What a strange bookstore we are.

First let me preface this by saying that this Black Friday was perhaps the best sales day we've ever had outside of Christmas week. We had well over a hundred customers, which means we had three or four times that many people milling around the store. Let me tell you, that's a lot of activity for a thousand square foot store manned by one person over a five hour active period.

So I came in this morning expecting to restock our "bestseller" shelves. Currently, we have about four bookcases that we can display new bestsellers face out. That's about room for over 100 books. 

We had one blank spot. We had sold one bestseller. One! By this I mean, the books that are on the New York Times lists, and other lists, the books you're hearing about on NPR or elsewhere.

One book.

At the same time we sold several hundred of other books, a huge number of books.  

Now I've been saying for some time that we are a midlist bookstore. I'd already noticed how often we sell certain perennial titles; which I try to suss out as often as possible. If I can assemble a few hundred books that sell regularly, the store is healthy. But to be sure I have full runs of authors and series and quirky books and bestsellers and books that sell regularly, I concentrate on carrying them.

So I will use 80% of my budget for reorders and only 20% for the new releases.  

For the above reasons. 

Don't get me wrong. I am very diligent about carrying the bestsellers. Out of the 150 books listed by the USA Today every week, I carry about 85% of them. The other 15% are books that I'm fairly sure won't sell for us, or books I choose not to carry. (I don't much like celebrity books, and I stay away from outright politically slanted books because their shelf life is very short.)

We don't return books so I order what I think I can sell. Instead, I reorder just about every day replacing what just sold. That way I'll usually have in stock most of the books that I think will sell, but not so many that I need to return them for credit.  

I mean, it seems to be working. We're going to have a record year, after a very strong previous five years: basically, ever since I transitioned into a full bookstore. 

It's working so well that I don't feel the need to change what I'm doing. It's not like I haven't tried.

I've experimented over the last few years with ordering well in advance, of ordering more often from the publishers, of ordering more new titles and more copies of each one. But when the dust settles, we've sold a bunch of perennial books and not so many bestsellers. So unless there is a sudden surge in demand, I guess we'll just keep doing what we're doing.

I like my store the way it is, frankly. It's what I always wanted it to be.   

Watch out, deep thoughts from a shallow thinker!

Woke up in the morning with the phrase, "The universe in a deck of cards."

I recently learned of the probability that no one--everyone--has ever ended up with the same deck of cards. Shuffling fifty-two cards ends up with as many possibilities as there are atoms in the galaxy. (So it should be "The Galaxy in a deck of cards," but I like the sound of the prior wording.)

Either way, from a human standpoint, the possibilities are virtually endless. Just a fifty-two card deck of that you and me and everyone in the world can hold in their hands. Think of all the inconceivably large number systems of the world that include more than 52 different forms. It's mind boggling. 

So what gives us little, bitty humans the idea that we can predict anything with any possibility?  We can't even solve "Three Body Problem." 

Basically, I suppose I'm talking about chaos theory. 

Yesterday, I looked up from my counter at the store and kind of blurted out to a random customer I was serving, "I can't believe this. Look at all these people milling about! I spent probably twenty years waiting for individual customers to come in and now this!"

I think they just looked at me blankly, but from my standpoint it seems like none of this was ever predictable. It simply can't be, because of all the factors. 

Sometimes I feel like there is something close to ESP among customers--that they all come in at the same moment or disappear at the same moment. But when there are endless possibilities, then endless variations that can and do happen. 

So what I think happens is that humans play the odds, that we rely on Occam's Razor to get through life.

Except when we don't. What really got me started on this line of thought is that I came up with a bit of a conspiracy theory that is both possible and improbable. Linda and I are selling the van we bought to travel with our cat. So the local dealer referred us to a dealer in the valley and we're going to drive over and see about leaving it there.

But of course, having driven three hours, the chances that we won't accept the terms of the deal offered are much less. So what if...what if the dealers are exchanging customers, making sure they clinch the deals?

It makes a certain amount of sense except--people are way too unpredictable to pull that off every time and if it doesn't happen every time, the advantage to the dealer disappears. Occam's Razor.

But it made me realize that once you start thinking in conspiratorial terms, there is no end to it, because there are no end to the possibilities. The possibilities are going to be mostly negative, but you can't prove a negative. That's where conspiracies gain their strength-- you can't really prove that something isn't... or couldn't happen. That way lies madness.

So we all muddle through life, attributing results to our own actions or to luck or to other people or to conspiracies. When all we can really do is try to reason out the odds and hope for the best.  

There's a thing I throw out sometimes when talking about business. It's about an article I read that talked about if you took three hundred companies that are all equal at the start, and they have to eliminate each other in competition for the customer, that one of those companies would end up on top.

So the natural tendency is to believe that the company that ended up on top was the best. That they possessed some secret competitive advantage that we can all learn from. 

But I repeat, you get the same results when all the companies are completely equal. All you need is to introduce the chaos of actual day to day business.

So we'll look back at Steve Jobs and think, "Of course he ended up at the top. He was a genius!" But what if there were hundreds, thousands, of people with comparable talents that just never had the chance? It's always easy to go back and look for the factors that played a part, but that's all in hindsight. 

I'm not saying that positive attributes don't play a part, just as I wouldn't say an Ace in the deck is equal to a Deuce. But that's also assuming that we're the one's shuffling the deck. I suspect that randomness and chaos play a much larger role than we like to think. 

For my own part, I feel thankful and grateful for how my life has turned out, because I feel in my gut that there are so many ways things could have ended up differently.  

I hope this has been helpful.  

I've been ordering books from Ingram on a twice a week basis for years now. 

This week I'm switching to once a day, or at least five times a week. There is no reason not to. I can easily fit that amount of ordering into a morning session, meaning I'd get the books the next day. I've also decided to not order from Scholastic, Simon & Shuster, or Harper Collins unless I have some extra money to stock up at the cheaper discounts. They take much more effort to order, take much more time to arrive, and have completely unpredictable fill rates. 

I'll keep ordering from Penguin Random House because of their wide range of titles, including DC and Marvel material. It's also relatively easy to use and easy to keep track of how much I'm spending. But because they take ten days to two weeks for the books arrive, they will be my second choice on just about everything.

If Ingram doesn't have something and PRH does, I'll order from them. If Ingram only has it from the Tennessee warehouse, I'll also order from PRH, since it would take about the same length of time to arrive. I'll also order a quick copy from Ingram and perhaps a backup copy from PRH if the title is hot enough. 

Both our best year (until now) and the best month we ever had in sales I had dedicated to ordering mostly from Ingram and ordering often. I had a feeling that PRH might be slow this summer and decided to go with Ingram for most everything. As it happened, PRH's warehouse had problems and things took two weeks to show up. Because I'd gone with Ingram, it didn't hurt us.

I don't trust PRH not to have similar problems during the Christmas season. My guess is that they took on way more trouble than they expected when they took on Marvel comics.  

The sales were so much better in August, a record month, that I think the discount difference became much less important. So the fact that it's quick, easy, and predictable is much more preferable than the extra 10% or so I get from ordering from the publishers direct.

If the publishers ever get their act together and get stuff to me in less than a week, I might change my mind. Sadly, if I wasn't ordering comics from PRH, I'd get books from their Reno warehouse in a few days. But because I am, I get my material from a Westminster, New York warehouse. Kind of ridiculous that I can't separate the two things, but there it is.  

 

Verbosities

That vast comfortable man is gone,

in his place a slithering gnashing gnat,

instead of curving complexities,

a lumpy straight line,

no longer a blinding rainbow

but a smear of shit.

the vibrating eternal purr

 a postmortem slime

exploding blue skies

a dark quivering mass. 

 

But other than that...

everything is just fine. 

Start ups.

I bought Pegasus Books for about 10K forty-two years ago. That would be about 35K in today's dollars. Looking back, I paid too much for the actual inventory but about the right amount for the opportunity. Something like that.

Anyway, it's astonishing to me that anyone can buy or even start up a business the way I did. I had almost no money, I borrowed the first 5K from the bank with a co-sign from my Dad, which I duly paid back. Then paid the other 5K in monthly installments. 

I calculated that I needed to double sales right away in order to make it work. But I'd been managing the store for a year by that time and I understood that the actual demand for product wasn't being fulfilled. So by spending another 2K on inventory, sales took an immediate jump. 

 Rents were cheap back then, creditors were patient. I could use old collections of comics and cards to pay the bills. Barely.

It was a tough slog for the first couple years. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps ain't easy. I finally went up COCC and talked to a business advisor, who told me that I had a "primitive sophistication" (heh) and that I needed more capital to grow. He went with me to the bank and I secured the loan.

Then it was the roller-coaster ride of one bubble after another for the next 15 years. The first two bubbles almost crushed us (sports cards and comics) the next three bubbles saved our ass (beanie babies, pogs, and Pokemon.) I'd learned how to play that game.

But we still carried that debt from the first two crashes and I was paying it down with 40% of Net profits (!) for several years before we got a bit of money from the family to pay it off. It's been more or less--or rather, in comparison to the first 16 years--smooth sailing since. At least at a "minimum wage" level. 

Then, in the last five years, we hit some tipping point and the store actually became profitable. Gee, it only took 37 years...

I don't think the whole thing would be possible today. The amount of money you need to have a starting inventory is much, much higher. Rents are probably double what they should be to mirror actual startup costs. Competition (the internet alone) is far greater. 

Even twenty years ago I'd probably have warned anyone who had stars in their eyes to think twice about opening a business. Now? I'm not sure you're not better off letting someone else lose their shirt.  I mean, it's probably still possible if you have enough capital to survive your mistakes, or if you already have experience, or if you do everything right. (right?) 

I'm glad I did it. I saw Linda surviving one crappy job after another until we opened The Bookmark which she happily ran for 15 years. That was possible because we had the above experience and capital to pull it off.

It's a tougher world these days.  

After years of more or less ignoring back-issue comics, we've reversed course since Covid and are trying to collect as good a back-issue stock as we can get. Part of it is the change in the market and part is because we've been given some collections relatively inexpensively. They're a chore to make salable, but it's also fun to do. Giving each comic a fresh bag and board really makes them look nice. 

Some former customer (and current friend!) donated a few boxes to the store a couple days ago. I took them home yesterday and started to work on them. About 600 of them were titles worth working on (the other 200 were fine, just not immediately salable. These we leave out for people who might want them for very low cost.)

Linda and I put on the extended versions of LOTRs. They movies are so comfortable that in some ways they've become background noise. At the same time, I noticed more than I had before how many changes there were to the books, and how well placed the changes were. They made the movies work, frankly. But they also aren't the books anymore. 

Fair enough.

Still have Return of the King to watch and taping and pricing the comics. 

It's a very satisfying and enjoyable process.