Bookstore thoughts.

These aren't serious complaints. I'm really having fun at Pegasus, finally seeing people respond to our selection. 

 

It's so interesting to me that people open specialty bookstores. A general bookstore is already "special" enough. In my experience, you need all the customers you can get. Why exclude any of them, much less narrow your reach to a small subset of what is already a small subset? You can still specialize, the way I do genre books, but why cut out a whole audience?

 

And while I'm on the excluding thing, I'm amazed by how limited most bookstores' genre selections are, especially SF/Fantasy, but including mysteries, romance, and horror. (Most stores don't even have a horror section.) I know that I'm inclined that way, but we sell a lot of genre books.

 

Had a guy in yesterday who just insisted I was leaving a ton of money on the table by not selling online. This despite the fact that he could look around my store and see the hordes of customers milling about. I mean, hordes. Hugely busy day. I was already exhausted when he said that.

I mean, how many hours and how much energy do I have? It's a bit like telling a guy who works a 48 hours week that he could make "so much more money" by working 64 hours a week! 

I'll say it again and again and again: Time, Space, and Energy ARE money. Period.

The funny thing is, this was a guy who'd retired at the age of 52. (Hey, you could make so much more money if you were working!)

A couple of days ago, an older couple was telling me how the store in their hometown sold coffee and this and that and the next things. Again, the store was packed with customers, who I'm barely keeping up with. I pause a moment and say, "You know want?"

They look at me expectantly. 

"I....just want to sell  (#@&%*) books."

Fortunately, they laughed.

 

Most frustrating thing about serving customers: I always, always say, "If you're looking for a title or author, just let me know." Ninety percent of the time, they'll shrug it off. But here's the thing: when they actually do ask for a title, I have a very strong hit rate. More often than not, I have the book in stock.

Sometimes they're headed for the door before I finally coax them to tell me what they were looking for...and it seems like when that happens, I always have the book.

I mean, there is only so much I can do. I offer, and sometimes mildly repeat it if I sense they're actually looking for something. But I can't pester them.

Teenagers especially will almost never ask.  (It's a secret...)

And then there are the customers who ask for a book, I show it to them. They ask for another book, I show it to them, they ask for another book, I show it to them.

They leave. 

That was fun. 

And finally, the people who ask for recommendations. I gets all enthusiastic about a particular book, they hold it in their hands, squint at it skeptically, and then hand it back. 

I love people, really I do.

Cats and dogs rise to the top

Stayed late and rearranged shelves. 

I don't know...it feels like I made changes that will matter, and then again, it doesn't really appear all that different. I never know if these types of changes are going to have an effect. 

Mostly, I consolidated some parts of the store and weeded out old and worn product. The store feels crisper, somehow. What happens is that when I bring in a new section, such as coloring books or drawing books or whatever, I tend to order quite a lot at first to fill in all the holes, this before knowing how well the section will actually do. Then, over time, I realized that I either overdid it or or under-did it. 

I could've ended up with two new shelves, even after adding Japanese fiction, but instead eliminated a tight shelf for a more open look. The final shelf will be used for Japanese "art" books. This may not work, but I got a deal on some very cool books, so we'll see.

I've opened up two shelves near the counter, and at least for a week or two, I'm going to highlight new books there by putting them on face-out stands. There is no way in my store that I can leave two shelves open, so eventually they'll be filled. Mostly by quirky, impulse style books. There are always books that sell based on covers or themes. For instance, I think at least one shelf will be cats/dogs. Yes, a whole prime shelf devoted to cats/dogs. 

I'm going to weed out the young adult section. I rapidly grew that section over the last few years and there were a fair amount of experiments that didn't work. Basically, stand alone graphic novels have a harder time hanging on, whereas series continue to sell. 

After that? God knows. Everytime I do something like this, I think it will be the last time, and then I get another brainstorm.

Meanwhile, it's going to be raining cats and dogs.

Mad ergonomics.

I've got some ideas, God help me. 

My mind is churning with ideas on how to configure the store. Small changes, but lots of them, and they'll add up to something significant. 

I'm trying to take the same limited space and make it as diverse as is possible. So that means adding some things, reducing some things, and most of all, moving lots of things.

The summer has arrived. What seems to be happening is that we are getting more people in the door than ever, but each of them are spending a little less money, and it comes out about the same. But it's also nearly impossible to file books when the store is packed, much less try to move product from one section to the next.

I will have to go in early for several days if I'm going to have any chance of pulling this off. 

The cubes have arrived. These are going to serve as risers for the new shelves, which were children's shelves and low to the ground. I've already raised them by one foot, and I'm intending to raise them another foot. Also gives us extra storage room. 

I'm going to put them together today in the basement, then install them on Sunday night.

I'd like to get all this in place by July 1, which means getting busy over the next week. I have a vision for how it will all look in my head and it's kind of exciting.

One unexpected result of going all in on the new bestsellers is that I'm noticing even more than before how cynical the book trade is. 

Now, this doesn't come as a surprise. I do believe all the arts are infected by commercialism (the horror!), pirating, plagiarizing on a grand scale, misdirection, and so on. 

But up to now, I've been able to avoid the worst examples. I ignored most celebrity books, most political books, most self-help books. I've avoided most books that I knew and/or suspected were ghostwritten.

A particularly notable (egregious) example is the new #1 bestseller by Michael Crichton and James Patterson. (Now there's a couple to ponder on.)

Here's the thing. I'm pretty sure that everything Crichton had ever set to paper has already been published. I read Dragon Teeth, published after his death, and it was barely a book. Meandering, paper-thin characters, disjointed. 

So my feeling is that the Crichton's pantry had already been raided, emptied of anything usable. I suspect the genesis of this new book was a tiny scrap of paper in the corner of the pantry on which was scribbled, "Hawaii explodes."

I admit, an interesting idea. But the world is full of interesting ideas, but most of them get no coverage unless they are written by already well-known authors. 

Well, nothing to do but order the damn book. Not for me to judge what other people read, me but to do as they will.

License Plate Bingo

I'm playing License Plate Bingo with myself this summer. Starting on the 25th of May, I started writing down license plates I see on my commute. The goal is to hit all 50 states by the beginning of September.

So far, in three weeks, I've seen almost half of them. The obvious, of course, but also states like Hawaii (that's like getting an inside straight) and Iowa and so on.

I figure I might be able to catch about half that many states in the next month, and then half again as much the last month, leaving me short by about five or six states. My guess is that Mississippi and Louisiana will be the hardest: maybe Delaware and Rhode Island. 

Populated states are easy: New York, Texas, but I also see a lot of Wyoming plates.

Some of these license plates have tiny lettering or are obscured; I have to stop myself from tail-gating just so I can see the plates. 

Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Montana, Arizona, Hawaii, Iowa, Colorado, New York, Texas, Alaska, Wyoming, Kansas, Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts.

It just goes to show that Bend is a tourist destination.

Grow or Die?

I'm pretty obsessed with the store right now. Constantly monitoring what's selling and what needs to be put back out again and what needs to be displayed face out. I'm really banking on the idea of having extra copies of the good selling books, even more than I am in ordering the new bestsellers. 

I'm not sure bestsellers is the right word, because these books haven't really proven themselves. They are more the "Chosen," by the industry to be the next bestsellers, which is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think I sold two or three of the "Chosen" in the first four days of the week. I probably need to sell at double that pace, at least. I'm definitely banking on the summer tourist trade. 

Yesterday was the first day that really that both really felt like summer and in which all the books I've gotten were fully in place. Sure enough, we hit our goal. That's kind of what we need to do. 

Whatever happens, I need to remind myself that we have returnability. It will probably make a huge dent in our cash-flow, which is why I'm doing it in the summer, but in the end, it can all be justified. PRH is gambling on me, and I'm gambling on them. 

I'm also intending to do returns with Ingrams, but I'm not going crazy on my orders there. Probably ordering twice as many of the "Chosen" as normal, but not three or four times as much as I am with PRH. 

 

I'm fine-tuning the displays in the next week. I've bought white cube lifters to raise up the new book displays and to give us more storage. I thought I'd ordered 10 of the 15" cubes, and then realized that was probably a mistake in that they would be too big for the center rack. 

However, apparently I only ordered one by mistake. 

When I went back to look at the white cubes, I found a different maker who makes slightly smaller cubes, which work much better for us. So the mistake turned into a bonus. 

By the way, I'm also being very aggressive with buying Magic. We've made real inroads there. The "Buy 5, get the 6th Free" offer is really attracting the gamers. It probably reduces our profit margin by 10%, but it also probably doubles our overall sales, so it's a net gain. 

I really gambled that having more SKU's would make a difference and I think it's paid off.

I'm pretty sure this recent increase in sales won't go away and can still be built on.

Pokemon, meanwhile, seems more static. But there are always people who buy them so I'm not worried.  I ordered enough of it to probably last us through the summer and beyond, especially if a new wave is coming. 

I'm continuing to be aggressive with comics and graphic novels, as well as toys. I'm taking advantage of every special offer, which may not pay off immediately, but if done consistently eventually take on a sort of "rolling" benefit; that is, the special offer product I bought a year ago sells enough to pay for the special offer this month. That's the theory, anyway. I think it works. 

Board games are probably the most problematic product right now. There's just too many coming out, too hard to predict, too hard to get the in-demand games. We're making sure we're stocked on the base games: the Catans, and Carassonnes, and Ticket to Rides and those sorts of games and I've given Sabrina the go-ahead to keep her eyes on what other games we could be selling.

I'm making sure the D & D stuff is fully stocked, with lots and lots of dice, and I've plunked down a bunch of money on Pathfinder; which will give us a second RPG game we can try to sell. 

I don't really buy into the Grow or Die philosophy. I think that corporate America's goal of constantly increasing profits is starving the core of our country as well as destroying the environment.

However, I think I do believe in Strive or Die. That is, make improvements over time. I don't think it's wrong to rest on your laurels for awhile: I've been trying to train myself to do that for years. But I do believe that once in awhile, you need to see if you can't make things better, if for no other reason than to keep one's interest in the business.

170.2. I'm OK with just maintaining that weight for a few days. Still have three days to get down solidly to 170, which was my original goal. I'm going to keep on doing this way of eating for the rest of summer, not so much to lose more weight, though that will be nice, but to establish a new baseline to my weight, the way I did when I reached 180. 

I'm more flexible and have more energy, lighter in step. No real change in my appearance, though. Darn it.

New book risk/reward.

First big batch of new books came in and I found places for all them. The new display racks have space for two or more books: one face out, the others in storage below. In theory, when one sells, there is another copy beneath which can immediately replace it. 

So they all fit in. But that was just the first week. They'll be another batch next week (actually, coming in today though not all can be put out until Tuesday) and another batch the following week and so on throughout the summer. At some point, some of them will need to be removed and stacked somewhere to be returned. (If a customer asks for a copy, I can give it to them for a big discount rather than pay the postage.)

I think I probably would have been better off increasing the number of new books I bought but keeping the higher discount I had before. I wouldn't be able to return them, but I think that if I were careful, that wouldn't have been a problem.

But I've bought all in on the program, and I'm ordering considerably more than I would have before, so we'll see what happens. 

I'm ordering books far in advance. I've always been a little leery of back-orders or pre-orders both; I much prefer to order books as they come into play. That way I know exactly how much I'm spending. The tough years trained me to never make purchases without knowing the totals. (I can still keep the totals, but it's a huge bookkeeping effort.)

But we've gone beyond that point now. There is no way to grow the business further using that method of buying. What I was doing until now was pretty much waiting for the books to become successful in the market before I ordered them, but by buying that way, I was missing out on the initial sales which, while not as certain as waiting would be, are probably the bulk of total sales.

In other words, I'm taking on more risk in hopes of more reward. Ain't it the way.