I'm never going to catch up and I'm never going to keep up.

When I bought Pegasus Books in April, 1984, I was behind on comic reading. I went on a spree of reading, and I read enough to understand the appeal of the X-Men and such. But I realized right away that I was never going to catch up nor was I ever going to keep up. 

I remember getting the trade magazine and simply being overwhelmed by the amount of information. The trick, as I learned, was to discover what was necessary to know, what was nice to know, and what was stuff I could safely ignore.

Back then, there weren't as many companies doing comics and there were fewer comics overall. Still, it was a daunting task to order material three months in advance with, if you were lucky, a paragraph of information. This was non-returnable material that had a short shelf life.

Later on, graphic novels came along and they had a longer shelf-life and I knew what I was getting. So a big improvement. 

But no matter how hard I tried, I could never quite make enough money on comics alone to survive, so began my odyssey of trying to find supplemental product to sell. Sports cards, beanie babies, pogs, Magic and Pokemon, toys, boardgames, and finally, books. 

I learned through all this that I didn't have to know everything, but I had to know enough to talk about it with my customers. Frankly, I also had to learn to fake it. (I never did play pogs, beanie babies were cute, but come on...) 

Thing is, this wasn't laziness or neglect on my part. I remember saying when someone asked me if I was going to carry electronic games, "My brain will explode if I have to learn one more thing."

So it's a constant triage of what's most important.

Currently, books and graphic novels are 2/3rds my business, comics about 20%, and toys, games, and misc is the last bit of percentage.

Sabrina takes care of ordering most of the comics and graphic novels and the games. I order most of the card games, toys, and, most importantly, the books.

I'm very much a generalist in knowledge. I know a little bit about a lot of pop culture. I think it has served me well. In every product category, I sort of have schematic in my head where everything slots in. 

With books, my schematic is pretty wide and detailed. I've always had a voracious appetite for knowledge about books and movies. So I'm in pretty good shape there. 

The interesting challenge to me now is the growing importance of anime, manga, and electronic games. They have gone from interesting sidelines to being a major part of the business. I may not carry electronic games, but I'm carrying a lot of books that are about them or inspired by them.

Manga has become so big that it has more or less changed the landscape of Young Adult books. A hefty percentage of the YA books I sell are graphic novels, and I think it was the success of manga that brought this about. 

The point being: I need to pay attention to Japanese, Chinese, and Korean culture: this includes DVDs, books, graphic novels, art books, and toys. 

I've been bringing in a lot of Japanese material, especially toys. Again, there is a vast array of material to choose from. I read somewhere that half of Japanese publishing is manga. Imagine that. Comics are tiny, tiny, tiny comparatively. (I'm not talking about the influence of comics, which has become huge. I'm talking about the actually reading of comics.) 

With manga, I have a pretty good idea of what is selling. I'm sort of like a restaurant who has to choose what types of meals to offer, because, believe you me, it would take a city block to try to carry every manga available.

Most of the Japanese figures I get are based on shows I've never seen. Here's the thing: these figures are relatively expensive. Hundreds of dollars for some of them, with minuscule profit margins. A relatively cheap figure might run $50. They sell "blind boxes" which have one small figure in them for anywhere from $5.99 to $19.99. 

The simple answer would be to only order toys from the well-known manga and anime. Demon Slayer, Jututsu Kaisen, Naruto, One Piece, Attack on Titan, and so on. 

The problem is--I don't know who the major characters are in each of these shows; or, at least, the characters my customers would be most likely to get.

What I finally decided to do was to order only those figures that had a "cool" factor--to me, if to no one else. The figure had to be aesthetically pleasing, something I could see having displayed on my own desk. Most of these are probably a mystery as much to my customers as to me. So they don't sell often and they don't sell fast, but in the meantime, the store is full of cool stuff.

Almost everything in my store needs to have the "cool" factor, including books. I'm not above ordering bestselling material that doesn't appeal to me, but when in doubt, I always resort to ordering something that I like. 

If what I like doesn't match the customers', then eventually it will catch up to me. 

So far it hasn't.