Shine On You Crazy Bookstore

I hobble down the main street in my neighborhood, going from one bookstore to another (there are only two). One is a used bookstore which stocks plenty of bargain to fill in the gaps. The other is a new bookstore. Back when I was a sales rep I tried a few times to sell to the new bookstore, but the owners had no interest.

Despite my constant cajoling, I do get it. You have built your reputation on all new books, frontlist and backlist, author events, the ability to return most inventory for credit, preorders, and everything sparkling clean and brand new. Bargain can be daunting. Here are another 30,000 titles to sift through, looking for what will work in your well-curated store. And you must have the courage of your convictions -- no returning for credit. So keep doing what you're doing and make it the best book experience you can for your customers and staff. I still think you're crazy, but good on you. 

You knew there would be more cajoling, so here it is. I was looking for Silent Cavalry by Howell Raines. The used bookstore didn't have it, even the public library didn't have it, at least that day. The new bookstore also did not have it. They offered to order for me, but I decided to wait. 

This was a weekday morning, maybe 11:00. The used bookstore had about 15 people shopping and two buying books. When I went to shop in the new bookstore, I was the only customer there. 

If you had one bargain table with short stacks of between 30 and 50 titles, and then 2 each of another 50 titles to shelve in your sections, you will have invested enough to give bargain a fair shot and you will not break the bank to do it. 

And don't worry about the time it takes to parse those lists and websites. Some of the best sales reps in the business are working for bargain wholesalers. At least for the first order, let them put it together for you. They are motivated to make sure your first order is full of their best sellers to indies. 

Price everything 50% off list price to start. If you're paying $4.00 for a $25.00 book and selling it at $12.50, your margin is good, and you can afford future markdowns if necessary. I would advise marking these with stickers and entering them in your inventory system, "R" before the ISBN, but if that's too much, just dot them and make sure your customers and staff know that these are 50% off list price.

This is just a start, getting your toes wet before jumping in the pool, but you will be pleased enough with the results to come back for more. 

Big Box Detox

Strange what motivates me to write my first post in how many years:

Costco's decision to stop selling books. 

This might be bad for publishers. Print runs will be smaller, especially for blockbusters. My favorite book of 2023 was The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. I wonder what the Costco quantities were for that? In any case, the thing I thought of first was how this shift will impact the only businesses I care about, independent and used bookstores.

The first thing that comes to mind is that it won't, much. The unfortunate loss of a venue where people can buy real books will, also unfortunately, not drive crowds of customers to your doors, at least at first. You will get some increases, more as time goes by. It does present a marketing opportunity where you can tell your community that you're still there, selling way more titles than Costco ever did, and you're there year-round. (Costco is going to sell books during the holidays.) The idea is to make sure that the customers who did shop Costco for books, not just because they happened to be there to pick up a 144 pack of sardines, know you are there.

It would be so nice if publishers suddenly wake up and say hey we should treat these indies better, but don't hold your breath (as if). They are more likely to go full(er) throttle at Target, Walmart, B&N, and other brick and mortar behemoths. They really have to.

Finally, if you're buying from remainder wholesalers, most of what you're buying from them are returns, and a percentage of those returns flow through the publishers to the remainder wholesalers. There will be some changes in the content of their lists as the big flood of Costco returns hits and then quickly subsides. You may not even notice. Costco returns are in better shape than others, but otherwise not so wonderful in quality of titles.

So why am I writing about this if it's not going affect you much? Because it reminded me that I have not nattered at you enough about what I always natter at you about, and that's how buying bargain increases your selection and customer traffic.

Looking at Costco's book displays, you see huge stacks of titles, sometimes double or triple stacked. With so many books per title, selection can't be what yours is. You might have 10,000 titles in your bookstore, or 25,000, or 100,000. This is an advantage you have over any and all of the big box retailers. You can point at exceptions (B&N, maybe), but overall you have the ability to offer a much wider and better curated selection than any of those corporate giants. 

Throwing bargain into the mix increases the depth and breadth of your selection dramatically. Your cost goes down and your profits go up. If you are not buying bargain, you are competing with the big box guys on their playing field. They can't buy bargain the way you can. When they try, it's always minimal and perfunctory. Again, there are clearly exceptions, but they prove the rule.

Booksellers Are Amazing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

💖Fulfilling wishlist items for kids in foster care.

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

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

@ThirdPlaceBooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Short Questions, Too Long Answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for being a bookseller!!!

Ben Back on the Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for reading!

Booksellers and booksellers

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

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

'Tis the Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting Your Best Square Foot Forward

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

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

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

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

Of Sales and Bookselling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inboxes Of Gold

I and most other book sales reps send lists of books to hundreds of customers every week. If I slack off or get jammed up and don't send the usual volume I start getting emails, phone calls, and texts from customers asking for the lists, or asking if they have been inadvertently deleted from the mailing list or if something happened to me. Sometimes I do inadvertently drop a good customer from my mailing list, which only happens when the accounts are shuffled and it takes a while to put things back together, or the customer has asked to be put on vacation while they catch up with receiving. I then lose track of when to put them back on and, weeks later, get a woeful email asking why I have forgotten them.

Customers have routines that vary as much as their bookstores. Some place small orders every week and have us pack and hold until there is enough to ship economically. Some order one large order per year. Some want reorder lists as often as they want regular lists, some don't want to order the same title twice. Most fall somewhere between these extremes. It might be imagined that the few hot sellers on every list go very fast to the first few customers that place orders, but it doesn't work that way because one bookseller's hot title is another's pass.

And then there are the customers that never order from lists. They might order at shows, or only order when they visit the warehouse or when a sales rep visits them. They might not order unless they are called with the few titles or niches they are looking for. Most will say they would rather receive the lists than not because one never knows when one might have the urge to peek. There are even some who another bookseller recommended me to, who call and tell me I must send them the great lists their friend told them to buy from, and after a couple of acknowledgements and questions in the beginning, I don't hear from them again.

I am fine with all of the above. I have a very full schedule taking care of the customers that do respond. Plenty of those customers would not give me amazing marks for customer service during some unfortunate period or two during our relationships as I get piled under by my to-do stack and my feeble organizational skills fail to kick in 100%. On the other hand, I must confess to a certain infinitesimal amount of pique with those who just ignore all lists, occasionally ask for a list, ignore that one as well, and then march purposefully up to me at a trade show wanting to know why they are not getting the best of the best like so & so over there, indicating the back of the head of some unsuspecting buyer, busily sorting samples and jackets into stacks of yeses and nos. 

The worst part is that I know so many titles that would have been perfect for the concerned buyer. They came and went several times as other buyers ordered in their 3s and 10s and 60s and 100s, all from the same lists that sat in the esteemed bookseller's inbox without ever being opened, gradually silted over by layers of more important and urgent messages.

Figure out a way to get those gems out of your inbox and into your customers' hands. Maybe you need to give this work to another buyer or employee, maybe you need to ask for some other format. If you have trouble with Excel, ask for paper mail, fax, or other document format. The important thing is to stop missing all the great deals. Grow your margins and make your customers happy by mining the gold in your inbox.

Stack Them and They Will Sell

Before preparing for a customer visit, where either the customer visits me or I visit the customer, I go through a series of scenarios, thinking of what works for that customer's bookstore, what they have bought in the past, categories or authors or formats I think they miss and should buy. 

Part of this preparation is printing a reorder list for my customer, however, unlike the reorder lists I actually send my customers, this one includes everything they've ordered in the past, including sold out titles. This gives me a good picture of what the customer looks for.

The plan all seems so clear and perfectly compartmentalized, all neat and easy. And then I go into the warehouse, look at the customer's sales history, scan our list, looking for books to match my well laid plans. 

Most of my customers buy multiple titles per order in varying quantities, most buy many titles on each order that make sense based on their bookstores and purchasing history. But all customers also buy some titles that make little sense from either perspective. The simplest illustration of this are customers who say they do not buy children's or fiction who then proceed to buy a few titles in children's or fiction in hefty quantities, on every order.

I ask why the exception, and the answer is usually something like "this is a classic," or "this sold so well as a new book." Often the book is neither a classic nor a great seller. What happened is that somehow a stack made it into the bookstore for whatever reason and their customers ate it up. 

Bargain books are particularly well suited to the task of finding out which authors or subjects you think don't sell... do. Even formats. You think you can't sell fiction in trade paper because you tried it in front list, but then you do a table at bargain prices and it becomes the best selling square foot in your bookstore. At bargain costs and prices it's a lot easier to let your customers decide what works.

When I look at samples and lists, deciding what to bring to our meetings, I try not to overdo the tendency to educate my customer. Most have been doing this for years and know exactly what they need, and what they don't need is a lesson from a sales rep. But I can't always resist the urge. There are more than a few titles I bring which I know to be counter to how my customer buys and they almost always take at least one or two of them. Sometimes these ringers do turn out to be lemons, but more often they sell very well.

There's no need to buy junk nobody can sell, but do try something new in every buy. Your customers will thank you.
_______________________________________________
But first, you have to buy the books...
http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/2015/08/inboxes-of-gold.html





   

The Challenges of Moving Books

My wife and I recently moved from a big old house into a smaller old house a few blocks away. There were the usual 100 or so boxes of books. Putting the books in boxes is a time-consuming affair. Each book must be read and reread, paged through, smelled, hefted several times in each hand, dusted, shown to the spouse who rolls her eyes, inspected for unremembered turns of phrase. Moving is exhausting work.

The first editions and signed first works by well known authors are not what piques the interest. It is such gems as:

New York Yesterday and Today, published in 1977. The yesterday of the title refers to the period from the late 1800s through about 1945. The today photos are from 1975 and 1976. All sorts of memories are triggered by these. Here's the place I used to buy a cup of coffee before getting on the downtown N train. Everything looking ancient; nobody is looking at a hand held device. In the 1970s, people standing on street corners, walking, driving, shopping, had their heads up, looking where they were going. I sell books by emailing Excel spreadsheets to my customers. I sometimes review orders on my phone as I am jay walking through heavy traffic, absent minded, autopilot kicking in as I dodge cars driven by people who are texting. I write a blog. But I am having a Luddite moment.

A very dusty copy of the Conrad Argosy, a collection of Joseph Conrad's work published on pulpy paper, getting brittle and yellowing now. It must be from the 1930s. I know I looked once, but now forgot, being too busy checking to see if there is anything in it I have not yet read. There is. This book was given to me by my father, after he discovered I was a Conrad reader. He bought it in the 1930s. I wish I remember if he bought it used or new. Maybe he never told me.

My son, who was helping to pack, found some things he had not read or read long enough ago to deserve a reread. He proceeded to reread them. 

Back when I painted I was obsessed with the form of the arch as used in Medieval, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance Architecture (that should be a title. I look it up. No... somebody needs to write it), so I collected books with images of these and more. They all got a good looking at before being boxed.

As I unpack them the process is repeated.

Some of the fiction I pull out and shelve in the new old house was given to me or recommended by buyers shopping the warehouse. One recent example, which I am reading now, is  Rules For Old Men Waiting, by Peter Pouncey. It is a beautifully written novel and I would not have known anything about it if my friend had not seen it at the warehouse and handed me a copy, telling me I had to read it.

Much of this blog is about trying to sell buyers and bookstore owners on the idea of buying remainders and bargain books, and much is about the quality of physical books as opposed to ebooks. I've written here about how even the presence of books triggers memory and emotional response in ways the digital versions can't touch. I think these are basic human needs and characteristics that will not go away. Petroleum replaced whale oil and cars replaced horses in a veritable flash, but no matter how much big money likes digital media, there are always going to be physical books and a significant percentage of readers remaining loyal to them.

If you are an author, and I see that an oddly high number of my readers are authors of ebooks, please consider publishing your digital books as real books when you can. In a few thousand years they might still be here, affecting how people feel and remember their lives. Well, at least I'll have a chance to read them as I pack and unpack next time I move.
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Links to articles about how real books help our minds and lives and how bookstores are doing just fine:
http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/p/cool-reads.html

Picking Roses in the Minefield

I had two customers shop the warehouse within the last couple of weeks that remind me of each other. Their personalities and life circumstances are very different, they live on opposite ends of the same continent, one owns his bookstore while the other is the remainder buyer for a large business, but they are like each other in that they both work without a computer, an increasingly rare characteristic among remainder buyers. There is so much data to work with when you are buying books, and it expands exponentially when you buy remainders and hurts because you now have different data to track for the same ISBNs, and new titles to track as there are so many more titles to consider when you buy frontlist, backlist, and bargain books.

Buyers who work without computers, and at the moment I can think of only two more, tend to be getting on in years, which is to say, slightly younger than myself. They tend to have amazing memories, at least for books and all they have ever known about books, and a deep abiding courage of their convictions. They tend to work fast. They know what they need, and how many copies, before they see the book, and zip through large warehouses in one or two days where most buyers will take 4 days to look at half as much. They are also much more willing to try books they don't know or don't even think will sell. They have a willingness to try things out on their customers before judging a book's saleability.

One big difference between my two buyers is that the one who owns his bookstore is the only buyer for that bookstore. He does not have other buyers he needs to worry about. There is no turf. I do know some owner-buyers who do have the turf problem, but it is never quite the minefield the professional remainder buyers must negotiate their way through. The frontlist buyer might comment on the lower prices effecting their sales in a general way or specific titles nuking the sales for the front- or backlist sales of those titles. Sometimes those frontlist buyers will complain about the remainder buyer's buys to the management, or to publisher's sales reps. This constant undercurrent of negativity can sap a buyer's productivity, though for most it is something that comes with the territory and can be a source of entertainment. A thick skin is a good prerequisite for the job.

This turf issue only exists where the idea of bargain books has not been communicated and shared with everybody in the organization. When all sales are analyzed by all buyers and booksellers, and it becomes apparent that remainder and bargain do not cannibalize frontlist or backlist sales, but are additional sales, that the lower costs work with the lower price to increase profits, that new and different customers are shopping bargain, that impulse bargain sales add significantly to the bottom line, and authors are introduced to customers through bargain, everyone will be on board. The most successful bookstores in the world have robust bargain components. Clear the mines and let your profits and customer base grow.
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Why aren’t remainders remainder marked? Hurts (returns) are marked. Check out my bargain book buyer’s glossary: http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/p/remainder-bargain-book-overstock.html 

Not in My Bookstore: Remainders and Author Events: http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/2015/04/oil-water-remainders-author-events.html

What’s so great about bargain books? I asked booksellers: http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/2015/03/whats-so-great-about-bargain-books.html

Book Expo, Feeling the Love

Maybe it was my unquenchable ray-of-sunshine personality (those who know me are now laughing), but Book Expo, held last week at the Javitz Center in NYC, felt distinctly up. I showed at a pre-show nearby for a couple of days before the official show began, which was great, and then the show itself was endlessly busy. Last year, in the same place and time, Friday was a slow day, almost slow enough to allow catching up with non-show sales and show follow-ups, but this year I didn't get a break.

Part of the story is that independent bookstores are back in a big way, and those who always bought bargain books are buying more, while new bookstores are trying it out and older bookstores that never bought bargain before are starting to work it into their business plans. I also felt that there were more international customers at the show, at least shopping with and talking with me. There were quite a few years where I did not see as many as before travel to the USA became such a challenge for many of them, so maybe there is something going on there that makes it easier, or maybe they are just dealing with it, but they were shopping for bargain books this year.

One observation that I had in previous years was also magnified this year, which is that customers who shopped the pre-show were very different from those who did not. The international customers, with a few notable exceptions, do not shop pre-shows and often only shop at Book Expo and other international fairs such as London and Frankfurt. Local booksellers tend to shop the pre-shows more than the official shows. Then there are the exceptions, those buyers who shop the pre-show and Book Expo, spending time and money with the same suppliers at both. 

Beating my drum once again, if you are not buying bargain books to sell to your bookstore's customers, here is one more bit to think about. The most successful booksellers in the world (seriously) shop the same bargain wholesalers twice within a few days, spending big money on airfare and hotel bills to do so. Maybe you need to rethink your buying strategies. 

More thoughts about trade shows:
http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/2013/06/in-trade-show-state-of-mind.html
http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/2014/11/post-pre-trade-show-post.html

New Books... Again

There are so many ways bargain books differentiate your bookstore from your competition. Being the beautiful physical packages that they were at full price, now at great new prices, changes what they are and how your customers perceive them. They are, in effect, new books again, creating new fans in a new space in a new market. Books which you might not have seriously considered when new now sell by the stack. You can fill more niches more customers are looking for.

When I see them at the warehouse in all their multitudes, millions of them, in their rows of pallets, arranged in aisles, stretching off into the distance, all surprises waiting to be opened, they are different than what they were when new, better in many ways. I find an intriguing cover, read about the author, or the place where the events in the novel occur, or where the chef has her restaurant, or the scientist first discovered his amazing discovery, and I think of the bookstores in those places. When I connect the book to the bookstore it is a different experience for the buyer than when the book was new. Buyers have another mind set as they consider who their customers are for this book.

While the big discount is the motivating factor in buying bargain books, there is more to the appeal than price. Many of these books were good sellers as new books, many still are. Some have been on backlists for years or decades, never quite selling so few as to be remaindered. Some have been remaindered and are no longer available from the publisher in any format. When they appear in a new space in your bookstore, occupying a corner on a table in a high traffic area, your customers consider them with fresh eyes, most picking them up for the first time. When you shelve a copy or two in your category sections, your customers now find so much more by the authors they were looking for.

Stacks on tables sell more books than shelves, but many backlist titles do not sell enough when stacked to pay for the square foot. This changes when they are bargain books, stacked on tables with other bargain books, as their sales double or triple.

If your bookstore sells both new and bargain, you tend to be biased toward data generated by new book sales. If a book sold great new, you assume it will sell well as a bargain book. You focus on bestsellers and bestselling authors, current and recent (unless you also sell used books, then you might know better). You look at books that did not sell so well when new and you assume it will not sell well in bargain. Frustrating for those of us selling bargain books to booksellers, this effect carries over to buyers who once only bought bargain and now buy new as well, even if those same buyers once poked fun at other buyers for missing this most important point in bargain bookselling. That data is hard to check at the door to the buyer's office.


One of the lists I (and probably a lot of other reps) produce on a regular basis is a "Sellers" list, showing just what has sold at least 10 copies in the last week, or 50 in a month, or some such metric. It is interesting how eclectic and unexpected a lot of these lists are. You never know what's going to sell in bargain until you put a stack in front of your customers and watch it go.

The fact is that books which did not sell well as frontlist or backlist make the best selling bargain books. This does not change just because you can now look at any amount of data showing that a title was a so-so seller as a new book. Part marketing, part packaging, part placement, and part good bookselling, bargain books are a whole new way to make books sell and make your customers happy, even if booksellers have been making profits grow with them for decades.
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What do other booksellers have to say about bargain books and how to use them to grow your bottom line and customer base? I asked them:
http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/2015/03/whats-so-great-about-bargain-books.html

More thoughts about buying and selling bargain books:
http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-one-thing.html

More about picking the best of the best... or not:
http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/2014/03/cherry-pickers-dilemma.html

Hints, tips, advice, and nagging for bargain booksellers:
http://benarcherbooks.blogspot.com/p/tips-ideas.html

Not in My Bookstore: Remainders and Author Events

Author events are huge opportunities to promote your bookstore. They raise customer awareness and create a sense of community between you, your bookstore, your customers, and authors. You are likely to sell more books, signed or not.

It seems that a rule of thumb among bargain buyers at bookstores, probably at the behest of the event coordinators and trade buyers, is to avoid displaying bargain books by authors who are doing book signings with them at any time in the foreseeable future, near or distant.

I get it. You never know if your author is going to be one of the few with an irrational fear of bargain. They probably are not, but the risk doesn't seem worth it. I would probably feel the same way. If you bring in a stack of their books, even a few months ahead of the event, and they sell out quickly and are forgotten, they show up in the hands of the customers waiting in line to buy the new title, in hopes that they can get this one signed too. Or the bargain book is the only one they want signed. Yikes.

Many, if not most, authors understand the effect bargain books have on their sales, which is to say, they grow them. Readers who had not tried them before buy one of their books off the bargain table on impulse and become fans for life. They buy the author's next book as soon as it comes out. But one of your responsibilities as event coordinator is to make sure your authors are as comfortable as possible coming into your bookstore and even asking them about this might seem a bit too awkward.

Booksellers would rather have the sale than know their customer is buying a "used" copy on the internet for "pennies," even though the bargain book still costs less because there are no shipping charges, and it usually costs less than the e-version as well. Bargain books are another way to ensure that the connection between your bookstore, the author, and your customer remains intact.

If this bargain book avoidance is something you practice, I would recommend that you moderate it a bit and buy the bargain books, just don't display them during the three or four weeks before the author's event. Wait a bit after the event, maybe until the next weekend, then do a display on your bargain tables. Customer interest in this author will be at its peak and you will generate some new readers for their works.

Feeling Good in the Bookselling Neighborhood

When I sell books to a bookstore, I send the buyer a list and the buyer sends it back to me after entering order quantities. Or I visit their bookstore and show them samples and jackets and write up the order there. Sometimes I meet the buyer at a trade show. Occasionally customers call in their orders. I call customers when I have pallet or truckload offers to sell. Since those can only be offered to one customer at a time, it's better to get the no's as quickly as possible so I can move on to the yes. Once I showed a buyer samples in my trunk in a parking lot at Newark International Airport. He was passing through and it was the only way we could make it work. It felt very... New Jersey.

On rare occasions I am asked to put together an order. The buyer will give me a dollar figure or a number of books or titles and ask that I hit those numbers. Categories might be specified, though not so much. These buyers usually know me and I know their bookstores and what works. One would think this would be the easiest kind of sale, but it is not for me, though they are one of my personal favorites. 

I sweat the details. I look at the sales history, try to determine what are the duds, what are the unexpected gems, the sleepers, the bestsellers. I look at the location, what the customer base might be, if there are schools nearby, what kind of recreation is in the area, what problems the region or town might be facing. All my pontificating about how buyers and their customers make bestsellers happen between them fades away when I'm doing this work. 

I produce an order, then go through it, wondering what the heck I was thinking. I delete 50% and start over. It wasn't this hard when I was a buyer working for a bookstore, or when I had my own bookstore. Then I knew my customers, sometimes so much so that we were friends. I knew the people I was buying for. This is something you can't know if you are hundreds of miles away from your customers' customers.

To be clear, I am not making a point here about buyers who buy for chains. They have a different operating plan, one in which they need to pinpoint the bestsellers that did not quite run the whole course before shuffling off to the backlist. They might find ten or twenty titles on a list and they buy high enough quantities that these few titles can be stacked in hundreds of locations. 

The bargain book buyer at an independent bookstore tends to buy much broader, usually between 100 and 400 titles per order, in very small quantities, all the way down to singles. They might buy 10s and 12s of a few proven bargain table bestsellers, and 5s and 6s of bread and butter basics like early readers, local authors, and classics (another subjective term), but most of the rest of their orders are 2s, 3s, and 4s, from many categories and price points. This is how they keep their customers coming back for more, creating an interesting, fun, enticing mix, changing all the time. And this is the kind of buyer I try to be when a customer asks me to put together an order for their store.

As much as it triggers my OCD, I love this particular job. It is one type of sale where I have to completely know my list, where I get to really submerse myself in the books. I feel like I am helping the bookstore and its customers in ways I don't often get to do.

So my plug for bargain books for this post: 
Bargain Books: Buy Them Because They Make You Feel Good  

Booksellers On What's So Great About Bargain Books

Why do so many booksellers put so much time and resources into making and keeping bargain books a big part of their bookstores? I asked a group of bookstore buyers and owners and the response was consistent and humbling.

A buyer at a bookstore that sells new books, this one with a large bargain department that could be its own bookstore, said: "Bargain books can create positive word-of-mouth in the community.  When people talk with others about a full-price book they talk about the book and not where they bought it. But when it's a bargain, that becomes part of the story they tell -- I just got this great book for $4.98 at such-and-such bookstore."

He continued: "And on a personal note -- booksellers are fellow travelers with many low wage folks. So I always get a thrill ringing up a customer with a stack of bargain books. I'm incredibly happy that they got such a great deal on books they want to read."

An owner / buyer at another bookstore that sells new books said she loves "having a great selection of kids' bargain books.  There are tons of gems out there if you look for them.  Kids go through so many books and new books add up quickly.  Even more important, I see families who probably would never buy their child a $17 book and who wouldn't even go down to our kids room, pick up bargain books outside the store.  We're putting books into kids' hands who might not otherwise get to have their own books." 

[I have always felt that part of my mission is to put more books into the hands of more people, including many who could not otherwise afford them, so it's always good to hear from booksellers who feel the same way.]

From another buyer at another bookstore that sells new books: "Aside from the obvious stuff, remainders are fun, in that the selection for both customers and buyers is unpredictable." 

[I always mean to, and forget to, stress the fun aspect of bargain. Many buyers and booksellers, on both sides of the buying counter, including me, talk about this as being one of the reasons for buying bargain.]

She continued: "It’s not just the latest/hottest stuff, it’s books you always wanted to read but forgot about when their moment passed. It’s books you loved and now can buy for all your friends. It’s art books at prices younger/budget-constrained people can afford—it makes art less elitist. The lower prices allow readers to experiment and indulge curiosities they can’t when new hardcovers are $25-plus and 'paperback' no longer means cheap." 

"I think it’s really the variety and constant surprises that I like most. That’s why I’d always rather get new stuff in than restock titles I've had before (except at Christmas: have to have those books customers saw back in June…the perfect thing for Uncle Bob!)."

[Other buyers reorder much stock that sells out and develop bargain bestsellers in this manner.]

From a buyer at a bookstore that sells both new and used books: 
"The thrill of the hunt has always been a personal reason why I like bargain. This means searching in the most unlikely places, the relatively small quantities, and being quick with responses, with the better books being limited in supply. Testing your book knowledge against the clock,  and all those other great buyers."

He continued: "Definitely add-on sales. We always have people buying new books, a few bargain books, and a sideline or two. The other thing worth mentioning perhaps is that you can market bargain tables like new tables- staff picks, coordinated displays, etc. I think it’s such an afterthought for most bookstores."

[It's interesting that so many bookstores which have made themselves experts in bargain have done the same with sidelines.]

From an owner / buyer at a used bookstore: 
"Bargain books have changed over the years. I used to use them to fill categories that were not coming in the door fast enough. I bought a lot of history, science, philosophy and other non-fiction. They really allowed me to fill in and keep a well rounded store."

[I recommend that bookstores selling new books use this category-building capacity of bargain as well, especially in sections such as poetry, philosophy, history, and art. With little effort and expense, you can greatly expand the variety and sales in any category.]

He continued: "Bargain books now seem to be more about returns from big box stores. So they allow me to keep mid-list inventory in stock. Thus I am buying more fiction, kids and art books. I can now get good pop-up books that are not broken.

Bargain books are great for window displays. I'd say more than 3/4 of the books in my window are from remainder dealers. They look nice, and when people want them, I can pull from overstock rather than having to redo my window every day."

[Again, this works for all bookstores.]

From an owner / buyer in the college market:
"We often find books that are used as course adoptions- we can price hurts in relation to their retail price at times rather than benchmarking their net price- offering sale books that come from titles in active circulation ( hurts ) gives us a chance to offer sale prices on books that people are still paying full price and that generates the sense of a bargain even greater than a remainder find."

This from an owner/buyer at a bookstore that sells new, used, and bargain:

"We started as a 500 sq ft used bookstore, expanding over the decades to 5,000 and then to 10,000 sq ft with the addition of new books and sidelines. However, the used books have always continued to be a big draw and we soon realized that the demand for used books far exceeded the supply. That's when we discovered remainders. Knowing our customers' interests in new & used books helped us to select remainder titles that turned over very rapidly. Bringing our new-book buyer to trade shows and remainder warehouses offered her the opportunity of filling out whole sections of the store with only a modest investment -- e.g., crafts, art, photography, memoir."

And he wrapped up with the kind of financial details I don't see much of and am very thankful to this bookseller for sharing:

"Last year we grossed $265K in remainders, 6-7% of our total sales. Purchases were $147K for a net of $118K, a 55% gross margin. Sweet."

I also heard from buyers, owners, events coordinators, and other booksellers saying that bargain books help with customer retention, always being interesting and drawing them back in. A customer running short on time, shopping on their lunch break, might come back on a day off to get a longer look at the bargain tables. 

Others say it's like saying "thank you" to their customers. Some of these under-price bargain, cutting their margins on targeted categories to make the prices so low they become a topic of conversation among their customers and help spread the word about their bookstores, reinforcing the first buyer's point.

Everybody seems to value the impulse sales that bargain brings in. The strategically placed bargain table can multiply sales when customers, walking to the areas of the bookstore where they will find the books they came in to buy, can't resist the great titles at great prices they see on the way, or that are stacked near the point of purchase.

Booksellers whose businesses rely heavily on off-site sales, such as college bookstores with buy-back events, children's bookstores running school book fairs, or any bookstore doing kiosks at convention centers during expos, often report using bargain to stock these events between 50% and 100%.

Finally and importantly, customers sometimes tell booksellers that they first started reading real books because they were in the bookstore with their child or friend or significant other and saw something interesting on the bargain table, bought it on impulse, and discovered that the reading experience was so much better than reading on an e-reader.

That should kindle your interest in bargain!