"In the Midst of Chaos, there is Opportunity." Sun Tzu

Our book sales are nearly double last year this month.

When I first started doing new books about fifteen years ago, I was ordering the low-hanging fruit. Favorites, cult books, classics, tangential to comics, requests. My new book ordering was at first meant to be a supplement to my used books. I had gotten tired of never having the titles come in used that people were asking for.

Within a few years, new books were outselling used books 5 to 1.

I removed the used books completely a couple years ago, making more room for new books and graphic novels.

I've always treated books in my store as more or less a continuum. Hardcovers or softcovers, comics or graphic novels, trade paperback or mass market paperbacks, art books, children's books, fiction, non-fiction if interesting. I tried to blend them all together. Stories--some with lots of words, some with lots of art, but all stories.

For about 5 years, I was bringing books in kind of from a distance. That is, I was home writing most of the time and would lift my head to order books here and there, whenever convenient. I kept expanding the bookshelves wherever possible. I wasn't really bearing down, but nevertheless, book sales continued to increase.

What I've found is this: Good books sell and keep selling. So every time I find an evergreen book, one that will sell every time I order it, it adds to the overall effect. One by one, I've been adding books that seem to have constant demand. All of this works because of the foot-traffic in downtown Bend, especially the tourists.

Because of the popularity of young adult graphic novels, I've been paying particular attention to young adult and kids books of all kinds. 

In the last year I finally decided to pay more attention to brand new books and bestsellers. I'm still a little careful there--I will order two or three of a bestseller that fits my brand (i.e. the new Hunger Games prequel), and maybe just one of other hardcover books. I'm still not trying to carry every new bestseller that comes out, but I try to have a good sampling.

Since I started working two days a week last fall, I accelerated the process, paid much more attention to what I was doing. This meant also coming in at least one more day a week to put books away. Book sales started to increase under the attention.

When we closed in April to put down new flooring, I shifted things slightly to make a little more room for new books. What's more or less happened is that the increase in new book sales have more than compensated for the decrease, due to disruptions and/or competition, in sales on other product.

In the chaos, I've had time to rethink how I'm doing things.

In the last month, DC comics has decided to distribute their comics under new distributors. This has more or less thrown the entire market into chaos. It forced me to take a closer look at what I was doing.

For one thing, I've been ordering all my new books from a distributor, both for convenience and speed. However, I can get a 10% better margin by ordering directly from the publishers. Over the last week, I've been transitioning--ordering books as usual from the regular distributor, but whenever possible going direct with the publishers. So far, I've set up accounts with two publishers--who probably account for a good 40% of my overall book sales.

If this works, I'll set up accounts with a couple more of the Big Five publishers--who between them own the lion's share of new books.

It's been a time-consuming process, and frankly, I probably wouldn't have done it if DC comics hadn't pulled the rug out from under us. I'll actually save money buying DC graphic novels from my new accounts, and while that is happening, I'll save money on a goodly percentage of my other books too.

So thanks, DC, for throwing things into chaos. I doubt you'll like the results, but it's going to be good for my store.