Nora O'Neill Focusing on increasing literacy should be part of every bookstore’s long term business plan. You may see no benefit this month or year, but if you plan to be in business ten years from now, this is one of the best investments you can make.
The 1970s, the decade of terror! If science didn’t kill you, sex would. Take a tour tour through the “me decade” with a representative book cover from each year.
The cliche is that every bookstore has a cat, but it’s actually fairly rare to encounter pets at bookstores anymore. Chains definitely don’t have them, so only indies still have the classic bookstore cat. One of the common notes in listings for books on online venues is “comes from a smoke free, pet free home”. … Read more
There’s only four books in the Twilight series. What should you recommend to tweens and teens that just can’t get enough vampires?
The problem with free clipart is its free. It means it gets used by everybody and all blends together. If you’re getting ready for a big advertising push in the downmarket, it is probably worth your time to actually commission your own one-of-a-kind artwork. It’s hard to establish a distinct presense if you look like everybody else. So here’s some guidelines for how to commission art for your bookstore.
February 10th was the day new lead standards rolled into place. You may have seen there was a one year stay on testing of products. Careful reading of the document points out two things. This only applies to manfucaturers and importers, not distributors and retails. The wording also makes it clear you’re still damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
From the linked document above:
“ Manufacturers and importers – large and small – of children’s products will not need to test or certify to these new requirements, but will need to meet the lead and phthalates limits, mandatory toy standards and other requirements.”
Remember, ignorance is no excuse, so if you cannot prove they are safe, you may still be in trouble. Also, the stay applies ONLY to the Consumer Product Safety Administration. They won’t enforce it… but that doesn’t mean that state attorney generals with an ax to grind or that lawyers looking to sue won’t use this law against you.
Twitter is one of those social media services that people either love to deathor just plain don’t get. Who wants to read a 140 character update saying things like “I just realized I accidentally had some books on “Judaism” marked as “Jedism” instead. Kabbalah does not give you a light saber”? At least 787 people read that yesterday on my Twitter feed.
Twitter is probably best described as microblogging. It’s the bastard child of blogging, social networking, news feeds, and online forums. Stick web 2.0 in a food processor and chop it into 140 character bite sized pieces and there you go. That’s Twitter.
The premise is pretty simple. 140 character updates on “what are you doing?”. This can be anything from deep thoughts to mundane tasks to actual plugs for your business. And you read the same thing from people you follow. Lots of Tweets are simply passed along links indicating what people are reading. There is where the power lies. Twitter is in some ways like a turbo charged mailing list. You’ll get a fast turnaround on anything you post, generally within minutes. Got a customer that’s given you a vague description of a book but you aren’t sure what it is? Post a query to Twitter and if your pool of followers is big enough, you often will get a response. It lets you pick other people’s brains.
The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA H.R. 4040) has a good goal: protect kids from dangerous imports tainted with lead. Bravo! Unfortunately it goes about doing so in such a way that it’ll drive up costs across the board, drive many manufacturers and retailers out of business, and not really make kids any safer.
So what does CPSIA do? It mandates lead testing for ALL items intended for children under 13 or PERCEIVED as being for those under age 13. So items commonly regarded as “kids stuff” even if it is intended for adults, such as many comics, collectible books, high end popups, etc, still falls under the statute even though they’re aimed at adult collectors.
It requires UNIT testing. The final product must be tested from each batch. It doesn’t matter if all the components going into it are certified and have been tested as having no lead, it still must be tested for lead.
