Conventional wisdom leads to conventional results.

If you are in a industry that isn't doing so well, then doing it like everyone else in the industry wouldn't seem to be the way to go about it..

Both used and new bookstores are struggling right now, and I'm pretty sure it's because they haven't been able to get beyond the 'usual' way they've always done business. People tend toward the idealized bookstore, the YOU'VE GOT MAIL bookstore, perhaps forgetting that at the end of the movie, Meg Ryan is turning out the lights.

It's especially revealing to me that many of the old, mainline, established and even famous bookstores are having the biggest problems.

Oh, many bookstores have added the interactive elements, readings and book clubs and such, many bookstores have become computerized, and many bookstores have online presences, but to me those are add-ons, they aren't the core of their business. The core is books and selling of books. If the core is weak, all the add-ons will be for nothing.

No, not for nothing. Actually, the add-ons, the value-addeds, cost time, money, energy and space. Ultimately, they often create burn-out. Sounds great to have a bookstore that sells tea and crumpets, with tables and sofa's, until you get that guy who nurses a cup of tea for hours, spilling crumbs all over everything, and falling asleep with loud snores on the sofa.

I've got a pretty good idea of what I think bookstores are doing wrong, but I won't know for sure until I've done it differently myself for awhile. Perhaps there are no answers, which will mean indy bookstores will be permanently marginalized, or at least until some genius figures out a new way.

I've always recommended the book, Growing a Business, by Hawken, but -- to be honest --the real reason I discovered it's virtues was because I'd already been in business for several years before I read it. I could appreciate its wisdom. Because I was proscribed by a lack of funds, I avoided many of the mistakes he talks about, but not all of them. But one especially values advice after one has already discovered for oneself that its true.

It's called experience.

I think almost everyone who goes into business follows bad examples; very often the businesses they are replacing, without thinking about the fact that the business they are replacing is perhaps gone for a good reason. Newbies are susceptible to the hangers-on in the business world who will try to sell them on 'status'; the best of this, and best of that. More advertising, more money spent on Image.

Almost all new stores, in my opinion, make too little effort on inventory, and too much effort on everything else. And they don't work the store 60 hours or more a week themselves, which would keep them out of much of the above mentioned bad habits.

I saw it first hand with sport card shops. They came and went like Mayflies. And if you asked why they were doing it they way they were doing it, the answer was almost always, "Because the store I used to go to, that I liked so much, did it that way."
It's how entire industries can become suicidally competitive and dysfunctional.

A store has to fight the tide, in fact, to do it differently, because suppliers and manufacturers are set up to cater to all those other -- dysfunctional -- stores.

Fortunately, there are almost always others who are fighting the tide, and sometimes you can ally with them.

In the sport card industry, I decided it was insane to constantly send my money off months in advance to get product that was almost always late, almost always in higher quantities than I wanted. All for what? -- 12% savings? And yet, I wasn't aware of any other card shop who made that decision. I snagged onto a distributor who supplied cards as a sideline to non card shops, and survived when most other shops disappeared.

I think the bookstore industry is at that stage right now. Some drastic steps are going to need to be made. And what I see, just like I saw with sports cards, are changes that are always a little too little, a little too late.

I'm not sure what the answers will be. I'm going to try a few things, and see if they work.

In a day or two, I will talk about a dozen factors I'm going to concentrate on.

I have a couple of unique advantages: I'm in a busy downtown district, and I don't need to depend on books to survive. I also have some unique personal advantages; information from a thriving used bookstore, lots of personal experience in ancillary product, a weird rain man memory for titles and authors, and a lifetime of reading all kinds of books.

And the biggest advantage: knowledge and experience that one can dare to do it differently.