A small independent bookstore just opened here, much to my joy. It has both new and used books. I’ve been impressed with the used selection; it’s as if they got a ‘open your own used bookstore’ kit. There’s one of everything. The selection of new books is pretty good, though I’m generally looking for something they don’t have. We were happy last week to be able to buy 5 books there.
They also offer tutoring services, and have local poetry readings and guitar players. They sell neat cards, leather-bound journals, and really cool metal hairclips.
They are right downtown–we still have a very nice downtown area–which undoubtedly has kept them alive for the past 6 months. They even extended their weekend hours a little while ago.
I hope they survive; the only other bookstore is the dreaded Barnes & Noble in the bigbox area at the edge of town.
I would suggest opening a used bookstore which combines local sales with sales on the Internet. A local used bookstore that does that very well is Loganberry Books. They have a special service that I and other Dopers have recommended from time to time, known as “Stump the Bookseller”. They have an online board on which people ask for identification of books that they read in their childhood, based on the few facts that they can recall. Then the bookseller can sometimes identify a book immediately, and if not, it is put on the list for the public to chime in with their identifications. This service alone has given them nationwide (perhaps worldwide) publicity. Just last year, they moved to a new location which tripled their shelf space.
Other local used booksellers have told me that they have been successful with a local/Internet combination by putting books on the shelves that they know their local clientele will be interested in, and listing the others on one of the Internet listing services, such as Abebooks.com, Abooksearch.com, Alibris.com, and dozens of others like the ones on this list.
This is anti-advice- “what not to do.” These are reasons why I, who buys between 15-30 books a month, have generally learned to avoid small indie bookstores like the plague and go right to amazon.com or the nearest Borders:
what not to do…
Don’t keep banker’s hours. I’m not sure if this is a U.S.-only colloquialism, so I’ll translate- don’t open at noon and close at four every day of the week, except for sundays, when you don’t open at all. Nothing alienates customers like a store that never seems to be open when they want to shop there.
Do carry used books. Don’t sell them at inflated prices. There’s an incredible used bookstore near me that I hardly ever frequent because they sell their used books for only $1 less than cover price. Used books should be cheap- book buyers will buy 10 used books at a buck each before they’ll buy two for $5 each.
Don’t have a shitty selection. This is tough, as you could try your hardest for months and the local Borders would probably still out-stock you, but at least make a valiant effort. I recently went to a local, mega-esteemed indie bookstore lauded for their selection of esoteric stuff, only to find that they not only didn’t carry Michel Houellebecq, they didn’t even carry Philip K. Dick, Haruki Murakami, Jerzy Kosinski, or even Umberto Eco! That stuff should have been a no-brainer.
(if you go the used bookstore route) - you’re a used bookstore, not a “collector’s” bookstore. Don’t price your stuff up because it’s “only the 3rd paperback printing” or “first printing!” when it’s something no one gives a crap about to begin with. I had another store I used to frequent that drove me nuts, because it was as though they found some excuse to price everything up under the pretext that it was “collector” - and we’re talking about worn paperbacks, broken-spined, no dustjacket 3rd printing hardcovers, etc. Needless to say, they were out of business in a year.
I highly recommend having an online counterpart to your store, such as an Amazon Z-shop. I know many stores that never seem to have customers inside, but stay afloat by doing 75%+ of their business online.
Yes- in fact you might get away with not opening until noon- but most people don’t get of work until 5 or 6, then they want to shop. Not during work hours. I think half of B&N sales success is that they are open late.
“Half cover” is a good place to start- well, except those books that were originally priced under a dollar.
Thanks for all the advice so far, guys. Jackelope, I’d really appreciate it if you couild get your GF to post some advice. (Congrats by the way!)
I obviously have no bloody clue what I want to do with my life now that I’ve taken the decision to leave Marketing, but a bookshop would be right at the top of my list of ideal jobs. I think it all does come down to location, and whether or not I can be organised enough to run my own business efficiently.
I live very close to a University which has a great Arts and Literature department. As far as I know, the only bookshop available to the students is a tiny one on campus that’s part of a national chain and is the size of a shoebox, otherwise they have to drive a couple of miles down the road or take the train to the next town where there’s a couple of larger chain bookstores.
I think that if I cater to the university students and provide a relaxed and convenient place for them to read and chill out, I could do pretty well. I’ll have a large number of steady clients within walking distance, and I could even stock up on all the textbooks they need or all the literary titles required for their coursework. I could even offer to buy their textbooks back off them at the end of the year and sell them on again as discounted, second-hand bargains.
As far as the money goes, I can afford to live hand-to-mouth for a while because I’m single and don’t have anyone depending on me. I just need to find out where I can get all the information to get me started. Are there any websites out there for bookshop owners?
If I can expand on that a bit with my personal pet peeve. I don’t know if it’d generalise, but for myself I’d say post hours promonently. I’ll be a lot more forgiving to a store that says “come back 12-4” clearly, than one that looks open until you walk into the door, and you have to hunt for a postage-stamp-sized label at the bottom left of the window that says “hours: afternoons”… On the same vein you could even experiment with hours. Say, open most of the time for a couple of weeks, and see when people come in. Personally I’d kill for a second hand bookshop open 8pm-2am, which is when I want something to read, but I realise I’m in the minority
If it meant the difference between succeeding and failing, I’d be willing to work whatever hours were necessary. Hell, if I’m catering to students, it would probably make sense to stay open really late so that I could give them someplace to study other than their rooms or the library. If there was enough space in the store for me to provide coffee, comfy armchairs and study tables, that would make the place damn near the perfect student hang-out.
Actually, I might not have to provide the coffee myself. If I situate the bookstore close to an existing coffee shop, I could probably work out a deal with them to help promote each other’s business. For example, we could do a joint “buy five books, get a free coffee / buy five coffees, get a free book” sort of promotion, or something similar.
I was going to suggest this route in relation to John Chance’s post as well: living in a college town, the best cash cow is to sell books to students. There was an indie bookstore where I went that survived against the University Store and “the other place” simply by…suckering?..convincing?..some teachers to have their course material bought at this store. I assume that the markup on textbooks is as much as on other books and considering the price of your average textbook…holy hell, that’s a sweet deal. The hard part though is convincing the teachers to have their students buy their books at your place. Not too hard if you’re stocking lit/classic books (indie spirit and all), but probably wouldn’t work with the sciences.
Although it doesn’t specifically apply to bookstores. The Comic Pimp always has some interesting marketing ideas that I imagine could be applied to bookstores pretty easily (author parties, after-hours discussions, etc.).
There’s a localish used bookstore located by some of the previous posters that will give you some great ideas of what not to do
piss your customers off by being a prick,
having the most bizzare policy regarding pricing, (“if you take a book of the shelf and misplace it, we raise the price by a dollar. If this happens three times, we throw the book out.” What the fuck’s with that? If we divide the selection into three categoreis: books someone (someone being the aggregate of your customers) wants to buy, books no one wants to buy and books that someone might want to buy, then you’ve got a real problem. 1) Books that someone wants to buy, they’ll buy without having to think twice, so no one has to worry about it 2) if the book sucks so much that no one wants to buy it, then it will sit forever, because no-one’s picking it up, allowing it to magically inflate in price 3) Books that someone picks up thinking they might want and then puts back, probably in the wrong spot because the store is organzied so poorly will just inflate in price until it gets thrown out (as subsequent people pick the book up thinking that it might be interesting until they see the freakin’ price tag). Granted, there won’t be as much of a problem with the reshelving now since the only books left are those that no one wants to buy.
Don’t get a freakin’ bookstore cat. Not only are people who are allergic to cats not going to enter (probably not that much of a problem) but the damn thing pisses on everything and very few people want cat-piss books.
I don’t know what university you are talking about, but as someone who studied foreign languages as an undergrad, I would have been sooo happy for there to be an independent place to buy foreign-language literature and other classic literature. The university bookstore a) was a ripoff, b) never had the books I needed in stock by the time I needed to buy them (hey, the classes were announced 4 months ago for this semester; why does it take you so long to order the books? It’s not like there is a revised edition of Homer’s Odyssey every fall!), and c) never had used copies of anything, because they offered students so little for their used books that people either decided to keep the books, or sold/lent them independently, which was a huge pain in the neck for all concerned. And they had the same dinky, practically useless paperback foreign-language dictionaries that you could pick up anywhere. The only thing they were good for was buying textbooks that were purely textbooks, or things where you needed to buy a specific edition. (Luckily my professors were usually pretty cool about not specifying an edition, but then it was usually because we’d have to read the whole book from one class to the next, so page numbers and such were pretty irrelevant.)
This was NYC, and I still spent a good couple of weeks at the beginning of the semester trying to hunt down the books I needed for my lit classes. It was ridiculous, and I’m sure it’s worse in more isolated areas. The Internet has surely changed the market quite a lot, but I’m sure there are still enough geeks out there who want to flip through a real, live book in their hands before making a purchase (especially for reference books).
Things about our large local used bookstore to be avoided:
High prices. 70% of the stock is overpriced, and even if there are 5 copies of a book on the shelf, they’re still too high. Worst is the children’s section; the owner has a good 20% of the floor space dedicated to children’s books, which are all way overpriced. $3 for a p-back easy reader, $3-5 for a p-back picture book of the type I’d read once and get rid of, much more for anything actually worth reading. If he’d price them at less than $2, they’d fly out the door, but he won’t, and actually gives away huge stacks of old stock to the school district librarian. Which is very nice for her, but just silly for a business practice.
Very little knowledge of the stock, little organization. It would help a lot if the history and religion sections had some sort of order imposed on them, instead of being shoved on the shelves as they come in. I enjoy browsing, but not looking at every single shelf in the effort to find a certain book that ought to be easy to spot. If I ask the owner, he gets snippy and orders me to go look (right after announcing that he keeps the location of each book in his head).
High curmudgeon quotient. Being a little grumpy and Luddite-ish is traditional. Forcing your customer to wait while he adds up the prices on an adding machine from the 30’s, and looks up the sales tax on a table–not so great. We could live with that if it weren’t for the fact that the owner snaps at anyone who so much as whispers the word ‘computer,’ and is insufferably snotty to everyone.
OTOH, a bookstore next to a college campus that is missing one is a great idea.
