Category Archives: bookstore management

New Year Resolutions Bookslingers Tend not to Make

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1. This year, I resolve to keep my manicure perfect. No more scraping off old price stickers, lifting bits of unidentified goo from covers, picking off bits of melted candy from the children’s books. I will not allow them to get dirt trapped beneath from the books. Lovely fingernails will be my priority.

2. Be nicer when people start haggling with me over prices. After all, it’s a terrible economy, and that dollar for the pristine copy of “The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig” could be all that stands between this well-dressed, hair-highlighted woman with the perfect manicure and her last six packages of Raman Noodles. I can eat mac and cheese again tonight.

3. Exercise more. Tonight when the shop closes I’ll get on the treadmill, since the eight miles I covered walking the shop floor today isn’t really exercise. Nor is that “bend from the waist, pick up the stack of hardbacks, back and forth to the shelves as fast as I can go; repeat” thing that comprises about 2 hours of my day. And I have to work off those cheese-covered carbs, because I sold “Three Little Wolves” for 50 cents.

4. Get out there and find authors or artists to support with great in-store publicity and shelving displays at my own expense. I need to help develop single-person-focused events that build ego rather than community, because artists with unrealistic expectations of their place in the world are truly hard to find. I must beat the bushes, and devote more resources to this field of endeavor.*

5. Drink less coffee/tea/vodka. I don’t need it to get myself awake Saturday at 7 a.m. so I can get the shop floor cleared of books by opening time and make that cute display for the upcoming author signing. I don’t need it to make the customer who came in and needs to talk feel welcome and like I have time to listen to her at 11 a.m. I don’t need it to wake myself up at 3 p.m. after a vigorous physical day during which I stuffed a fiber bar in my mouth at lunch because the place was mobbed and my part-time student help didn’t show. And I don’t need it to stay awake at 7 p.m. during the author event, because this paranormal romance is well-edited and has such an innovative plot that I’m fascinated, despite that carb-heavy meal of mac and cheese I wolfed down from 6:32-6:34 p.m.

6. Spend more time in my shop. Ten hours a day six days a week really isn’t enough to get the feel of the place. I must make an effort to be there more often and take a livelier interest in its day-to-day workings.

*Authors and artists, don’t take personal offense. The world needs you! Many wise and wonderful creators understand what’s realistic and what isn’t — like Lisa Pell and Heather Volk and others who have been a pleasure to work with. But, as one small bookstore owner and I discussed recently, we average five people per week asking to do signings or display items. Not all of them are cued up–or polite.

My Grandmother, What Big….

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Weep and wail, you procrastinators. Our last trilogy of 50 Shades of Grey has left the bookstore. It went out in a brown paper bag inside a recycled “Books a Million” polystyrene bag. And the buyer—who of course was purchasing it for her grandmother, not herself—was careful to let no one observe her.

In fact, when “Liv” came into the bookstore during Christmas vacation from university, she walked straight to the trilogy’s star place on the “holiday specials” shelf and plucked them up. “I knew these would still be here,” she grinned. “This town’s too small for anyone to buy them from people they know.”

How right she was. ‘Tis the curse of a small town bookshop that one cannot sell books on addiction or copies of the Kama Sutra to customers one knows by name—and goes to church with, or attends the annual gala at the college with, or otherwise could make a lot of trouble for if one were to start naming titles. We swear ourselves to secrecy, but it matters not; people don’t buy “iffy” titles from us unless we don’t know who they (the customers) are.

But we were startled that young Liv, an intelligent, self-confident young woman who’d worked the shop for us many times during her high school summers, wanted the Shades of Grey trilogy.

“No, no,” she said, waving the paper bag concealing them in negation. “My grandmother wanted to read them, and I told her I knew where I could get them without anyone knowing, and that I’d do it for her for a late Christmas present.”

For her grandmother. Of course. We tried to shake her, but she stuck to this story, repeating it several times over our shared cup of tea and general catch-up in village gossip. Which included lots of names, but no titles.

And for those of you who hesitated to enter the bookshop and carry away these treasures of grammatical insight—sorry, I meant anatomical—please be advised that we don’t plan to restock those…books.