When I started, there was little to no information available on the type of business I was in. Books about business were useless or irrelevant. (The one exception, Growing a Business, by Paul Hawken, which was somewhat useful.) Not only couldn't I get any advice from other business owners, but they wouldn't even talk to me. Especially the Downtowners (all of who are gone now.) 

I flailed around, making mistake after mistake, and worse--I let it show. I didn't hide anything. I was willing to share --and in return, I felt most other business owners considered me a fool.  I tried to figure it out myself. By the time I went up the COCC for the small business counseling, I'd learned enough that the advisor told me I had a "primitive sophistication," which I took as a compliment, not an insult. 

He made me put together a business plan, gave me a little advice, and helped me get a business loan. 

And then I was on my own again. 

So it's frustrating to have learned so much, to have a store that is far exceeding my expectations, which is finally performing at the levels I aspired to 40 years ago, and not be able to pass that information on. 

What I have learned is--everyone goes their own way. No takes unsolicited advice. Everyone has to learn everything the hard way. 

It's a shame, because I can show them some "tricks" but whenever I've done that, they have ignored me, bless their little hearts.  

When Hannah Oliver decided to open a bookstore in Prineville, I didn't have much doubt that the store would be nice and that she'd do a good job. But I did wonder if the Prineville I remembered from my youth was ready for a bookstore.

She reassured me that Prineville was prospering.

I visited her store yesterday and while Linda and I were there, we went to the only Taco Time in Central Oregon. I really love their crisp meat burritos. A Cascade Business News was on one of the tables and I snagged it. 

There was an article on Prineville there, and some remarkable statistics. In the last seven years, the median income in Prineville rose from $45K to $82K.  Crook County as a whole has had a 52.5% increase in GDP.

The town still feels rural; but there are signs. New shops and nice houses on the outskirts. You've got to believe that as Bend continues to boom and with Redmond following, that Prineville will be the next place to accelerate in growth. 

Whenever I make my commute to Bend, I'm accompanied by the grand march of the Cascade mountains on my right, blue skies on my left. This ain't stopping anytime soon.   

A remarkable week, one of the best we've ever had outside of Christmas. And it's only June.

I stocked up on Pokemon and Magic, gambling that we'd be able to sell it during the summer, and that seems to be happening. That's probably 60% of the increase, with books being the other 40% of the increase, holding our own with comics and down a little on toys and games. 

Last year at this time I went all in on returnability with PRH. Bought multiple copies of bestsellers I might not have bought at all before (or after.) It didn't really work out. But in order to prepare, I redesigned the store yet again and that has proven to be a real bonus. Plus I kind of learned that I might have been a little too careful ordering new stuff before that, and that ordering a couple of copies almost always works out.

So the increase in book sales is partially due to that experiment. But as a whole, I really blew my budget on inventory instead of trying for a monetary profit.  

This year I'm going forward with a rolling average for the budget. It's a generous budget (the mistake in the past I've always made is to make the budget too skimpy thus almost always busting the budget in short order.)

I've been doing this for seven weeks now, and I'm about 20% of a single week above the average, so pretty darn close.  

I don't want to anticipate too much. Whenever I do that, it runs the risk of being a disappointment. But July 4th is usually the real kickoff to summer business, where it normally really takes off. If it takes off from the current level...well, that would be amazing.  

Downtown Bend is booming. It's really quite remarkable. I suspect there are few places in America that have as much activity as we do. 

Part of it is that the entire area only stretches a few blocks--you know, like a town of 10,000 people. But we're now a town of 110,000 people and the area isn't getting any bigger. Sure, there are other commercial centers, Old Mill, Northwest Crossing, Cascade Village, but none of them have the old school charm of old downtown.

Now the locals would probably scoff at the "charm" part. To many locals it just seems too crowded to bother with. No Parking!

But newcomers and tourists just see the shops. They don't seem to have trouble parking in the parking garage. They are attracted to the hustle and bustle.

Once again, I'll throw out the old Yogi Berra bon mot:  "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

I wish I had a time machine so I could go back to my younger self, twenty, thirty, especially forty years ago and say, "Someday these streets will be filled with shoppers." Part of me always thought that was a possibility. I always chose to pay the higher rents because I saw a continual progression. I made the right choice to stay right where I was. And I'd already made the mistake of expanding too much, what I will call the Duncan Corollary to the Peter Principle: "A business will expand to its level of incompetence."

I'm happy with what I've got and really don't want to add more complexity or stress. Just grateful to see it happen.  

 

My biggest dilemma is still what to do with myself without the store. (A couple years away yet.) I really don't like doomscrolling and yet I seem to be addicted to it. I seem to be able to read a book only about half an hour at a time these days. Either that or I'm simply not finding books I find engrossing. Linda is able to watch entire seasons of old shows (she currently working through the old Perry Mason shows) but I become quickly bored. Even at night, I have to distract myself with coloring books. 

I don't want to be pest at the other bookstores, which I could easily become. I'm not ready to really consider opening a used bookstore, though if I can't find a solution to my lack of activity, I might end up doing that.  

Take up writing again? Thing is, I don't know how to do that as a leisure activity. I'm either all in or I'm all out. I've tried writing snippets but I quickly lose whatever motivation I had by not diving all in. Still...I could probably get into some routine where I write stuff I want without any consideration of saleability. Just write what I want. But that would pretty much be mental masturbation, though I'm not sure that doomscrolling isn't even more that. 

I'm assuming that I'll come up with an answer in the next couple years. Meanwhile, the store is a lot of fun to watch operating at full blast. I waited so long for that to happen.  

The Final Fantasy Magic cards haven't been a flop. They're selling at about the pace I hoped for, maybe a little faster, though it's the beginning of the run so that seems right. I haven't been at the store so I don't know exactly what's selling. 

Meanwhile, new books continue to sell. It looks like this will be the sixth month in a row where we'll beat last year. In fact, we're on pace to have our best year ever. 

I can't believe how much more work it's taken to catch up from taking a week off. Pretty much spent all of today doing book orders--and I'd already done about 40% of them before today. I'm not sure I'll ever dare do a skip week again. 

Everything comes down to the budget. I'm finding it nearly impossible to keep track of what I'm spending with my three new publishers: Simon & Shuster, Harper Collins, and Scholastic. Unlike Penguin Random House and Ingram, they don't give me totals, and it would add a hell of a lot of time to add them up one by one. I count them, and round them off to a certain number that I'm pretty sure is slightly higher than they actually are. But it's inexact, and I'm been caught flatfooted a couple of times. Nothing dangerous, but slightly off putting.  All those years of living week to week without credit or reserves made me very careful about how I spend the money. 

I figured out a budget that would work within a 20% range of my high estimate in sales and the 20% range of my low estimate in sales. In other words, a firm number I stick to every week. It's hard to see progress on a day to day basis, but I know it's probably starting to accrue. I don't need to change the budget unless there is a radical change in sales, up or down.

Yeah, it only took me 40 years to figure it out. 

This new Magic release is going to be an interesting experiment. Today is going to be a test, though it may be too early to draw conclusions.  

I can't think of a time when we've had all these particular circumstances at the same time.

The eternal retail conundrum: Supply and Demand. 

On one hand, we have a supposed "hot" product that I have been able to order a lot of; as I've always said, selling hot product isn't hard, getting enough material in stock to sell is the hard part. I have this weird feeling that while most stores are not getting as much material as they usually can sell, I'm getting more material than I can usually sell.  

So it's a gamble. Already today, the day of release, the prices seem to have moderated online. However, it also seems to be sold out most places and we have plenty in stock. Not everyone wants to buy in advance, not everyone wants to buy online.

One good thing about ordering so much product is that I can sell a large part of my order at "regular" prices. I'm always more comfortable at SRP. But with hot product, you have to be careful. Another saying I have--it's better to have product at higher prices than to not have any product at all. But preferably, we can have both SRP and sufficient supplies. 

Sure FOMO exists (Fear of Missing Out). But conversely, everyone will always have the fear that they are paying too much and prices will drop. That fear is why people are willing to pay in advance, but that fear is also why they might also want to wait and see.  

During Covid and more recently after Pokemon seemed to suddenly sell out everywhere, my experience told me to buy everything I could get, every chance I got, even at higher prices. That worked very well at the start, but lately I've noticed that I'm able to get more than I'm actually selling. Which would seem to be a warning sign to back off. 

I've also ordered extra product outside normal channels at higher prices. So far, every time I've done that, it's been a step too far. So I think that is where I need to draw the line.  

There is a possibility that it could all be a flop. I'm betting otherwise, but I've certainly had that experience before. Back when I was doing sports cards--the nearest example of what's happening now--I would often itch to buy tons of some product and then only see it flop. But just as often,  the product would be a hit. My general sense was that they cancelled each other out. 

What saved me was that I didn't have the money to gamble all that much.  

This time I do. 

My main supplier has proven somewhat reliable in offering more material over time--but it's spotty. Some product they continue to offer and some is never offered again, and damned if I know which is which until I've already committed.  

All of this stuff will sell over time. I don't know, maybe Sabrina will benefit more than I will. However, I have no problem with handing over a thriving store to her.  

 

Went on vacation for five days and decided to do a skip week.

Oh, boy. I came back to a swamped store and a swamped schedule. Summer is hitting hard all of a sudden. I looked at Sabrina and said, "With the amount of stuff I'm doing off the clock, you're probably going to need a full time employee."

One of my jobs at the store is to just go around and straighten everything. A seemingly simple job that is actually really important with a packed store like Pegasus. It would be so easy for everything to get out of control, to become utterly chaotic, impossible to find anything. Overwhelming.

I spent most of today just doing that; going around, checking to see where we had holes and what was missing or filed incorrectly. Meanwhile, Sabrina was dealing with customers and the register and she's being nearly overwhelmed. 

By skipping a week in orders, I didn't save any work. If anything, more stuff arrived this week than ever before, especially with the huge Magic and Pokemon orders, as well as boxes from Harper Collins and Simon & Shuster on top of the usual Penguin Random House and Ingram. 

Meanwhile the usual six or eight pages of books sold that need to be reordered ballooned to about twenty pages, single spaced pages, books that have to be looked up, to check to see if we have them in stock, figure out which publisher carries them, and enter all the information.

I do this mostly at home, but that's becoming more and more difficult too with the multiple publishers and random arrivals of stock. I make more mistakes if I can't see what the store actually has. 

I think Sabrina has pretty much decided that she'll need a Point of Sale program to keep track and I have to agree though I shudder how hard it will be to get up and running.  

The bright side is: this is all due to success. We're doing very well, sales-wise, and that just requires more effort to keep up with. Peak business, I'd say. Any more and we'd have to completely upend our single store person model and that brings its own headaches. Frankly, having more than one person in the store at a time means we're often stumbling across each other. I try to stay out of the way, but I can't help overhearing discussions where I can add my two cents worth. 

We've got time to try to work out a way for Sabrina to get all this done. I'd like to hang around a little if possible, just be an unobtrusive worker bee, if that's possible. But she's be in charge and I'll need to do what she wants. If she'll have me. 

If not, then...full retirement. Hint, hint, she's been telling me I need to "practice retirement..." 

Getting into the weeds about my budgeting process.

I'm still dealing with the consequences of moving from a timeliness/accuracy model of ordering to not so timely or accurate, but higher discount model. Still working out the kinks, though I'm beginning to get a handle on it. Over the course of the year, the higher discounts should make us more profitable.

I think. 

We get an extra week for budgeting each month, The first three weeks divides almost all the large overhead costs (wages/rent/wages) and leaves the fourth week to pay down on whatever debt we might have accrued, or if no debt, a chance to order something we don't normally order.

Each quarter we get on fifth week, which helps even more.  

I have spent four times as much money as normal this month on Pokemon and Magic, so I'm applying the fifth week to June, even though the accounting Tuesday falls on the first of July. (Tuesdays are when I do all my figuring.) 

I budget week to week. It took years to arrive at this solution. Monthly was too long a stretch and daily is too short a stretch; weekly seems to be the right number to keep accurate track of both sales and budget.  

My budget is planned for when I make the orders not when the monies are due, so I have a lot of leeway, which I try not to abuse.

This week I skipped ordering books. This is almost the first time I've done this since I became a full bookstore. 

It doesn't really matter because we've had huge shipments arrive yesterday and today and probably tomorrow. I can no longer keep track of when books will arrive, except from Ingram. They just keep flowing through the door.

So budgeting has really come down to doing a rolling average of what I spend. This is a change, because until now I've been matching spending to sales pretty accurately. Now that I'm ordering from five different sources for books, I can't really keep track of that. So the focus is on the budget. As long as I budget correctly, the rest should work out (assuming sales continue to be close to what they've been.)

Because of the skip week, I'm moving up my accounting on books to the actual week I order instead of the following week. I don't need to do this, but it does feel more like I'm top of things that way.  

We've been rolling along selling books and cards, and we've turned some of our attention to back issue collectable comics, which we suddenly have a good supply of. As usual, whatever we turn our attention to gets a boost in sales. I finally feel like I have the two major legs of our store on a solid footing so I'm trying to get comics back to being a good solid third leg to the stool. 

 Anyone get this far? It fascinates me, if no one else.  

Because I'm on vacation anyway, I decided to do a skip week on books. We're a little overloaded right now anyway. Of course, it won't matter if I end up ordering the same number of books and get them in one week instead of two, but I'm hoping it will inspire me to be a little pickier for once.

We've got so many good books and we're mostly up to date. Also, the minimums numbers for the secondary publishers have to be reached anyway, so it's only the dozen or so bestsellers that came out this week that we'll be missing. As you've heard me say many times, we're a midlist bookstore, not a New This Week bookstore. 

We're getting the most Magic that's we've ever gotten. Now I have to hope Final Fantasy is a hit. We can be pretty moderate on pricing, at least compared to what I see online, so we can afford to sell a lot at a lower price  

June 8.

Going to walk the one mile Hiouchi trail down to Jedidiah State Park today while Linda tries to attend zoom church.  Jasper is motionless, crouched over a gopher hole in the meadow outside the trailer. He can stay like that for a long time. He's already master of the RV park, wandering around with his leash but without anyone holding the other end of the leash. Tail straight up in the air, head held confidently high, he'll approach anyone who shows the slightest interest, including dogs. With his gear on and upright posture he absolutely looks like a dog from a distance. I've always said he is our Cat/dog.

We did absolutely nothing yesterday. I think I napped three times. Such behavior at home would feel disgraceful, but here it feels just right. (Which only raises the question: Why is it disgraceful at home?)

 

Crossed the highway and found the trail easily. There was a couple in front of me, blasting their radio. Inexplicable! What kind of fucking idiot brings a fucking radio on a nature walk!? I waited to let them get ahead of me. Started walking, immediately came upon a doe who just stood there while I took its picture and talked softly. Didn't run off until I started walking toward it. 

Got sidelined partway to the park. An offshoot of the trail that led down to the Smith River and a gorgeous rock pinnacle over the water where I'm now sitting on a handy seat-sized rock. I will make it to the park yet--I do want to see the Redwoods, but meanwhile I'm going to just take this in. 

 

I'm already relaxed and the sound of flowing water is just layering on another layer. I brought donuts with me. (I know, I know...what kind of idiot brings donuts on a nature walk!) Just going to sit here and imbibe nature and artificially sweetened donuts. And...can't I just enjoy nature without a running commentary? Well you can take the boy out of writing but you can't take the writing out of the boy.

I forgot my hat for this trip, again, so the sun is really beating down on me. I've moved to a less comfortable but shady rock. I think once we really start doing this on a regular basis--which, I hope is pretty much starting now (I'm 'practicing' retirement!) --we'll work out the kinks. Linda brings way too much food and books, I bring work stuff that I'm never going to get to. 

Interestingly, it turns out that a large percentage of people in this RV park are permanent residents. You know, I don't think I would find this kind of living to be all that bad. Maybe a bigger rig than a our Catbus, but...

Toby and Felicia have been making noises about moving to Brookings: she wants the coast and he's adamant about staying in Oregon, so a permanent set up in an RV park in Hiouchi would be great. A vacation home, so to speak. 

Rafters coming by...I'm such an awkward fella, I never know how much to interact or when to wave.  

Guy in the first raft was friendly, people in the second and third raft ignored me. I know, I know...who keeps score but an awkward introvert! Linda and I talk about this all the time; she is a natural, it's second nature, she doesn't think twice about it. I have to admit I'm getting better at it--the trick for me is not try so hard.

Also brought some beef jerky which got got in my teeth. Pulled some grass stems and used them as toothpicks. Real nature boy.

I believe most of the trees along the hills above the river are fir trees. Interesting to be only a mile from the Redwood stands, but no Redwoods. Climbing up some fairly steep rocky terrain. I have to constantly remind myself that I'm an old man--not because I feel like that, but because I don't. I objectively know that my balance, while still good, isn't probably what it used to be.

I think I'll move along to the park, and maybe stop off at this spot again on the way back. I tell you, if I lived in Hiouchi, I'd be down here every day. Maybe getting my writing going again... 

 

Started seeing Redwoods about five minutes from the park--so, probably already the park. They stood among the firs, and weren't the really big ones, so I kept going. Then...relative civilization. Big trees, but also paved roads, cabins, campers, cars, sewage disposal, rangers, the whole shebang. Did a loop, took a few pictures, almost got lost, and headed back.

Took another offshoot, but couldn't quite reach the river without taking a chance. (Someone had even coiled a rope at the top of the slope, but that was more of a warning than an enticement.) I tell you what, though...if I lived here, I'd probably walk this trail every day, especially the offshoots. Only a couple minutes on foot to get to the head of the trail instead of an hour's drive from Bend to get anywhere truly nature and private and not a "No Trespassing" zone. To be fair, there are public trails like the Hiouchi trail a lot closer, but tons of people these days. This trail is relatively quiet. It's just the right length, two or three miles overall, for a relaxing walk. 

Aside from the radio buffoons, saw only two fast moving old men on the trail. Heh. A quail scooting by, leading me away from the nest. That's it. Glorious. 

 

 

I may have overreacted to the shortage of Pokemon. We'll have plenty for summer, and if summer doesn't pan out, then we'll have inventory for the foreseeable future. It's a bit of FOMA: Fear of missing out. But it's also our one competitive advantage: the depth and width of our inventory. We don't do in-store play, or tournaments, or singles, or full boxes at a discount. We sell packs. And more packs. And we can sell packs as long as the trading card games are viable.

There is zero sign of weakness in the market, besides a few grumbles, and there are always grumbles. The prices are being pushed to maximum frequency and price, which may mean people will buy less, or some people will quit, but the game itself will go on. 

I went all IN on Final Fantasy Magic the Gathering. One good thing about having an account with the the same wholesaler for 35 years is that we get a nice allocation of shorted product. In fact, most of the time I don't even take the full allocation.

This time I did....+ every additional chance to order.  It remains to be seen if it was a mistake, which just points out the conundrum. The failures in ordering come from the same place as the successes. The same reasoning, the same planning. It depends sometimes on whether the upside outweighs the downside.

Since we have resources and aren't in debt, the upside tips the balance. When I was broke and in debt, the downside controlled my decisions. Success breeds success, failure breeds failure.   

I like to think I'm smarter than your average bear (though I often fear I'm a hell of a lot dumber). Taking the daily "Slate" quiz is enough to keep me grounded. I'm average, at best, on most quizzes, absolutely terrible at the Science and Vocabulary quizzes (foreign words, no fair!) and do best on Culture and News. 

It's a big comedown for an INTJ on the M&B, and a 5 on the Enneogram.   

Apparently, as far as I can tell, we sell a lot more "Classic" books than most stores. In fact, most stores have a relatively small percent of their space devoted to Dickens and Austen and Hemingway and such. 

In fact, I think that's probably why we sell more classics. We devote a fairly large space to them. It's one of those things where one shelf doesn't have much effect, but two or three bookcases do. But you would only know that if you took the chance to give that much space to classics.

I think when you do things on your own, you tend make mistakes that turn out not to be mistakes.  

 

Another thing I do that seems unusual is that I basically automatically reorder every book I sell. I don't know how this works--or rather, how long it will work. Because it would stand to reason that I'd be constantly expanding my selection. And we really are running out of room.

However, there does seem to be a self-correcting mechanism somewhere in play. Books become unavailable and so drop off the list. I also do drop some titles over time. Just enough, apparently, to allow the other reorders. 

Here's the thing I'd love to ask other bookstore owners. How well do you know a midlist book will sell if you don't reorder them? I'm not talking about bestsellers; those I know you reorder. But that interesting book that took a couple months to sell....how do you know it won't sell every couple of months from then on? Get enough of those rolling and you have a constant flow.  

 

At the doctor's, I compared their weight measurement to our scale at home. To my surprise, the professional scale was actually half a pound less. I guess, in the hour or two between measurements, that's a plus or minus. Not meaningful. 

My BMI is 24, just under the upper limit of 25. But I'm 72 years old, and the internet actually suggests there might be a benefit to being a couple points over. But I like being as slender as I can manage.

It was funny. The nurse started to say something like, "Everyone I see over the age of 70 is..."

"Overweight?" I interrupt.

She shakes her head. "No, the opposite. I see very few overweight and especially obese people, almost none after the age of 80."

I mean, that may just be her observation, but I never would have guessed it. 

For some reason, going to the cardiologist is nowhere near as nerve-wracking as seeing my regular doctor. Basically, about my heart there is no difference that I can tell. As I always say, if I didn't KNOW I'd had a heart attack six years ago, I wouldn't know I'd had a heart attack. No symptoms that I can discern.  

Both doctors said I'm in great shape.  

 

Did I ever tell you guys I wrote a bestselling NYT's novel...under another man's name? 

 

If I told you the name, I'd have to kill you. 

 

Don't ever ghostwrite a novel folks. It feels utterly empty. An exercise in futility, no matter how much they pay you.

 

Basically, I was an intern. (Well, I was paid, but...) I only did it because they promised to seriously consider my next novel. Nothing but crickets. I felt used and I'd given away one of my best premises.

 

Not to mention they turned into complete crap after they took it away from me. Basically MAGA gun porn.

 

 

Another thing that I've noticed about my writing: I wrote about a bunch of different subjects and different genres, 1st person, 3rd person, present tense, past tense, female, male, multiple, single, short, long, anything I wanted.

 

If you're trying to make a career out of writing, this is probably a mistake. Find that thing that works best and keep doing it. 

 

But if you want a fulfilling writing life, do what you want. Write what you want when you want.  

 

 

Anyone reading this will notice that I've been posting much more often in the last few days. I'm probably going to continue that. I'm not going to post it on Facebook. Those who want to read will want to read it.

It's not like I haven't been writing blog posts over the last few years, but 95% of them were private notes to myself. My journal, if you will. 

So what I'm doing is posting publicly what I had been posting privately--with a few more filters attached. Business-wise, I can post the same things, but not with specific numbers, but percentages or trends. 

Fair warning: I'll probably repeat myself a lot. Other than going over every post I've done, this would seem unavoidable.  

 

I went to my doctor yesterday. My A1C has been bumping upward for a few years now, and it was finally at a point where she thought I should really deal with it. 

I didn't get a lot of sweets when I was younger; mostly for special occasions. So around the time I hit 60 years old or so, I decided to let myself indulge. I've managed to keep my weight down. I didn't think I was predisposed for diabetes, and why not? Life is short. 

But it's now getting close to edge of needing medication, so I've decided to quit consuming mass quantities of Sour Patches and pastries and bread. Going to test myself in four or five months to see if that has done the job.

The biggest change is that I'm going to ween myself from drinking lemonade constantly, even though it's always been sugar free. Apparently, the body can be fooled into thinking that artificial sweets are the real thing. So water it is. (I've been doing water for a few days since I got the lab results and I'm already bored. But I think I can stick to it.) 

 

Huge numbers of books are showing up at the store. I'm ordering from four or five publishers now, so I have no control when they show up. So sometimes they all show up at the same time. I have to remember, 90% of these books are books I've sold.

It's crazy how many books we're selling. It's pretty much getting to be a full time job just ordering, collating, and stocking the books. Hell, I spend probably a couple hours a week just dealing with the boxes and the packing material.  

But what fun to see the store fully functioning. It's what I always dreamed of... 

Counter-intuitively, I tend to be more selective in books during the summer and Christmas seasons than I an in the off seasons. 

When I started, I would bulk up for the summer and Christmas because that's when we were selling the most stuff. But, eventually, a Christmas season came along where I really, really needed to turn a big profit and the only way I could do it was to sell down the inventory and be more picky.

Strangely, it didn't affect sales at all.

I started thinking about it and decided that during the off season you need the biggest selection you can manage because people are much more likely to come in looking for a specific title. They are more likely to be locals, so they will want something they haven't seen before.

Whereas in summer and Christmas, the majority of customers or infrequent locals or tourists. It's all new to them. As long as you have a reasonably expansive selection, you will sell books.

The "reasonably expansive selection" is done during the off season.

So strangely enough, it all seems to work, assuming you can afford to possibly lose money to take chances during the off season, you're more likely to make it up during the busy seasons.

I don't know. This is my observation and I could be all wet.  

 

Meanwhile, I've noticed how often we are complimented by our "curation." Which is true, considering that all my titles are handpicked by me, rather than by some corporate algorithm. 

Put I've always been a bit abashed by the knowledge that I pay a lot of attention to the bestseller lists and to the inventory levels at the wholesaler. (Inventory indicates that they have faith in it and will be pushing it.)

But I've noticed lately that when it comes time to reorder, especially with the trade paperback editions, that I veer quite a bit from those two indicators, because I have own experience as to whether the hardcover sold.

For instance, this week I'm being offered the PB version of "How to Age Disgracefully." The inventory numbers are on the low end, but I ordered high because I sold the HC over and over again. 

So in the end, the more or less permanent inventory, or what I call "perennials," are most definitely handpicked and curated.  

For me, all books are good. Read a book? Good on you!

There is no such thing as a guilty pleasure. If it's whipped cream, what harm does it do? Read whatever you want, whenever you want. Reading one thing doesn't mean you can't read another thing.

When I first bought the store the impulse I had was to welcome all comers without judgement. I don't know that I truly respected comics (yet! I was totally won over within a year or so) but I respected people's predilection to reading them.  

But a store like mine? It ill behooves me to judge. It's almost the very reason for our existence.

On the other hand, if something doesn't sell? That's another story.

Anyway, I noticed early on that people were pretty picky about the terms they used for what they were reading. Books that I thought of as potboilers were considered "literature" by those who read them. People who read "romance" often didn't like that term. I never have figured out exactly what "historical" books meant, except as a label by the publishers.  

Roughly speaking, it's "literature" if that's what you read. 

The one area where I'm a bit of a snob is SF and Fantasy, but by now I'm so dated that I can't really judge what people consider good or bad. (In other words, I haven't enjoyed a lot the new bestsellers and award winners in the genre.) I burned out on fantasy long ago--and believe me, I read a TON of it in the day. 

Out of the best new SF series I have read lately, two of them were originally self-published: Dungeon Crawler Carl and We are Legion: we are Bob. Neither of them take themselves too seriously, but are strong stories and characters. I think it's interesting that the pipeline to new fiction is so constricted that the authors had to do it on their own, originally.

The third series I really liked was Murderbot, which also doesn't take itself too seriously. It's also a great TV series on Apple, which the store-crew gets together to watch each week, along with Poker Face. (So many IN jokes!)  

Anyway, I try to find non-pejorative terms for genres.  I mix SF and Fantasy together--it's up to you to be snobs about one over the other. (I put Romantasy in either regular fantasy or in the TikTok book section.

The TikTok book section is strictly a merchandising term and refers to a number of genres. 

I use the term "Rom-com" for the new version of romance novels. I stick in my historical novels section whatever books the customers refer to as historical (while the vast bulk goes into "regular" fiction.

Yes, I use the term "regular" fiction because I'm damned if I know which books are literary and which are not. 

That's totally up to the reader.  

Wildfire

That was an interesting experience. We had a wildfire just two miles away yesterday. Once I ascertained where it was, I realized it was area I'm very aware of. I don't think it was BLM land, but ranch land, so probably some isolated houses.

The planes flew so low over our house that everything shook. 

First the lights went out. I walked out the door and stood in the driveway to see if any my neighbors were doing the same thing. Cale, across street, confirmed the outage. (Cale is the neighborhood connector.) Met Jennifer from across the street and had my first conversation with her: she showed me an app on wildfires. Talked to Cale's wife, Kerry, who had let her kids up on top of the house to watch the planes. "Good for you," I commented. 

Our neighbors to the west of us came out; very private people, but managed to exchange a few words. I exclaimed, "We're doomed!  Game over, Man!" and the husband laughed. 

Uploaded the wildfire app, which took forever because we had about 1 and 1/2 stripes. 

Woke up coughing this morning, but it looks like they have it under control.  

Anyway, it started off as a "Get set" level of warning and then was downgraded to "Get ready," both of which seemed somewhat alarming.  Thing is, I have a tendency to think everything will be fine. If I'd been in one of the Twin Towers, I would have been one of those who stayed in my chair.

But then I started thinking what I'd grab if I had to run. 

Well, the Catbus is ready to go. I could pack a suitcase with some traveling cloths; my medications; my usual backpack with computer and notebook plus a few other business records off my desk.

Jennifer commented that her first thought was her passport. "I don't want to have to go through getting one of those again!" 

Linda has a file with most of the important info. But other than that? Not really much. Oh, yeah. The Cat. 

It just goes to show how little is truly necessary to keep going. And that a "go bag" isn't probably necessary as long as you have the important steps already mapped out and some kind of warning. 

A little excitement. Electricity went out around 4:00. Then airplanes came flying close over our house. Neighbors all out on the sidewalk, some with apps showing the Euston Fire only two miles away, with a "Be Set" to leave notification.

Around 8:30, electricity came back on, but still on a "Be Ready" notification. However, they seemed to be saying the fire isn't progressing, so...

 

For the first time, I'm going to be taking money out of my retirement account. The Catbus and traveling costs have caught up to me. But I'm 72, so holding off this long is pretty good. I'll still be earning for another year and half, but after that it's a fixed income, baby.

Linda been drawing out for awhile now. She's four years older than me and when she retired, she retired, by God.  And good for her.

 

I think maybe I've gotten a week ahead of myself, at least for PRH, Scholastic, Book Depot, and S&S. My reasoning is, while Ingram shows up on the week I order, other distributors don't until ten days to two weeks later. 

I was more or less able to parse it out this week. The important number is the budget each week. So far, I'm a little in the  negative after the first six weeks of keeping track with a rolling average.  Not bad. 

We're ahead in sales and earnings. We're going to be spending a fair amount on product through the summer so we'll need to a boost. But no one has canceled Summer or Christmas yet.

 

I'm going to open up to the possibility of taking people's comic collections, if they want to donate them. You know, find them a good home. Our "Dungeon" is now open for business, and I'm giving Dylan some extra hours to work on back issues. I want to keep him, and I think we'd coasted a little too long on collectables. It's time to be proactive. 

 

Out of the blue, Dylan asked me if he recommend anyone be a writer as a career.

Without thinking, I said, "Oh, no.  Don't do that."

Then spent the next five minutes trying to explain myself. But the automatic "No" kind of surprised both of us.  

 

Big versus efficient.

Because of my experience with debt in the first half of my career, I now deduct what I spend from the budget when I order it, rather than when it comes due. This keeps me in check. Sometimes it doesn't come due until much later, but I can always be assured that it's covered in the budget. 

Throwing the door open to Simon & Shuster, Harper Collins, and Scholastic has complicated things immensely. This on top of already ordering from Ingram and Penguin Random House. 

When I first started ordering, it was strictly from Ingram. I knew exactly what I was spending and when it was due. But the profit margin was frozen at about 10 to 15% less than I could get from the publishers. 

Now I'm juggling multiple invoices, arrivals times, and due dates. Each of these publishers have their own accounting methods and procedures. It's taking time to learn the quirks, but it should get easier.

The thing is: I know I have the money. Because I spent it when I ordered. So however confusing it all is,  we're fine. I just like knowing where I'm at.

What's happening is that I'm relinquishing the fine tuning that I'm used to doing. Instead of constantly monitoring the inventory level, I moving to keeping track of the budget. A constant flow of books is replacing specific orders. Because there are more books coming in, I'm not worrying as much whether I have a particular book.

I think this is the direction the store has to go, if I'm not involved. I'm a bit obsessive about having every single title I think we should have as quickly as possible. Because of that I'm willing to spend hours and hours checking, ordering, and putting out everything as early as possible. 

But I don't think other people can be expected to be this way. 

I've always said, the big chains stores aren't efficient--they're big. They compensate by not have specific items by having tons of items. 

In a minor way, this is where we are transitioning. A constant flow of good material will have to work to replace a fine turned monitoring of each title. Anything else will burn out anyone who doesn't enjoy the process as much as I do. 

I'm going to increase my public blogs. I think it's part of my "practicing for retirement."

I believe this is going to mean turning somewhat inward. So instead of meeting people in my store, I'll be doing more online. This, at a time, when Facebook is becoming fairly useless. So I'm going to ruminate more here, instead of doomscrolling, which I'm wont to do.  

Of course, this means perhaps revealing what a horrible person I am. I won't know I'm doing that, of course. I'll be trying to be reasonable, but if I'm horrible I'm horrible in ways I may not be aware of. 

 

Apparently, AI stories are starting to flood Amazon.

The bookstore owner in me says, "Great! All the more authenticity for my store. Come to Pegasus and get the real thing!"

The indie writer in me is sad. The vast majority of my sales have been online.

It appears to be the future, either way. 

State of the Store.

We're ahead of last year in the first five months by 20%. At this rate, this will be a record year. I don't know what to make of that. Especially with all the uncertainty on the national level.

Some of that is because I decided to go harder on making sure the store was inventoried to the very highest level possible. Some of that is the popularity of Pokemon. 

We've also tried hard to pay more attention to back issue comics, which really paid off this month. I've opened up the Dungeon room downstairs. It's not organized, but that's part of it's appeal. Instead of setting a price before the customers go downstairs, I tell them, "We'll negotiate at the cash register. I promise I'll try to be generous..."

Books continue to climb, though not quite at the rate they were for the first four years since Covid. Games and toys have more or less slowed down. I'm not trying terribly hard to goose them. I'm maintaining, at this point.

I believe I've made a lot of decisions that have turned out well. I went all in on Pokemon and Magic at a time when they seemed on the verge of becoming a fad. I'm willing to risk that it could all come to abrupt halt because I know that the product will still be viable years from now. Meanwhile, sales are rocketing. I've played this "shortage, FOMO" game before. Lots of experience and it's paying off. 

I've now got accounts with four out of the six most important publishers: the Big Five and Scholastic. I'm going to hook up with MacMillan as soon as I've figured out all the kinks with Simon and Shuster and Harper Collins. Their systems are somewhat antiquated, not entirely easy to deal with. But for the extra ten to fifteen percent discount, it's worth the effort. I think.

I'm trading ease and timeliness for discounts. But it will become easier over time, I assume. And since I'm now ordering a constant flow of books from different sources, I'm not sure the timeliness is quite as important, plus I can always order the "hot" current book from Ingram while waiting for it to arrive from the publisher. 

Instead of "practicing retirement," as Sabrina suggested, I seem to be fully engaged. 

I came home really tired last Sunday, and after resting awhile, I started ordering books. I realized that ordering books is relaxing for me. It's not a chore, I find it fun and interesting--and I can do so in a quiet, peaceful way. 

Everyone has work they like and work they don't like I guess. In helping Hannah with her store, I've realized that what works for me won't necessarily work for her and vice versa. Obvious, I suppose, but I do things that I absolutely KNOW work and I want to pass that along.

For instance, I figure that half the books we sell are books that are facing out: part of this is because the books are already hot and we want people to see them. But a large part of it is that seeing the cover is the trigger.

I asked Sabrina what percent of the books we sell are face out, and she said, "Maybe half...?" Which was the exact percentage I landed on. Hannah has decided she wants her books more orderly looking and who's to say she's wrong?

Anyway, feeling energized. I'd like to say I'm being cautious, but the very spurt we're getting right now can pay for whatever crash happens, so no reason not to keep being aggressive.  I'm 72 years old and I feel like I do this for another twenty years. But...time (and Sabrina and Linda) disagrees. 

Trying to get down to 170 for my yearly doctor appointment next week. Why it matters, I'm not sure.

170.4 this morning.

I was very disciplined yesterday. I'm more or less turning to my "Sandwich Diet." That is, I have a sandwich (300) calories at Noon, 2:00, 4:00, 6:00, with a salad (300) in-between (sandwiched, as it were.) I allow myself to switch out one sandwich for 300 calories of snacks. (I often am not hungry until 2:00, so I can skip the noon. Or I can skip the 8:00 one. The point is to not ever really get hungry. Two sandwiches within two hours of each other gets me through. 

This gets old pretty fast, but for a week or two, it's very effective. 

What are you trying to prove?

 

I'm 40% the way through a long book and I'm suddenly losing interest. 

Years ago, I tried reading The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The premise I took away from it was that if one was the own and ride a motorcycle, it behooves you to know all about how a motorcycle works and to be able to fix it yourself. And that should apply to all aspects of your life.

Hooey. 

Screw that. I just want to ride a motorcycle. If I want it fixed, I'll take it to an expert. And that applies to all aspects of my life. I'll earn my money in my area of expertise and pay people for their area of expertise. That's more or less the definition of an economy. 

So I'm reading the book, "A Walk in the Park," about a complete walk-through the Grand Canyon, something that apparently few people have done. The first part of the book talks about the geology, the wildlife, the history and other interesting stuff about the area.

But about 40% of the way through, it suddenly becomes Extreme Sport, and boy, that turns me off.  

There's a recent picture of the traffic jam at the top of Mt. Everest. Why the fuck would anyone want to climb Mt. Everest now? Inexplicable to me. 

I'm not interested in super-techies, or super athletes, celebrity culture, etc.  Normal life and normal living, that the life for me. For fucks sake.

Are Pokemon and Magic becoming a bubble?

The thing about a bubble is that it's very difficult to know. Almost by definition, you're inside the bubble. You have to do a mental jujitsu where you purposely place yourself outside the bubble, which is easier said than done. But I'm going to try.

There are distinct signs of a bubble. Increasing brands, increasing gimmicks, increasing prices. People hoarding product, speculators, sell-outs when offered, influencers trying to get everyone excited, and so on. 

But the biggest indication of a bubble is more intuitive. Simply put: does this seem completely off-the-wall, batshit crazy?

Thing is, you really DO know it when you see it. 

For instance, the housing prices in Central Oregon are high and are rising. But, whereas I just KNEW there was a housing bubble in the early aughts that continued to get crazier and crazier, I don't think prices alone are an indication of a bubble. I think there is high demand currently in Central Oregon, and while the market is obviously being manipulated to some extent, it's nowhere near as nuts as it was back then.

Prices pretty much need to double and triple and quadruple in a short time for something to be a bubble to me. For instance, in early 1994, I realized that my comic orders were double in cost than what I'd earned in retail the previous year. (In other words, I was ordering 4 times the product to fill the presumed demand.)

I should have trusted my instincts.

I'd already been through one bubble in the late 80s. Sports cards had doubled each year for four years in a row, and then--for us at least--it collapsed. That was my first bubble. I always say, everyone gets one bubble that isn't their fault. All bubbles after that are on your own head.  

After the comic collapse, I got pretty canny about how to deal with bubbles. We did very well with pogs, beanie babies, and the first incarnation of Pokemon, because I understand the dynamics and was able to benefit without being hurt. 

Since then, while I've seen hot product come and go, I don't believe we've experienced a bubble since.

So far I'm coming down on the side of Magic and Pokemon being very hot, but I won't be entirely surprised if the market collapses. The difference is, like comics, there were be a continued demand for Pokemon and Magic, though perhaps at a much more steady pace.

I'm good with a steady pace. If I have to absorb the overstock for the next couple years--or even let Sabrina get the benefit later on--we'll be fine. We have the resources to withstand a collapse. 

Meanwhile, I admit I'm just as much a gambler as some of my customers; I just have more experience at it.

Mr. Know-it-All.

I decided for my last two years of owning Pegasus Books that I'd stick to a strict budget per week for product. It occurred to me the other day that there should be a way to keep track of this. The term "running average" came to mind and out of curiosity, I looked it up.  

Turns out, there's something called a "rolling average," exactly what I was looking for. 

Now I've tried to stick to budget for 40 years and never really succeeded. The way I did it was set the budget, write it down, and subtract until it was gone. But that only accounted for that week. Any time I spent less or more, slid under the radar. 

And of course, I often spent more (and sometimes less) so that way of accounting didn't really work.

The rolling average is such a simple concept, I'm stunned that I didn't think of it years ago. (I realize how stupid this makes me sound...)

My point is: how much don't I know? What simple formulas am I missing? 

For instance, would I have ever figured out the Break-Even point equation on my own? (Fixed overhead divided by profit margin. duh.) I was sort of doing this crudely when I was handed the equation by the guy up at COCC. I've used that equation ever since. 

So I'm sure there are plenty of useful business tricks that I simply don't understand. It took me years to figure out how to measure cash-flow for instance. I mean, I sort of understood it instinctively, but never really put all the parts together. Basically, you can say this about everything I know about business. I understand a hazy intuitive version of the truth which is enough to help me survive, but not the precise mechanisms to make it easy. At least, not at first.

Such stuff seems utterly obvious in hindsight, but I have had to figure them out all by myself. (One of the first things I had to learn was that just because everyone else seemed to be doing something didn't mean it would work for me.)

Would taking business classes or reading business books have helped? Based on my experience with business books, I doubt it. Sure, every 100th idea would be applicable to what I do, but I wouldn't know which idea works until I've already experienced it.

I had that experience with the only business book I ever felt helped me: "Growing a Business," by Paul Hawken. But even then, I only understood the book's value because I'd already experienced many of the pitfalls he was pointing out. 

The business guy up at COCC said I had a "primitive sophistication." I think this figuring stuff out on my own stuff is exactly that. But I don't know what I don't know.

My basic approach has been to to simplify everything as much as possible. When I look out at the world of bookstores, it seems like everyone else is taking the opposite approach. I'm comfortable with what I'm doing and it's working well--the last five years have been the best years by far. 

I'm an old dog, and I'm not really looking for new tricks now. But I really wish someone out there could cut through all the BS that business books and classes put out and give newcomers the simple equations and procedures that would help them survive. 

My guess is that not enough small business owners would buy such a book. 

Because we're all "Mr. Know-it-Alls."

My reservoir of back issue comics; and organized mess.

Strangest thing. The basement at my store is full of stuff again.

A few years ago I set out to empty the basement, even if it meant giving things away. First thing I did was sell all the sports cards for fractions of a penny to someone who so loaded up a U-Haul, that it was nearly dragging on the ground. Half a million cards? Supposedly, he was going to use the cards to paper the walls of a restaurant. (Crazy idea--the thought of applying each card to the wall gave me shudders. Besides which, all those cards were "commons" which I warned him about.

Then I sold all the comics in the basement to another dealer. Tens of thousands of comics for pennies on the dollar. There was some value there, but I simply didn't have the time or space to deal with them.

Finally, I sold all the non-sports cards I had. I'm willing to bet that I probably had more of these cards than anyone in the country. Tens of thousands? Incomplete sets and boxes and boxes of individual cards.

And so, I had a basement that was cleared out. I didn't miss any of it. In all three cases, the cream had already been taken and it would have required time, space, and effort to sell any of the rest.

 

So I'm feeling proud of myself. But then back issues started selling again.

You see, when I started 41 years ago, back issues were a major part of my business. The crash of the comics bubble in the mid-90s pretty put an end to that. I kept the readers as customers but lost the so-called "collectors." Of course everyone buying comics were also collectors, but unless you had something truly extraordinary, they didn't want back issues.

But over the last decade, collecting has become more of a thing again. And I simply didn't have enough of the strong titles or "key" issues to do much about it.

So I saw a longterm customer who was going to sell his collection at a garage sale because he was moving. I knew what this customer had been buying, Spider-mans and X-Men and so on and knew the price he was offering was really good.

I called him up and said, "At the price you quoted, I'll buy them all."

It took me nearly a year to go through those 40 boxes. I decided I would extract the titles I knew would sell and bag and board them all. Eventually, I simply replaced the back issues I had upstairs with a fraction of the comics I'd bought. 

So...sales went up. They went up enough to add a button to the register to distinguish back issues from new. Nothing spectacular, but more than enough to pay for the collection I bought and still have most of the comics leftover. 

So I thought to myself, "Don't turn down offers automatically. Inquire about what the seller wants. Or even ask if they want to "contribute" comics to the general cause. So comics started coming back in, a few boxes at a time.

Then I got a call from someone who apparently had a garage full of comics and was willing to give them to me if I would haul them away.

Turns out, these were the comics I left in my mall store back in 1997, which had been stored in someone's back garage. Weird to see my own tags and prices, but there was good stuff in there. I gave the owner a bit of money because I didn't feel great about taking them for free, but the truth was, I wasn't going to be able to get to them for a long time. Another 40 boxes or more.

Then...well, after offering the boxes of used books and fixtures from Linda's bookstore, The Bookmark, someone finally took me up on it. That emptied the basement somewhat, but the comics have continued to flow in the door. We apparently have enough goodwill in the community that people want to leave their comics with us. Got another 2500 comics last week, some decent stuff in there.

 

Here's the problem. There is plenty of salable stuff in the basement, but it's like a reservoir of oil that can't be accessed without extreme effort. I've got enough oil flowing through the pumps that it's worthwhile, but the vast majority of salable comics are out of sight. 

I know people will point out that I could sell them online, but I'm just not set up for that. Frankly, I'm not inclined. One of the reasons I quit pursuing back issues in the first place was the constant need to justify prices, the constant haggling, dealing with difficult customers. The way it's being done now is, I plunk a price on a comic, the customer can see the condition themselves, and all is well. 

The other possibility is letting people down in the basement one by one to check it out, but the problem is, I'm still months if not years away from separating the wheat from the chaff. I know from past experience that people will cherry pick what's there. 

Oh, well. It's a nice problem to have. We have plenty of "key" issues now to put on the wall. We have plenty of good runs on the most important characters, all the Avengers, Batmans, Supermans, Spider-mans, X-men, etc. 

I've taken another step back from the store. Dylan, an employee from a few years ago has come back and I'm giving up most of my hours so he has enough. So I can amuse myself by going through all the rest of the comics, extract the good titles, bag and board and price them, and leave Sabrina with an organized...what should I say? 

An organized mess.

Too soon to react?

Doing this week's orders--and stopped midway. 

I need to think about this.

The stock market is crashing. 

So my dilemma is this: when I order from Ingram, I get books in a very timely manner, in no more than two days, and I know exactly what I've spent. However, the discount I get from them is a full 10% less than what I get directly from the publishers.

However, when I order from the publishers, it can take anywhere from ten days to two weeks to arrive, sometimes even longer. The books also come in piecemeal, and I don't know in advance which books they won't have in stock. 

It's Timeliness vs Discount, simple as that.

Here's what I've learned in the past...

 In an insecure and uncertain market, you need to know exactly what you're spending and when the product will arrive.

In other words, when given the choice, timeliness over discount. 

We've been doing very well up to this moment; a record year so far. So I've been trying to do both. I order extremely hot material from both the distributor and the publishers. 

It's been a record keeping chore and has complicated the cash flow, but when the overall market is functioning, it evens out and we do fine. 

Now?

That's the question. Is it too early to take drastic measures? 

Again, what I've learned in the past is...trust your instincts. When there's a falling market, you almost can't be too quick to take action.  If you're wrong, you can always amp back up again. But if you're wrong about holding course and the market keeps falling, then you can easily start spending more than you're earning.

I think people are under-reacting. Maybe they aren't paying attention. Maybe they're in shock. Maybe they're resigned. Maybe they're afraid of overreacting.

I need to change course and start being more conservative.

OLIVER BOOKS! Somebody finally took me up on it.

Customers in Pegasus Books often say something like, "I'd really like to have a bookstore."

For the past five years of so, I've answered, "If you're serious, I have all the fixings. Tons of used books and fixtures. You can have them for a very low price."

"Oh?" a few people mutter, already backing away. 

"Yeah, my wife and I owned a used bookstore for 15 years, and I've been buying up used books for another five or ten years, with the intention of opening a used bookstore in Redmond when I retire. But I've worked longer than I expected and so it's probably not going to happen. Especially with what the rents in Redmond are like now." (Not all that much cheaper than Bend...at least not cheap enough...)

Well, by that time they've probably scooted out the door. Obviously, they weren't serious, or maybe they didn't believe I was serious, that I really had the fixings, or that it would be cheap enough. But I really wanted to give my 15 to 20K used books stored at home and I couldn't see dumping 35 or 40 perfectly good bookcases, or leaving it for my loved ones to have to deal with when I'm gone. 

In my mind, I could see some young person getting a start in a store for less that I paid for my own store 41 years ago. I was quite serious. I could see someone earning a perhaps small wage at first, but maybe turning it into something, the way I did with Pegasus.  

It would have to happen in some small town, such as Prineville or Madras or Burns or LaPine, someplace like that, but yeah....someone could make an attempt for what would have been peanuts. 

No one bothered to ask the price. 

So I had a young woman in the store a few weeks ago and we went through the conversation and she was still standing there. 

"I'd love to do that," she said. 

"Would you like to see the fixtures?" 

"I really would." 

So I gave her a tour of the basement, and it was about closing time, and I asked her if she wanted to follow me to my home to see the books, and she did. I had a large storage shed and a garage packed with boxes of books. 

She was still interested. 

Long story short, she's opening "Oliver Books" in downtown Prineville on April 1st. (No joke.)

She's gone way beyond the starter kit that I provided. With my advice, she decided to add new books to the mix. Even Prineville isn't terribly cheap anymore and she is renting a space larger than mine, so I told her I thought new books would be necessary to carry the load.

Most gratifying of all, she's seems to be listening to my advice. She's doing it right, not the bare bones effort I originally envisioned but a full-on, quality bookstore, with my contribution being only a foundation to what she's building.

I'm amazed by her energy and her savvy. I think she's got the stuff to do it. 

Prineville is a small but growing town and I suspect they'll welcome her with open arms. It might even be worth a visit from all you folks in Bend and Redmond and LaPine and the rest of eastern Oregon.  

OLIVER BOOKS, Prineville, Oregon. 

It's been fun to see it take shape, and I'm super impressed. Good luck to you, Hannah Oliver!

 

I've been reappraising my books. I'm proud of them, and as strange as it is to say since I wrote them, they're better than I expected.

I came back to writing with doubts. I submerged all doubts and forged ahead. I wrote what I wanted., when I wanted, how I wanted. I got feedback that made me feel like I wasn't wasting my time, but it wouldn't have mattered. I had creative energy to burn.

Eventually, I felt that I had achieved what I set out to achieve.

As time has passed, and interesting thing has happened. I've become more and more proud of my books, not just because I achieved my goal, but because I truly believe that I have writing talent, that the books are well done, original, and diverse. I believe they are satisfying reading experiences. 

All the rest is BS. What others think, what level of sales they achieved, how well known I became or didn't become. BS. 

What counts is that I know I wrote some good stuff. And I'm proud of it. 

Wait just a little before igniting the rocket.

There is a local bookstore I visit who has two large bookcases with the latest week or two releases face out. Whenever I'm there, I count what percent of those books I carry and it is almost always about 1/3rd. 

But just to the right of those two shelves is a shelf that contains the bestsellers from past weeks that have continued to sell. Of this rack, I usually have about 90% of the titles.

Basically, I'm letting all the other stores do the hard work of weeding out the true bestsellers from the aspirational bestsellers. The true bestsellers will pop up on the radar almost immediately, followed quickly by requests and by entry onto the bestseller lists. 

I always make sure I get these true bestsellers as soon as possible, but I don't order the majority of the new releases just because they're new. I'd rather spend that money on my midlist books, my perennials. 

The danger is that I'll miss a week or possibly two weeks of these books; but the true bestsellers usually have selling spans of many weeks, months, and sometimes even years. 

What I've done is avoided the sunk costs on the aspirational bestsellers; and the job of sending back those that don't sell. The few clunkers I get, I have maybe one copy and generally, eventually, someone will buy it. 

It may be a little lazy on my part to wait for confirmation of whether a book really has legs, but I order books without any intention of returning them. I'm not sure that people come to my store for this week's new books, but come into my store and see the books they've heard about.

I'm not saying these other stores are doing it wrong, only that I'm doing it differently. Most stores can't afford to miss out, but they also return books that don't sell. Because my clientele is so heavily tourists, to them most of my books are new.

Last year I tried for a full six months the method I see other stores take because my publisher promised me full returns. I ordered more of the each week's books and more copies of the books that were earmarked to be bestsellers.

At the end of that period I realized that what I had been doing a pretty good job of ordering the right books in the right numbers before that experiment, but not tying up as much of my money on inventory that didn't sell.

So back to basics. Let the books prove themselves a little bit and then get them. My guesses are usually pretty right.

Timeliness and reliability versus higher discounts.

First, a little orientation for you.

There are basically five major publishers who distribute their own titles today. They're called the Big Five. These publishers have more or less bought up every important imprint there is. 

They are: Penguin Random House, Simon and Shuster, Macmillan, Harper Collins, and Hachette.

Meanwhile, there is one major distributor who handles all the others' books: Ingram. 

I have been ordering the majority of my books from Ingram even though I get up to 13% better discounts by ordering direct from the publishers.

Today, I got in a measly small box of some of the "a" titles from a major publisher/distributor. The fill rate was actually less than I get from Ingram. 90% of what I ordered still hasn't arrived twelve days after I ordered them.

I still haven't heard from the other big publisher/distributor that I applied for. The western rep hasn't bothered to answer my email. (The eastern rep has been very nice and responsive, but she's not MY rep.)

I'm thinking I'll need to keep ordering from Ingram on these titles for the next couple weeks unless things change. Waiting a couple of weeks to get the material and then only getting a 50% fill rate: well, that 13% extra margin looks a lot less appealing.

It seems like I have to learn the same lesson over and over again. Timeliness and reliability outweigh an extra discount every time. Not to mention the extra work it takes to keep cross-checking the different distributors and keeping records of what I have or haven't ordered. Basically, I won't know if these two new publisher/distributors have something in stock until it does or doesn't arrive.

Well, screw that.

Don't get me wrong: getting a higher discount is helpful. It's why I'm constantly tempted by the possibility of it. It's just that almost every time, the lower cost provider is much less helpful, accountable, efficient, timely, and reliable. 

One of the big distributors I ordered from is the actual publisher of the books I ordered and yet they had a lower fill rate than Ingram! How is that possible? How is it possible that these giant corporations are so bad at it? Honestly, I have to resort to Google and Amazon to search for titles because these big publishers and distributors' search engines absolutely suck. 

A bad fill rate is not great, but not knowing what the fill rate is going to be until it actually arrives is intolerable. It basically doubles the shipping time that is already twice as long a time it takes to get the books from Ingram. That 13% better discount doesn't look so good for books that never arrive or arrive two weeks later than they need to. 

So ease of use, taking less than half the time to order; knowing what's in stock; getting the product a minimum of a week, more often two weeks sooner

Versus 13% extra margin.

In the end, I find the former better than the latter. Certainly a lot less aggravating. I chased margins and goals throughout 2024, only to fall an exasperating small margin short. The 13% is still very attractive, so I'm going to continue to tinker with the process, try to make it easier and more reliable. But I'm also going to use Ingram as my bedrock.

So...back to more of the way I was doing in 2022 and 2023. We were doing gangbusters business just by ordering from one wholesaler. Easy-peasy.

How statistics don't tell the whole story.

How statistics don't tell the story. They don't mean a lot unless you actually look at them.

The sales of books comparing Nov., 2023 to 2024 nationwide.

Up 10.3%.

Look a little closer. The biggest increases included 

1.) Higher Ed. (textbooks)

2. Children's ebooks.

3. & 4. Religious books

5. University Press

None which matter to me.

It isn't until you get down the middle part of the chart that you see adult novels, with very small increases.

And in the negative is one of our most important categories:

1.) Children's YA

2.) Children's YA hardcovers.

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.