Last month, the event previously known as Authors for Indies took place for the first time under its new moniker: Canadian Independent Bookstore Day! You may remember our week-by-week planning guide for booksellers, in which we advised all independent shops to stock up on cake. Well, it looks like they listened.
On Saturday, April 28, book-lovers across Canada (and the US) flocked to their local haunting grounds for games, prizes, balloons, snacks, and, of course, books.
Here's how it went down.
Canadian Independent Bookstore Day was a smashing success. There were authors and readers of all ages out and about checking out their favourite shops, and scoring some pretty amazing deals on books. Luckily for us, it's all up on Twitter thanks to the #CIBD and #CanadianIndependentBookstoreDay hashtags
In terms of books sold, indie bookstores in Canada had a great week leading up to Canadian Independent Bookstore Day. Compared to an average of three weeks prior, unit sales at Canadian indies were up 7% that week while the overall market (which includes indies) was experiencing a 2% drop. This is according to data reported to BookNet Canada's national sales tracking service, BNC SalesData, which covers 85% of the print, English-language trade market in Canada.
Despite #CanadianIndependentBookstoreDay being the recommended hashtag, #CIBD became much more commonly used, likely thanks to its brevity.
Header photo by Novel Spot Bookshop (@NovelSpotBooks)
To sum up the infographic:
- Out of 184 total tweets using the hashtag #CIBD, 71 were retweets, 24 were of images or links, four were plain-text tweets, and one was a reply.
- The Twitter users with the most tweets using the #CIBD hashtag were @cdnbookstoreday, @HrDanielle, @goose_lane, and @NovelSpotBooks.
- The time period with the most tweets using the hashtag #CIBD was 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET on April 28.
