One conversation I have with buyers and others is about how so many people no longer respond to email, phone calls, or faxes. This often includes both people in the conversation, which might start with something like, "Did you get the list I sent you last night?"
"Yes, did you get the order I sent you last week?"
Part of the problem is the caller ID effect. Back in the bronze age, before many of you were born, when telephones were connected to wires and cables, before "voice mail," before phones told you who was calling, or at least their number, we would all answer the phone whenever it rang, if we were in the vicinity. We would say "hello," and then conduct whatever business had to be conducted at that moment. The term "phone tag" had not yet been invented. It was a hyper-productive system compared to the current weirdness. Now, call just about anybody, and if they do not pick up (they usually don't) you can be be fairly sure they know you called, or at least they will when they look at their phone, if it's functioning properly, or they will get your message, if you leave one, which you most likely will not, and, hopefully, will remember to call you back later. Unless they were on another call, in which case they often don't know at all that you called since that's one of those glitchy parsecs in the dumb-phone universe. The reason you probably won't leave a message is that few people ever listen to their messages.
There was a buyer, retired a couple of years ago, who had as his greeting, "Feel free to leave a message, but I will never listen to it." He then spelled out his email address. His voice mailbox was always full, so leaving a message was not possible, but he did occasionally call back, especially after the 5th or 6th attempt. He almost never responded to email. He was a pin on the map for most sales reps, so one had to persist and he knew this.
Email is more impacted by the caller ID effect than phone calls. Maybe I should call it the email effect, except that the caller ID problem came first, back when email was still enough of a novelty that everybody answered every message, often at the expense of what they really had to do, such as pay bills and answer the phone. Back then you were not cool if you did not answer email, but you were kind of cool if you let your phone get chock full of voice mail and then return calls once a day, or week. That questionable practice was, and still occasionally is, in the lists of top ten time management tips tucked into the folders handed out at seminars.
My email inbox grows by between 300 to 500 emails per day. It is not humanly possible to answer them all. If it does not fall into the "Customers," "Orders," or "Lists" filters, I may not see it. I am very sorry about this, it is one of my terrible faults, something I work on and struggle with. I do not mean to imply that others are as bad as I, or even close. It has lost me friends and business. But if I have just enough time to put out the fires, enter the orders, and reply to customer questions by the end of every day (you know... 11:59PM), I have no choice. I often chew on more than I can bite off, something else I need to work on, so some areas just plain suffer. Does this sound like you? I hope not, but I'm sure more than a few readers are sadly nodding their disheveled heads. I'm bald so at least I don't have that last problem.
It would be nice if we still lived in the world of assistants and phones with curly cables, not to mention profits, but here we are. When we (we being those of us not working for the biggest companies) had assistants and/or managers and/or support staff that would handle some part of what we had to do to get our jobs done, there was a fantasy promulgated by software engineers that technology would one day free us from those "constraints" and make us much more productive. Now that we have been so freed, very few people have any support at all. You're on your own. Every little facet of your work or anything having to do with your work is something you have to do yourself or it does not get done. As it turns out, we are less productive, but it's too late to reinvent the old world.
You might think this is an old book guy struggling with his lack of organizational, communication, and interpersonal skills, and you would be right. I am crazy bad in these areas, and therefore write with authority. Still, judging by the vast ocean of books, software, seminars, classes, consultants, departments, and companies devoted to time management, this is a major issue for lots of people in business. We are overloaded to the breaking point and it shows.
Most buyers don't have time for networking, reviewing their competition's web sites, experimenting with new products, or reading blogs... well, maybe they have time to read A blog. Lists come in all day from dozens of sources, sales reps visit, and you shop several sites, looking for new arrivals. In addition, you have hundreds of things you do every day that don't come close to adding to your bottom line, you just have to do them, they are part of your profession.
Jack LaLanne was once asked for his secret to long life and good health. He said, "If it tastes good, spit it out." I think the best advice for managing time, which really means managing yourself, is: Whatever you're doing, stop it and go do what you're supposed to be doing. I hope that's buying books from ol' Ben.
(And here I am writing another blog post when I should be selling books.)
(...and if you need me, just put the words "order attached" anywhere in your email... at least I'll know I have a reader)
Monday, December 16, 2013
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Holiday Wrap
December can be a slow time for remainder wholesalers. Their customers have been buying for the holiday shopping season since July and most of the large orders are in by the end of October. November is somewhat busy with last minute rush orders and regular business. Most customers are too busy in December to spend time at their desks placing bargain orders.
Those who have the time and staff to plan ahead are waiting to see the results from the first weeks of the official shopping season before they place their reorders or stock up in areas they did not get enough of. Most just wait for the last week of December or first week of January to start buying again. Those year-end or year-beginning orders can be substantial. For bargain wholesalers, January is often one of the best months, if not the best month, of the year.
December is a good time to go over the numbers, revise forecasts, see what the customers are doing, and think about the past year.
I saw many of my customers expand their businesses in 2013, some adding locations and others moving into larger spaces. A few told me their businesses increased by over 100%. Others went quiet and when I called I discovered they were either out of business or going to close soon. Still, overall, this was a good year for bookstores selling bargain. If I had more internet-only customers I might have a better bead on that category, but the few I have were up a bit or flat.
It is glad tidings indeed that more bookstores are attracting more customers and thriving. After all the gloom and doom in the trade press over the last couple of years, as well as some laughable commentary coming from outside the trade, nothing beats talking to booksellers, smiling and nodding and wondering what that was all about. There are new bookstores opening in most markets. If you followed this blog over the last 3 years you know that I always doubted the doubters. People who love to read have a very long way to go before they give up on real books, and the younger the reader the greater the trend.
This is also the time of year I think most about what I could have done better, what I learned, what I hope to accomplish over the next 12 months, and how lucky I am to have my patient, kind customers who stick with me through thick and thin. If I had to pick one area where I need the most improvement it would be focus, and what I will focus on most over the next 12 months is bringing my customers the best books I can find.
Thank you to all of my customers for a great 2013. Here is to 2014, and an even better year of bookselling.
Those who have the time and staff to plan ahead are waiting to see the results from the first weeks of the official shopping season before they place their reorders or stock up in areas they did not get enough of. Most just wait for the last week of December or first week of January to start buying again. Those year-end or year-beginning orders can be substantial. For bargain wholesalers, January is often one of the best months, if not the best month, of the year.
December is a good time to go over the numbers, revise forecasts, see what the customers are doing, and think about the past year.
I saw many of my customers expand their businesses in 2013, some adding locations and others moving into larger spaces. A few told me their businesses increased by over 100%. Others went quiet and when I called I discovered they were either out of business or going to close soon. Still, overall, this was a good year for bookstores selling bargain. If I had more internet-only customers I might have a better bead on that category, but the few I have were up a bit or flat.
It is glad tidings indeed that more bookstores are attracting more customers and thriving. After all the gloom and doom in the trade press over the last couple of years, as well as some laughable commentary coming from outside the trade, nothing beats talking to booksellers, smiling and nodding and wondering what that was all about. There are new bookstores opening in most markets. If you followed this blog over the last 3 years you know that I always doubted the doubters. People who love to read have a very long way to go before they give up on real books, and the younger the reader the greater the trend.
This is also the time of year I think most about what I could have done better, what I learned, what I hope to accomplish over the next 12 months, and how lucky I am to have my patient, kind customers who stick with me through thick and thin. If I had to pick one area where I need the most improvement it would be focus, and what I will focus on most over the next 12 months is bringing my customers the best books I can find.
Thank you to all of my customers for a great 2013. Here is to 2014, and an even better year of bookselling.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Independent Means
Several years ago I was involved in the founding and management of the Independent Booksellers Consortium, a group of bookstores who joined to form a cooperative buying and information sharing venture. The first thing they wanted to do together was buy remainders.
We quickly discovered that, if there is one area in which independents are more independent than others, it's remainder buying. Lists would go out to the member stores and come back with different selections for every bookstore. There was very little overlap. The buyers know their customers and buy for them, not for customers of another bookstore in another state. One of the IBC board members at the time was also the buyer for his bookstores (he had 7) and had a hard time believing that the buyer for a certain other store, located half a continent away, did not also want to order any of a title he wanted 50 copies of. He had an even harder time believing that no other buyer in the group wanted that title. It was a learning experience.
Once we figured out that remainder buying was not going to be the glue that held the organization together, we developed new goals and IBC became a great place for its members to work together to improve and enjoy their businesses. Twenty years later, they are still going strong. (If you would like to see a list of IBC member stores, go to my "Great Bookstores" page here. You will find the link listed between Honey & Wax Booksellers and Jim Reed Books.)
Being an independent bookstore means buying and selling independently, and when it comes to remainders and bargain books, very independently. You have all sorts of systems to help you buy frontlist and backlist and, inevitably, those systems create buying scenarios that homogenize you to a degree. You are not quite independent when you are buying the latest releases. When you buy remainders, however, you are focused entirely on your bookstore, your community, your customers. One look at my daily bestsellers list says it all: Most of them will not sell, ever, to most of my customers, yet some of my customers buy up to hundreds of copies of those titles at a time, or they would not be on the list. A high proportion of those titles sell out during those sales that put them on the list. And the customers these bestsellers represent are not necessarily frequent buyers. Many only buy between four and six times per year.
Most of my regular customers, that is, those who buy more than once per month, are small bookstores. Their orders are frequently the minimum or a little higher, averaging about $325. They tend to buy fairly quickly, ordering from lists sent to them in the morning by the end of that day or within a few days. They buy 2s, 3s, 5s, sometimes 10s, and there are usually between 20 and 30 lines per order. Most of their orders contain a few titles that no other bookstore buys, and they reorder some of these unique items over and over.
When visiting bookstores, this wide spectrum becomes more apparent. Lots of booksellers put their bargain books in one area of their store, like a department, some on tables, stacked face up, some spine up. Some display them in bookcases, spine out for the shorts and singles, face out for the larger quantities. Used bookstores tend to mix remainders in with their regular stock on their shelves, and more and more trade bookstores are doing this as well. Some bookstores do all of the above.
If you're looking for the best way to do bargain, the most important thing is to pay attention to what works in your store, for your customers. Some bookstores actually put their bargain department in their (nicely appointed!) basements -- you know, the bargain basement -- others have found this completely kills their sales. Don't give up right away if your first month or two of bargain sales are not what you had hoped. Mix it up, change your approach, go from tables to shelves, or shelves to carts, or whatever makes your customers happy.
We quickly discovered that, if there is one area in which independents are more independent than others, it's remainder buying. Lists would go out to the member stores and come back with different selections for every bookstore. There was very little overlap. The buyers know their customers and buy for them, not for customers of another bookstore in another state. One of the IBC board members at the time was also the buyer for his bookstores (he had 7) and had a hard time believing that the buyer for a certain other store, located half a continent away, did not also want to order any of a title he wanted 50 copies of. He had an even harder time believing that no other buyer in the group wanted that title. It was a learning experience.
Once we figured out that remainder buying was not going to be the glue that held the organization together, we developed new goals and IBC became a great place for its members to work together to improve and enjoy their businesses. Twenty years later, they are still going strong. (If you would like to see a list of IBC member stores, go to my "Great Bookstores" page here. You will find the link listed between Honey & Wax Booksellers and Jim Reed Books.)
Being an independent bookstore means buying and selling independently, and when it comes to remainders and bargain books, very independently. You have all sorts of systems to help you buy frontlist and backlist and, inevitably, those systems create buying scenarios that homogenize you to a degree. You are not quite independent when you are buying the latest releases. When you buy remainders, however, you are focused entirely on your bookstore, your community, your customers. One look at my daily bestsellers list says it all: Most of them will not sell, ever, to most of my customers, yet some of my customers buy up to hundreds of copies of those titles at a time, or they would not be on the list. A high proportion of those titles sell out during those sales that put them on the list. And the customers these bestsellers represent are not necessarily frequent buyers. Many only buy between four and six times per year.
Most of my regular customers, that is, those who buy more than once per month, are small bookstores. Their orders are frequently the minimum or a little higher, averaging about $325. They tend to buy fairly quickly, ordering from lists sent to them in the morning by the end of that day or within a few days. They buy 2s, 3s, 5s, sometimes 10s, and there are usually between 20 and 30 lines per order. Most of their orders contain a few titles that no other bookstore buys, and they reorder some of these unique items over and over.
When visiting bookstores, this wide spectrum becomes more apparent. Lots of booksellers put their bargain books in one area of their store, like a department, some on tables, stacked face up, some spine up. Some display them in bookcases, spine out for the shorts and singles, face out for the larger quantities. Used bookstores tend to mix remainders in with their regular stock on their shelves, and more and more trade bookstores are doing this as well. Some bookstores do all of the above.
If you're looking for the best way to do bargain, the most important thing is to pay attention to what works in your store, for your customers. Some bookstores actually put their bargain department in their (nicely appointed!) basements -- you know, the bargain basement -- others have found this completely kills their sales. Don't give up right away if your first month or two of bargain sales are not what you had hoped. Mix it up, change your approach, go from tables to shelves, or shelves to carts, or whatever makes your customers happy.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Step-by-Step Instructions for Remainder and Bargain Book Buying
A few weeks ago I was showing Wordsworth Classics at the New England Independent Booksellers Association (NEIBA) annual fall conference in Providence. On Sunday, October 6, two days before the trade show portion, I was on a panel discussing how to to use remainders and bargain books to grow your business, make your customers happy, and have fun doing it. I was joined on the panel by the organizer, Vicky Titcomb, owner of Titcomb's Bookshop in East Sandwich, Massachusetts, Alie Hess, buyer at Brookline Booksmith, in Brookline, Massachusetts, and Henry Zook, owner of Book Court in Brooklyn, New York.
We had a healthy turnout, all booksellers, some owners, some buyers, some both. We talked about planning, buying, merchandising, and managing remainders and bargain books. Vicky had lugged in about 200 pounds (100 per shoulder bag) of her favorite examples. We took turns at guessing prices and talking about sales potential and merchandising ideas.
After our presentation there was time for questions, and one of those questions illustrated what is, for me, the reason for being:
"What is the step-by-step process for buying remainders?"
Alie summed it up best:
1. Order them.
I'm not sure what it is that makes this part of the industry so inscrutable for the uninitiated. Maybe there is a fear of the non-returnable. Or maybe it's the layers of Edelweiss, Ingram, industry data, and customer service between the bookseller and the buy for new book purchasing, whereas with remainders and bargain books, it's pretty much just you and the books.
I am working on a post about overload, and one of the ways in which I am overloaded today is that, like my last post and the one before that, I am writing in my hotel room at a trade show. The one I am at now is CIROBE, the granddaddy of remainder shows, and I got completely caught off guard by the demand and have been standing, or sitting, for 8 hours straight, 2 days in a row, inputting orders. The customers are bringing me stacks of books, I scan one into my database, and the customer says whatever the number is they want, then it's on to the next. This is my experience at trade shows. At a busy show this can go on, non-stop, for two or three days in a row.
These customers are not second guessing themselves. They know their businesses, their customers, and basically what they need to bring in. There is not much science to it. They place their orders, leave sheets or cards with their store addresses, credit information, shipping preferences, and move on to the next vendor.
This is admittedly a tight bunch. There are too few booksellers in the world, and far fewer buy remainders and bargain books. Therein lies the mystery. There are so many doing such a good job of it, making good money, day in and day out, and for others it seems to be a puzzle.
Don't think too hard about it, don't look for reasons not to get in. Order them and they will come.
Also see my post at http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/2014/04/value-beyond-bargain.html.
In case you were actually looking for instructions on how to order from little old me...
HOW TO ORDER:
By Email, Using the Excel Lists I Send You as Order Forms:
Save the Excel lists where you will remember the location (desktop or a file folder) and then enter your order quantities in the "order qty" column. When you are done, save again and close, then send to me as an attachment to an email.
By Fax:
Write your order on paper and fax me at (800) 576-2703 (that only comes to me). If you create your order in the Excel sheet as described above, you can sort by quantity ordered and then just print that bit and fax it to me. Make sure to include enough contact info so I know who the order is from.
By Email Without Attachments:
You can also copy and paste ISBNs, titles, and quantities into the body of an email. Orders are okay without titles, just ISBNs, however I prefer at least a keyword or two from the title to make sure I’m getting it right.
By Paper Mail:
If you like to help keep the Post Office in business, mail your orders to me at PO Box 8143, Pittsburgh, PA 15217.
If you do decide to mail via the Post Office, I will send you postage stamps to cover your cost, up to $5.50, or the current Priority Mail rate.
We had a healthy turnout, all booksellers, some owners, some buyers, some both. We talked about planning, buying, merchandising, and managing remainders and bargain books. Vicky had lugged in about 200 pounds (100 per shoulder bag) of her favorite examples. We took turns at guessing prices and talking about sales potential and merchandising ideas.
After our presentation there was time for questions, and one of those questions illustrated what is, for me, the reason for being:
"What is the step-by-step process for buying remainders?"
Alie summed it up best:
1. Order them.
I'm not sure what it is that makes this part of the industry so inscrutable for the uninitiated. Maybe there is a fear of the non-returnable. Or maybe it's the layers of Edelweiss, Ingram, industry data, and customer service between the bookseller and the buy for new book purchasing, whereas with remainders and bargain books, it's pretty much just you and the books.
I am working on a post about overload, and one of the ways in which I am overloaded today is that, like my last post and the one before that, I am writing in my hotel room at a trade show. The one I am at now is CIROBE, the granddaddy of remainder shows, and I got completely caught off guard by the demand and have been standing, or sitting, for 8 hours straight, 2 days in a row, inputting orders. The customers are bringing me stacks of books, I scan one into my database, and the customer says whatever the number is they want, then it's on to the next. This is my experience at trade shows. At a busy show this can go on, non-stop, for two or three days in a row.
These customers are not second guessing themselves. They know their businesses, their customers, and basically what they need to bring in. There is not much science to it. They place their orders, leave sheets or cards with their store addresses, credit information, shipping preferences, and move on to the next vendor.
This is admittedly a tight bunch. There are too few booksellers in the world, and far fewer buy remainders and bargain books. Therein lies the mystery. There are so many doing such a good job of it, making good money, day in and day out, and for others it seems to be a puzzle.
Don't think too hard about it, don't look for reasons not to get in. Order them and they will come.
In case you were actually looking for instructions on how to order from little old me...
HOW TO ORDER:
By Email, Using the Excel Lists I Send You as Order Forms:
Save the Excel lists where you will remember the location (desktop or a file folder) and then enter your order quantities in the "order qty" column. When you are done, save again and close, then send to me as an attachment to an email.
By Fax:
Write your order on paper and fax me at (800) 576-2703 (that only comes to me). If you create your order in the Excel sheet as described above, you can sort by quantity ordered and then just print that bit and fax it to me. Make sure to include enough contact info so I know who the order is from.
By Email Without Attachments:
You can also copy and paste ISBNs, titles, and quantities into the body of an email. Orders are okay without titles, just ISBNs, however I prefer at least a keyword or two from the title to make sure I’m getting it right.
By Paper Mail:
If you like to help keep the Post Office in business, mail your orders to me at PO Box 8143, Pittsburgh, PA 15217.
If you do decide to mail via the Post Office, I will send you postage stamps to cover your cost, up to $5.50, or the current Priority Mail rate.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
On Browsing
It's been a while since I posted about real books vs e-books. When I started blogging I had a long pent up rant going on regarding the trade press, which seemed to be uncritically accepting the approaching dominance of e-readers and various other non-book books. Between those first posts and a NACS poll some months later showing that 70% of college aged people prefer their books the old-fashioned way, I felt the need to write shifting to other points on the bookselling compass.
Then, a few days ago I was watching my 25 year old son reading the dictionary and I realized I needed to expand on some of those thoughts.
Starting out, I should clarify "reading the dictionary:"
Open a dictionary (I recommend the American Heritage, 5th Edition) to any interesting word and read a few pages without putting it back down. My mother used to read dictionaries, cover to cover. She was an author, as is my son, but my son didn't spend enough time with her to pick up such habits, so I think it must be a genetic trait.
That is partly humor, partly a gut feeling. There is that old stele/clay tablet/papyrus/paper-mind connection, the physical surface on which are printed or carved the words we read and take into our minds as our own thoughts. These thoughts and ideas may be communicable on screens, but apparently to some lesser degree. Why else do scientists and engineers of all persuasions, people who use their minds as tools to an extent most of us cannot imagine, still paper their computers and walls with sticky notes? Their offices are often crowded with books, walls sporting white boards covered with scrawls old and new. Web developers will often whip out tiny notebooks of the 3-for-a-dollar variety, when they are taking notes in a meeting or just capturing thoughts for later applications. I have buyers who never respond to email of any kind, but will order from paper mailings. Most new parents still instinctively surround their children with real books, making sure they learn to read from them rather than from screens.
When we browse through any book, we have a more open, curious, comfortable mind if the book we are browsing through is real. E-books are made for reading straight through, but they are harder to browse, and the experience is less fulfilling than with real books. This may be lost on people who have never read real books, but many people who read now who have not done so much in the past have often begun reading because of the allure of these gadgets. Some will become readers of real books due to this difference. There is a physical interaction, tactile and visual, with a real book that does not have an equivalent in any of the digital reading experiences.
Yes, I've made my living for more than three decades by buying and selling books. Nothing about being a bargain book dealer, buyer, or wholesaler transforms to e-anything. I am 100% biased. But when we buy and sell (or read) real books, we are doing something that has been done, in one way or another, for thousands of years. Some of us buy and sell new books, some used, and all of us are dealing in objects which transcend their status as objects. They might be new or they might be tens or hundreds of years old.
This goes beyond the obvious practical advantages of real books over e-books. You might have 100 books on your e-reader, but drop it once the wrong way and it's all gone. Sure, buy another of the expensive, fragile electronic devices and try to reload it with everything you had on your old one, but what a pain. Real books are there, beautiful and inviting, on your shelves until you want to read them, and if you drop them, be it off the side of your bed or out a third story window onto a concrete sidewalk, you won't think anything of it, you will just pick it up and start reading where you left off.
And about those 100 books, or whatever, loaded on these things. You might read more than one at a time, but not often. Most will be lost in the ether. They're there, but not inviting you over to the table or bookcase; they are out of sight, out of mind.
I often focus on how the shopping experience for e-books, or shopping for real books on the Internet, is so different from shopping in a bookstore. As customers browse in a bookstore, they see books which they did not know they wanted until they see them. They might not have even known they were interested in the category until they see the stack as they pass through your store on the way back to the children's section. This is the ideal situation for bargain books.
Now, looking at the experience of reading, I find the same thing to be true, only more so. There is no browsing a dictionary, or any other book, on an e-reader. You might search or scroll, but browsing with a real book, a mindful and, at the same time absent minded exercise, involves riffling through the pages, stopping at a place just because.
There was a bargain bookstore that closed back in the early 2000's. The owner told me she felt her sales dropping since the advent of search engines. People's minds, she said, were now so tuned to focus on a specific book (or text string) that they were looking for only that one item when they walked through her door. They had stopped coming in just to go slowly through the store, finding something that appealed to them at that moment. Impulse buys have driven the bargain book business for years, and she was describing a change in this behavior, possibly due to search engines taking over how we think.
Yet there are still bargain bookstores, thriving and growing. They do many things right, including moving stacks around, doing big new arrivals displays or tables. They buy wide and shallow, never relying too much on too few niches or titles, never assuming they know everything about what their customers want. They make it easy to shop their stores in every way they can, but they also make it rewarding and fun to browse.
Browse, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is probably from obsolete French broust, young shoot.
I suppose that was from grazing, sometimes a synonym of browsing, and young shoots make for the best grazing. But, for me, I think of the fragile new path one takes when browsing through books or bookstores, almost finding that looked for title, or even finding it, then finding something that moves one in a new direction, maybe for life.
Since I looked up browse on AH's online version, being in my Providence hotel room before NEIBA starts, I could not see what came before or after browse, and that young shoot ended there.
For more about these and other thoughts, please check out this page:
http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/p/cool-reads.html
Then, a few days ago I was watching my 25 year old son reading the dictionary and I realized I needed to expand on some of those thoughts.
Starting out, I should clarify "reading the dictionary:"
Open a dictionary (I recommend the American Heritage, 5th Edition) to any interesting word and read a few pages without putting it back down. My mother used to read dictionaries, cover to cover. She was an author, as is my son, but my son didn't spend enough time with her to pick up such habits, so I think it must be a genetic trait.
That is partly humor, partly a gut feeling. There is that old stele/clay tablet/papyrus/paper-mind connection, the physical surface on which are printed or carved the words we read and take into our minds as our own thoughts. These thoughts and ideas may be communicable on screens, but apparently to some lesser degree. Why else do scientists and engineers of all persuasions, people who use their minds as tools to an extent most of us cannot imagine, still paper their computers and walls with sticky notes? Their offices are often crowded with books, walls sporting white boards covered with scrawls old and new. Web developers will often whip out tiny notebooks of the 3-for-a-dollar variety, when they are taking notes in a meeting or just capturing thoughts for later applications. I have buyers who never respond to email of any kind, but will order from paper mailings. Most new parents still instinctively surround their children with real books, making sure they learn to read from them rather than from screens.
When we browse through any book, we have a more open, curious, comfortable mind if the book we are browsing through is real. E-books are made for reading straight through, but they are harder to browse, and the experience is less fulfilling than with real books. This may be lost on people who have never read real books, but many people who read now who have not done so much in the past have often begun reading because of the allure of these gadgets. Some will become readers of real books due to this difference. There is a physical interaction, tactile and visual, with a real book that does not have an equivalent in any of the digital reading experiences.
Yes, I've made my living for more than three decades by buying and selling books. Nothing about being a bargain book dealer, buyer, or wholesaler transforms to e-anything. I am 100% biased. But when we buy and sell (or read) real books, we are doing something that has been done, in one way or another, for thousands of years. Some of us buy and sell new books, some used, and all of us are dealing in objects which transcend their status as objects. They might be new or they might be tens or hundreds of years old.
This goes beyond the obvious practical advantages of real books over e-books. You might have 100 books on your e-reader, but drop it once the wrong way and it's all gone. Sure, buy another of the expensive, fragile electronic devices and try to reload it with everything you had on your old one, but what a pain. Real books are there, beautiful and inviting, on your shelves until you want to read them, and if you drop them, be it off the side of your bed or out a third story window onto a concrete sidewalk, you won't think anything of it, you will just pick it up and start reading where you left off.
And about those 100 books, or whatever, loaded on these things. You might read more than one at a time, but not often. Most will be lost in the ether. They're there, but not inviting you over to the table or bookcase; they are out of sight, out of mind.
I often focus on how the shopping experience for e-books, or shopping for real books on the Internet, is so different from shopping in a bookstore. As customers browse in a bookstore, they see books which they did not know they wanted until they see them. They might not have even known they were interested in the category until they see the stack as they pass through your store on the way back to the children's section. This is the ideal situation for bargain books.
Now, looking at the experience of reading, I find the same thing to be true, only more so. There is no browsing a dictionary, or any other book, on an e-reader. You might search or scroll, but browsing with a real book, a mindful and, at the same time absent minded exercise, involves riffling through the pages, stopping at a place just because.
There was a bargain bookstore that closed back in the early 2000's. The owner told me she felt her sales dropping since the advent of search engines. People's minds, she said, were now so tuned to focus on a specific book (or text string) that they were looking for only that one item when they walked through her door. They had stopped coming in just to go slowly through the store, finding something that appealed to them at that moment. Impulse buys have driven the bargain book business for years, and she was describing a change in this behavior, possibly due to search engines taking over how we think.
Yet there are still bargain bookstores, thriving and growing. They do many things right, including moving stacks around, doing big new arrivals displays or tables. They buy wide and shallow, never relying too much on too few niches or titles, never assuming they know everything about what their customers want. They make it easy to shop their stores in every way they can, but they also make it rewarding and fun to browse.
Browse, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is probably from obsolete French broust, young shoot.
I suppose that was from grazing, sometimes a synonym of browsing, and young shoots make for the best grazing. But, for me, I think of the fragile new path one takes when browsing through books or bookstores, almost finding that looked for title, or even finding it, then finding something that moves one in a new direction, maybe for life.
Since I looked up browse on AH's online version, being in my Providence hotel room before NEIBA starts, I could not see what came before or after browse, and that young shoot ended there.
For more about these and other thoughts, please check out this page:
http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/p/cool-reads.html
Friday, September 13, 2013
Meltdowns, Thank Yous, and a Response to a Previous Post
It
was great seeing about 30 of my closest friends in San Francisco on September
5th. I brought Nationwide Book Industries' samples, and joined with Armadillo,
Bargain Book Wholesale, and Book Country at the Marriott Marquis to show about
20,000 samples to booksellers in a mini-trade show. We arrived on Tuesday, set up on Wednesday, sold books on Thursday, and flew back home on Friday.
On
Tuesday afternoon, just after arriving in my hotel room, I discovered that my
computer had stopped working. There was an arrow in the middle of a black
screen, and I could move it with the mouse pad, and that was all I could do
until I brought it to PC Doctor in Pittsburgh a week later and got the hard
drive replaced.
So
there I was, unable to enter or process orders, or send lists out for my other
clients, not to mention keep up with my blog. There were a number of customers
coming to this show who I had not seen for years, who I was looking forward to
working with again, as well as customers who had not bought from me directly
before, and I wanted to be at my best, not my worst.
My
wife and partner in bookselling, Gale, had produced a color catalog of new
arrivals, books which had arrived in quantity at NBI after the samples had
shipped, and printed lots of paper order forms and lists before I left, so I
had a good old school backup in place. I had customers put sticky notes on
samples they wanted quantities of, and they wrote their quantities and initials
on the notes. I quickly got behind, of course, and went from stack to stack,
writing ISBNs, titles, and quantities on the paper order forms. This is the way
things were done before the age of scanning everything into databases, and it
works, however those were also the days of having more than one person working
a show, and it is almost impossible to hand sell, look for special requests, or
talk and catch up with old friends when all you can do is write. It also
creates a backlog of samples which are stacked and appended with sticky notes,
as other customers miss them or must be reminded to only borrow from those
stacks, not take. Some samples would have multiple sticky notes as different
buyers would go through each others' stacks. One wrote a "2nd" on his
to make sure I knew he had been behind the first buyer. He did not want to get
anything if it meant the other buyer was shorted. Booksellers are such good
people. You know who you are!
Speaking
of good people, two of my favorites are Gayle Shanks and Bob Sommer who own
Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona. They placed their order with me
(great order, by the way) and went on to buy from everybody else. About half
way through the day, they came back to me, saying they were leaving early. Bob
then gave me his computer, showed me how to get online, opened a spreadsheet,
and said I could ship it back to him when I no longer needed it.
I
don't care how many spare computers you have lying about, think about all that
it means to leave your computer with somebody else, all that is exposed and
possibly compromised, work that you have done that might be lost. This was one
of those moments in life when one realizes that one is truly not alone, that
humans are not such a bad lot after all, and that Bob Sommer is a saint. When
they award the Nobel Prize For Bookselling, he's got my vote.
Thank
you Bob.
Another
piece of that trip I feel very thankful for was getting to spend time with a buyer
who I count among my closest friends. I am never able to sell much to him, as he is a big pin on the bargain buying map, hence closely guarded by the house reps, so we get together when we can and
catch up with each other. It was in San Francisco that he told me that he reads
this blog whenever I post, and thinks of it as an inspiration. He hopes I write
a history of the remainder market here or even as a book. I told him it would
have a readership of about 20 people, but he thinks it is a more broadly
interesting history than I give it credit for.
I
wonder if he took pity on me during my computer breakdown panic attack, or if
it was a spontaneous barrage of positive energy, but it worked, and I felt much
better after that conversation, and still bask in it now.
So
thank you too, and you definitely know who you are!
Now,
about that response to my previous post:
Because of my computer problems I could not write a post in
time to make that week's edition of Bargain Book News, so I asked them to
use a post I had written between their editions, but not the latest. It is about a
small show which took place in Boston in August and the fact that buyers from
Asia had made the trip while booksellers from a few blocks away did not. If you
would like to read that post, here is a link to it, which I hope works:
I
received a well-thought out response to this post, via email, from one of my
regular customers. I asked him his permission to use his words in a further
post, and he said yes, so that's what I am doing here. I'm breaking up his
email into separate points and putting my responses between them. I am labeling
his words as "Customer" and mine as "BA:"
Customer:
I'll
tell you why I stopped going to shows. There are two major reasons.
1. When
I first started going to CIROBE, 20 years ago, I would get catalogs from
various remainder dealers once or twice a month. When I went to CIROBE, the
books would be fresh. Most of the books on display had not been in the
catalog, or were in the catalog that was so new that they had not been mailed
out yet. The best books sold off immediately, if I wanted a shot at them, I had
to be at CIROBE.
The
internet changed this. I get email lists several times a week.
BA:
Yes, and
you order almost immediately upon receiving them, thank you very much!
Customer:
The best
books are sold off within hours of the list going out. Most of the remainder
houses sent me the list of what they were bringing to CIROBE the week before
the show. I go to the show and essentially see the books that nobody had
bought: a complete reversal of the way things used to be.
BA:
Which is
why it is so important to buy early from the lists, as you do.
This
"good stuff being gone before it starts" is one of the hardest
realities of bargain trade shows. If and when you do go to shows, always make
an appointment with your sales rep. At least your rep then knows you are
coming, and when, and should make sure that you see whatever is best for you to
see. More great stuff makes it to shows than you think, but it has to be pulled
from the haystack by people who know where it is.
One more
thing to look for are new arrivals. Sales folk often have boxes of samples
shipped at the last minute, books which did not make the deadline for the big
sample shipments. And one more one more thing: Watch for jacket kits. If you
see there are cartons or file folders of dust jackets in a booth it often means
this is where the shortest quantities are, which are often the best titles.
Customer:
2.
Scale. I've got a 3500 square foot store. But I've only got one
location. So this limits me on what I can buy.
Numerous
reps had minimum orders that were just too large for me to consider. It's not
that I don't make real orders. It's that their minimums were designed for
chain stores.
BA:
I find
that the minimum problem is not what it used to be. Back in the old days there
were some truly absurd minimums designed, you are correct, to keep all but the
biggest buyers away. Not only have those wholesalers long gone out of business,
but the buyers they were in business to serve are mostly gone. The bottom line
is, if you think a minimum is too high for you, just ask. Especially you, sir,
who everybody knows and loves, but also any customer trying to make bargain
work. If you show up, you have a leg up, and you may find the suppliers
appreciate that effort.
Customer:
Further,
I had to figure the cost of going v. what I got out of the place. By the time
all was said and done I was spending close to $1000 to go to the show, airfare,
hotel, show fees, meals, etc. And I loose a week from the shop, which
always included a busy weekend. If I was lucky, I'd spend $5,000 with the hopes
of doubling my money. More often it was closer to $3,000. Not
because I could not afford to buy more inventory, but because there was
not enough good material or because it was priced too high for my market [I
stopped buying imports because the "wholesale" price was not very
different from my retail]. My time and money were better spent elsewhere than
to spend a week spending $4,000 hoping to sell the books for $6000.
BA:
The
financial side is the hardest for me to argue. Unfortunately you are probably
right. Booksellers of all stripes work on tight margins and if your volume does
not justify the away time or the results, there is not much I can say to the
contrary, especially for someone like you, who is so attentive to the lists and
buys so regularly without going to the shows.
However,
regarding my post to which you responded, this was a show in the middle of
Boston, yards and blocks from booksellers who did not attend. There was
considerable effort and expense by the sponsoring wholesalers, World
Publications Group and Book Enterprises, as well as the other exhibitors, to
make sure it was great just for the local booksellers, and to avoid some of
these issues. Newest and freshest stock was on display. There were no travel
expenses, or very little.
It was
still a great show for the vendors and for the booksellers who did attend, just
should have been better attended by the folks it was created for.
Customer:
I also
should note that I wrote up far more orders than that. But a
large number were never filled because the wholesaler did not pull display
copies when they ran out of inventory. So I wasted a lot of time filling
out orders that were never going to be filled because the entire lot was sold
to B&N in a special preview they were given before the show opened.
BA:
This is
a big issue for the sales staff at the booths. There is not time enough to weed
out the o/s titles until a break in the action and that often does not come
until after the show closes on the first day. Before it opens on the second day
is when the weeding often happens, and it is just too late. We need to work on
that.
Another
part of this problem is that lists are being ordered from and sales reps are
visiting customers in all parts of the world while the show is on, and if
something sells out off site it is often not known by the sales staff at the
show until they get a chance to download their inventory.
Customer:
I've
talked to other bookstore owners, people who used to go to CIROBE every year,
who have stopped going to trade shows for essentially the same reasons.
BA:
Remember
the first several CIROBEs? There would be a large pack of buyers waiting at the
doors before the show opened, and when it did open, they would run in goups to
the most desirable booths. Yes, run, flat out.
Those
days are behind us, but the shows are still important and booksellers should
still attend them. If it does not make as much business sense as it once did to
go to buy for half a year's bargain sales, go for one or two days. Meet new
suppliers, hash out arrangements with old ones, say, regarding minimums. Or
backorders. Or returns. Just being there makes you more important to the
wholesalers, and more so as time goes by.
Customer:
Anyway,
that's my 2 cents.
BA:
Priceless,
thank you.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Happy Pre-Hallothankshanuchristmanza Year
Here they come. The winter holidays ended yesterday and they start today. Pick a day, any day.
When I started in this business, Halloween was a zero on the sales chart, at least in the market I was buying for, and Thanksgiving was just Black Friday Eve. Now they are two more holidays that contribute to my sales in a bigger way every year, right behind the major winter holidays. And the buyers started buying last month.
I'm sending lists of holiday titles, including stuff that just sells better in the coming months than at other times, so let me know if I've missed you or you want to receive a particular list.
Not to belabor the obvious, but keep in mind:
When I started in this business, Halloween was a zero on the sales chart, at least in the market I was buying for, and Thanksgiving was just Black Friday Eve. Now they are two more holidays that contribute to my sales in a bigger way every year, right behind the major winter holidays. And the buyers started buying last month.
I'm sending lists of holiday titles, including stuff that just sells better in the coming months than at other times, so let me know if I've missed you or you want to receive a particular list.
Not to belabor the obvious, but keep in mind:
- Halloween will take place right in the middle of CIROBE* this year. Buy those pumpkin cookbooks and Charlie Brown & The Big Pumpkin books way ahead of time!
- Hanukkah 2013 begins in the evening of Wednesday, November 27, the night before Thanksgiving.
- Christmas is on a Wednesday this year. Despite the Black Friday hoopla, the biggest shopping day of the year is actually the Saturday before Christmas, and with many people getting the Monday before Christmas Eve off, that Saturday-Before effect can stretch out and you could have a very busy few days between December 21st and 24th.
Being the sales rep with the bargain books, the other thing I will always belabor is that you need to get ahead of the crowd and buy early for the holidays. The best stuff sells out before October, and much is selling now, as the big bargain buyers place their purchase orders now to ship in a month or two.
*CIROBE is The Chicago International Remainder & Overstock Book Expo
October 29 - November 1st, 2013
Hilton & Towers, Chicago
October 29 - November 1st, 2013
Hilton & Towers, Chicago
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Go There
There is something wondrous about the world of a publisher's rep. I'm sure they would beg to differ, and rightly so, since this is purely a bad case of the grass being greener. I know their lives are not at all easy, and becoming less so, but I have always thought how nice it would be to just have a territory and have accounts in that territory and therefore get commissions on the sales to those accounts just because they are there. To show up with a wee case of slick new sell sheets about one best selling forthcoming title, and write an amazing order. Ah, the life.
There is a reason the most successful booksellers have substantial bargain departments and have made it a priority to keep growing that side of their business: It pays off, handsomely. So they send their buyers to the shows, showrooms, and warehouses.
I can only restate what I have been saying for years and what my competitors, suppliers, and customers have been saying for even longer: You need to pay attention, buy bargain, grow your business. We bring them to you, but you need to take that last step and actually attend the show, or let us in your door, or drive to the open warehouse. We are not just sales types telling tales. It's work, but you really need to do it. Stop putting it off. If you have to hire one more employee, so be it, but it really should be you. Owners are the best buyers of bargain. If you must hire, make sure you hire somebody who knows what they're doing. Better yet, promote. Do the work, count your money.
Don't let the buyers from Malaysia get all the good stuff.
Feedback Received September 6, 2013:
To put it mildly, it does not work that way in my world. If I don't receive and process your order, I may not ever know it exists. I am often with a customer who assumes otherwise and starts to talk about something they ordered, only to discover that I don't have it in my sales data for them because I never saw the order.
I'm not complaining (well, not much), other than to use this as an illustration of what I think is a divide between the two sides of the trade. I don't mean the buyer and myself, but between bargain wholesalers of all stripes and booksellers who buy and sell mostly new books, who either dabble in bargain, or have a buyer who has to divide her time between new and bargain. Buying new is much easier (sorry, with a few exceptions, it really is), and therefore most buyers who want results both fast and large can make quicker work of their frontlist and backlist buys than they can of bargain. It's a different story with buyers who know the bargain market and buy frequently here, but for this discussion, I am talking about the trade book buyer who sees bargain as a sideline or one category among many. I think most bookstore-employee buyers fit this description.
I recently returned from a bargain trade show, the Boston Remainder & Overstock Show (yes... BROS). I have heard a few negatives about this show, mostly along the lines of "oh why do we have to go to a show in August," (best show to kick off your holiday buys, for one thing) but generally speaking, this show was a huge success for the few vendors and buyers who attended. There were, perhaps, a dozen vendors, which made it relatively easy for the buyers to work the whole show, and most of the buyers were serious bargain buyers who are very familiar with the vendors and wrote some serious orders. Three of the vendors are local to the area and had open warehouse hours before and during the show for buyers who like to shop warehouses, and this drew more buyers in, from as far away as Malaysia. The show itself was only open for two days. This is a sort of ideal formula for a remainder show. The best stuff has just enough time to sell out, and there are very few buyers who are disappointed.
The one thing that struck me was that here in the capital of New England, where there are so many great independent bookstores, I did not see more than two or three buyers from the region, other than the biggest buyers, who do not even work for bookstores. I wonder why, after all these years, those of us making our living in the bargain book industry, who love independent bookstores and have been trying for so long to convince them that they will improve their sales, businesses, and customer loyalty by putting bargain books in their mix, have not been able to do a better job of it. If overseas booksellers see the value in flying their buyers to bargain-only trade shows half the world away, it should be simple to convince local buyers to walk a few blocks or maybe take a bus.
The one thing that struck me was that here in the capital of New England, where there are so many great independent bookstores, I did not see more than two or three buyers from the region, other than the biggest buyers, who do not even work for bookstores. I wonder why, after all these years, those of us making our living in the bargain book industry, who love independent bookstores and have been trying for so long to convince them that they will improve their sales, businesses, and customer loyalty by putting bargain books in their mix, have not been able to do a better job of it. If overseas booksellers see the value in flying their buyers to bargain-only trade shows half the world away, it should be simple to convince local buyers to walk a few blocks or maybe take a bus.
There is a reason the most successful booksellers have substantial bargain departments and have made it a priority to keep growing that side of their business: It pays off, handsomely. So they send their buyers to the shows, showrooms, and warehouses.
I can only restate what I have been saying for years and what my competitors, suppliers, and customers have been saying for even longer: You need to pay attention, buy bargain, grow your business. We bring them to you, but you need to take that last step and actually attend the show, or let us in your door, or drive to the open warehouse. We are not just sales types telling tales. It's work, but you really need to do it. Stop putting it off. If you have to hire one more employee, so be it, but it really should be you. Owners are the best buyers of bargain. If you must hire, make sure you hire somebody who knows what they're doing. Better yet, promote. Do the work, count your money.
Don't let the buyers from Malaysia get all the good stuff.
Feedback Received September 6, 2013:
I received a well-thought out response to this post, via email, from one of my regular customers. I asked him his permission to use his words in a further post, and he said yes, so that's what I am doing here. I'm breaking up his email into separate points and putting my responses between them. I am labeling his words as "Customer" and mine as "BA:"
Customer:
I'll tell you why I stopped going to shows. There are two major reasons.
1. When I first started going to CIROBE, 20 years ago, I would get catalogs from various remainder dealers once or twice a month. When I went to CIROBE, the books would be fresh. Most of the books on display had not been in the catalog, or were in the catalog that was so new that they had not been mailed out yet. The best books sold off immediately, if I wanted a shot at them, I had to be at CIROBE.
The internet changed this. I get email lists several times a week.
BA:
Yes, and you order almost immediately upon receiving them, thank you very much!
Customer:
The best books are sold off within hours of the list going out. Most of the remainder houses sent me the list of what they were bringing to CIROBE the week before the show. I go to the show and essentially see the books that nobody had bought: a complete reversal of the way things used to be.
BA:
Which is why it is so important to buy early from the lists, as you do.
This "good stuff being gone before it starts" is one of the hardest realities of bargain trade shows. If and when you do go to shows, always make an appointment with your sales rep. At least your rep then knows you are coming, and when, and should make sure that you see whatever is best for you to see. More great stuff makes it to shows than you think, but it has to be pulled from the haystack by people who know where it is.
One more thing to look for are new arrivals. Sales folk often have boxes of samples shipped at the last minute, books which did not make the deadline for the big sample shipments. And one more one more thing: Watch for jacket kits. If you see there are cartons or file folders of dust jackets in a booth it often means this is where the shortest quantities are, which are often the best titles.
Customer:
2. Scale. I've got a 3500 square foot store. But I've only got one location. So this limits me on what I can buy.
Numerous reps had minimum orders that were just too large for me to consider. It's not that I don't make real orders. It's that their minimums were designed for chain stores.
BA:
I find that the minimum problem is not what it used to be. Back in the old days there were some truly absurd minimums designed, you are correct, to keep all but the biggest buyers away. Not only have those wholesalers long gone out of business, but the buyers they were in business to serve are mostly gone. The bottom line is, if you think a minimum is too high for you, just ask. Especially you, sir, who everybody knows and loves, but also any customer trying to make bargain work. If you show up, you have a leg up, and you may find the suppliers appreciate that effort.
Customer:
Further, I had to figure the cost of going v. what I got out of the place. By the time all was said and done I was spending close to $1000 to go to the show, airfare, hotel, show fees, meals, etc. And I loose a week from the shop, which always included a busy weekend. If I was lucky, I'd spend $5,000 with the hopes of doubling my money. More often it was closer to $3,000. Not because I could not afford to buy more inventory, but because there was not enough good material or because it was priced too high for my market [I stopped buying imports because the "wholesale" price was not very different from my retail]. My time and money were better spent elsewhere than to spend a week spending $4,000 hoping to sell the books for $6000.
BA:
The financial side is the hardest for me to argue. Unfortunately you are probably right. Booksellers of all stripes work on tight margins and if your volume does not justify the away time or the results, there is not much I can say to the contrary, especially for someone like you, who is so attentive to the lists and buys so regularly without going to the shows.
However, regarding my post to which you responded, this was a show in the middle of Boston, yards and blocks from booksellers who did not attend. There was considerable effort and expense by the sponsoring wholesalers, World Publications Group and Book Enterprises, as well as the other exhibitors, to make sure it was great just for the local booksellers, and to avoid some of these issues. Newest and freshest stock was on display. There were no travel expenses, or very little.
It was still a great show for the vendors and for the booksellers who did attend, just should have been better attended by the folks it was created for.
Customer:
I also should note that I wrote up far more orders than that. But a large number were never filled because the wholesaler did not pull display copies when they ran out of inventory. So I wasted a lot of time filling out orders that were never going to be filled because the entire lot was sold to B&N in a special preview they were given before the show opened.
BA:
This is a big issue for the sales staff at the booths. There is not time enough to weed out the o/s titles until a break in the action and that often does not come until after the show closes on the first day. Before it opens on the second day is when the weeding often happens, and it is just too late. We need to work on that.
Another part of this problem is that lists are being ordered from and sales reps are visiting customers in all parts of the world while the show is on, and if something sells out off site it is often not known by the sales staff at the show until they get a chance to download their inventory.
Customer:
I've talked to other bookstore owners, people who used to go to CIROBE every year, who have stopped going to trade shows for essentially the same reasons.
BA:
Remember the first several CIROBEs? There would be a large pack of buyers waiting at the doors before the show opened, and when it did open, they would run in goups to the most desirable booths. Yes, run, flat out.
Those days are behind us, but the shows are still important and booksellers should still attend them. If it does not make as much business sense as it once did to go to buy for half a year's bargain sales, go for one or two days. Meet new suppliers, hash out arrangements with old ones, say, regarding minimums. Or backorders. Or returns. Just being there makes you more important to the wholesalers, and more so as time goes by.
Customer:
Anyway, that's my 2 cents.
BA:
Priceless, thank you.
Friday, July 26, 2013
The Anti Best Seller
Best sellers are in the trade news again, with Amazon and Overstock announcing new discounts of 51% to 65% off list price, so I called a few buyers to see what they thought. Most were unperturbed, saying they had given up on so-called best sellers years ago.
Then again, most of my buyers are bargain buyers. In remainders and bargain, a best seller is a very different and more interesting animal, not effected so much by popular delusions and the madness of crowds (a little bargain reference*).
The daily best seller page is one of the most viewed pages on this blog. Each day I post the title that sold the most on the previous day and, while some make sense in a New York Times sort of way, most are interesting just because they are so far off the usual top ten. Many are probably not in the top million.
I don't think it generates more sales, though I think it does get some people to request my lists. One day it's an advanced test prep title, the next it's Curious George, the next it's a history of the oil industry. What my daily bestseller list does do, or at least I hope it does, is help to show how diverse and healthy this market is, how bargain is a part of a successful business plan, no matter what area of the industry you're in.
All of my best sellers are sold by me to my customers, which is to say, mostly bookstores. They don't necessarily reflect what my customer's customers are buying at the moment, only what my customers have confidence will sell in the not-too-long run. So, while there is the occasional Mitch Albom or Nora Roberts (Eric Carle, Hannah Arendt, James Joyce... Matthew Quick), most come from my customers' best market niches, whether or not my customers or I previously knew about those niches.
This is not to say my best sellers are not the product of my customers' businesses. I sell to a number of larger customers whose buys definitely skew the numbers their way. More interesting to me are the best sellers for the days those larger customers are not buying.
And the list reflects other aspects of my business. Many of my customers rely heavily on children's and young adult for their bargain sales. A few of my customers order much more frequently and in greater quantities than others. Some customers only order a few titles in heavy quantities a few times per year. Some days I have many orders, many titles per order, some as many as 1000 titles, but all in small quantities: 2s, 3s, 5s. On those days the best seller might sell as few as 25 copies. Some days I get very few orders, with a few titles per order, in high quantities per title.
Full disclosure: Most (about 80%) of my daily bestsellers are generated when one customer buys one title, and the quantity ordered is just, or much, higher than any other quantity ordered, combined or otherwise, of any other title that day.
Some lists contain one or more titles that everybody wants, the problem being there might be only a few copies. So, while I might get orders for a few hundred copies of that title, I really only sell the few copies on the list. I still make that title my best seller for that day. On the other hand, I had one title that never shipped, and this was one of the very odd titles I describe elsewhere, which I had never seen before and thought nothing of it when I saw it on the list. Unfortunately, when the supplier went to ship the books, they all turned out to be defective. So I sold about 800 copies, all of which were actually in inventory, and the sale was zero after all was said and done. I couldn't bear to put that one on the best seller list. Too depressing.
One of the keys, if not the key, to best sellers in bargain is that you, the buyer, build them. They often don't happen all at once the way frontlist or even backlist best sellers do. You generally know what those are when you first buy them, before you see the numbers. Not necessarily so with bargain.
You will probably know which books are going to be good, solid sellers. These are usually from hurts sorters (see glossary page here) and are in your back list stock or your used bookstore has customers asking for them regularly.
Bargain best sellers, on the other hand, frequently will surprise you. A bargain priced book is often not the same book as it was at full price. You merchandise it differently, your customers see it differently. The book may have simply been overpriced by the publisher to start with, or aimed at the wrong market. Now it might become an impulse buy near the register, whereas it was previously shelved in the wrong section. A front- or backlist young adult nonfiction book about addiction and recovery, shelved spine-out in the young adult section, priced at $16.95, is not going to sell anywhere near as well as the same book, stacked near checkout, priced at $5.95.
The building begins as you get to know what your bargain bestsellers are. First you buy a few copies and, when they sell out quickly, you buy a bit heavier. You might have started with 5 and then bought 10. When that 10 sells out quickly again, you buy 20. They sell out even faster and you buy 50. By now you might have discovered why they are selling so well. The author, previously unknown to you, is local, or the subject has relevance to your community that you were not aware of. Maybe a teacher at a local community college is surprisingly popular and recommends this book to all students. Or it might just be that pictures of kittens and monkeys hanging out together in strange places while playing musical instruments with their.... oh never mind. There is no predicting some of these. Just rock and roll with them, make your customers happy.
The fear, especially if you have a small store without a lot of traffic, is that you will get stuck with your last buy. Just as you receive the last shipment, your customers lose interest and you are making a new desk out of the cartons of books. In fact you can almost always make that last buy sell. It was your bargain best seller; you just need to push a little harder to make the last buy sell out. If you have seasonal sidewalk sales, it will sell then, or at an expo sale, or just during the holidays.
More often than not, the supplier sells out long before you run into an overstock situation, and you end up thinking you should have bought heavier on your second-to-last buy. Then you start building the next best seller.
* Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, first published in 1841, was a huge best seller as a bargain reprint in the 1980s, and probably would be again for many years to come if, say, Wordsworth Classics would bring it back (oh wait, they did! Order some now, this book sells).
Then again, most of my buyers are bargain buyers. In remainders and bargain, a best seller is a very different and more interesting animal, not effected so much by popular delusions and the madness of crowds (a little bargain reference*).
The daily best seller page is one of the most viewed pages on this blog. Each day I post the title that sold the most on the previous day and, while some make sense in a New York Times sort of way, most are interesting just because they are so far off the usual top ten. Many are probably not in the top million.
I don't think it generates more sales, though I think it does get some people to request my lists. One day it's an advanced test prep title, the next it's Curious George, the next it's a history of the oil industry. What my daily bestseller list does do, or at least I hope it does, is help to show how diverse and healthy this market is, how bargain is a part of a successful business plan, no matter what area of the industry you're in.
All of my best sellers are sold by me to my customers, which is to say, mostly bookstores. They don't necessarily reflect what my customer's customers are buying at the moment, only what my customers have confidence will sell in the not-too-long run. So, while there is the occasional Mitch Albom or Nora Roberts (Eric Carle, Hannah Arendt, James Joyce... Matthew Quick), most come from my customers' best market niches, whether or not my customers or I previously knew about those niches.
This is not to say my best sellers are not the product of my customers' businesses. I sell to a number of larger customers whose buys definitely skew the numbers their way. More interesting to me are the best sellers for the days those larger customers are not buying.
And the list reflects other aspects of my business. Many of my customers rely heavily on children's and young adult for their bargain sales. A few of my customers order much more frequently and in greater quantities than others. Some customers only order a few titles in heavy quantities a few times per year. Some days I have many orders, many titles per order, some as many as 1000 titles, but all in small quantities: 2s, 3s, 5s. On those days the best seller might sell as few as 25 copies. Some days I get very few orders, with a few titles per order, in high quantities per title.
Full disclosure: Most (about 80%) of my daily bestsellers are generated when one customer buys one title, and the quantity ordered is just, or much, higher than any other quantity ordered, combined or otherwise, of any other title that day.
One of the keys, if not the key, to best sellers in bargain is that you, the buyer, build them. They often don't happen all at once the way frontlist or even backlist best sellers do. You generally know what those are when you first buy them, before you see the numbers. Not necessarily so with bargain.
You will probably know which books are going to be good, solid sellers. These are usually from hurts sorters (see glossary page here) and are in your back list stock or your used bookstore has customers asking for them regularly.
Bargain best sellers, on the other hand, frequently will surprise you. A bargain priced book is often not the same book as it was at full price. You merchandise it differently, your customers see it differently. The book may have simply been overpriced by the publisher to start with, or aimed at the wrong market. Now it might become an impulse buy near the register, whereas it was previously shelved in the wrong section. A front- or backlist young adult nonfiction book about addiction and recovery, shelved spine-out in the young adult section, priced at $16.95, is not going to sell anywhere near as well as the same book, stacked near checkout, priced at $5.95.
The building begins as you get to know what your bargain bestsellers are. First you buy a few copies and, when they sell out quickly, you buy a bit heavier. You might have started with 5 and then bought 10. When that 10 sells out quickly again, you buy 20. They sell out even faster and you buy 50. By now you might have discovered why they are selling so well. The author, previously unknown to you, is local, or the subject has relevance to your community that you were not aware of. Maybe a teacher at a local community college is surprisingly popular and recommends this book to all students. Or it might just be that pictures of kittens and monkeys hanging out together in strange places while playing musical instruments with their.... oh never mind. There is no predicting some of these. Just rock and roll with them, make your customers happy.
The fear, especially if you have a small store without a lot of traffic, is that you will get stuck with your last buy. Just as you receive the last shipment, your customers lose interest and you are making a new desk out of the cartons of books. In fact you can almost always make that last buy sell. It was your bargain best seller; you just need to push a little harder to make the last buy sell out. If you have seasonal sidewalk sales, it will sell then, or at an expo sale, or just during the holidays.
More often than not, the supplier sells out long before you run into an overstock situation, and you end up thinking you should have bought heavier on your second-to-last buy. Then you start building the next best seller.
* Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, first published in 1841, was a huge best seller as a bargain reprint in the 1980s, and probably would be again for many years to come if, say, Wordsworth Classics would bring it back (oh wait, they did! Order some now, this book sells).
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Book Business Your Way
I've been a manager and a buyer for bookstores and wholesalers, managed a buying group, owned a bookstore and two wholesale companies. One thing I discovered over the years is that, if you own or manage a business, you tend to think of your customers as fitting within fairly easy to define boundaries. There are these customers here that do business this way, there are those over there that do business that way. This is a perception problem.
Entrepreneurs who buy into the bargain book wholesale business run into this problem early on. They see a particularly successful customer that buys large and often, and they ask why the sales team can't go find all the other customers in the world that match that profile; there must be so many. After all, one casual dining restaurant is duplicated with another name right next door and within a few years you have dozens of them, all successful.
Even after years of trying, these recently-new book wholesalers will still sometimes wonder aloud why there is only one huge successful stand-alone surplus store that buys lots of books, or why they have only the one customer with the big mail order business that only sells bargain books, or how there can be only one regional chain of used bookstores that knows how to buy bargain. The thing is, all of these are actually the only ones doing it just the way they do it.
When I travel to visit customers, I will stop in at other bookstores in the area and see if I can meet the owner or the buyer, say hello, and do my best to convince them to buy bargain. I am struck, even at the smallest store level, by how unique each of these businesses is. There is the store with the maze of small rooms in an old apartment building they have gradually expanded to fill, or the stall in a hospital that has turned into a full service bookstore. A few stores are members of franchises, but seem to fit the corporate mold in signage only, being unique in how they buy, merchandise, and promote.
If there's a formula for (or symptom of) success, it is that these businesses do everything they can to do business. They have internet sales, sidewalk sales, warehouse sales, and direct sales, school fairs, craft fairs, job fairs, health fairs, birthday parties, wine tastings, coffee shops, and date nights. 10% of their sales might be sidelines, or 90% non-book merchandise, and books, though sales have increased, have become one of many sidelines. The ever-present owners work harder than anybody else, and they seem to love it most of the time.
I was sitting with the owner of a medium sized bookstore and coffee shop as he was placing an order with me. As I was entering his order quantities in my spreadsheet, I saw that I had just received an email from another "books & coffee" business of about the same size, a customer who orders from me once every few weeks. The message was that the list I had sent that morning had nothing of interest, better luck next time. Same list, similar businesses, one buying, the other not.
Many of these differences can be chalked up to location. You can have two towns with 2 bookstores run by the same company, bought for by the same buyer, and stocking very different books, especially in the bargain area, because of location. But I think it's more because of the individuals buying the books, the hard working people who pay attention to what their customers need and want.
There are bookstore neighborhoods and bookstore towns. Hay-on-Wye, a town in Wales, is pretty much all bookstores. The only way this is possible is because of the individuals who own and manage those bookstores and supply them with their own unique mix of books. Customers can wander from store to store, never growing tired of the variety in selection and the bookstores themselves.
Physical books and the venues in which we sell them draw us in and they hold us, as they do our customers. This is certainly not the most financially rewarding career in the world, yet so many very smart people are still doing it. According to the ABA, 41 new bookstores opened last year. This does not include used and bargain stores that opened during the same period, some of which I know. This is quite a number for a business model and industry the prognosticators had deemed done for.
There are stores going out of business. Part of the time I spent writing this post I was in the office of a fellow sales guy who was cold calling a store only to discover they were most likely closing their doors soon. This is a hard business, otherwise we would not need to work so hard, and yes, sometimes all that smart, hard work is not enough. But overall, looking at the whole experience of I and others in my line of work, it seems that the ones who do continue to make it, who see sales increase and businesses expand, are doing it in their own, unique ways.
Entrepreneurs who buy into the bargain book wholesale business run into this problem early on. They see a particularly successful customer that buys large and often, and they ask why the sales team can't go find all the other customers in the world that match that profile; there must be so many. After all, one casual dining restaurant is duplicated with another name right next door and within a few years you have dozens of them, all successful.
Even after years of trying, these recently-new book wholesalers will still sometimes wonder aloud why there is only one huge successful stand-alone surplus store that buys lots of books, or why they have only the one customer with the big mail order business that only sells bargain books, or how there can be only one regional chain of used bookstores that knows how to buy bargain. The thing is, all of these are actually the only ones doing it just the way they do it.
When I travel to visit customers, I will stop in at other bookstores in the area and see if I can meet the owner or the buyer, say hello, and do my best to convince them to buy bargain. I am struck, even at the smallest store level, by how unique each of these businesses is. There is the store with the maze of small rooms in an old apartment building they have gradually expanded to fill, or the stall in a hospital that has turned into a full service bookstore. A few stores are members of franchises, but seem to fit the corporate mold in signage only, being unique in how they buy, merchandise, and promote.
If there's a formula for (or symptom of) success, it is that these businesses do everything they can to do business. They have internet sales, sidewalk sales, warehouse sales, and direct sales, school fairs, craft fairs, job fairs, health fairs, birthday parties, wine tastings, coffee shops, and date nights. 10% of their sales might be sidelines, or 90% non-book merchandise, and books, though sales have increased, have become one of many sidelines. The ever-present owners work harder than anybody else, and they seem to love it most of the time.
I was sitting with the owner of a medium sized bookstore and coffee shop as he was placing an order with me. As I was entering his order quantities in my spreadsheet, I saw that I had just received an email from another "books & coffee" business of about the same size, a customer who orders from me once every few weeks. The message was that the list I had sent that morning had nothing of interest, better luck next time. Same list, similar businesses, one buying, the other not.
Many of these differences can be chalked up to location. You can have two towns with 2 bookstores run by the same company, bought for by the same buyer, and stocking very different books, especially in the bargain area, because of location. But I think it's more because of the individuals buying the books, the hard working people who pay attention to what their customers need and want.
There are bookstore neighborhoods and bookstore towns. Hay-on-Wye, a town in Wales, is pretty much all bookstores. The only way this is possible is because of the individuals who own and manage those bookstores and supply them with their own unique mix of books. Customers can wander from store to store, never growing tired of the variety in selection and the bookstores themselves.
Physical books and the venues in which we sell them draw us in and they hold us, as they do our customers. This is certainly not the most financially rewarding career in the world, yet so many very smart people are still doing it. According to the ABA, 41 new bookstores opened last year. This does not include used and bargain stores that opened during the same period, some of which I know. This is quite a number for a business model and industry the prognosticators had deemed done for.
There are stores going out of business. Part of the time I spent writing this post I was in the office of a fellow sales guy who was cold calling a store only to discover they were most likely closing their doors soon. This is a hard business, otherwise we would not need to work so hard, and yes, sometimes all that smart, hard work is not enough. But overall, looking at the whole experience of I and others in my line of work, it seems that the ones who do continue to make it, who see sales increase and businesses expand, are doing it in their own, unique ways.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
The Priceless Impact of Bargain
I have written elsewhere in this blog about using your remainder and bargain buying to make your bookstore, online or off, unique, or at least differentiated from your competition. Chains buy a few titles in huge quantities and display for set periods of time. Amazon often sells used and bargain without images or annotations so that the customer has to know exactly what they are looking for to buy. The price clubs and enormous box retailers buy print runs in huge volumes of mostly current best sellers to retail at somewhat discounted prices. And most stores don't carry any bargain anything. That's a barn sized differentiation target.
The independent buyer, frequently the owner, can buy very short quantities, focused on what they know of their customers. They mix up the bargain in their stores so that they might have a bargain section, or bargain displays in one or more points throughout the store, but also mix them into the main category sections. Used bookstores put them everywhere, treating them as just another product stream. The bottom line is that you, without thinking about it too much, can have an amazing selection, the likes of which the aforementioned behemoths can't imagine and could never put together.
Most bargain buyers have databases that they access while they work, determining how many of a particular book they bought in the past, how often, if there are still any in inventory, at what cost. Some buyers still just buy what they see and want for their stores.
Selling to these buyers, I often hear a running commentary about why a title is good or, more often, why it's impossible to sell. "We can't sell this." My favorite: "Nobody can sell this." Guess what the next buyer buys. Routinely cited as the reason for not buying a title in bargain: It did not sell well as a new book. Yet they will also routinely buy books in bargain that they know very well did not sell as new, and they know the reason they do this is because they now have a track record of it selling as bargain.
I have buyers who will only buy mint condition. These are the hardest to please, for me, as most of my lines are marked. The interesting thing here, though, is that these buyers tend to buy very different titles than other buyers. They buy bigger books, more hardcovers, more of the full color, gardening-cooking-home-decorating coffee table books. Some of my other buyers buy this material, but very few. They say these "never sell." Again, as I've said elsewhere, these buyers can be in the same town. They probably have many of the same customers.
I have internet marketplace resellers who use elaborate formulas or purpose-built software to figure out what to buy, and others who just focus on the rankings. Either way, these buyers feel very strongly that the books they reject on every list have zero value and the ones they buy had better ship immediately to keep the competition from buying them. This is a perfect illustration of what I am trying to get at here, since both buyers sell in exactly the same place and they buy completely different books.
One aspect of my service is that I highlight sellers, books which my customers are buying consistently over time, or those which one or a few buy in big quantities. This annoys my suppliers. They feel the highlights skew the lists against the titles without highlights. If only they knew the most common reaction I get from my customers is "who would buy that?" My customers buy what they will, highlights or none. There is neither rhyme nor reason to my sellers; they are all over the place.
All of this is to say, please broaden your buys. I'm not laboring under the mistaken impression that I could do what my customers do. Running a bookstore or any kind of retail book business is extremely challenging. I can't tell you what to do and never for a moment suppose that I could do it better. But just this one bit, this one little angle of perspective, does seem so clear to those of us on this side of the table, and so obscured on the other. In the difficult market in which we work, sales reps do not tend to talk business with each other much, but this buyers-who-do-not-buy thing does get into the conversation.
Take a look at the titles you are passing and try a few. You might go on the recommendation of other buyers, customers, other staff, nearby children, or, dare I say, a sales rep. Don't do too much damage. If you order 100 titles at a time, try 5 you might not have tried. Order in small enough quantities to be able to mix in with shelf stock, but enough to display face up on a table and get some idea of track record before it (hopefully) sells out. Keep doing this. Your sales will increase.
Independent booksellers are businesses, but the buyers that work for them or own them are individual, idiosyncratic people. Otherwise why be in this profession? They order based on what they perceive as the needs and wants of their customers, and no doubt about it, they are right in this. Still, they cannot help but show their true colors through their selections. The differentiation is noticeable in front and back list buying, and starkly stands out in bargain.
A buyer emailed me this feedback, June 27, 2013:
The independent buyer, frequently the owner, can buy very short quantities, focused on what they know of their customers. They mix up the bargain in their stores so that they might have a bargain section, or bargain displays in one or more points throughout the store, but also mix them into the main category sections. Used bookstores put them everywhere, treating them as just another product stream. The bottom line is that you, without thinking about it too much, can have an amazing selection, the likes of which the aforementioned behemoths can't imagine and could never put together.
Most bargain buyers have databases that they access while they work, determining how many of a particular book they bought in the past, how often, if there are still any in inventory, at what cost. Some buyers still just buy what they see and want for their stores.
Selling to these buyers, I often hear a running commentary about why a title is good or, more often, why it's impossible to sell. "We can't sell this." My favorite: "Nobody can sell this." Guess what the next buyer buys. Routinely cited as the reason for not buying a title in bargain: It did not sell well as a new book. Yet they will also routinely buy books in bargain that they know very well did not sell as new, and they know the reason they do this is because they now have a track record of it selling as bargain.
I have buyers who will only buy mint condition. These are the hardest to please, for me, as most of my lines are marked. The interesting thing here, though, is that these buyers tend to buy very different titles than other buyers. They buy bigger books, more hardcovers, more of the full color, gardening-cooking-home-decorating coffee table books. Some of my other buyers buy this material, but very few. They say these "never sell." Again, as I've said elsewhere, these buyers can be in the same town. They probably have many of the same customers.
I have internet marketplace resellers who use elaborate formulas or purpose-built software to figure out what to buy, and others who just focus on the rankings. Either way, these buyers feel very strongly that the books they reject on every list have zero value and the ones they buy had better ship immediately to keep the competition from buying them. This is a perfect illustration of what I am trying to get at here, since both buyers sell in exactly the same place and they buy completely different books.
One aspect of my service is that I highlight sellers, books which my customers are buying consistently over time, or those which one or a few buy in big quantities. This annoys my suppliers. They feel the highlights skew the lists against the titles without highlights. If only they knew the most common reaction I get from my customers is "who would buy that?" My customers buy what they will, highlights or none. There is neither rhyme nor reason to my sellers; they are all over the place.
All of this is to say, please broaden your buys. I'm not laboring under the mistaken impression that I could do what my customers do. Running a bookstore or any kind of retail book business is extremely challenging. I can't tell you what to do and never for a moment suppose that I could do it better. But just this one bit, this one little angle of perspective, does seem so clear to those of us on this side of the table, and so obscured on the other. In the difficult market in which we work, sales reps do not tend to talk business with each other much, but this buyers-who-do-not-buy thing does get into the conversation.
Take a look at the titles you are passing and try a few. You might go on the recommendation of other buyers, customers, other staff, nearby children, or, dare I say, a sales rep. Don't do too much damage. If you order 100 titles at a time, try 5 you might not have tried. Order in small enough quantities to be able to mix in with shelf stock, but enough to display face up on a table and get some idea of track record before it (hopefully) sells out. Keep doing this. Your sales will increase.
Independent booksellers are businesses, but the buyers that work for them or own them are individual, idiosyncratic people. Otherwise why be in this profession? They order based on what they perceive as the needs and wants of their customers, and no doubt about it, they are right in this. Still, they cannot help but show their true colors through their selections. The differentiation is noticeable in front and back list buying, and starkly stands out in bargain.
A buyer emailed me this feedback, June 27, 2013:
I would point out that large format pictorial books sell, but only in mint condition. Why would an interior designer who is concerned about things being in their proper place want a ratty book with a mark on the bottom to put on their fancy coffee table? Thus your customers who are extra picky about condition are right. But they often don’t understand the power of price. A book becomes something completely different when it’s $19.98 instead of $49.98. Those who primarily buy hurts believe of pictorial books that“they don’t sell” because they always get slightly flawed copies with marks on the bottom. In this case they are right.
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