directly to attendees. How will we do that?

Fresh author events. Every author event we host will be a fresh experience our attendees can’t get anywhere else. We will play matchmaker with the authors you pitch us to produce creative pairings that make for irresistible events. As a result, the quantity of authors we place won’t be as high as previous years.

Read more and pitch authors here -->
Call for education. When you pitch your ideas to us, don't stop at authors.

Event moderators. We always need talented hosts and moderators who are good on camera and can think on their feet.

Education leaders. Do you have an author of a nonfiction book who can lead an education session? In-house publishing staff who can educate booksellers on topics such as marketing, social media, or important ideas regarding DEI?

Submit education ideas -->
Book room. Think of the book room as the ultimate hub for Midwest booksellers to learn about titles to stock this year. Each book will feature the author photo and book graphic with corresponding icons to regionality, sales rep picks, Edelweiss, and more.

Submit book room titles here -->
Rep picks unleashed. Rep Pick events are fun, but it can be challenging to capture the individual pitches for each book. To address that, we're asking reps to pre-record their picks and submit them to us timestamped for each book. That way, every time we refer to that book or author, we can link to the presentation and also feature it directly alongside each title in the book room for instant rep pick access.

Submit rep picks here -->
Free opportunities! Submit your show specials and set up meetings with our booksellers. Upon request, we will consult with you about our member list and help you build connections with new stores and those you aren't connected with.
Exclusive sponsorship and advertising opportunities. Last but certainly not least, our virtual show this year will be driven by industry sponsors, who offer an important foundation of support and indie bookstore celebration. If sponsorship isn't the right match for you, advertising your titles and programs with us is also a win-win situation, as it gets the word out about your product and also supports the indie bookselling industry.

Act on our sponsorship options -->
Book your advertising -->

Exhibitors: How to Use Heartland Summer

Join us for Heartland Summer, a creative way to bring our industry together during challenging times.

Here's a how-to overview for our valued exhibitors.

Vision
Heartland Summer is an interactive content generator that offers multiple forms of engagement for your promotions.

We are offering real-time virtual events for booksellers to come together with authors, reps, and session leaders of all kinds. Yet booksellers also have stores to run, so none of our virtual events will live in a vacuum. Each will be recorded, and the content will be pulled out, promoted across all of our platforms, and hosted on your Exhibit Gallery to view any time. Our Exhibit Gallery goes live this month (i.e., as soon as you register to exhibit) and runs through the end of the year.

We're hosting our virtual events on a consistent schedule every other week from June 23 through September. October will feature "grand finale" marquee celebrations and will be announced soon.

Each week of programming will feature two newsletters:

1) Monday Heartland Preview featuring the virtual events happening that week alongside registration links

2) Friday Heartland Review featuring all recorded events, the main take-aways, and title support, such as Edelweiss collections from Rep Picks, links to the authors' books, and ARC request forms

VIEW OUR SCHEDULE HERE

How to Do Heartland Summer
By its very nature, Heartland Summer offers fewer placement opportunities than our in-person show, and we aim to create streamlined content that rises above the noise of the online world and inspires our booksellers to action: attend that event, buy that book, promote that author.

Re: author pitches. We encourage you be judicious with your Heartland Summer promotional choices. Strategize carefully across all of our opportunities and design an approach that works for you.

1) Pitch strategically because spots are limited. 2) Pitch a culturally representative set of authors. 3) Use the Exhibit Gallery and Rep Picks to promote authors that aren't hosted in our events.

1. Pitch us authors: Pinpoint your most indie-friendly and charismatic authors and pitch them for one of two main events: Meet the Authors ($200) or Marquee Author ($1,000) (see our detailed event descriptions). We are also hosting a grand finale marquee author event called Heartland Book Club ($1,500) and we are taking pitches for this event as well.

3. Sign up for Rep Picks: Convey the broader scope of your list by applying for a spot in our multiple Rep Picks events from now thorough September ($175)

4. Exhibit Gallery: Host the following content from now through the end of the year ($250)

All Heartland Summer videos in which you participated
Heartland show specials
ARC request forms
Publisher-chosen featured content
Links for booksellers to request meetings with reps and publicists

5. Become a Heartland Sponsor: Go beyond a standard exhibit space by becoming sponsoring our show ($1,500)

Everything listed above plus . . .

Top placement on exhibits page
Newsletter featuring your unique content
Banner on Heartland, MIBA, and GLIBA websites for 1 week
Ongoing sponsorship acknowledgment in all newsletters

6. Book additional promotions: Boost your signal even further by featuring your unique sponsored content in the Heartland Preview and the Heartland Review

7. Education: Do you have a strong voice or topic that would lend itself well to an educational session? Please email Larry Law with your idea at larry@gliba.org

To our valued partners,

Like everyone in the publishing industry, we've been having ongoing conversations about how to support the bookselling industry during the time of coronavirus. We've been thrown a huge plot twist and we're all writing the next chapters together.

For everyone's safety, we've decided to postpone this year's Heartland Fall Forum until 2021. We're sticking with the same venue, so we'll be able to convene again October 20, 21, and 22, 2021 at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch.

Our annual celebration is always a major highlight of our year and we are eager to see you all again under the banner of Midwest bookselling, where we can raise a glass, meet loads of authors, and learn from each other in person. Until then!

In the meantime, we're eager to bring the book industry more opportunities to connect, learn new ways of doing business, and discover books and authors. When we laid out everything Heartland offers, however, it became impossible to try to fit it all into one short span of time, so we're moving forward with a creative mix of extended programming.

Welcome to Heartland Summer!

During the months of June, July, August, and September, we will offer an ongoing array of events - rep picks, education, and authors events - all virtual and easy to attend and enjoy. It will be sustained by an exhibits page on our website that allows publishers and industry members to bring you the show specials, creative assets, and the necessary forms of connection we usually provide.

In October, we will host a bigger virtual celebration, including a Heartland Booksellers Award celebration, the Heartland Book Club.

The goal is to deliver key pre-pub opportunities that allow us to do business together at a time when we really need it, while also opening up the fall schedule to host a bigger celebration of bookselling in the Midwest.

Thank you for your support and we'll be in touch within the next few weeks as we create the infrastructure to make our plans a reality.

St. Louis Site Visit 2020!

Heartland staff headed to St. Louis earlier this year to check out our digs for Heartland 2020. The hotel is a great fit for us and the city has so much to offer. We're going to have a fabulous time. Here's a few pictures from our trip.

(L to R: Larry Law, executive director of GLIBA; Jeffrey Blair, EyeSeeMe African American Children's Bookstore; Kate Scott, project specialist and Carrie Obry, director MIBA; Stephanie Otani-Sunamoto, The Novel Neighbor; Michelle Barron, The Book House; Melissa Posten, The Novel Neighbor; Andy Hall, Emily Hall Schroen, Ellen Hall, Main Street Books; Kris Kleindeinst, Shane Mullen, Left Bank Books)

The Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch has in the heart of downtown with a commanding view of the Gateway Arch and the Mississippi River.

The pièce de résistance is the indoor/outdoor Gateway Terrace, the site of our new Heartland Book Club! Check out our author placement grid and let us know what authors you have in mind for Heartland20!

2019 Posts: Cleveland Recommendations by Native Danny Caine

An Incomplete and Highly Autobiographical List of Cleveland Recommendations
--Danny Caine

I was born and raised in Cleveland, living there until I moved to Lawrence, Kansas five years ago. Many of my best and silliest memories are in Cleveland and its surrounding environs, so I will try to distill that into about 500 words of what to do in your free time around Heartland Fall Forum. I’m not including bookstores because I already know all of you will find a way to visit the Forest City’s incredible practitioners of our trade. There are so many more things that I can’t include (the right kind of writer can talk about his hometown forever) so come find me at Heartland and I can give you a personalized prescription.

Hyatt Regency at the Arcade
I got married in this hotel, which is now the Heartland overflow hotel. If you’re not staying there it’s worth a walk down Euclid to see the majestic 100-foot glass ceilings of the world’s most glamorous shopping mall. It’s not super vibrant on the retail or food court front these days, but this is a spot for an absolutely ace Cleveland selfie.

The West Side Market
When I was a grad student and actually had free time during the week, I’d go to the West Side Market on Wednesday or Friday mornings and pig out. This huge brick temple to food (all of my favorite places in Cleveland have high and dramatic ceilings) is a pilgrimage for anyone who likes to eat. There are many culinary wonders in here, but I wouldn’t miss the Beef Jerky at JJ Meats, the Falafel at Maha, and the pierogies at the Pierogi Palace. Yes, Cleveland has a Pierogi Palace. Can’t you see why I love this town? As it turns out, we took a few engagement pictures at West Side Market, one of which features us blissfully looking at some fish.

Great Lakes Brewing Company
I miss this beer often. They don’t distribute to Kansas. The Christmas Ale at GLBC has a following that can only be called religious, and I make sure to pack a bunch in my suitcase every time I visit during its season. I don’t think it’s out yet, but that’s not to say the other offerings aren’t delicious. The food is good, too. This place has been around forever, and they know what they’re doing. I watched the US Women’s Soccer Team win a world cup in the basement here.

Cleveland Museum of Art
This is a bit of a hike from downtown but if you can swing it, it’s totally worth it. The collection is stellar and the building is gorgeous. Plus, it’s free. There’s a Monet water lilies painting here that’s part of a triptych alongside one at Kansas City’s art museum. The poet and narrative fan in me loved this resonance when I moved from Cleveland to Kansas. Also, yes, the main atrium has an absolutely bonkers ceiling.

Mabel’s BBQ
Michael Symon, Cleveland celebrity chef, opened a “Cleveland-style” BBQ restaurant on E 4th Street, a pedestrian mall with several bars and restaurants, many of which are good. One thing I learned after I moved to Kansas is how fun it is to argue about BBQ. So go to Mabel’s and have a spirited debate over whether “Cleveland-style” BBQ is even a thing.

Progressive Field
There’s a strong chance the Cleveland Indians will be playing the AL Wild Card game on October 2nd, the first night of Heartland. It very well may be at Progressive Field, an absolute gem of a ballpark a few blocks from the Renaissance. If they win this game they’ll play game 1 of the ALDS Friday October 4th, the last night of Heartland. This may also be in Cleveland. It could be an interesting time to be downtown if they win. If they lose, you’ll experience the very VERY Clevelandish feeling of being disappointed in our sports teams, which has happened to me at both of the Heartland Fall Forums I’ve attended so far. It’ll only be a bit more intense this year.

Make a 1-on-1 Appointment with IndieCommerce Staff

Booksellers - Do you need direct help with IndieCommerce™ or IndieLite™ -- or were you a B&T Books and More user and need a new e-commerce platform?

You can meet face-to-face with IndieCommerce and IndieLite staff at Heartland, and ABA is currently offering a special promotion for stores that participated in the B&T’s Books and More e-commerce platform.

Ryan Quinn will be available to talk to both users and non-users of IndieCommerce and IndieLite and you can reserve your spot for the meeting. Walk-ins are welcome too. Meetings will be occurring on the show floor on Thursday, 10/3 and Friday, 10/4.

Stores can make an appointment using this form:
https://www.bookweb.org/indiecommerce-one-one-appointments-heartland-2019-fall-forum

For those who aren't familiar...

IndieCommerce is the American Booksellers Association’s e-commerce platform for independent bookstores to create unique, content-rich, and easy-to-operate, fully transactional, e-commerce enabled websites.
IndieLite is specifically designed for booksellers who want to have a web presence with limited time and effort to maintain.

2019 Heartland Fall Forum Scholarships Are Open!

Apply for a Scholarship

We understand the financial challenges of funding trade show travel, so we work with publishers of all sizes to create a scholarship fund for booksellers from GLIBA and MIBA. All current members are welcome to apply.

We are excited to announce we have raised the scholarship amount this year to $500!

We award roughly 25 scholarships each year; we award as many as we receive funding to support

• We accept two applications per store
• Priority is given to booksellers whose stores are furthest from the show
• Booksellers who haven't won before will be our first priority, but everyone should apply
• The deadline to apply is Monday, July 8th, 2019.
• Winners will be announced in July.

Loganberry Books on the O List

In honor of Bookstore Day, Oprah Magazine rounded up "a list of the most picture-perfect indie shops around the country for bibliophiles to enjoy." Loganberry Books made it to the list, and it's no wonder why. It's a gem of a bookstore that goes on and on, a true compendium of delights. Check it out at #11!

Come see Loganberry as we kick off Heartland 2019 with an opening reception in the store!

Visit to Cleveland for Heartland Staff

Such fun! Your trusty Heartland staff made a trip to Cleveland in March to check out the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel and enjoy the local literary lights. We have great news to report. The venue is stunning, and the bookstores are exciting. Please join us October 2-4, won't you?

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