Liz Hottel Takes the Helm at NAIBA With Bookselling Experience and a Programming Mindset

NAIBA marked a leadership transition on August 4, when Liz Hottel officially became the organization’s second executive director during the annual membership meeting at the New Voices New Rooms conference. The handoff comes after the retirement of Eileen Dengler, who led the association for 27 years, and places Hottel at the center of a regional bookselling group that is navigating both practical and cultural shifts in the trade.

A career that led to bookselling

Hottel describes the role as the culmination of a varied career that touched nonprofits, freelance writing, television and film production, and, crucially, bookstores. In particular, she has spent time directing and building author event programs, experience that fits closely with NAIBA’s work supporting booksellers across the region. For her, the appeal of the position is the mix of operational pressure, organizational vision, and collaboration with people whose work directly affects bookstores’ daily lives.

That bookselling background also shapes how she approaches the job. Hottel says bookselling is not the quaint occupation outsiders may imagine, with tea and cats standing in for labor and logistics. Instead, she frames it as demanding, fast-moving work that can involve early-morning unloading, event setup, and the constant realities of returns, scheduling, and ticketing. Her point is not simply that the job is hard, but that it creates a deep sense of kinship among people who do it.

Learning from a long tenure

Hottel spent the past year onboarding while Dengler was preparing to step away from the position she had held for nearly three decades. She likened the transition to an intensive graduate-level course in association management, crediting Dengler’s conference-planning experience as exceptional and describing the learning process as both serious and good-humored. She also pointed to the support of the rest of the NAIBA staff, saying their generosity helped her get up to speed.

The timing matters for NAIBA because executive leadership changes at regional bookseller organizations often coincide with larger industry pressure points. Hottel has said that her initial emphasis is on absorbing as much as possible and speaking with both booksellers and publishers to understand how NAIBA can remain useful in what she calls a challenging economic and intellectual landscape. Rather than announcing immediate reforms, she is treating the opening months as a listening period.

Still, she made clear that she does not see the organization as static. In her view, any association that hopes to remain effective has to evolve along with the industry it serves. She did not outline specific changes, but signaled that adaptation will be part of NAIBA’s future, leaving open the possibility of more definite direction once she has spent more time in the role.

Working alongside SIBA

Another part of Hottel’s early agenda is strengthening her relationship with Linda-Marie Barrett, the executive director of SIBA. Hottel said that working side by side at a major event like New Voices New Rooms is one of the best ways to build that kind of partnership, and she described the connection as easy from the beginning because both leaders share a commitment to supporting booksellers.

Their common ground extends beyond association management. Hottel said both she and Barrett are passionate about authors and come from programming backgrounds, which helped the two leaders quickly align around the task of building a strong and varied author slate for booksellers. That collaboration suggests that author programming will remain central to how NAIBA and its partner organizations serve independent bookstores, especially at a time when the trade is looking for events and initiatives that can help sustain readership, sales, and professional community.

For booksellers, Hottel’s arrival at NAIBA signals continuity and possible renewal at once: a leader steeped in the realities of bookstore work taking over an association built on service, events, and advocacy. What she learns in the near term will shape how the organization responds next, but the early message from her first days in office is that the work will begin with listening, partnership, and an insistence that bookselling is as much about strategy and labor as it is about literature.