Here's a news flash for you: bookselling is a hard business, especially if you're a "little guy."
In case you haven't heard, the margins are low, the customer base (not to mention your discount) is shrinking and you're always in danger of being squeezed out by the "bigger guys," which once meant just the chains but now means the chains plus the so-called big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Costco et al.
And it's not as if there's anything you can do about these "facts": all you can do, really, is to keep on keepin' on, just like in the good ol' days, the days you sit around lamenting the passage thereof, the days when, supposedly, every secretary and shopgirl and insurance salesman bought and read a book a week and discussed real literature instead of reality shows.
To hear many industry folk tell it, the above statements are cold, hard facts, laws of nature, rules of thumb. Except that there are also—to use another cliché—more than a few exceptions that prove the rule.
I've been trying to pay a lot of attention to bookselling lately—how it's done, when it "works" and who is making it work. And while it's true that bookselling is a hard business; that a lot of independently owned bookstores will continue to suffer the indignities of the competitive marketplace; and that not a lot of second graders are telling their parents they'd rather forgo being doctors or movie stars to open a corner bookshop, there are actually signs of life in this old horse.
In my completely unscientific way, I've been looking around at bookstores and have come across more than a couple of booksellers who "get it":
Booksellers like Powell's, which has figured out the Internet and has thus become the third largest online retailer of books in this country
Booksellers who know that, say, when the best thing about a store is its location adjacent to a train station in an affluent suburb, they'd better exploit that location by opening very early in the morning and staying open past rush hour.
Booksellers who know to offer special services to customers in neighboring affluent suburbs—like dropping off ordered titles with a local florist or liquor store in that neighboring town, both as a service to customers and to prevent them from driving in the other direction to a chain.
Booksellers, like RJ Julia in Madison, Conn., which is launching a "Just the Right Book" service, in which the experienced booksellers will find, wrap and deliver the perfect gift to people whose profiles the customer has provided.
Booksellers who know their customers and cater to them, with thoughtful editing of stock and intelligent, not knee-jerk or PC recommendations—booksellers like New Haven's newly launched Labyrinth Books, around the corner from the chain-run university bookstore. Among other things, it stocks several translations, remaindered and new, of many of the classics—all the better for course adoption—and knows enough about this theater-oriented university town to put a collection of Harold Pinter's works in the front of the store the day the playwright won the Nobel Prize.
Booksellers, in other words, who don't buy into the old-think clichés, booksellers who might actually "think outside the box," but who would never, ever put it that way.
