Wait just a little before igniting the rocket.

There is a local bookstore I visit who has two large bookcases with the latest week or two releases face out. Whenever I'm there, I count what percent of those books I carry and it is almost always about 1/3rd. 

But just to the right of those two shelves is a shelf that contains the bestsellers from past weeks that have continued to sell. Of this rack, I usually have about 90% of the titles.

Basically, I'm letting all the other stores do the hard work of weeding out the true bestsellers from the aspirational bestsellers. The true bestsellers will pop up on the radar almost immediately, followed quickly by requests and by entry onto the bestseller lists. 

I always make sure I get these true bestsellers as soon as possible, but I don't order the majority of the new releases just because they're new. I'd rather spend that money on my midlist books, my perennials. 

The danger is that I'll miss a week or possibly two weeks of these books; but the true bestsellers usually have selling spans of many weeks, months, and sometimes even years. 

What I've done is avoided the sunk costs on the aspirational bestsellers; and the job of sending back those that don't sell. The few clunkers I get, I have maybe one copy and generally, eventually, someone will buy it. 

It may be a little lazy on my part to wait for confirmation of whether a book really has legs, but I order books without any intention of returning them. I'm not sure that people come to my store for this week's new books, but come into my store and see the books they've heard about.

I'm not saying these other stores are doing it wrong, only that I'm doing it differently. Most stores can't afford to miss out, but they also return books that don't sell. Because my clientele is so heavily tourists, to them most of my books are new.

Last year I tried for a full six months the method I see other stores take because my publisher promised me full returns. I ordered more of the each week's books and more copies of the books that were earmarked to be bestsellers.

At the end of that period I realized that what I had been doing a pretty good job of ordering the right books in the right numbers before that experiment, but not tying up as much of my money on inventory that didn't sell.

So back to basics. Let the books prove themselves a little bit and then get them. My guesses are usually pretty right.