Reviewing my writing before going forward. 

What mistakes might I have made.

1.) Too many books, too fast.

2.) Too many genres and subjects.

3.) Not enough planning or outlining in advance,

4. Not writing a "serious" book. No trauma drama for me.

5.) Not writing enough short stories.

But even if these are mistakes, they are what I would call career mistakes. That is, they could be considered mistakes if I was trying to make a paying career out of my writing.

The irony is, these are also exactly the terms of writing that I set out before starting.

Rule #1: Write the book without going backward, or without too much pre-planning. Let the book go where it goes. 

The reason for Rule #1, was that in my previous career, I'd fallen into a pernicious writing cycle. I'd research and plan and then never write the book. I'd start a book, and then restart a book, then restart a books, then restart a book....

Rule #2: Write what I want, when I want. 

For me, there were only two reasons to write:

A). For fun and personal fulfillment.

B.) For money and fame.

I realized ahead of time that the latter was very unlikely. Besides, I figured if I wrote for the reasons in the former, I'd have a better chance of reaching the latter.

Rule #3: Write for fun.

I have no interest in what I see in the literary field. I read to be entertained, and so I decided to write to be entertained. I'll let others write about trauma drama, I want my books to be an adventure.

In other words, what could be considered mistakes from a career aspect are the very reasons I was writing in the first place. I really can't see how I could have done it differently.

The last possible mistake was not writing short stories. But I can only now see this because I didn't even try until my last two efforts. Both were short stories, and both were immediately accepted by anthologies. 

Live and learn.  

So, if I'm just going to do what I was doing, then I have to figure I'm writing for fun and personal fulfillment. In that, I've already succeeded beyond anything I could have imagined.

 

The English Wolf of Wall Street.

I wonder if anyone else has put these story parts together. I've picked it up by bits and pieces, and it's a fascinating case of six degrees of separation to me.

Bend used to be a company town: Brooks/Scanlon, the largest pine sawmill in the world. The town I grew up revolved around the mill. The population of the town was 13,000 compared to over 100,000 today. 

I'd just returned to Bend after college in 1980. My understanding was that Brooks/Scanlon was sold to Diamond International, which was controlled by a British mogul named Sir James Goldsmith, who then proceeded to sell off parts of the company for the breakup profits; including the mill. 

Thus, the end of the mill. 

After a little research, I learned the Goldsmith had been buying up shares of Diamond, but had disagreed with Diamond buying the mill. However, Goldsmith was keen on the lumber land, so ended up buying out Diamond. 

And thus, the end of the mill. https://www.sirjamesgoldsmith.com/businessman/investor/us-major-takeovers/

However it happened, it made me look up James Goldsmith, and it turns out he was the model for the British takeover mogul in the movie Wall Street, played by Terence Stamp, who was even worse than the character played by Michael Douglas ("Greed is good.")

What reminded me of this is the podcast "Behind the Bastards," (which interestingly, is done out of Portland, Oregon, I believe), which did an episode about the gambling tycoon in England, Lord Aspinall, who fleeced post-war aristocracy of much of their cash.

One of these guys was a Lord Lucan, who was part of the in-crowd at the Clermont Club, which was rife with men who were a little to the right of Attila the Hun.  Brixet before Brixet.

Lord Lucan was over his head in debts and about to lose custody of his children in a divorce. He tried murdering his wife, but killed the maid instead, and then disappeared.

There is a strong suspicion that his buds at the Clermont Club, including Sir James Goldsmith, knew what he was going to do and may have even helped him. 

Fine fellows all. Little old Bend didn't stand a chance, though I'm pretty sure Brooks Scanlon was doomed anyway.

 

"Cancel Christmas!"

Always have to remind myself that no one's cancelled Christmas. The Sheriff of Nottingham has been denied yet again. 

Though every year, the customers show up later than the year before, they do eventually show up, thankfully. 

Nevertheless, I always imagine Armageddon. Five days before Christmas and we're at war with China, three feet of snow on the ground, and a new plague keeping people holed up at home. Any or all or a million other scenarios. 

But every year, Christmas comes, people get the urge, and we come out OK. 

I used to scoff at the idea that Christmas represents half of the year's profits. Well, since we started carrying books, it hasn't been "half" but it's been a good solid third of our profits. 

It's nerve-wracking, I tell you. 

The comics controversy.

So there's been a lot of talk in the comic industry about the dangers of the future. 

It doesn't surprise me.

In 2017, our comic sales had declined two years in a row, after a decade long steady increase. What I noticed was the market seemed focused on speculation: variant covers, #1s, special editions. But Pegasus Books had decided after the crash in 1995 against encouraging any kind of speculation. We catered to readers. My saying was, "Readers stay, speculators eventually leave."

But that's where the market was going for the foreseeable future, and it put us in a bit of bind. Either we had to pivot to understanding the collectable market, are our sales would continue to decline.

It wasn't an impossible ask. I'd probably spent half my first 30 years on the job dealing with speculators. It's a very time-consuming, somewhat risky market to engage, but I really had no choice. It could be done, though it was always a gamble.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."  John Maynard Keynes. 

In other words, no one is bigger than the market, and no matter how right you think you are about a certain stock or trend, the market doesn't care ... (Charles Schwab.)

So I conferred with Sabrina. If we were going to go after the speculators , she would be the point person. She really didn't want to do it. I'd just spent 15 years telling her how dangerous and harmful the speculators could be.

"If we don't do this, we'll have to build the other parts of the store," I said. "Are you OK with that?"

She said she was, so we pivoted even more toward books (a process we'd started years ago, but now we were getting serious about it. 

As I've described many times before, when we closed for two months during Covid, we took the opportunity to lay down new flooring and redesigned the layout of the store to focus on books. To my great surprise, this worked even better than I expected. People started tell me that I was a bookstore, and sales confirmed it. We went for 65% comics/graphic novels to 65% books/graphic novels.

Ironically, comic sales also increased, but I think this was a Covid bump. 

Over the last year, we've been slowly "reverting to normal." Our books sales are still very good, only down 2%, which is a real accomplishment because Manga has definitely declined. 

Comics really aren't down for us in the numbers that other comic retailers are talking about, but I think this is because we'd already absorbed the hit. Sometimes you just have to take your lumps.

The secret to survival is to try to pivot with the market. You Zig when the market Zigs, and Zag when the market Zags. If you do the opposite, you'll pay the price. 

Obviously, you don't always get it right. But the more often you get it right, the healthier you are. 

The thing is, it's much less effective if you start to pivot after the market has already moved. You need to start the process before, and that's always a bit of a gamble itself. 

This is our third amazing fabulous year in sales. I'm expecting more "reverting to normal," but that's OK as long as our budget it aligned. We're so far above pre-Covid sales that we could get a lot of it back and still be a very prosperous business. 

Nice to see at the end of a long career hawking comics.

Minus 1%,

Our book sales this year are down 1%. 

I consider this a raging success. Covid brought in a wave of new customers, and it appears we've managed to keep them. Books now account for 70% of our overall sales, versus 60% last year. So books have kept our overall sales close. 

This despite a rather noticeable drop in manga sales. During Covid I went out of my way to stock as much manga as I could, whereas I suspect that B & N and other stores just took in whatever manga came through the pipeline. I was extremely proactive during those two years tracking down and stocking the hot titles. 

Now that the supply problems have cleared up, that competitive advantage has disappeared and manga sales are reverting to normal numbers.

If I include graphic novels overall, we are down 3.5% in sales. (Probably mostly manga.) It's become impossible to separate graphic novels from regular novels since we're pretty much ordering them from the same place. 

I believe things are reverting back to normal. There was a boom during Covid because we were open while restaurants, theaters, and game play spaces were closed. That we can match Covid number despite overall competition increasing is actually pretty impressive. 

To put this in perspective, we are selling 5 times more books then pre-Covid! Having to close for two months turned out to be a blessing in disguise. When we laid down new flooring it gave me a chance to reorient the store toward books, and it paid off. 

I think surviving for forty years in downtown Bend comes down to making these kinds of adjustments to the economic conditions. I've been lucky that I've mostly guessed right about trends. 

Onward!