It’s officially the 4th quarter. Many bookstores’ futures depend on what happens in the next 3 months.

I don't know about you, but I hope the world on the other side of all this is still full of indie bookstores.

Here’s why this is gonna be a strange Q4, and how you can help.

Reason for Q4 strangeness:

The USPS is still victim to a serious campaign of political sabotage. While some measures were halted, Postmaster DeJoy has promised big changes after the election. That means unpredictable shipping times. 40% of our business right now is via USPS.

Reason for Q4 strangeness:

There's a printing capacity shortage in the US, so reprints for sold-out books might not happen until 2021. That means we’re doing a lot of calculations and guessing about what’s gonna hit big. Some books we'll get right; others we'll run out of.

For more details, here's a good deep dive into book industry supply chain issues: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/books/printing-companies-backlog-book-publishing.html

Reason for Q4 strangeness: lots of exciting things are happening really close to Christmas. For instance: Barack Obama's new book, the National Book Awards, and the Booker Prize all happen the week of November 16. Each one of those *on their own* would make supply-chain waves.

Reason for Q4 strangeness: lots of open questions, like: will we have to shut down for a time to keep our booksellers safe? How's the election going to go? How much will the recession affect Q4 retail? Will Amazon continue trying to crush every small retail business in the US?

(at least for that last one, we know the answer is probably yes, but we'll keep fighting, don't worry)

So what can you do? Every retail business depends on Q4 sales. So goes Q4, so goes the whole year. That’s true of big box stores and that’s true of us.

Here's something you can do: when holiday shopping, shop at the places you’d most like to see make it through all this.

What do you want the 2021 story to be?

Do you want the 2021 story to be "small businesses adapt and make it through difficult times?"

Or do you want the 2021 story to be "large corporations exploit hard times in order to consolidate more profits and power?"

Specific to bookstores, it really really helps for you to shop early. That gives us plenty of time to deal with all the strangeness we talked about in and above.

We know we’ll have lots of books on December 20th, but we can’t guarantee which ones.

For our best service, our best selection, and our best chance to get you the exact perfect book for you, talk to us earlier than normal this year.

That’s why @ABAbook has launched a new campaign called “October is the new December.” They’re not kidding.

Your support for us has been awe-inspiring.

We reinvented our business and asked you to follow us and you did.

We look forward to doing our best to keep you reading through more strangeness.

Thank you for your support.