Confessions of a Luddite.

All right, I admit it. I fight and/or ignore technology every chance I get.

I remember trying to read "The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." I was about halfway through before I threw the book across the room and said, "Up Yours! I see no reason I need to know how a motorcycle works. It's for riding, man!"

I fought off getting a computer for a long time; or what seemed like a long time back then but was probably only a couple of years. I couldn't run my business without being online today. Well, obviously.

I think I've only survived this modern world at all because of my friend Aaron, who is a tech wizard and is on retainer at the store. (Well, he gets a big discount for his comics...)

But I'm not completely stupid. I understand objectively that a Point-of-Sale computer would probably be a good thing to get. If I got one, I'd eventually learn how to use it. I's fumble around a lot, be eventually get a functional place. 

But I'm not far away from retiring, a couple years at the most. It's going to be Sabrina's task, and I'm going to strongly urge her to go that direction.

However, I do have some arguments against being too dependent on digital records.  

For instance, we constantly get people who want us to "look up" a title. Here's the thing: I'm literally 5 seconds away from anyplace in my store. I can walk to the spot where the book would be and tell you in another 5 seconds whether it's there. I can go to three different spots in my store and see if it's there. 

Whereas actually going online, hooking up, typing in the title (assuming it's the right title and author and believe me customers get that wrong all the time) would take probably twice as long. 

You can extend this analogy to all aspects of the store. Entering the digital information correctly and in a way that doesn't take much time has to be weighed against the time and effort it takes to do is physically. 

The second reason I like doing it manually is that it imprints the information in my brain. Actually cogitating and examining a book and deciding if I'll order it gives me command of the store, if you will. I can tell a computer that, say, I want a particular book to be reordered only if it has sold in the last six months, but there are so many exceptions to this rule--all the rules--that I feel like it is better to examine each title on its own. 

So that's my defense of my Ludditeism. I'm a small store, that maximizes what its got, and tries to keep a personal touch on the selection and curation of the inventory. 

I won't say "Up Yours!" but I will shrug my shoulders. 

So you thought this was simple.

In the early 90s, in  my "Young Entrepreneur phase," I was trying to operate four stores. After three of them fell apart, mostly due to the fact their underpinnings depended a little too much on sports cards, I realized that I simply didn't have the management skills to do more than one store. 

Personnel management was a problem: dealing with multiple employees was tough, but even that could have been managed if I'd had inventory systems in place to deal with the flow of product. I tried to do all that by hand and it simply got out of hand.

In my defense, the technology wasn't there yet, and the money wasn't there to hire people to do the job. I was the little Dutch boy running between the four stores plugging holes with my fingers. It was only a matter of time before it all came crashing down. 

Ever since, I've contented myself with one store, where I can more or less keep track. I can operate one store efficiently. Along the way, Point-of-Sale computers came along, and I even tried one for awhile, but I hated it. 

It was all manageable as long as I could keep employees long enough for them to learn the ropes (usually about a six month process). I've been very lucky on that front.  I could even coast for awhile. 

Then sales on books exploded. For the last four years I've been keeping up by working on orders from home, using pencil and paper. Again, it has been manageable, even enjoyable. 

Lately, I've started to notice that good titles, ones I call "perennial" sellers, are sometimes dropping between the cracks. What happens is, a book becomes unavailable. After a few weeks, that title drops off the radar because I don't have a system in place to keep track.

It's a fairly minor problem, but growing over time. 

Last year I was offered a good deal from Penguin Random House, who distributes roughly a third of the books I carry. I could return any book I ordered, no limits. In return, I had to give up six percentage points in my discount.

I figured it was a "no-lose" proposition, and that I could test the limits of how many books could be pre-ordered.

Well, as it turned out, the number of books I'd been doing previously was right on. I didn't gain any sales by ordering more, and returning the books seemed like a huge hassle. After six months, I gave up and asked for my discount back. They gave me four percentage points, not six (I'm still trying to recover the other two points.)

So once again, I realized that keeping it simple and keeping it within my skill level was the best idea. 

The only solution to getting more complicated is a Point-of-Sale system, but I'm only going to run the store for a couple more years and I can see that half of that time would be used flailing around trying to learn to run it efficiently.

Right now, I figure that my pencil and paper system is keeping pretty good track, and it also seems to have deeper, intuitive features that I think a strictly statistical measure would lose. My brain, in other words. I can look at a title and see that it's sold only once in the last year but think, "This is a cool title to have around. I'll go ahead and reorder it."

The whole point of a POS system is telling you numerically what is selling and what isn't. If I have to go over the list and make personal intuitive decisions anyway, what good is it? 

I can say that in my store, every book has been picked personally, not by an algorithm.

If I just keep going as I'd been going before the PRH experiment, we'll be more than profitable and functional. 

However, I've learned over the years that we can't just stand pat. We can't just coast. Things start to decline fairly rapidly if we're not constantly striving to improve. In some ways, trying the improve at least keeps us even with the entropy.

This year I've decided to make the leap of ordering from two new publishers: Simon and Shuster, who carry the Viz manga books that I sell a ton of, and Scholastic, who has a lot of YA books and graphic novels I sell. If I order direct from them, I gain at least ten percentage points, even more if I order in volume. 

But it means ordering from four book distributors per week instead of two. I need to keep track of when I reach the minimum ordering levels to maximize the profit margins; measuring how long I can wait between orders before the margins are erased by not having the material to sell. 

Again, if I had a POS system, it would be easier.

I think. 

But I quail at the thought. 

I'm going to experiment with ordering from from four instead of two distributors for my books over the next six months or so. If it increases either sales or profits without completely turning into a grind, I'll keep going.

If not, I'll just go back to the previous system, which was working fine. Like I said, "working fine" is a recipe for stagnation, but better than going backward or burning myself out.

Why we carry what we carry, Part III

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm partial to art books. My main interest is in fantastical art, but I also like the Old Masters, Impressionists, post-Impressionists, and Modern Art of the 50s and 60s. Modern comic artists can be wonderful, modern illustrators, kids books. Bill Watterson does a serious story? Sold! (At least to me, if not to many others...)

Do they sell? Not very fast, especially since I don't have much room to display them. Art books that can't be displayed are a hard sell. 

And they can also be hard to get. It's crazy how hard it is to get Moebius and Giger, for instance. For a long time, I couldn't find Frazetta. These fantasy art books go out of print maddeningly fast. 

But here's the thing. If I can't sell what I like, why am I doing it? I might as well be selling widgets if all I consider is the salability of something.

On the other hand...I need to turn a profit. 

Fortunately for me, on a Venn diagram, there is a large crossover between my interests and those of the customers. For the stuff I don't care much for, I find that if I order enough of that stuff that sells but sucks it cancels out the stuff that's great but doesn't sell. 

Finally, and this is entirely intuitive, it helps to have a store with interesting stuff even if all it doesn't sell fast. I think many customers can see that and appreciate it. 

For example: I've always liked the books that Bud Plant offers online. It has exactly the mix of art books I like, but they only sell retail, so I can only afford to buy books they have discounted. 

Yesterday, I learned a dangerous new trick. I perused the list of books for pleasure and suddenly got the idea to check my wholesaler for availability. I expected almost none of it to be there, and indeed, about two/thirds of the titles aren't. But, oh the third that are!

I immediately put them in my cart. 

On top of that, I've always really loved the books that the Taschen (a German publisher) puts out, but again, they are either unavailable or very, very expensive. 

Again, I've recently found that a small portion of these books are available through my regular wholesaler. (Another really cool batch are only at retail, so if I'm going to carry them, I have to tack on a surcharge, if you will, which I really don't like doing.)

Anyway, between these two sources, I suddenly have access to a bunch of cool art books:

WHICH, I don't have room to display and WHICH, probably won't sell, at least not very fast.

But Pegasus Books has had a decent couple of decades and the last five years have been great and I made decent profit this Christmas and I'm 72 and very near retirement but will still be around for awhile to have fun and so....

Rationalization anyone? 

I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I'm probably going to. 

Why we carry what we carry, Part II

Ordering is both a matter of math and of intuition. 

The math accounts for most of your orders: I check the inventory of new titles and if the wholesaler has enough faith in a title to carry a large backstock, I am more likely to order. Every week I look over the coming titles and try to order what I consider to be the most important.

For us, that accounts for about 20% of our orders, while the other 80% is restock or books that appeal to me. I'm fairly certain this equation can be reversed for most indie bookstores--that is, most of the weekly arrivals in most stores will be the newest new book, and probably only 20% are midlist. I won't go into all the reasons for this again, but it seems to be our reality.

The intuition part is more fun. It's a matter of, "How clever can I be? What mix of books will both appeal to people and also make our store unique?"

Every store is probably tailored to the owner's interests, at least those still in charge of humans and not algorithms. We all have our biases and our favorites. The test, in a way, is to see if what your favorite is popular enough to sell to others.

Way back in high school speech classes, I listened to a senior expound on the idea that if you like something there's a good chance that others will like it too. That seems to be generally true. Not everyone, but if you aren't too far off the mainstream, enough to keep you going. Or more to the point--the average thing goes by without notice. but there's a good reason you like something enough to mark it.

So I trust my instincts. 

One of the first things I did when first buying new books is start getting titles that I remember liking. I've read a lot of books in my life and I've settled on authors I like, books I adore, and books that intrigued me. 

So that's a good start.

Then I started listening to the customers. I find that almost any book that a customer asks for is something that might be worth carrying. I have to be careful that it isn't something odd that only that one person likes, but you can usually tell. A little research will either confirm or raise doubts.

So I order that requested title and often it will sell to someone else as soon as it arrives and I have to order again in case the original customer comes back. 

I also listen to my quirks. I can't tell the number of times I've ordered something that I was fairly certain only I was interested in only to have a delighted customer find it. That's cool.

I'm partial to art books, for instance. They don't sell fast, but I still like having them around. They make me feel good. 

I guess the point of all this is to say that it's important to have product you can stand behind, even if it isn't the most popular thing around. That's what make it interesting. 

Why we carry what titles we carry.

I went into this a little with the last Pegasus Books post, but thought I'd add some detail.

Because for the first half of our existence we were a comic, card, game, toy store , it's been difficult to get most of the local population to understand that we've added so many new books. This affects what and how we order books.

To put it plainly, the locals don't seem to think of us when it comes to the new bestselling releases each week. As a result, I may sell, at first, one or two copies of these big sellers instead of dozens. We're not the type of store where you will find stacks of the same title. 

The thing is, I can always order more.

What I find is that I will indeed sell the bestsellers, but more often to tourists and newcomers to Bend. Not sure why that is, but that seems to be the case. Fortunately, downtown Bend attracts exactly those customers. 

By luck and happenstance, the main wholesale book distributor (Ingrams) has a warehouse in Oregon. If I order a title before noon, I will get it the next day. So I'm only one to two days from replacing titles. My strategy is to carry smaller quantities of each title knowing I can quickly replace them.

Do I miss sales? Probably, but the other side of this equation is that I'm rarely left with any overstock. So few are leftover that I don't actually ever send books back. 

In other words, I try to be timely and efficient. Get what sells and keep ordering it. 

The other reason I don't send books back is that I get a higher discount from Penguin Random House, the biggest publisher in America. PRH and the publishers they distribute, account for about a third of all the books I order. Unfortunately, the PRH warehouses are back east so it takes a week to ten days to get a shipment.

I'm constantly weighing whether to order on a timely basis from Ingram or a higher discount from PRH. 

Because we don't churn new bestsellers like most bookstores, I try to make up for it by having the broadest selection of books I can, with an emphasis on what are termed "mid-list" books. In other words, instead of having twenty copies of this moment's bestseller, I'll carry a couple and then have eight other titles instead. Broad and thin inventory. 

This allows me to experiment with lots of titles. I cast the net as wide as possible. I'm constantly on the lookout for a midlist book that will sell. When I find one, I add it to the perennials that I keep in stock. 

This also separates Pegasus Books from most corporate stores and even most indie bookstores. We carry a selection of books that is unique to us.

For instance, we have strong SF/Fantasy (as might be expected), Horror, Mystery, and Classic books sections. Lots of YA graphic novels (as might be expected), and even Western and Romance novels. We're considerably more genre oriented than most bookstores.

But we also carry the more literary books--indeed, we probably experiment more with titles than even those stores that specialize in them. 

I admit. I want to be taken seriously as an indie bookstore, while at the same time, I want to seem quirky and unique. 

Frankly, I don't think I can help it.

How we became a pop culture bookstore.

I've decided to write a series of posts about Pegasus Books.

First off, I thought it might be interesting for explore how a store that had sold comics, games, cards, and toys for 25 years became instead a store whose sales are 75% books and graphic novels, while at the same time maintaining the same level of sales on the product we'd always carried.

It was a long process, especially at first, as we sort of tiptoed into becoming a bookstore. 

When we decided to start carrying new books, we started out with classics that were constantly being asked for but which never seemed to come in used. Titles like, "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Catcher in the Rye." To these, we added other classic authors: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and so on. Basically your average high school syllabus. 

We then moved on to our own favorites books: "Lord of the Rings," "Watership Down," "The Once and Future King," etc. 

As we got more comfortable buying new books, we started responding to requests, especially of books that we already knew about. We discovered that these books would usually sell, and it didn't necessarily have to be the people who actually requested them.

As time went on, we realized that some books constantly sold, and that they weren't always the books we expected to sell. Titles like "The Princess Bride" and "Hyperion" and Edith Hamilton's "Mythology." We called these perennials.

By this time, we realized that new books were outselling used books 5 to 1. When Linda sold her used bookstore, we got out of used books completely and turned that space over to new books.

At the same time all this was happening, Sabrina had revived the Manga section, which we had given up on. She too was responding to requests. In fact, the first decade of new books were mostly responding to customers. At the same time as Manga was becoming more popular, so were young adult graphic novels. This genre fit right into what we were already doing.

We began to view the store as a continuum of stories; from books with all pictures to books with all words. It all fit. 

Over time, we added more and more cult authors; Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk, Charles Bukowski, etc. We learned that by carrying almost all their ouvre, we could usually catch even big fans with a titles they hadn't yet gotten. 

Adding to cult authors, we also found titles that were so quirky, that they became bestsellers for us. For instance, our bestselling book of all time is--believe it or not--"How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety."

Here's the thing about perennial sellers: once you identify them, they sell continually. In effect, every perennial we discover is a permanent part of our sales, day after day, year after year. In some ways, our most important job is to discover these titles and make sure we have them in stock. 

Anyway, leading up to Covid, new books had become an important part of the store's inventory. We'd built them up to 25% of our sales. A nice sideline, you might say. We were constantly scouting for more space to display books, because we could sense the demand was there for more books -- but it was a struggle.

When Covid happened, we took the opportunity of the two months we were closed to lay down new flooring. We had to move everything out of the way, so when we put the store back together, we decided to once and for all make the move to new books, but only if we could do it without relegating our main product lines to second-class status.

By having the chance to redesign the layout, we were able to add at least a third more space to new books. Within the months and years following that, we added more and more shelves until we'd probably more than doubled the space for new books. 

Finally, we took the plunge to ordering new books, especially new hardcover bestsellers, on a weekly basis. 

Something extraordinary happened. Tourists and new customers started referring to the store as a "Bookstore" with a capital B. That is, they saw it not as a comic, card, game, or toy store but as a pop culture oriented BOOKSTORE. 

Meanwhile, sales on all the other product continued to sell as the same levels as before. 

Book sales sort of, well, exploded. It was all in addition to what we'd been doing before while our overhead hadn't changed at all. 

We've continued to add more and more features to the bookshelves, started ordering multiple copies of books at a time, and so on. 

In other words, acting like a bookstore, while at the same time not hurting the impression of those who'd always viewed us as something else. 

It's a neat trick, I think.

The Real Luxuries of Life?

"The real luxuries of life:

time 

health

a quiet mind

slow morning

ability to travel

rest without guilt

a good night's sleep

calm and "boring" days

meaningful conversations

home cooked meals

people you love

people who love you back"

 

I came across this on Reddit. It pretty much describes my life, except for perhaps the home cooked meals. Don't do a lot of cooking, but do eat at home, I guess.

More to the point, this pretty much describes being retired. Heh. At least as long as we're healthy.