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!