Pamela Grath [Editor’s Note: Pamela mentions our recent shift away from bookselling specific stories, while this is true we are looking for a bookseller to join us and help us get back to our roots. Details here…] Bookseller’s Reply to Comment from Another Bookseller Recently I wrote a post narrated in the voice of a book in … Read more
“Pick Me Up! Take Me Home!” I’m a book, and I’m for sale at a reasonable price, hoping to find a home, but all I can do is wait. Whether I’m lying on a table or sitting on a shelf or am propped up in a spinner rack, until someone opens my pages I have … Read more
We all think about invitations and press releases and publicity before a bookstore event, but what about afterward? Politicians call it “taking care of your base,” and it’s good manners as well as good business. You probably have an e-mail list from which you issue invitations to your bookstore events. Pay attention to everyone who … Read more
Don’t Invite a Brush-Off! “Do you have that new book by So-and-So?” In my shop, the answer to that question will usually be no unless So-and-So is an outstanding northern Michigan author. New books are a small percentage of my store inventory, and about a quarter of those, fiction or nonfiction, have Michigan themes and content … Read more
Booksellers, you know what I’m talking about. The high school yearbook committee, women’s club, civic theatre, etc. are eager to beat down the bookstore doors when it comes time for them to sell advertising, but are your business budget dollars well spent in these venues? Effectiveness of advertising can be looked at in a couple … Read more
“I have been invited to so many conferences on “The Death of the Book” that I suspect it is very much alive,” wrote Harvard Librarian Robert Darnton in an article in the December 23 issue of the New York Review of Books (“The Library: Three Jeremiads,” LVII:20, 22-26). Darnton went on to note that very … Read more
“How do you get people to a book signing?” The houseguest who asked this innocent question may have regretted it, because my answer was lengthy and detailed. Nothing can be left to chance for a successful event! PRESS RELEASE. This is my foundational campaign piece, and I write it carefully, with important facts in the … Read more
A reader of the Bookshop Blog e-mailed to ask if I would be willing to share my “business plan and wondering if Dog Ears Books had made money its first year. The shocking truth is–We had no business plan! But we made money! We had books threatening to crowd us out of house and home, … Read more
