Bestsellers versus Backlist.

As I've mentioned before, I came back to working a couple of days a week at the store in September, 2019. For several years before that, I'd been getting more serious about new books, to the point where I was ready to drop used books altogether. But up to that point, I'd been ordering what seemed to me to be the low-hanging fruit; classics, cult books, award winning SF and Fantasy, backlists of best-selling authors. Buying brand new bestsellers seemed pretty iffy to me, because they had no history and because they were more likely to be sold at a discount online and in the big stores.

But eventually I decided that if we were ever going to be taken seriously as a bookstore that I would have to dive into new bestsellers. 

I started off slowly, buying a couple of New York Times bestselling hardcovers per bi-weekly period. That is, I'd look at the bestseller lists and pick a couple that seemed most likely to sell in my store.

Then I started looking at the "coming next week" lists and ordering a couple of those each week that seemed most likely to sell. 

Over the year, I steadily increased that amount of recently printed titles until I had most of the current Top Ten bestsellers in stock, and a couple of dozen new titles each week off the "coming" list. 

What seemed to happen was the some of the bestsellers would sell really well, a few would sell once or twice, and a few would hardly sell at all. It seemed like a pretty breakeven proposition.

Nevertheless, book sales increased, which allowed me to experiment more, and when we reorganized the store during the Interregnum, I was able to create room for an increase in selection. I now order bestseller routinely and it seems to have helped the overall impression we make on customers--especially tourists and newcomers to Bend. Fortunately, there are enough of those to overcome the seeming impenetrable perception by most Bendites that we are a comic or a game or a toy store, but not a bookstore. Fortunately, new customers come in and see books and think we are a bookstore.  

The experiment has been a huge success. I'm getting better and better at guessing which new books will sell, and the selection continues to improve. Books sales have doubled. (And because of that, I've had to add a couple more days worth of work per week. The cost of success, I guess.)

But I have to say: what's been most valuable about the experience is that I'm starting to see how we are different from other new bookstores. 

In short, we focus on the backlist more than most bookstores. We try to carry a strong selection of historically important books; as I said above, the classics, the cults, the mainstream authors with strong followings. So we carry stacks of Vonnegut, and Bukowski, and P.K. Dick, and Murikami, and Palahniuk, and so on. 

We carry most of Steinbeck, and Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.  Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mark Twain.  

We carry Emily Dickenson, and T.S. Eliot, and Mary Oliver....Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Nietzsche...shelves of mythology books, a shelf of "cat" books, quirky impulse books, and so on and so forth. 

My basic strategy is that if a book sells, I almost always order it again. My goal is to seek out every perennial seller I can find and keep it in stock. I have yet to return any books, (though I'm thinking about it.)

Believe it or not, this is different from most traditional bookstores. 

Basically the difference is this:

For traditional bookstore, the focus is on recently printed titles, especially bestsellers. It appears to me that most of their budget is buying every book listed on the American Booksellers Association pamphlet each month. Backlist is an afterthought.

Whereas for my store, the focus is on backlist, with recently printed titles as a constant experiment.

It seems foolish to me to focus on churning recently printed titles, gambling each time, sending back what doesn't sell after a couple of months and then buying the next week's titles. Yes, there are bestsellers that will support most of that business plan, but it seems to me that you can get those that are obvious and save some space for perennial sellers. 

Or, more to the point, if you have the space and time and energy, you could do both. (I'm trying to do this.)

What seems neglected in most new bookstores is the backlist. I'm not talking about midlist titles that have a limited followings, but books that have a proven track record. I'm always going to sell "Mythology" by Edith Hamilton, or the Princess Bride, or The Prophet, or The Monkey-Wrench Gang, or The Alchemist, or Dune, or...well, I have a couple hundred years worth of books to chose from. 

So, yeah. Bestsellers are bestsellers--for a reason, right? But the problem is that they seem to require using most your space, time, energy, and money keeping up with them.  

I'm still trying to find the right balance. Sometimes when talking to other bookstore owners and they tell me that sold 50 or 100 of a new bestseller, I wonder if I'm doing it al wrong. But then I look at my sales and think--no, that's more like gambling. 

Selling a copy of Dune is a sure thing.

Like I said, I'm trying to do both, but I'm not sure the current model of carrying all the bestsellers, churning through, buying the next batch, churning through, buying the next batch, week after week--well, I don't think that lets a bookstore really ever fill-in the backlist, and I think that's a mistake. 

I know, I sound like a know-it-all, but I do think the point of carrying more backlist classics is something that most bookstores could profit from.