I'm turning yet another toy shelf over to books. Toys have always been part of the mix for the store because I couldn't figure out what to put on the walls over seven feet from the floor. 

Turns out, I can put special editions books face out, as well as sets of books. Yes, it's a little inconvenient, but they sell at least as well as the toys have been doing over the last few years.

I stocked up on toys while Diamond, our comic wholesaler, was still in business. But they're gone and I have no inclination to try to open accounts with toy wholesalers who are notoriously unreliable. We have enough toys to last us a few years, while we transition those spaces into books and graphic novels, probably keep about half of them, which is fine. We're doing the same thing with board games. There are a stupid number of board games coming out, so we're sticking to the tried and true, even though games like Catan and Ticket to Ride are selling in the Targets of the world.

 

We've transitioned our retirement account from 70% equities (that's the stock market) to 30%, which is safer at our age. The rest is fixed income of one kind or another, or cash. I simply do not trust the stock market anymore.  

 

I've finally settled into the new sleeping schedule. Usually in bed by 11:00 now, instead of 12:30, and usually up by 7:00 now, instead of 8:30. Gives me enough time to drink my coffee, peruse the news, and then drive to the store by around 9:00. Spend two hours putting books away in a quiet store and leave at 11:00 before I get a ticket and the customers arrive. Usually get home by noon. 

I'm not looking forward to the time change. It's going to be starting all over again.  

Finished the 2024 taxes. 

What a mind-draining activity. Make one computational error and I have to start all over. The longer I do it, the more mistakes I make, even when I try to take breaks. It could be done in one day, if I measured by hours, but takes two days measured by energy and probably should be three days to be sure. 

Rough estimate of the operational profits from the store is pretty close to 2023.

I've always played it conservatively, not trying for any questionable deductions. I've never claimed travel, entertainment, or home office expenses. The store is pretty much self-contained because that's the way I made it. 

This year I seriously considered including home wifi and streaming services. Pegasus Books by any measure is a pop culture store and I need to keep up with what's going on in the entertainment business.

In the end I decided not to fight that battle since we are so close to the end of our tenure as store owners. 

That will be Sabrina's decision when the time comes. 

Last year, I tried to be careful in my purchasing, looking for the best margins. Our sales were down from the previous year, but not outrageously. I just figured we were experiencing a slow decline from the Covid peak of 2022. 

This year I decided to quit chasing margins and concentrate on what was selling and being aggressive about keeping it in stock. So far, we're up by 20% over last year, and we'll almost certainly going to have a best year by more than 10%. 

A few percentage points in margin pretty much gets washed away by that much of an increase in sales.

I always seem to come back to the conclusion that I should just order what sells and keep ordering what sells and pay whatever I have to, within reason, to keep it in stock. 

Lesson learned once again.  

A customer asked me if we carried used books. "The reason I ask is that you have a much broader range of titles than most bookstores."

She gave us an unintended compliment. Because that's exactly what we do. Because most people don't come in on Tuesdays to buy the latest bestseller, or reserve books in advance, or join a "book club," or any number of other things most regular bookstores do, we've arrived at a different process. 

We concentrate on "midlist" books. Oh, we get the new bestsellers, but we don't get stacks of them. Because the Oregon warehouse for Ingram books is just two days away, we don't really need to. All we really have to do is keep track of what's selling and reorder immediately, which we do. Because we don't have money tied up in stacks of bestsellers, we can buy more titles. 

I focus on perennial sellers. Books that continue to sell, even if their bestseller status has faded from the national lists. Part of this is because we are very oriented toward tourists. This summer has really proven that. Our sales have dropped almost in half from our pinnacle of sales in August (not to worry, sales are still really good, but sales reached a record level last month). So...well, I guess something like 35 to 45% of books that sold were to tourists.  

It all seems to work for us. Each store has to adapt to their own circumstances, and we seemed to have stumbled on a formula that works really well for us.  

Boycott Disney?

I think about half of my shop is tied up with Disney. All the Marvel, all the Star Wars, the DIsney books and the shipping of Marvel comics from Penguin Random House. Take those away and there is a huge hole created. 

Simply not possible.  

The original sin was allowing these companies to grow so big. Monopolies, basically. Now my very life's blood is tied up with them. Whenever I've had the chance I've tried to diversify, but eventually, the Big Fish eat the Small Fish. 

It's pretty fucked up and probably too far along to ever be reversed. Which then begs the question: is our society, politics, and economy too far gone to be reversed? 

Put that way, the answer if pretty obvious.  

I need to do something. I think I'll have to take up writing again. The big fantasy world. 

How do I make it different? How do I escape the Tolkien trap? Do I want to escape the Tolkien trap? How do I write a book like LOTRs without copying LOTRs? 

Is the template so rigid and inviolate that it can't be altered except by simply putting each important piece with something equal? If you do try to escape the trap, do you simply destroy the trap and make it something completely different?

I've seen authors make LOTR's more violent and brutal, I seen Frodo replaced by a rapist and murderer, I've seen all the background elements simply made bigger or more complicated. I've seen settings in every conceivable historical parallel. I've seen the characters' gender and race changed into every gender and race. I seen every kind of religious and political construct. 

But at the base of it all, it's just switching one thing for another same kind of thing. 

To write the grand fantasy, you still need the quest. You still need the talisman. You still need the innocent hero's journey. You still need the companions. You still need the great evil. 

Change any of these things and they become what? Something other than heroic fantasy. Steampunk, cyberpunk, urban, romance, SF, magic realism, whatever. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it isn't any longer LOTR's. 

I know. It's stupid question. You can't do a LOTRs without doing LOTRs light. You'll never have the breath of background in setting, language, knowledge of mythology that Tolkien had. Everyone who tries it comes across as a shallow reflection.  

The Westminster warehouse of Penguin Random House has finally, this week, caught up. They've been dreadfully behind on their shipments for most of the summer. Fortunately, I decided in July to buy primarily from Ingram, though my discount is lower. At the time, I thought I was saving 10 days of waiting. As it turned out, I probably saved myself 20 days of waiting.

I have to wonder if taking on Marvel and the hundreds of titles they represent didn't overload the Westminster location. I've thought from the start that PRH probably didn't fully understand what they were taking on. 

I tried to get transferred to the Reno warehouse, but apparently as long as I get comics from Westminster, it has to be my primary warehouse, even though Reno is only three shipping days away. Their loss. I will continue to order from Ingram first and PRH second, though I'd flip that if I had Reno. I pretty sure PRH doesn't care. 

 

We met our goals for the month. I worked a long Sunday at the store, came home and went for a nap at 8:00 and woke up the next morning at 8:00.  I don't know if I've done such a thing since childhood. 

What it was, I think, is a collapse from a self-induced extroversion overdose. My store persona at full speed. 

I can relax now. We've done what we set out to do for the summer, now I expect that the store will turn back into a pumpkin. (Though I have 25 full pages of reorders to do...)