Reading a Used Book

I'm reading The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. I bought it from a new bookstore many years ago and recently discovered it in a piece of carry-on luggage otherwise stuffed with dust jackets and samples, sales tools left over from a long forgotten sales trip. The bookstore had new and bargain on the first floor, textbooks on the second floor, and used books in the basement. This is the Harper Perennial edition, trade paperback, from 1998; I think I bought it in 2007.

I read slowly and occasionally put books aside for years. Used books with notes penciled or penned into the margins by previous owners slow me down even more. In the first paragraph of this book, the word "bluebottles" is underlined. I wonder why somebody would underline this word and I look it up. While it can mean cornflowers, it also means blow flies, as it does here.

Some underlines are in pencil, some in pen. The pen is all ballpoint, all blue, with one exception. The pencil varies more. Some pencil markings do not grow wider as the line continues, some do. I think the latter must be wood-clad pencils, while the more even lines were made with a mechanical pencil. Also, the person who used the pen was always consistent: some words are outlined completely, some are underlined, all with great care. The wielders of the wood pencils left flourishes at the ends of some lines, little calligraphic upswings that show some enthusiasm. The blue pen writer made a few notes in the margins. "Like untouchables," and "History House," very carefully written. One longer note compares this book to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and I think of my sister Jane, who is, among other things, a professor of comparative literature.

And then I found one page, about half way through the book, where there are two words circled in red ballpoint, without consideration of the nearby words: "chromebumpered sharksmile." This time the pen indented the page slightly, I can feel the ridge as I brush my finger over the surface. I know I would have thought these two words together wonderful; now I find them even more so. This is not entirely due to the fact that they so aptly describe the front of an old car, a weakness of mine.

There is something about the personalities of the people who read this book before me, something of those people that remains within the pages. Some were most likely college students. Near the bottom of the spine there is a sticker, old and partly picked off, bright yellow, that says "USED." I know this sticker. Off and on over the years I have sold to college wholesalers and this sticker told their customers and employees where this book should be shelved and how it should be priced. It told the end customer not to expect this book to be anything like new.

And yet everybody who has ever read this book, and it has definitely been read, probably several times by several people, has treated it with care. Nobody has dog-eared a page, though the bottom corner of the front cover is a bit dog-eared from many trips in and out of back packs. The spine has never been bent back to the point that it cracked or creased, as have the spines of many if not most used paperbacks. I'm terrible at this, but I know I won't do it with this one, having been shamed by my ancestor-readers. There are no stains or chips. All of the pages are securely attached; there are no page edges coming up out of the gutter.

I can see where some pages have been read over and over again, favorite passages or especially dense prose.

I sense that others before me loved this book as I do, and have treated it accordingly.

Friday, May 2, 2014

Since I wrote this post over a year ago, I have seen the strengthening of independent bookstores and, at the same time, growth in sales of e-readers and digital book sales. I keep thinking about used bookstores and how they make such a great counterpoint to all of those screens, back-lit or otherwise.

There have been a few posts on other blogs, mostly in the comments sections, from nasty sounding sorts who seem oddly angry or resentful that some of us still prefer old fashioned books and don't mind saying so. It might be that there's something threatening about the continued strength of real books. The old ways are not disappearing as fast as the digital types would apparently like.

I think many of these folks were never book readers. They are not lost to us "bookstore cultists" (the name they have given us!). They discovered books after they were made cool by technology. It's great that they are now reading and supporting authors, and I hope their numbers grow.

Still, I also hope a few of them, now and then, walk into a used or any bookstore and give it a try. We might then get a few converts to our cult.

When Dinosaurs Dance

Barnes & Noble is in a conflict with Simon & Schuster over terms. According to an article in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/books/barnes-noble-simon-schuster-dispute-said-to-hurt-sales.html?_r=0), Barnes & Noble essentially wants to pay less for books and receive more for displaying books in prominent positions in their stores.

This is bad news for the industry as a whole, and particularly bad for authors, especially those whose books do not achieve best-seller status. While remembering an independent bookseller once telling me, during a discussion about disputes between chains and publishers back in the 90s, "stay out of the way when dinosaurs dance," this might be time to consider again the advantages you have, as an independent, over the chains.

You have neither the time nor the money to waste on schemes involving threats and payback. But you do carry far more titles, authors, and publishers than the chains. I have made this point here before, but only regarding bargain books. In buying bargain, the chains buy a few of the best selling authors and only if there are heavy quantities available per ISBN. This means that the best books are left behind and available to you. If you buy ones and twos and 5s and 10s of the best stuff, you quickly create a dense, awesome bargain section and your customers will wonder what the heck is wrong with the chains when they stop there for a cup of coffee.

Now it seems you can apply the same logic to everything. Even without tussles over prices and discounts, the chains have trimmed the number of titles they carry. They focus on sales volume when selecting and eliminating titles, publishers, even categories. You know that the best selling authors at your location, in your store, usually do not come close to the best seller lists. Think about what this means.

Independents will become more important to the publishers and authors as this struggle plays out. The publishers will discover that there are markets for their authors everywhere, even across the street from the chains that have counted the beans and found them lacking. While this particular dispute will be resolved rather sooner than later, it will not be the last of its kind, and it illustrates a dynamic that can work in your favor.

Many years ago when the chains were rapidly expanding at the expense of independents, booksellers lamented that after they had, through their decades of purchases and author events, built the publishers into the successes they had become, they were being shut out by those same publishers in favor of the bigger sales volume of the chains. I never thought much of the argument that they should go to the publishers and point this out, but now that the chains are struggling and regional and local markets have become viable again, maybe it is time to tell the publishers to stop wasting their money and time on diminishing returns, put their efforts where their customers are, and sell some books.

Follow up note, 6/4/13: S&S had a strong first quarter this year, despite this protracted struggle with B&N.

Petty Sales Rep Musings

5 Things That Bother Me:

1. If you take up half an hour of my time at a trade show talking about how great bargain books are and lay out your truly impressive plans for including them in your store, then not place an order, then hand me your business card after writing on it "please send lists" and drawing an arrow pointing at your email address, you really should not say, after six months of never responding to any list or voice mail, that you are sick of my spamming you and want to know how you can make me stop. This is bully behavior. If you don't want me to send you lists, just tell me to stop. This is just little ol' me, by myself. No big company. Better yet, tell me to mail you blurbs with images. Just be decent.

2. When you call me from a phone number I do not have in my phone as belonging to you, repeatedly, and never leave a message, then finally, when I pick up, tell me that you have been trying to reach me and that I am impossible to get to, I can only ask, why can't you leave a message? There seems to be some magic left in the world, and it is associated with certain people and when they call me. I am inevitably either standing on a very long line at an airport and finally in the process of explaining to the person behind the counter that, no, I do not want to sign up for a credit card in order to save 10% on my next booking, or I am making the difficult turn from the Lincoln Tunnel exit onto 42nd Street, or maybe I'm on another call. I have learned from experience that when I call unknown numbers back, from calls which do not produce messages, I usually get an automated response telling me how I can collect my prize just for attending a time  share lecture in Orlando, or some such uselessness. Leave a message! Or email me! Most of the callers who do the daily anonymous call thing actually have my email address. Or you could even text me. I really am not THAT hard to get in touch with. Well, usually not.

3. If I send you a list on January 18th and you place an order from that list on March 4th, you can't complain about fill rate. Fill is bad enough for customers who order within 24 hours of having received their lists. You will only get a worse fill if you wait so long to order. Don't get me wrong, I am extremely grateful for your order, no matter when I receive it, but why not ask for an update if it's been six weeks since I sent you the list (though I must admit you will occasionally get great fill on such orders. More magic). 

4. If you beat me up on price and terms, don't be all shocked and incredulous when the title or skid you made an offer on sells out to another customer at the original ask. Welcome to capitalism.

5. Don't trash other booksellers or sales reps when speaking to me. I don't have a delete button in my brain and will forever remember that you trash people to other people in ways that can actually hurt their prospects of making a living. 

Sorry, just had to vent.

Of Horses, Books, Radios, Tablets, and Other Ancient Relics

My grandfather was killed when he tried to separate two horses fighting in his barn. This happened before my mother was born, so it had to be very early in 1917.

By 1917 we humans had been using horses as beasts of burden for somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 years. My father, who was born in Virginia in 1913, remembered the first time a car went through  his little town when he was a young boy. He talked about how, before 1930, where he grew up, most people of any means whatsoever often smelled like horses.

Horses were our constant companions before the 20th century. They were our saviors, friends, laborers, family. They did the work of engines in almost all conceivable situations. Horses were loved by us, yet were used so hard by us they often died from their efforts. They were among our biggest investments. We would occasionally risk life and limb, as did my mother's father, to protect our horses from harm. Stealing one could land you in prison or worse. If you fell asleep while driving, you simply ended up at home. When cars came along, they were not only easier, eventually, to work with, and sheltered us from the elements in comfort and style, they freed these beautiful creatures we had shared our lives with for thousands of years.

The act of physically writing our thoughts and feelings and experiences onto physical surfaces began a long time before books, perhaps not as long ago as when our reliance on horses began, but a very long time. We've been reading with our eyes from things we hold in our hands, bookmarking, making indecipherable notes in the margins, putting our index fingers on the lines we are trying to concentrate on, forgetting where we were and rereading again and again, for thousands of years.

The way we write has certainly changed for many of us. Now we "type" into ephemeral media that could be extinguished in a flash in its entirety. We proofread from backlit screens that degrade our eyes and which do not, of themselves, connote a sense of progress or heft or essence.

When we write our deepest feelings we can separate ourselves from them in ways we could not before. My drafts of this piece are deleted as I go, backspaced out of existence, never saved in notebooks, no evidence of my labor. My mother had stacks of legal pads and journals all over the house filled with her beautiful longhand drafts of novels she was working on, gave up on, or published. My son, another writer, says he still prefers writing with a pencil on paper before doing the final digital draft.

Another story my father, a librarian both professionally and spiritually, told me was that when radio became the huge thing in the 1930s, librarians and booksellers everywhere were convinced the end was in sight for books. This fear was soon brought back by television, VCRs, books on tape, PCs, and video games. The latter, video games, were my generations' parental bogey. My children and their friends spent so many hours on them that were once spent reading, there was a real fear they would not grow up as readers of books.  Yet  my children, now adults, do read lots of books, and belong to the generation that, when polled recently, would rather read real books than any alternative, by a large margin.

Music and music stores often show up in articles about the downfall of bookstores, as they have been for longer than it took for music stores to succumb to digital music. Music and the experience of music are much closer to being the same thing than are writing and reading. When we listen to a piece of music on a car radio or through our ear buds or on an LP or a CD, the experience is almost the same. It will never beat listening to a live performance, but all those other ways to listen are not as much a part of the experience as books are the experience of writing by readers. When technology came to music it was a fairly short period of time before the music stores, with the wonderful exception of used record stores, were almost all gone. I agree that there are some connections, ones which booksellers have learned to handle, but when the doomsayers proclaim the end of the bookstore by holding up the passing of music stores as a model, they are missing much.

Whatever is thought to be replacing books at whatever the current time, be it radios or TVs or VCRs or e-readers or tablet computers, it never really seems to have all the necessary ingredients to do the job. What these things do is add to our enjoyment of reading and, sooner or later, bring us back to books. Books are not something we are uncomfortable with. They are not ugly or poorly equipped to do what we require of them. They are not creatures toiling  under the yoke of necessity. They do not make our experience of reading worse or less comfortable or more difficult. They add to the enjoyment of reading in a way nothing else matches. We love our books. We want them in our lives. This is a feeling that does not emanate from electronics quite so much.

I see more people reading e-books on their electronics every time I travel. It used to be about every 10th person on a plane or train would be reading a mass market or trade paperback. Now it seems just about everybody is reading something, which is one aspect of e-books I love, yet it is still about every 10th person reading a real book. I know the electronics have a big fan base. They love those things, propped up on the little cool looking holders on their seat back trays. Does it beat a book in the hand? Let me know after you spill a drink on it. I can definitely see the advantages of most of the other newer technologies that have replaced older ones, just not this one.

My uneducated guess: If you took the number of people reading physical books now and compared it to the number of people reading physical books just before the Wall Street driven "superstore" boom of the 1990s, it would now represent a larger and growing percentage of the population. E-books are adding readers, not subtracted them. Many of those new readers will start reading more real books as time goes by, and they will continue to shop in bookstores.

Books, after having been with us for thousands of years, have yet to be improved upon.

Another Favorite Thing About Bookstores

It's more about books, but it's a part of bookstores which is not part of the digital reading and shopping dullness:

Categories

I have been talking to a friend who is opening a bookstore. He had a much smaller one, mostly used and remainders, and closed it a few years ago to focus exclusively on internet bookselling. Now he is opening a larger, more general bookstore in a busy neighborhood.

He has been thinking a lot about categories. Since I categorize my lists, he thought I might be good to talk to, but he has quickly gone way beyond my 51 categories. In a physical bookstore you can have so many more categories and subcategories.

Having a physical bookstore is so different from being an internet marketplace seller. The books sell because of where your store is located, where you put books in relation to other books, where you put them in the store, how they look, what your staff says about them, what your customers are reading lately, or hearing from other customers, fixtures, signage, light.... This is why categories are so important to me, as a broker with limited sales tools. Before I send lists to most of my customers, I spend a lot of time categorizing them, indicating what's new since the list was last sent to the group of customers I am sending to, and what has sold recently. I also fill in missing data in all fields, but categories are the most important and time consuming. If the book was on previous lists I use the category and other data assigned to it previously, otherwise I look them up.

The difference between what my bookseller customers do makes it impossible for me to ever have a rock-solid set of categories that can be applied to every list. If there are 5000 titles on a list and 2 of them are biography and 1000 are history, the customers that look for biography will never buy the 2 titles, so I would probably put them under history, where the author or the subject might sell them. If I have enough readily identifiable science fiction on a list (always a challenge), I will put them in their own category, otherwise they go under fiction. If a customer just wants material on ancient history I have to search for everything from all categories that might apply. I don't have enough demand or supply to create such a category by itself, but for this customer I do the work every time. I have a bunch like this, so subcategories are an ongoing project. There are so many situations like this that I can't think of them all; they occur with almost every list.

I have 51 categories I apply to my lists. I used to have more, but I have consolidated some. But in a bookstore you can have many categories tailored to what your customers are looking for. You can have a local history or interest category.

Mistakes sell books in bookstores in a way you can't sell books on lists, physical or digital. You will sell more fiction if you occasionally put the novels next to the same author's work in non-fiction sections. Put something erotic in the parenting or cooking section. A dated home repair book in the antiques and collectibles section, or with the grilling books. A Bobbi Brown beauty book with the yoga books. What a mistake, the customer thinks as she picks up the book to page through it. 

Create flows from window to tables to shelves to other categories. If a bestseller is tied in to a movie, similar subjects may sell more if located close by.

Years ago a used and rare dealer I knew bought a large lot from another dealer who was closing down after many years. He thought he was getting mostly literature by authors of the Hudson River Valley, and books about the area, but, due to a mix-up, it turned out to be a few thousand books on automobile repair. There were manuals, annuals, catalogs, paint swatch books… All were dated, some by decades. This was not what he had bargained for. He had overpaid for books which he was sure were unsellable.

He left them in cartons in his storeroom for several months, but when an ice storm caused a leak in the roof, he put everything onto shelves in the store and sorted it out as best he could. He now had a large auto repair category. For a few more weeks the books pretty much sat there, being ignored, a few selling online. Then one of his customers turned out to be the owner of a car repair shop in a nearby town. This guy had been shopping at my friend's store for years, buying crime fiction off the sale table. He bought about 10 items from the automobile section that day. Over the next few weeks his mechanics started coming in, buying a few books at a time. They then brought their kids to shop the children's section. Eventually a collector showed up and bought most of the really old stuff.

There is no way to know what will happen when you buy used books, and no way to know how well you know your customers until you put something in front of them you thought would never sell.

I got turned around again. What began about categories became more about merchandising. But categories are a big part of it all, including how I love and understand what I do in this business.

Bestsellers for Friday, March 8, 2013

ISBN	Title	Author	Publisher	Format	Net
9780312426088	Good German	Kanon, Joseph	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.25
9780312427740	Tree Of Smoke	Johnson, Denis	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.50
9780312427771	Quiet Girl	Hoeg, Peter	Picador	PB	$ 3.50
9780312428020	Snake Stone	Goodwin, Jason	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.25
9780312428433	Atmospheric Disturbances	Galchen, Rivka	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.25
9780312428501	Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947-1963	Sontag, Susan	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.50
9780312428792	Welding With Children	Gautreaux, Tim	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.25
9780312429416	Shadow And Light	Rabb, Jonathan	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.50
9780312429973	Subject Steve	Lipsyte, Sam	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.25
9780312572938	Ilustrado: A Novel	Syjuco, Miguel	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.75
9780312655341	Box 21: A Novel	Roslund,	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.50
9780312680633	Ask: A Novel	Lipsyte, Sam	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.50
9780312680695	Positively 4Th Street: Lives & Times Of Joan Baez,	Hajdu, Dabid	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 4.00
9780374531584	House Of Happy Endings	Garis, Leslie	Fsg	Tradepaper	$ 3.25
9780374531669	Against Happiness	Wilson, Eric	Fsg	PB	$ 3.00
9780374531942	Carrying The Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys	Collins, Michael	Fsg	Tradepaper	$ 3.75
9780374532444	American Original: Supreme Court Justice Antonin	Biskupic, Joan	Farrar	Tradepaper	$ 3.75
9780374532666	Pierce The Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007	Cole, Henri	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.50
9780374532888	Crimes In Southern Indiana: Stories	Bill, Frank	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.50
9780374533045	Heavenly Questions: Poems	Schnackenberg	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.25
9780374533212	How The West Was Lost	Moyo, Dambisa	Fsg	Tradepaper	$ 3.25
9780756657307	Brain Trainning: Boost Memory, Maximize Mental	DK Publishing	DK Publishing	PB	$ 5.00
9780764133169	Barron's Grade 8 Fcat In Reading & Writing	Battles, Kelly	Barron's	PB	$ 1.50
9780785214113	Leadership Gold: Lessons I've Learned From A Life	Maxwell, John	Thomas Nelson	HC	$ 5.75
9780805083385	Book By Book: Notes On Reading And Life	Dirda, Michael	Holt	Tradepaper	$ 3.50
9780805087307	Retire On Less Than You Think	Brock, Fred	Holt	Tradepaper	$ 3.75
9781250002334	Poser: My Life In Twenty-Three Yoga Poses	Dederer, Claire	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.50
9781250002549	Rawhide Down, Near Assasination Of Reagan	Wiber, Del	Picador	Tradepaper	$ 3.75
9781400203048	Thunder Dog: The True Story	Hingson,	Thomas Nelson	HC	$ 5.00
9781400203574	Beyond Talent: Become Someone Who Gets Extraordinar	Maxwell, John	Thomas Nelson	PB	$ 3.75
9781401601119	Gentleman Gets Dressed Up	Bryan, Curtis	Thomas Nelson	HC	$ 3.25
9781401602345	Here's Your Sign!	Engvall, Bill	Thomas Nelson	PB	$ 3.25
9781401603205	Simply Salads	Chandler,	Thomas Nelson	HC	$ 5.50
9781427212917	Goodnight Trail	Compton, Ralph	Macmillan Audio	Audio CD	$ 3.25
9781554076024	Ultimate Student Cookbook: From Chicken To Chili	Goodall,	Firefly	PB	$ 3.25
9781555975425	New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, And	Leader, Darian	Graywolf Press	Trade Paper	$ 3.75
9781555975654	Report: A Novel	Kane, Jessica	Graywolf	Tradepaper	$ 3.50
9781595547132	Long Way Home ( The Homelanders)	Klavan, Andrew	Thomas Nelson	HC	$ 3.00
9781595550347	Fyodor Dostoevsky (Christian Encounters Series)	Leithart, Peter	Thomas Nelson	PB	$ 2.50
9781595551344	Boom	Freiberg, Kevin	Thomas Nelson	PB	$ 3.25
9781595551498	It's All About Him: Finding The Love Of My Life	Jackson, Denise	Thomas Nelson	PB	$ 3.50
9781595553553	Pershing: Commander Of The Great War	Perry, John	Thomas Nelson	HC	$ 4.50
9781603208178	Life: Picture Puzzle Across America	Life Magazine	Life Mag'	PB	$ 1.75

Believe it or not, my bestseller this week was 9781400203048 Thunder Dog: The True Story

I sold over 1,000 copies.

Go figure

#2: Beck Diet Solution

#3: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (not on the list above because I did not sell any yesterday).

Skids

Do you know what skids are? If you don't, ask me, otherwise, check out the list below and let me know if you want details on any of these. I have manifests for some of them.

Description	Available	Qty Per Skid	Price Per Book	Price Per Skid
Assorted Returns	864	864	$ 0.92	$ 797.99
Assorted Returns	730	730	$ 1.03	$ 753.97
Assorted Returns	732	732	$ 1.13	$ 826.04
Assorted Returns	732	732	$ 1.14	$ 833.69
Assorted Returns	597	597	$ 1.11	$ 659.79
Assorted Returns	698	698	$ 1.07	$ 749.20
Assorted Returns	571	571	$ 1.32	$ 754.61
Assorted Returns	553	553	$ 1.38	$ 762.01
Assorted Returns	699	699	$ 1.10	$ 770.96
Assorted Returns	771	771	$ 1.08	$ 833.83
Assorted Returns	147	147	$ 1.66	$ 244.56
Kids hardcover stickered returns	3834	3834	$ 0.75	$ 2,875.50
Candlewick paperback, approximately 2100 per skid	32000	2000	$ 1.00	$ 2,000.00
Scholastic Color/Activity	3456	3456	$ 0.75	$ 2,592.00
Scholastic Juvy paperback	18000	6000	$ 1.00	$ 6,000.00
Scholastic Mass M/Digest	14000	3500	$ 0.75	$ 2,625.00
ASST RODALE MAIL ORDER MIXED HURTS	608	608	$ 2.00	$ 1,216.00
Wal-Mart Returns Stickered $6.97, all fiction hardcover	614	614	$ 1.25	$ 767.50