How to use this Page

Last Sunday our sermon was about the story of Ruth. Ruth is a story about how God redeems broken lives, brings light to the darkness.

One of the points Pastor Mike touched on was how Naomi's faith was highly visible to those around her. Naomi's faith made a big impact on her daughters-in-law, both of whom refused to leave her side even though their husbands (her sons) had died. Ruth went so far as to return to Naomi's homeland with her (a land that was a bitter enemy of Ruth's birthplace, Moab), and help provide for Naomi. Picture giving up your life here, moving to Iraq, or Iran for good to help your mother-in-law after your spouse has just died.

Rather than do what was easy or comfortable for herself, Ruth did what was best for Naomi. Ruth had seen something in Naomi that convinced her to do this. She had seen Jesus, she had seen "love one another" worked out day after day in Naomi's words and actions. It led me to think about how hard I try to "love one another", and how much harder I should be trying.

So as I listened to the sermon I drew this sketch. Jesus is seen directing Naomi. She is providing for a man, maybe a homeless man, I don't know, but a person in need. He definitely suffers from cartoony giant feet.

I hope you enjoyed this drawing, and thank you for stopping by.

Part 2 of our 3 Part series on Inventory Management by Nora of Rainy Day Paperback Exchange.

What to do with an under-performing section
Just plain moving it or remodeling it didn’t work, so now you need to bite the bullet and get rid of some books. But how do you actually get rid of them?

Trim it down!
Some sections tend to attract junk books that come to your shop to die. Ideally, don’t take these books in the first place. However, sometimes you’ll end up with stuff sitting around and you’re not sure why it didn’t sell.

After a certain point, this becomes visual noise and actually distracts buyers from finding the books they want. It’s like annoying pop up ads and banners. There’s so much clutter surrounding what they want that buyers give up and go elsewhere.

A good way to weed out books that are pure visual clutter is to date them when they come in. Once they reach their expiration date, heave-ho!

But, I can’t throw out perfectly good books!
It’s especially hard to let go of books if you paid money for them. But sometimes you need to admit it was a bad investment. You wouldn’t keep a stock that had been in the tank for years. But before you send them to the local library sale, you can try these things.

Decrease the price
Stick it on the bargain rack. Some people love bargains and will snap it up BECAUSE it is a bargain when they’d never normally visit that section.

Offloading it at discount on Ebay may also work. Bulk listings are a good way to get rid of boxes of spare books. This may not recoup your investment, but it gets you something.

Increase the price
What? It didn’t sell where it was and now you want me to INCREASE the price?
Yes. Items with higher prices are priced higher because they are rarer and more desirable. The high price in and of itself says: “I am desirable.” Much like people buy designer clothes because of the price, increasing the price and putting it with higher priced, desirable items may make it sell. It becomes a luxury item because it is expensive.

Send it on a nice vacation
If you have a storage area, take it out of the store for a few months. Then bring it back when there’s space in that section. It’s still the same old book, but because it’s had time to fade out of people’s memories, it looks new and exciting.

Online only
If it’s worth listing online but its just cluttering up your store, consider just having it in your online inventory. Wrap it up real nice and stick it in a plastic storage bin where nobody has to see it.

Have a customer appreciation sale
Got an e-mail list? Have a special sale just on the books you want to go away. Tell people this is their last chance to get these gems before they go away forever. Either flag them somehow in your online inventory or if you don’t have a way to do so, export them from your database and dump it into a document that you can attach to the mail.

Make sure to give people a deadline for buying them. It gives a sense of urgency. If they don’t buy right now, they’ll never get a chance!
If you do this, make sure you genuinely get the books out of there by the end of the sale. Fake sales annoy people. Stuff them somewhere else for a week or two for your customers that go “oh, I really meant to get X, but I forgot, you don’t still have it, do you?” They’ll love you for that. After that, really genuinely get them out of there.

Trade!
Your “competition” is not necessarily your competition. I’m lucky, I have three other dealers within two blocks of me. None of us carry overlapping stock. If you have other local dealers with different specialties, they may be interested in the contents of your under-performing sections. Odds are they have an under-performing section too… and it just may well be one you’re constantly trying to get more stock for. I recently gave the history specialist down the street a box of history books gratis because he could probably sell them. He’ll bring me a box of cheesy romances next time someone dumps a box of ‘em on him. He can’t get his customers to touch them, while mine will gobble them up. We both win.

Related Posts: Part 1 of the Series | How Many Worthless Books in your Inventory?

Share This

Here is Part 1 of a 3 Part series on Inventory Management. A great piece from Nora at Rainy Day Paper Back Exchange. It will get you thinking about optimizing your shop. It never hurts to do little a tweak here and there. We have sold many books right after moving them from one spot to another. Your regular customers can develop a ‘blinder effect’ after a while. This article should provoke you into at least thinking about placement if not actually moving a few things. Let us know if you’ve had success doing anything similar via the comments area.

*******************************

Part 1

What to do with under-performing sections?

You’ve figured out that a section is really taking up far too much space compared to what it contributes to your bottom line. But what do you do to rehabilitate the section?

Move it!
Sometimes it’s the location that’s doomed a section. Consider who normally buys those books and look over the section with a careful eye. Once you take a careful look at a section you may see the problem.

For example, putting the books on parenting and childbirth at knee height won’t work. Pregnant ladies can’t see their feet, let alone that shelf. Sometimes it’s something you’d never think of, but smack your head when you hear someone say it out loud. To use the same example, if the parenting books are somewhere mom can’t get her stroller to, women with little children won’t buy those books.

If there’s no obvious reason, consider moving it next to a section that IS selling. The high traffic in that area may be enough to get a bad section out of its rut (see the blog article on planograms for more on this). Try and come up with a logical pairing. If your logical pairing didn’t work, try something completely illogical! We moved True Crime many times, placing it (logically) next to Mystery, Thriller, and Biography at points but finally found it sold when placed next to Science Fiction. We still have no idea why.

Move PART of the section
A little shuffling may be just what was needed because where you shelved it wasn’t where your customers thought it should be. This is easiest to do with nonfiction sections. Don’t overload a high performing section with books from a poor section. Just move some of the most valuable books.

For example, say you have a book about the psychology of serial killers. You could easily put it in psychology or true crime. If it gets real specific with examples, it might even fit in biography. Try moving some of the higher priced items to a different section and see if they move there. Don’t forget to put a new date on them to indicate when they’ve overstayed their welcome there!

Remodel it!
If the section happens to be somewhere that gets natural light, walk into it several different times during the day and check the light level. It may be unbearably bright or thrown entirely into shadow for part of the day. Installing a curtain or a spotlight that can be adjusted during the day may be all that’s needed.

Also stand there for a few moments, preferably while there’s customers in the store. If it’s a tight space, browsers may be giving up because they keep getting bumped by other customers trying to get by. People generally will put up with being jostled once. Twice and they’ll move unless they REALLY want it. Consider moving “grab and go” stuff to that spot instead. Serial romances and Cliff Notes are good examples. Customers’ll glance at it quickly and decide in maybe 5 seconds whether they’re buying or not, so they won’t get jostled or block the aisle.

You can also consider moving around some of your fixtures to create a little more aisle space or to reroute the foot traffic away from that section. Less foot traffic seems like it should lead to less sales, but giving people time to browse items undisturbed may actually lead to more sales. Putting the high priced items that people will examine in detail far off the main foot traffic may actually make them sell better. Those willing to drop $500 on a book will still find the section, but won’t get run over by a baby stroller while contemplating their purchase.

Also consider whether there’s adequate places to put things down. This is especially true to sections browsed by women with small children (such as the kids section). If mom’s got a toddler in one arm, she’s only got one arm free to browse with. If she has nowhere to put her purchases down while she continues shopping, she’ll only buy one or two books.

Look for Part 2 & 3 later this week

Rainy Day Paperback Exchange
Bethel, CT
gently used books for kids and adults
http://www.rainydaypaperback.com

related posts: Using a Plannogram | Killing a Section

Share This

I’ve had crap days turn into splendid days just by noticing the smiles of strangers. - BH

There was a forum topic on MySpace just asking to write one sentence. That was what I came up with.
On to bookselling…

What percentage of your sales comes from sidelines?

One of our goals this coming year will be to increase our sidelines. As was mentioned here in a recent post, it’s much easier to sell more to existing customers than to find new ones. Many booksellers often find themselves at thrift shops and yard sales, a breeding ground for inexpensive trinkets/collectibles, so why not try a few items. We hadn’t done sidelines at all but this past summer I experimented with buying a few lamps, candle holders, odd items and they’ve started selling. As with books I find hunting for these ’sellables’ a lot of fun. Just today while popping into a thrift shop I came across a ceramic Pillsbury Dough Boy cookie jar for all of $3.00. I have it priced at $24.00 and I’m sure it will sell (I’ll let you know). Here are some items I’ve picked up that sold fairly quickly.

Coca-Cola fridge circa 1955 bought $20.00 sold for $45.00
Lamps avg.price $5.00 at yard sales sold a few for $15.00 - $20.00
Art Deco spritzer bought for $27 sold for $45
Decorative tins bought for $1.00 sold a few at $6.00

What sidelines work well for you and have you tried any that just collected dust?

Share This

Another terrific article from one of our regular contributers. Take a moment to say Hi to Nora at Rainy Day Paperbacks. If you’d like to contribute a posting just send me an email ([email protected])
*****************************

When you have a limited amount of space, you must make the best use of what you have. This means you need to keep track of what is contributing to your bottom line and what is just sucking up valuable real estate. You can look at the raw numbers, but sometimes a visual representation of what’s going on will help you better determine what actions you should take.

This is a very, very basic analytic planogram of my store layout showing what’s selling, what’s not. This simply shows which sections are selling very well (blue), average (white), and which ones are under-performing (red) compared to how much space they take up.

The basic idea here is that sometimes items sell poorly because they’re in the wrong place. What seemed like a good idea at the time doesn’t seem to actually work. Your logic didn’t match your customers’ logic.

These are three different 6 month shots of the layout of the store. As you can see, it’s kind of oddly shaped. I have to try and work around some oddly placed interior walls because I’m in a converted Victorian house. At least the floors are level!

Note: These maps are not to scale. They just give the general proportions and layout. The sales counter shows a square wall behind me, but it’s actually a half hex. I just didn’t feel like drawing that.

click here for full size

Here’s how it looked a year ago. The blue sections are performing above expectations, based on how much space they use verses how many items I sold in the previous six month period. Mystery, general fiction, romance, thriller, western, and some small sections are doing very well.
Many of the nonfiction sections in the back are doing extremely poorly. They’re labeled in red. There’s also a section in the sci-fi area that’s doing poorly.

To see if moving the nonfiction will improve sales, I swap it to a location that is doing well, the mystey. It’s right up front. Improved visibility should help the nonfiction. The mystery readers will still find the section.

click here for full size

On map two, you can see it sort of helped… and hurt. Mystery slows down some. This is mildly concerning, but that’s traditionally my slow half of the year, so not unexpected. You can see some other sections slide from “above average” to merely “average”.
However several of the nonfiction sections flip out of “waste of space” to “average”.

click here for full size
On the third one I’m again looking at the profitable half of the year. This is what the layout looked like at the beginning of November. (it covers the same 6 month period, one year later) as map one)
Mystery once again goes into “above average”. Several other sections switch from average to above average. More importantly, there’s less red! Ideally I’d like to see those nonfiction sections go blue, but I’ll take average to start.

Now, there’s another component to this. The color coding makes it easy to visualize what’s happening on the flat. There’s also a vertical component. Some cases are a mix of poor , average and above average, so are only partially colored, roughly in proportion to how much space the section is occupying. The labels are also coded, to provide info on what shelf they occupy. In cases with multiple sections, they go roughly in labeling order of top to bottom. If it was unclear, I added a number indicating what shelf it was on, with #1 indicating the start of the sequence.

This shows off a pattern. A section is likely to do poorly if it is on the very bottom of a case or the very top. Why? People can’t see things below their knees and can’t reach things above their heads! They have to REALLY want it to get down on the floor or climb on a stool. Thus the trick is banishing things to the top and bottom that people are willing to do that for. And are capable of doing so! As tempted as I am to banish parenting (a poorly performing section) to the top or bottom of a case, pregnant ladies aren’t inclined to sit on the floor or climb on a stool unless there’s absolutely no other way to get at them.

In the third view you can see a long line through the romance section marked “foreign”. I banished all the foreign language to the bottom shelf in those sections. If I look at the real sales numbers for Romance, I probably should have colored it radioactive blinking blue since it isn’t just outperforming, its doing four times the average! To make space for that foreign language, I got rid of some romance which made sales go up. Go fig. This can almost entirely be attributed to everything now being visible, so the authors at the end of the alphabet that had been languishing on the bottom shelf are suddenly hot buys because people can finally see them!

As to the foreign language, it still sells perfectly well on the bottom shelf. It takes up a lot of space, but its EXPENSIVE, so makes up for it in dollar volume. It sells just as well there as it does at eye level because virtually nobody buys Spanish or German books on whim. They ASK where they are and spend twenty minutes browsing.

But what to do about the rest of those red items? Time to shuffle them around and see if they can do better elsewhere. I’ll also try some other tricks to try and turn them around, but that’s best left to another post.

Rainy Day Paperback Exchange
Bethel, CT
gently used books for kids and adults
http://www.rainydaypaperback.com

Other Posts by Nora Killing Sections | Building your client base at Fan Conventions

Share This

We have a special guest writer today. Jill Hendrix of Fiction Addiction and regular contributor at Bookthink.com has offered us some insight on growing your business.

*******************

Bruce’s recent post asking how to best grow one’s bookselling business got me to thinking. I commented on his post with a few off-the-cuff remarks, but really there’s a lot more to say about this issue.

To grow your sales, you have two basic options: You can attract new customers or you can convince your existing customers to spend more. I think the easiest tack is to start with your existing customers and try to maximize those sales. After all, you already know these customers and probably have a better idea what will appeal or not appeal than you do when trying to craft marketing material for nebulous, yet-to-be-seen customers.

The easiest way to increase sales with your existing product line and existing customer base is simply to increase your prices. For example, when I started my business I priced my mass-market paperbacks at 40% off the original cover price (with a minimum floor). Thus, even if the book was currently in print at $7.99, my copy with $5.95 on the cover would be priced at $3.57. In analyzing my customers this past year, I determined that my main competition was not other used bookstores, but chain stores like Barnes & Noble. If I didn’t have what my customer was looking for they were not going to bother driving all over town to check out other used bookstores. Instead, they were going to hop over to the chain store, whom they knew would have it in stock. So, when they were looking at the price of my used book they were thinking about it in terms of the price they’d pay at a chain. If the alternative to a $3.57 book is a $7.99 copy, then you have some room to increase your price and yet still leave the customer feeling that they are getting a deal. Our current policy is to price at 40% off the current retail price, no matter what the original book cover price is. So, a used copy of that $7.99 book now sells for me at $4.79. That’s a 34% increase in sales! So, take a look at your pricing and who your competition is and see if you have any room for growth.

If you determine that your customers are extremely price-sensitive and you can’t move your prices up, then consider what you pay for your inventory. If you take trade-ins or pay cash at a set amount, then lower what you offer. Any easy way to do this without really announcing it is to put a cap on what you pay. For example, we use to pay 20% of the original cover price for paperback books. Now, we pay 20% with a maximum of $2.00 per book. So on a trade paperback with a $14.00 cover price, our new policy means that we’re paying $2.00 for that book instead of $2.80. Thus, when the book sells at $8.40, our profit on it has increased 14%.

Another way to get your customers to spend more is to try to better meet their demand. This is hard in the used book business as you don’t have as much control over your inventory as a new book store. If you do not already have a system for taking down customer wants, then this is a great thing to start. Once you note down the wants, you also need to take some time to actively search for these wants for customers. Consider making a weekly tour of your area thrift stores or to other bookstores in town that offer you a dealer discount, or perhaps you can purchase the book online cheaply enough to still make a profit. If you can satisfy more and more of your customers needs then they are more likely to think of you first when a book purchase becomes necessary. Even if the customer has already bought a copy by the time you call, they are always glad to hear from you and it’s a friendly advertisement for your business.

Another way to better meet customer demand is to proactively try to mold that demand. Send out monthly newsletters highlighting some of your favorite inventory and explaining why it’s begging to be purchased, write book reviews, put up cards telling customers that if they like this author then they’ll also like author x and author y. Try to stockpile inventory for a few of your favorite books so that anytime someone asks you for a recommendation you have several to give them.

The final option for increasing sales from your existing customers is to find another, complimentary product that you can sell as an add-on. When choosing a complimentary product make sure that you’re not simply cannibalizing your book sales. For instance, if most of your customers consider books to be an entertainment purchase and you began carrying used DVDs then you might find that your customers are still spending the same amount with you, they’re just now splitting it between books and DVDs since they consider both of these to be entertainment purchases and they only had x amount in their budget to spend on entertainment. For our complimentary product, we decided to add gift items. Everyone needs to buy a gift at some point or other, yet most customers coming to a used bookstore were probably not planning on a gift purchase in the first place, so any gift sales are usually add-on sales to what they were planning to buy anyway. Other advantages to gifts are that many of the items are small and/or have higher price points than used books and if they are not pre-priced you can set your own margins.

Maximizing the sales and profit from your existing customer base should generate some positive cash flow that may then allow you to play the expensive game of luring in new clientele through advertising, marketing, publicity, and/or perhaps by moving to a more expensive but more heavily trafficked neighborhood.

*********

Jill Hendrix is the owner of Fiction Addiction (http://www.fiction-addiction.com), a new-and-used bookstore in Greenville, SC. She has her own blog at http://fictionaddictionblog.com and also writes a series for BookThink (http://www.bookthink.com) on How to Start a Clicks-and-Bricks Used Bookstore.

Related Posts: What was your best business move?, Location - Location - Location

Share This

Would this make you angry or sad for the guy? He’s obviously made some poor decisions in life.
We had a rather odd event happen last week that I’m guessing does not happen too often in smaller towns. A rather suspicious looking guy, who looked about forty five but may have been only thirty, came in the shop and went to a tucked away spot to ‘browse’. I kept an eye on him but didn’t catch anything. After he left I still didn’t see anything out of place. It was his return visit a few days later later that I found - well, more sad than anything. He came back into the shop trying to sell me an odd looking Jimmy Hendrix statuette, a dvd, and a book. Of course the book looked a little familiar but I couldn’t immediately place it. I just said no thanks. On his way out he said he was just trying to get five bucks for lunch, tried to make me feel a little guilty. After he left I double checked my inventory and sure enough the book he tried to sell me was one that he stole from me on his last visit (minimal value). Imagine being so fried that you can’t remember where you ‘acquired’ your products, or perhaps so desperate he just didn’t care.

Share This

Joe Orlando runs a great service for owners of Brick and Mortar store. Many of you are already subscribers,  for those who own a shop and aren’t you may want to consider signing up. Have a question on return policies, buying out another store or simply pricing a rare tome then Joe’s Old Bookstore list serv is for you.

Joe was recently profiled on the IOBA Standard. He can be contacted via his own website at Fenwick Books

Share This

Our review of the eBay search tool we promised will be coming this weekend, sorry for the delay.

A fantastic story about following a dream came to us via the Old Bookstore group on Yahoo. It comes from Lera of
Aunt Teek’s & Uncle Lectable’s Vintage Store. - Thanks Lera.

****************************************

May I take a moment and share my “story” with you. First, a little
history and scene-setting.

Without giving away my age, I will share with you that I am a
grandmother of 12, mother of 4, wife of 1 and daughter of 1. For many
years my husband and I owned an auto body repair shop (far cry from
the book world) and we worked side by side to make it a reputable,
fair and honest body shop. My mother-in-law died, my father-in-law
developed Altzheimer’s and my husband dealt with those problems by
absenting himself from the business, leaving me to run it all alone.
Now, please understand that I am a woman and although I love
Corvettes and a few other cars, that is a love that is not extended
to anything beyond looking at or driving. Which resulted in my
running a business that was more my husband’s than mine, and
continuing his dream, not mine. Suffice it to say, I reached the end
of my rope and, feeling like I had no other choice, I walked out. I
moved in with some friends in another town to house-sit for them
while they traveled and started putting on stupid seminars on how to
manage a body shop using a computer.

One day, I drove by a yard sale that had literally hundreds of boxes
of books in the front, side and back yards. They wanted 25 cents a
book. All of them were hardcover book club editions with DJs from
about 1950-1970. I love mysteries and most of them were mysteries so
I spent a good bit of time going through the boxes picking out the
ones I wanted. After a while, with the hot Texas sun beating down on
my back, the man on the porch said I was giving him a backache
watching me so if I’d give him $10, I could take them all. Now, I’m
fairly certain he didn’t really expect me to take them all, but I
did. Two trips in 3 vehicles by 3 people later, I was the owner of
about 3000 books. I had a booth in an antique mall so that’s where I
took the books. The booth wasn’t big enough, so I rented the building
next door and hung out my shingle. (Just to keep the time-line
straight, this was BOBS [Before Online Book Selling].

Shortly after that, my dentist and the friends whose house I was
house-sitting with talked to my husband who came to see me. And I am
sharing these personal issues with you because I am an extremely
lucky and blessed lady. In short, my husband sold the business, sold
the house and said it was time for him to stop being selfish about
living out his dream and he would now — for the rest of our lives –
help me fulfill my dreams. BOBS came along and I closed the
bookstore, we bought an old house in another town and “started over”.

Life is never simple so the new complication was a 2-story pier and
beam house built in 1920 with a fireplace in the middle and a lake
that formed underneath it every time it rained. By this time I had
amassed a lot more than 3000 books and that weight, coupled with the
fireplace and the “lake”, made us realize what we were doing wasn’t
going to work. Nor was the moisture good for the books. So a few
years ago I opened my 2nd bookstore.

I tell you all this to help illustrate a philosophy and support some
advice I’m going to give you. It is not just a cliche to say “life is
too short”. It is, indeed, a fact. Why did I wait until my father-in-
law got Alzheimer’s before I became unhappy about the road I chose in
life? Why did I think that road had to be the same road as my
husband’s? Was it a generational thing? Why did I not “get in touch”
with my own wants and desires? These are, of course, hypothetical
questions at this point and even though I may now know the answers, I
am so totally satisfied with my life as a whole — and so is my
husband, by the way — that my only regret is that I waited so long
in life to pursue my dreams.

I will never be able to advertise my bookstore as having been in
business for many years. My children will not be able to say they
were raised in a bookstore instead of a body shop (although my girls
are quite proud of that, having won some trophies with cars they
customized themselves, and my son continues the body shop business
today). I have more books than I could possibly catalog in the amount
of time I have left on earth if I never buy another book. Soon I
won’t be able to carry boxes of books from one end of the store to
another.

So no matter what you think the obstacles are, forget about them. If
it truly is a dream, don’t wait another day to put the wheels in
motion. Organize it all in your mind over the next 24 hours and go
browse some bookstores over the weekend. Look at the stacks, smell
the books and remember the first time you ever stepped foot in a
bookstore (that was NOT a Barnes & Noble or Waldenbooks, etc.). Go
back home and do some googling on how to handle books, repair books,
and identify books.

Another cliche: Do what you love and the money will follow. If it
doesn’t, that’s okay too, because you’ll be happy anyway.

Then just do it.

Share This

Have you scrapped a complete section recently? I fear that I’ve been a bit stuck in my ways. I assumed that any self-respecting bookshop should always have a nice supply of the ’standard’ categories. Of course each shop will have variances based on locality and customer cravings but I believed that the main sections would be found in every generalists shop. As of this past weekend we no longer have a biography section. I’ve been reading more and more about dead zones in ones shop and how important it is to only keep products that move. I was wearing blinders when it comes to removing a complete section, never even considered it, but it makes sense. I rarely heard anyone say where’s the bio section and I definitely have other sections that move well and could use a little growth. So here’s my question. Do you have a dead section and have you considered removing it altogether? Have you recently done anything similar? Of course we will still carry biographies but they will be scattered about the place. Cary Grant meet the film section, Douglas Bader will be flying with some buddies in the history section and that nice little Van Gogh well its art and design for you.

Share This

One thing that independent booksellers should learn from the chain stores is that a customer wants a comfortable place to kill time almost as much as they want a selection of reading material. Of course not every independent can accommodate a café and comfy chairs–and we don’t want to encourage B+N-style abuse with people sleeping in the corners and mauling our stock. What we want is an atmosphere that’s unique and welcoming and attracts customers, even when they don’t have a particular purchase in mind.

Here are a few things that have drawn me to–and held me in–particular stores:

• readings and book groups
• a newsletter (e or print)
• zines or a local authors section
• original art on the walls
• a specialization or a few well-developed sections
• a community bulletin board
• staff hi-lights/picks
• good music
• organized/accessible shelving
• a new arrivals section (for used books)
• a discount punch card or a frequent shopper club
• special orders / OP book searches
• volunteering for store credit

Because my own store is strictly online I have a more intangible tool set but my goal is still to get people to goof off in my shop (even if they’re sitting in a cubicle on a Monday afternoon). Pursuant to this I’ve added a blog , Flickr sets and I’m planning experiments with LibraryThing, YouTube, and podcasting. So far all of these elements use free third-party webware. The benefit of this is two-fold: a) I don’t have to sink cash into a site redesign b) I’m spreading my footprint over several sites that are very actively search indexed AND have a social networking component.

So how many of these things do you do? What else have you tried to hold your customers attention and keep them coming back?

editor’s note: William is exactly right especially in regards to music, we get comments on ours all the time. The pic above is from our shop so I obviously by into Williams ideas on this topic.

Share This

We have a guest writer posting today. John Goodman is a manager at Zeeba Books as well as a budding filmmaker. He shares his thoughts on colour and its effects on business.

************

Colour your online and/or book world.

There are many theories concerning colour and how it affects the world and individuals. Conclusions may vary but the general consensus seems to be that colour matters and not only to people. For example, it has been demonstrated that the taste and vitamin content of a vegetable can be influence by the colour chosen for the plastic sheeting hanging above or below the plant. But more importantly, how does colour affect the book business? Your business? Perhaps drastically.

From a marketing perspective advertisements and words in print can be made more or less affective based solely on colour choice. This is hardly revolutionary but surprisingly easy enough to skip over when trying to decide on a particular palette scheme for that half page you’re thinking of purchasing in the upcoming town quarterly. The research is ongoing but certain statistics and theories seem to be convincing enough to at least consider. This detailed web site is worth a glance or two to help you with colour choice and your presence online. It would be sad to lose a potential customer solely because they didn’t like how you painted your virtual welcome mat.

Or your physical one. Aside from grabbing and keeping the attention of a passerby (online or not) it is important to address how they feel, whether consciously or not, once they step through your door. Perhaps it is best to approach this as if successfully scoring a film. You wouldn’t want your viewer commenting on the music of your Oscar winner while watching the film, even if it is a particularly well written piece, because that would require the viewer stepping out of the world in which they have become engulfed. Subtlety is key. What is the first thing that greets a customer as they enter your store? Will the colour they see encourage them to take their time and look around or to sprint down the isles? The more laid-back the clientele the more likely they are to notice something they may not have had they been on edge or in a rush. Do you offer coffee and biscuits? A relaxed individual may be slightly more inclined to purchase one and sit down with a book that seems interesting (the counter affects of the caffeine in the coffee are currently moot). The possible financial benefits aside, the result may be a customer that leaves your establishment feeling happier and maybe even healthier. That is definitely something to be proud of.

Burnt umber and cornflower yellow may comfort you and remind you of the days when your biggest worry was whether the rope on the tire swing would snap, but it may also influence the shady character in the self-help section to pocket Richard Carlson’s latest. Please, colour wisely.

Share This

We have a new contributing writer to introduce. George from Calgary (I’ll get his last name soon and see if he can share a short bio with us). Please take a sec to visit his website, Fair’s Fair -  no online sales but a very nicely designed site.

********************

I have seen many bookstores come and go during our years in the business (by the end of this year 4-5 reasonably good Calgary operators will have closed their shops) - most of them have complained about the increase in rents caused by the real estate boom these past few years.

For years I was under the same impression “a used books store needs a location with low rent!”

I now fully understand the phrases “Location! Location! Location!” and “There is no free lunch!”

It is possible other bookstore operators can make a case against those two phrases if your online sales numbers work but I really doubt that they do when you take all the extra work into consideration. We gave up on internet sales 1 1/2 years ago because the numbers produced did not justify the inordinate amount of work it took to produce those numbers and the usual suspects holding the hammer required a large part of our inventory to be held in abeyance - or else!

Our experience with the local market is “If you build it they will come!” - particularly if the thing you are trying to build is somewhere in the realm of “beyond your wildest dreams!” … smile.
What this business needs is more workaholics … lol.

It took me 17 years before I overcame the mental block about “low rent = possible success over many years” and tuned in to the reality “high rent (the rent required to obtain a legitimate retail location) = assured success within 2-3 years leading to continuous growth.”

The only cautions I would add - be sure you have a broad-based inventory of at least 15-20,000+ books and make sure your store has high visibility (try not to be in the middle of a block - look for a corner location).

Our latest store (opened June 26th in an extremely busy stripmall) covered its high rent in the first 24 days.
Now, almost at the 2 month anniversary date, daily average sales are continuing to climb and the enthusiasm of our clientele has been overwhelming - almost stunning … whew.

So … the 17 year apprenticeship we served is starting to pay dividends … smile.

Now all we have to do is continue working our asses off for another 50 years … so we can continue to thoroughly enjoy our lives for another 100 years.

It is amazing and gratifying to be in a business where the harder you work - the more you learn - and the more you learn - the insignificance of the monetary rewards, when compared to the worthiness of the enterprise, becomes more and more clear.

How much money would it take to balance the scales loaded down by the ooohs and ahhhs of satisfied customers?

Share This