Bopping into the store early this morning to bump around. I'd forgotten the aura of an empty store. There's something very peaceful about it. I don't have any books to put away, so this will be a look-around, whatever small improvements I can make.
When I first started carrying books, I ordered as many "budget" books as I could afford to get up to speed. Getting my inventory at full wholesale through my cash flow was going to take forever. (I don't borrow money anymore for inventory purposes--it all has to be paid for.)
Some of the budget books were decent, some were junk, a few were prizes.
I firmly believe that, at any one time, 20% of your inventory are going to be 80% of your sales. But I also believe that you have to have that other 80% in stock. You can work on improving that 20% over time, so maybe it can become something like 30% or 35% of your stock. But it will always be a matter that only part of your inventory will be attractive to your customers.
Don't ask me the mechanics of it. I've just found that trying for 100% saleable product is pretty much impossible.
There's a context to inventory; where and how you display the 80% will help sell the 20%.
I recently wondered what percent of the books we sell are the books we put face-outward. I came up with a guesstimate of 50%. I ask Sabrina the same question, and somewhat to my surprise she immediately came up with 50%. The other day I asked Dylan, and he immediately guessed 50%.
But here the thing: only a small percentage of the books can be faced outward. The books behind those books are the kind of midlist books that you'll sell less often, but they are just as important. Anyone can have the bestseller, but a store that can please the customer with something more unusual is also important.
So the more books you have, the better. The better those books are, the better. But you'll always be shuffling books around trying to find ways for the customer to discover them.
I recently add two authors to my cult stacks. These are authors that few people know about but those in the know will totally glom onto if they find them.
J.G. Ballard and Roberto Bolano. They join Vonnegut and P.K. Dick and Chuck Palahniuk and Charles Bukowski and a bunch of other authors where I try to carry a good chunk of what they've written. They may not be part of the 20%, but they are also important for verifying to the discerning customer that you know what you are doing.
Anyway, I'm slowly but surely replacing the bargain books I used to bulk up the store. They've probably gone from 25% of my inventory to maybe 10% of my inventory. Eventually they will all be replaced. But it's still pretty satisfying when one sells; 100% profit, for one thing, since I'm not replacing them.
It's still not easy to get new inventory through cash flow. It's almost the very definition of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but it's getting done. I probably reorder 90% of the books I sell because I've found that a book that sells once will most often sell twice and a book that sells twice is even more likely to sell three times. I think this is smart, but it also means that the smaller percentage of my budget can be used on new titles and most of those new titles are new releases--bestsellers more often than not.
But you do it book by book and over time, the inventory improves. I probably won't get to 100% satisfaction, if for no other reason than the amount of space I have to work with, but it's getting better all the time.