Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Summer's been good.

Worked at Pegasus Books for a few hours yesterday.

We're selling the hell out of books. All these tourists seem to believe we're a bookstore. Literally outselling both comics and graphic novels (but not the two together.) That is truly astonishing, especially since so far I've made little effort to carry current bestsellers. It makes me believe that I could be a full bookstore if I needed to be. But then, why? I like comics and graphic novels. It's all one big compendium of words and pictures, as far as I'm concerned.

Magic sales are down, because of increased competition, I think. It reminds me of sports cards in that there always seem to be so many people selling magic and so many people discounting. Plus...play space. Not at all sorry to be foregoing that.

Toy sales are up, which I've made a concerted effort to do.

Games are down a little bit, but not bad considering how much competition we have these days.

Comic floppies are down this month, which is the first time we're really seeing what the rest of the industry has been reporting. But graphic novel sales are up, almost compensating.

Overall, we're going to beat last year for the second month in a row, which I think is due to paying more attention to books and toys.

Anyway, this huge increase in book sales more or less confirms what I've been thinking---that filling the store with good books, interesting books, books with a history and books without a history, but just doing the best I can to fill the store with books, results in sales that are not dependent on competition but result from being downtown when there is lots of foot traffic.

That we can do.

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