Alta Journal celebrated the early days of our brand-new Issue 25 amid an essential group of readers: California’s booksellers. More than 200 attendees, including independent booksellers, publishers, and writers, gathered at the South San Francisco Conference Center for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance’s annual Fall Fest—and we happily gifted each with a copy of Alta’s Writers Issue. Conferences like this allow Alta to directly connect with the folks who sell our magazines—and our favorite books—at indie shops throughout the state.
After exhibiting at a similar event last week in Portland, Oregon, Alta bookstore partnerships manager Eliza Gislason joined assistant editor Jessica Blough in the Bay Area to continue the conversation in the magazine’s home state. They discussed the California Book Club’s highly anticipated fall roster (Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians, and Carribean Fragoza’s Eat the Mouth That Feeds You) as well as Alta’s new contributors book guide and the ways it might be leveraged in bookstores to promote sales of many exciting titles this holiday season.
Fall Fest presented a program of educational panels and readings, with events that ranged from a conversation on hiring and retention best practices to a discussion of the importance of protecting drag story hours in today’s political climate to a California-writers panel featuring Alta contributors David Kipen and José Vadi.
“We go to events like this for all the obvious reasons, like to hear about the fall titles reps are excited about,” said Lillian Van Cleve of Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco, “but it is also an opportunity to be a part of the bookselling community in California. We all have so much we can learn from one another.… Otherwise, we’re isolated in our own experience as booksellers, and nothing good comes from that.”
CALIBA represents approximately 200 booksellers across the state. For booksellers, publishers, and authors alike, its show embodies the growing network of support behind independent bookstores today. “It’s an inspiring bid of community,” says Van Cleve. “You might imagine we’re pitted against each other, but it’s really not like that. Bookstores came together to create an organization that unifies the resources for bookstores across the entire state.”
Explore the current list of bookstores carrying Alta right here. And if you can’t make it to a bookstore, grab your copy of Issue 25 (and one of our new T-shirts) in the Alta online store.
