Edelweiss, Beyond the Buyer
At the recent Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Fall Discovery Show, we co-hosted an education session called Edelweiss Beyond the Buyer: Marketing and Bookseller Engagement. This session was aimed at highlighting the various Edelweiss tools that stores can use to communicate excitement, plans, co-op highlights, and more. Below, you’ll find a few highlights, along with links to help documentation that explains how to use these tools.
First, you can find a webinar recording here that actually highlights lots of this stuff, Edelweiss for Frontline Booksellers
Find how to add, remove, and manage staff Edelweiss accounts here.
Tags allow users at your organization to collaborate on lists of books. It is highly recommended that you develop a system, internally, for which tags to use in which situation to be sure they’re most effective. Just for example, if you decide to use a tag for co-op titles, make sure that everyone involved is using the same spelling, coop and co-op are technically 2 different tags. Some stores have tags for staff picks, which are a nice alert for a buyer. If a great handseller tags a title with their staff pick tag, the buyer can buy more intelligently, and everyone make out like bandits. Bandits!
User Administrators can edit, merge, delete, or rename those tags, too. Learn about Managing Tags.
Reviews and Shelves not only allow each user to track their reading, but IndieNext submissions and the ability for all users at your store to see that activity can be a great way to share staff excitement, and to allow buyers to use that information to, again, buy more intelligently.

Also, connecting with other booksellers, reps, librarians, bloggers, etc. can be a great way to network through the lens of title interest, as it were. Make friends and connect with the community. Publishers do pay attention and very muchwant to get their books in to the right hands.
Event Grids are a key piece to be aware of, as well. If you want to ask publishers for author visits, this is how you do it.
Also, creating PDF’s or emails of upcoming titles that the store ordered can be a great way to make sure that the staff is informed and ready. A better informed staff is a better performing staff. Here’s a great way to get that key bit of info.
Finally, did you know, Edelweiss+ Analytics Summit users, that you can create regular email alerts for (for example) soon-to-be published titles that you’ve missed? Or for big titles that you’re suddenly out of? Yes! Email subscriptions can be a huge help, and can, of course, be shared with your colleagues. Details here.
Questions? Contact us at support@abovethetreeline.com