Ordering books.

So, over the weekend, I ordered over 600 books. I figure another 400 or so, and I'll have the inventory I want for the new bookshelves. (I still want to order the very best S.F. and Mystery mass paperback books I can come up with.)

Meanwhile, I'm thinking -- "WHAT ARE YOU, NUTS!!!"

"Hush," I answer. "I know what I'm doing. " (yes, I'm talking to myself, you gonna make something of it?)

These are good books, and they deserve shelf space. Which I don't have.

So why am I doing it?

1.) I can afford to do it within my cash flow budget. That is, I'm not borrowing money. What it means, I suppose, is that the overall margin in the store has reached a level that it is above replacement costs. I can replace all the good evergreens I need, and still have money left over for new or offbeat stuff.

2.) It forces me to be creative in my displays. I'm always amazed by the solutions that present themselves when I'm forced to come up with them.

3.) It refreshes the inventory, creates variety. It makes me move stuff around, which is something I should do on a regular basis. It creates unexpected matches and combo's.

4.) It makes me choose product to retire. I often leave semi-dead material in the store in the hopes it will sell, telling myself that it's 100% profit if I do. But there comes a time...

5.) I like doing it, which is no small thing. I need to be active to keep an interest in my store. I can't just sit there everyday without making changes. I get all charged up for a few months while it's happening, and I think that translates into sales.

The choice of books for my store is definitely idiosyncratic and offbeat. I do have a bunch of classics and just plain great books. But nestled around them are my own choices, or books that look interesting. I still don't pay much attention to the bestseller lists. I've got to get on that.

Anyone with a creative pulse might find something interesting. (I'll say nothing about the 95% of the foot traffic that walk on by despite the books in the window -- or the 80% of the people who walk in the door and see all the books and have no reaction, and certainly don't buy anything. Really, I won't say anything....)

I like the selection I have, and I just have to hope there are enough people who have similar tastes and interests. How else am I going to choose?

The obvious answer is, Bestseller Lists. But I got to be honest with you -- I look at the top bestsellers and I see....can I say it?....dreck. Mostly dreck.

Now, I'm not saying everyone has to like exactly what I like. Or that every book on the bestseller list is dreck. Or that I'm above selling dreck if it sells.

But, more often than not, it's both dreck and it doesn't sell in my store. It's a "bestseller" because it is carpet bombing the mass market bookstores, because Amazon will ship it to you free and at half price, because Costco has three foot stacks of them on their feeding troughs.

Add to that my 'Meh...' reaction to most dreck, and the 'bestsellers' are dogs. I only order bestsellers that I like, or look intriguing, because at least I'll have a chance of selling them.


I'm going to need a few hundred more mass market paperbacks, minimum. The S.F. and Fantasy will be relatively easy, because I am so steeped in the genre. All I probably need to do is order all the big author's works, Heinlein, Clarke, Asimove, etc. and all the well known series -- Dune, Robert Jordan, etc. And my favorites.

Mysteries, I'm going to just look at the lists of books I've read over the last five or ten years, and get a good sampling of all my favorite authors. I tend to read hard-boiled detective and thrillers more than parlor-room mysteries, but I've read enough of the latter to fill in mostly. A little research for some more.

Paranormal romance is what I paid most attention to on our bookstore visits, writing down as many authors as I could. This will be a bit of an exploration.



Back to the 1000 books I'm ordering. Doesn't sound like so much, does it?

I hear my wife say that all the time, "We get over 200 books a day at our store," she says. The reaction of the customers is always Meh. Doesn't sound like so much, until you measure it.

But it was 15 pages of printed readouts. I know from my wife's store, that 200 books take up about 15 feet of linear space, spine out. Since my bookshelves can hold about 15 linear feet, on average, one thousand books will fill 5 bookcases. Like I said, I'm trying to reserve about 3 or the eight bookcases for better display of the books I already have.

I do seem to have an innate sense of space that makes me order 'just enough' product to fill the available space.

And -- well, think about the average price of a books, and tell me 1000 books isn't that much.