Book Buying

Improving Inventory Turnover in Your Bookshop

by

The Benchmark of Bookstore Sales Performance

By Louis Gereaux

Many of us who have become bookstore owners have a passion for books.  To live the dream as a professional bookseller, we also need to maintain a strong interest in the basics of the retailing business.  A foundation of the merchandising business is Inventory Turnover.  One turn is completed when all items initially on hand for that year have been sold and replaced by new items.

(Elsie esq./Flickr)

Keeping track of turnover of inventory can be a problem for the used bookstore owner because there will be titles which come into the store and then go out in a week, while other titles sit on the shelves for years.  Many of your titles are unique books that you may only have one copy of. FIFO and LIFO do not make sense in this situation.  Is there anything wrong with keeping a book around for several years until it sells?  A used bookstore is not a supermarket with food that goes bad in a short time.  Additionally, if the used bookstore owner received money for those books which sat around for years, what is the concern?

Your browser may not support display of this image. Whether it appears this way or not, the books that are sitting on your shelves are costing the business money – if not in dollars then in the time it takes to manage those books.  Most bookstore owners have limited space in which to keep and display their inventories.  That space could be better utilized with books that turn more quickly.  As an online business, much time is spent managing inventory and revising listings – time which is best spent on faster turning books.

Read more

Any problem areas in your bookshop?

by

Back on Board & Discussing Problem Areas

Well, yes, I’ve been very quiet of late, and I do apologise.  I haven’t even had time to look at The Bookshop Blog for the past month.  We’ve just passed through the busiest time of the year here in town, and now I’m all about replenishing titles at the moment, so it’s back to the hunt for me.  I had some good luck through January, with a couple of good lots come in through the shop, which kept the stock fresh and moving.  I seem to be staying on top of most areas on the whole – there was for a time over November and December I felt I was buying more books than I was selling – but there are sections I struggle to keep up with.

Do other booksellers have these persistent problem areas?

Science Fiction
How do you keep science fiction stocked?  I find that when my science fiction titles sell, they don’t sell one by one, butGun With Music practically by the metre!  And I find it very difficult to source ‘fresh’ sci-fi/fantasy titles.  Does anyone have a practical suggestion for an Australian bookseller?  I heard from another bookseller the other day that she had a competitor in her shop (and there is an unwritten bookseller’s ‘code’ that we sell books to one another at 10% off) trying to purchase her collection of Dr Who novels.  She actually refused the other bookseller, on the grounds that they are hard to find, hard to keep on the shelf, and to sell them for 10% off when she could easily sell them to the summer tourists would seem like a poor business decision!

Science fiction/fantasy readers seem to collect and continue collecting.  They don’t seem to trade their books in, or sell them.  I assume there are plenty of bookshops out there who simply don’t stock sci-fi/fantasy, but I feel that as this is often an adolescent market I’d like to keep the genre, in the hope that I’m encouraging younger folk in.

Read more

Will You Buy My Used Books?

by

This is not a strength of mine. I am not a haggler. I walk into a store and ALWAYS pay the price that is being asked. I am trying to change this particular trait – it is not beneficial to my business to pay full price for something I’m trying to on- sell. That’s the nature of our chosen job isn’t it? We want the best quality for the lowest price, and then want a discount on top of that because our margins are so tight.

The wonderful, wacky world of fanfic

by

Think of any relatively book, movie, or TV show.  There is fanfic about it somewhere.  Go type it into a search engine “Your Book of Choice + fanfic”.  You’ll get results.


Fan fiction is basically additional material produced by fans of a media title.  The internet has made it easier than ever to find fanfic of whatever you want.  The newest hottest blockbuster movie, TV show, or book tends to be the easiest to find.  These are of course produced without the original creator’s consent and often take characters in directions that weren’t intended.  New characters get added.  Old annoying characters get killed off in the ways fans dreamed about and never got.  Characters finally hook up with the person they’ve been making gooshy eyes at for the entire series .  Bromance blossoms into actual homosexual romance.  There’s sex scenes that would never get past censors.

Due to the overflowing abundance of fan fiction on the internet, it often seems like a modern online only phenomenon.  But it’s hardly new.  Mainstream publishers snap up fan fiction of books that have fallen out of copyright.  There’s at least 20 books put out by mainstream presses that are spin off’s of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice that are sequels, prequels, retellings from a different perspective, or just downright weird retellings.  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is one of the best known current ones.

Read more