Focusing on books.

 I think avoiding Facebook isn't going to be as hard as I thought. It turns out I spend most of my time online reading articles, and then just checking Facebook in-between for a little dopamine boost. Fuck that.

Twitter and Reddit have been removed from my Bookmarks and I'll miss them not at all. Besides it gives me more time to write here. 

 

 

The store continues to do extraordinarily well. It's late September and daily averages are still really high. I'm not sure how long this will continue. If it's due to books, it may not decline as much as it usually does in the fall.

So it turns out that carrying a product that has a wide appeal results in higher sales. Fuck me--I should have known that. I've known that for years but didn't go to the obvious solution. I think part of me was fooled by all the press about how bad bookstores were doing.

 I also didn't want to detract from what we were doing, so it was a slow morphing process--finding room for a bookrack here, a bookrack there. Closing the store for two months and laying down new flooring allowed me rearranged a little more, and suddenly more than half of the store--more if you include graphic novels--is books. 

But the biggest failure was not understanding the unique situation of being in Downtown Bend. We have succeeded in what every shopping district craves--we are a special destination, especially for tourists, but also for locals. People coming in my store aren't shopping for a specific book: if they were, they'd be more likely to find it at Barnes and Noble, and even more so, at Amazon.

No, they are Downtown for the unique experience. Something to do, places to see. And when they come in the store, they see books and they don't question it. I'm a bookstore. And because I'm very carefully curating what I've found sells or--based on that experience--what I think will sell, we're getting people to open their wallets.

A real irony is that the same people who were the scourge of my store, "young families," are now my best customers. Again, this is a special circumstance in that young adult graphic novels are very much in vogue, but even if the popularity wanes, I've had a chance to stock my store with other young adult material that will have perennial appeal. 

I just keep ordering more books, improving all the time. Don't think we've hit the peak yet.