Booksellers Are Amazing

I keep saying I'm going to get back to regular blog posts, and then I stop. A few months go by, I try to start a post, then stop again. It is a hybrid form of writer's block at work here, built from a conflict between working for a living and writing for my customers and friends, who are often one and the same. It's not just that working for a living takes up time and creative energy that might go into writing. My blog has always been meant to promote bargain books to booksellers, and bound paper books to the digitally addicted. In the times we are living through now, there is an additional conflict between that mission and the need to say something more generally helpful. That conflict gets the best of me when I freeze up and can't write anything.

So, for this post, I am going to stay off my bargain book soapbox and focus on booksellers, those marvelous beings who have, for my whole life, walked a fine line between success and poverty, threatened by chains, online behemoths, competing platforms, and the relentless dumbing down of their cultures.

I would not be writing this post were it not for my readers (yes, okay, both of you!) telling me they miss my posts and, especially now, think other booksellers could benefit from them. And when I say "writing," picture two of my thumbs (I have ten of them) pressing a couple of keys and then disappearing from the vicinity of the blog for another few days, then coming back to delete the few characters they input before. This has been going on for weeks; I hope today will be the day I finally manage to publish my sorry efforts. Thank you for urging me on.

Seeing so many of you doing whatever it takes to stay safe and keep your customers safe, while at the same time investing incredible amounts of energy and elbow grease in getting books to them using whatever tools you have available, is an inspiration. What have I seen and heard? For starters:

💖Arranging books by author, theme, or subject category, as if in a store window or end cap or tabletop display, and posting pictures of those displays on social media, in email, on websites.

💖Here's the amazing Arsen from Boulder Book Store on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y2VOht226s&fbclid=IwAR1ceBiV5aknczsTC6u64TvR7d8Kp_CcC4B69Ev2pPQ0GBDFuYrIE7m_qfM

💖Creating packages of books based on what particular customers like and having them delivered to those customers. The customers can then call and say what they don't want, the booksellers picks them up, and collects the payment for what was kept. All of this is done with disinfectant, gloves, and masks applied at the right time in the appropriate places.

💖Fulfilling wishlist items for kids in foster care.

💖And then there's this from the amazing Megan at Hills and Hamlets Bookshop and Underground Books:
https://www.facebook.com/UndergroundBooksCarrollton/videos/247338776503365/?t=2

💖Third Street Books is tweeting black ownded bookstores all day, 6/2/2020:

@ThirdPlaceBooks

💖For those bookstores with pets beloved by many customers, the pets show up in the posts with various backgrounds, maybe including books, maybe not, more just to say hello and comfort the lonely.

💖Doing "buy 3 from this stack, you get one free from this stack" deals. See above bit about posting pictures. (Uh-oh, I feel a plug for bargain books coming on...)

💖Here's Janet at Source Booksellers getting on BookTV on C-Span:
https://twitter.com/sourcebksellers

💖TONS of readings online. Booksellers reading children's books for the kids, authors reading novels for the grownups.

💖Here's Third Place Books raising money (and books) for students in need:
https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/books-students-fund

💖Several friends are in danger of losing their businesses during this time. Some are doing "GoFundMe" drives, asking for donations to keep them going. One pays her employees whether they stay at home or not, whether or not they are getting government money, whether or not she ever gets her PPP. Another, who did finally get her PPP, announced that she is going ahead with her long-delayed plans to finish her build-out on her new location, making sure everybody knows she is still in business, is not going away, and is aggressively moving forward.

💖Some are driving (or riding bicycles, or walking) summer reading mystery bags or boxes to customers who have subscribed to the service. At first, they had the impression that this was partly charity on the part of their customers, but so many have said that it's so great that they want to continue past the reopening, that now they think, if it was charitable to start, now it is just another fantastic way to sell books.

💖And many, whether or not they've been told they can reopen, would rather not expose their staff and customers to danger, as Hannah from The Book Shop at Beverly Farms writes here:
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/05/22/massachusetts-reopening-small-business-hannah-harlow

Ostensibly, I suppose, all of these efforts are meant to, eventually, in some way, directly or indirectly, lead to sales, but they sure feel like they are really there to help their communities through this time. It all takes immense amounts of work, time, planning, thinking, creating. Who else, what other merchant professional does this? Outside of some nonprofit organizations, health and medical professionals, and the military, are there other industries like this? Our extended family of booksellers is made of some tough, good, wonderful stuff.

Two Short Questions, Too Long Answers

I had a dear customer respond quickly to my post of yesterday with questions and suggestions. I am transposing them here, much paraphrased to protect the innocent, with my answers below each:

Q: What are ways us regular remainder buyers can improve the quality of the titles we get access to?

A: You might be subtly alluding to the fact that I have terrible organizational skills and lose the thread often, leaving you wondering whatever happened to old Ben Archer. But when I send you my lists, and I promise to send them to you more often, I really am sending you everything I can find. To fine tune to the extent that the big remainder buyers see better lists than small remainder buyers would be so conterproductive as to cause our sales to decrease as we spend time figuring out what to show who and when. And the big buyers that compete with you for inventory, meaning the largest indies and used bookstores, not Safeway or Dollar General, want exactly what you want, 90% of the time. However, all that being said, sales reps almost always send the most info, lists, "good stuff," nudges, etc., to customers who respond. It hard to send lists, deals, and announcements week after week, month after month, to a "customer" who never, or almost never, responds. I have very few customers, count 'em on one hand, who respond immediately to 75% of what I send them, and, yes, guilty as charged, they do get my attention. I'm sure most of what I am writing here applies to other reps. It's human nature. (Dear customer: I hope it is obvious that I am NOT talking about YOU!)
Think of your customers, walking into your bookstore. Some come in almost every day. They may not buy anything most days, but you get to know them. You think of them when you order books. You call them when something comes in that you know they would want. 

Access Tip: The biggest buyers, and lots of smaller ones as well, visit our warehouse. Some visit once a year, some once per month, some visit for a few days at a time, some a few hours, but that is the best way to get the best books. You can't just show up, we need to set up appointments, but start talking to me about it now, and we can make it happen. 

Q: How can I get a better rate of fulfillment?

A: You can order immediately, you can order on our site (well, all right, that might actually be a bit better), call ahead to reserve inventory, you can cajole, berate, plead, and harass, you won't get 100% fill on anything but a handful of orders. Some might be 95%, but 100% is the holy grail. Sometimes books are damaged out after we receive your order. Sometimes our receiving process glitches and we did not get what we thought we got. We have over 30,000 titles here, but about 10,000 of those are available in quantities under 10 and you don't see them on our lists for the simple reason that the fill rate on those is so low. (Tell me if you want to see such a list and I'll send it to you, as long as you consider yourself forewarned.) If all you cared about was fill rate (like the chains), you would only order from lists where the available quantities were high, say, 100 minimum. You can ask me for that, too, but you won't buy much. I know others might have better fill rates, but we have the best books in the industry, so it's a trade off worth making.
Going back to those few hyper-responsive customers, they have the same fill rates as everybody else, but they order the same title over and over, whenever they see it on a list, until they get it.

This customer also had a suggestion, for me to create a "Pro Tips" page, which I will do, just need to give it a little thought. While most readers of this blog are pros, I am not, so will need some more suggestions to get that project done.

Thank you for being a bookseller!!!

Ben Back on the Blog

It has been a long time since I've posted. My plan is to post once or twice per week, add a "best seller" page for books we at Book Country are selling best to our indie and used bookstore customers, and put daily deals and links in the "Deals and Steals" page. 

Since my only concern is our customers, I'd love to hear questions from you, either about Book Country or the industry in general. While I probably will not have the best answers to your industry questions, I can point you in the right direction or get those answers for you and credit the source when the the source wants to be credited.

I will stay with some of my old threads. I see in PW that print sales were a bit down in 2019, mostly due to lack of blockbuster best sellers (and maybe lower print runs?), but clearly, the billionaires and the publishers were wrong when they said that books would be replaced by digital media. People will be reading beautiful wonderful physical books long into the future, as long as there are publishers printing them.

WAY more bookstores have opened since I last posted here. What happened? Borders and Barnes & Noble were said to be killing them, Amazon wanted to kill them, Walmart and Costco and all the other big baddies were supposedly killing them... but they weren't and they didn't. The experience of shopping in a bookstore, especially a local, one-of-a-kind bookstore can't be matched. The ones that did go out of business simply were not buying enough bargain books. Oh all right, yes, I am joking, but take a look. Not that big a joke. The hugely successful, big indiependent bookstores that have survived, thrived, and dominated, buy a LOT of bargain books. I will hit that point hard in coming posts.

I want to post more about how successful booksellers work bargain into their mix, how they merchandise, how they use it to generate sales and interest. Publishers are not huge fans of bargain, though they should be, and the trade press is all about making the publishers happy. After all, they support them. Years ago, PW and The Bookseller had occasional columns about the bargain book industry, but that has all but disappeared. If I can help make up for that dearth in any small way, I will.

Again, if you have any questions or suggestions, anything you want to share with other booksellers, please email me. Most of you reading this blog know me, so just email me. Email works better than comments on the blog.

Thank you for reading!

Booksellers and booksellers

Booksellers are the people who sell books for the independent bookstores that employ them, the people who, when they see you walk into their bookstore, walk to a shelf, grab a book, and put it in your hands. They do this because they know you and they know how to put you together with the books you need to read. You buy the book and read it and are not surprised to discover that you never want to put it down.

How wonderful it is to have these people in our lives, without whom we would not have a livelihood. Now that e-books and other gadgets are proving not to be the death knell for bookstores the manufacturers and publishers were hoping they were, it's safe to say human booksellers are still necessary, still amazing, and still sought out by readers everywhere.

'Tis the Season

This is the time of year I start to hear from customers about how they're doing, how their sales increased, or stayed flat, or went down. Some are reporting that their sales went through the roof. Maybe a chain store that opened near them in the 90s closed, and now the independent owns their town again. Maybe they opened a new location and it went gangbusters. Or maybe the local demographics had a sudden change. I had one customer tell me their sales went up by over 100% this year. Of course I told him it was all due to the bargain books he was buying from me, but who would listen to an old remainder rep.

The ABA says they had another increase in members this year, and several bookstores were sold to new owners rather than closed, another very positive new trend. When I was at CIROBE a few weeks ago I noticed more young (read: under 40) people than usual, and these included buyers and owners. Recently when I am prospecting (sorry if I spammed you recently, it's a hazard of having a bookstore) I have a hard time keeping up with new businesses. 

The news is never all good. I lost a few customers this year. I hear from others that they are laying off employees or cutting their buying budgets or both. Every one of these booksellers did everything right. Some were the best booksellers for miles around, but something tipped the scales and they had to take measures or throw in the towel. 

There are a few oft-heard refrains. Amazon and the rest of the e-world are still taking up lots of space in the marketplace, even as people begin to go back to real books. Browsing continues to seem like the forgotten passtime of a bygone era, though I have heard a few booksellers say that they are seeing it ticking up again. Customers walk into a bookstore with their phone out and show it to the bookseller and ask for the book on the screen, but it seems like a bit fewer of them just turn around and walk out if the book is not in stock. Creating impulse sales has become much more of a science than it used to be (cue the plug for bargain books...).

To my readers who have decided to close up shop at the end of the year, I want to say thank you for your business over all these decades, thank you for being pillars of your communities, for providing beautiful spaces and experiences for the friends, family, strangers and travelers that walked in your door, for being the reference librarians you didn't know you had to be, and for being such gracious hosts to all of us in the trade.

To those of you who have recently opened a bookstore, or who are thinking about it, or bought one this year, thank you for taking a chance on our wonderful old industry. You will find everybody in this new family of yours strangely accommodating and eager to help in whatever way they can, and I am not just talking about publishers and other suppliers, but other booksellers as well, often even the competition in your own town.

There is a lot to learn, lots of new challenges, and there are lots of new opportunities. We might be a bunch of recalcitrant old curmudgeons, but we're here to help. Welcome to the book business.

Putting Your Best Square Foot Forward

It used to be a rule that if you carried bargain books you put them in front or toward the front of your bookstore. It was a way of saying thank you to your loyal customers and welcome to your new customers. Impulse sales were created as customers walked through the bargain areas to get everything else they needed. Sidewalk sales in front of main street bookstores were great promotional tools.

Then came calendars, eating up bargain book space in the front zones around the cashiers and foyers during the biggest retail months of the year. Then kiosks (if by kiosks we mean gargantuan swaths of real estate that could have been stand-alone stores on their own) to sell Kobos or Nooks or whatever other brain melting tech was being pushed by the media moguls at the moment. The space traditionally used to sell bargain was just about gone, squeezed into small end caps around the security hardware or along the baseboards next to the restrooms.

Now that books are kicking the assets out of e-readers, and calendars are a bit more obsolete every year, how about putting your bargain books back where they belong? The electronic stuff can go on slat boards near your reference and education sections, or maybe near your retirement and senior health books, judging by the demographic that still swoons over those things, and you can watch as your customers buy all those books they now know they love all over again.

Bargain books are not just discount merchandise, they are the entrée to unexplored categories and authors. Your customers will thank you with their dollars for giving them the opportunity to get acquainted with whole new reading realms, and for being able to try out new authors without spending the big bucks, so pack up the "kiosks" and stack up the bargains!

Of Sales and Bookselling

Sales is not generally considered to be one of the top professions. Most people who go into it end up there due to extenuating circumstances. Something was missed or got bungled along the way and sales was the default career. I'm sorry, I know I just offended some readers, but even you know what I mean. Not many people go to a top college with the goal of becoming a salesperson.

I was at a block party a few years ago. The demographic of the block we lived on was heavily weighted toward the academic. CMU and U Pitt professors lived there, one of whom was an astrophysicist. I happened to be standing next to him at the block party when he said to me, "you're in sales?" I said yes and he turned and walked away, making it clear what he thought of me, though he knew absolutely nothing about me. This may or may not be typical, and he was displaying one of the lower behavior traits associated with nasty people, but it was a good illustration of how sales folk are perceived.

Being in book sales is a sort of hybrid. So many of us are here because our love of books is inextricably hooked into our need for food, clothing, shelter, and college tuition for the kids. There was no getting around the fact that we writers, painters, and readers were no good for anything outside of books, but that we had to provide for ourselves and often others, so we made the best of a low-paying industry. Average pay for a pharmaceutical sales rep is $64k, and I'm sure that average is severely dragged down by lots of entry level types who make somewhere between zero and minimum wage just to get in the door. Average starting pay at many publishers probably really is just zero, since their internship programs allow them to hire overqualified debtors to work for free.

But if you must support yourself and/or others, get a driver's license, pack your car with samples, and hit the road (see illustration, below). As long as books will be books (as opposed to electronic gizmos), there will be a need for this, and almost nobody expects you to do it for free. It is very hard work and there is no guarantee of success, but it can also be gratifying and interesting. It might help to have a working knowledge of books and literature, but one of the best sales reps I know in the business has a background in plumbing supply. He's just very good at developing great relationships with key customers.

A good car for going on the road selling books, not to mention picking up buyers at airports, the Mercury Grand Marquis can carry about 900 pounds of samples, plus one 225 pound sales rep. (Overweight sales rep and oversize Rizzoli coffee table book added for scale.) Photo by Mark Skinner

Booksellers know all about the relationship business. There is not another retail category more invested in social media, community outreach, schools, and the spirit of public service. Relationships between booksellers and their customers are deep, long lasting, and meaningful. The same can be said for the relationships between booksellers and other booksellers.

When you have author events, that is sales. Your cashier tells a customer you have another book by the author of the book the customer is buying; that's sales. Paying a full-time staff member to maintain your social media is sales, even when most of the content is not directly sales related. But how about when you have an author event for an author who is well known for controversial views, who receives death threats, whose event at your bookstore causes you and your staff to receive death threats, but you go ahead with the event because you feel it is the right thing to do? Is that sales? You announce you are going out of business and your community spontaneously generates a massive outpouring of support, including but not limited to financial. Is that sales? Books are a hybrid product, more than a product, perhaps the central and defining product of civilization. Some booksellers, feeling just this, remain poor all their lives just to keep their bookstores alive in their poor communities. 

Peter Drucker said that the purpose of a business is to create a customer. All of the above can create customers, whether intentional or not. I write this blog not just to promote my and my employers' business (which is a good thing since it does a terrible job of that), but to promote the bargain book industry overall. If I can't convince you to buy from me, but convince you to buy bargain books at all, and you buy from my competitors, your bookstore becomes more successful, your customer base grows, and I have helped create a customer. I have also done my bit to keep you in business for another day and maybe you end up hiring a buyer who gets serious about bargain and eventually starts ordering books from me. Stranger things have happened.
________________________________________________

I received more than the usual amount of feedback regarding this post, much of it from those who felt a bit maligned by my seeming denigration of sales as a profession, but most of that relating to an interpretation lumping booksellers in with that perceived slight, something I did not intend to do.

I am sorry I made it seem I was negating sales as a good and honorable career. My words stopped short of expressing my feeling that sales is actually a core profession. Whether looked down upon or not, nothing happens anywhere without it. 

Sales careers comes in all shapes and sizes. Commission sales in a wholesale marketplace, such as selling remaindered books in bulk to large customers, is not quite the polar opposite of bookselling, but it's close. Its commodity trading aspect is closer to that of my customers who sell strictly online and process lists as data only, without looking at categories or authors, without caring about the look and feel of a book.

I have always tried, and sometimes succeeded, to treat my lists as a bookseller would want them treated, with emphasis on the actual subject category, not the weird mismatched ones our large databases come up with, and authors all with the same format so you don't have to look in five different spots on my lists for the same author. The big challenge is to do this in a short time span so that I get the list to you before warehouse shoppers get the best books. My M.O. is to get the list out within an hour of generation, which means I can never get it as fine tuned as I'd like.

So, yes there are big differences between you and me, but we do have the same goal, which is to get as many great books into the hands of your customers as possible, and make a living while doing it.