Attendance may have been down 10% from last year’s high of 268 buyers, but spirit was up for the Great American Bargain Book Show, which returned to Boston for the second year in a row on August 19 and 20. First-time bargain book buyers like Jan Hall of Partners Village Store and Kitchen in Westport, Mass., attended the show looking to make bargain work. So did online newbie bargain retailers like Aurora Anaya-Cerda, owner of the online Spanish and English-language bookstore LaCasaAzulBookstore.com.
This year’s show offered more programming aimed specifically at helping online and bricks-and-mortar retailers dip their toes into bargain. At a seminar organized by the executive directors of NEIBA, NAIBA, and SIBA, sales representative Sean Concannon at Parson Weems Publisher Services; Alie Hess, buyer at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Mass.; and Sue Little, owner of Jabberwocky Bookshop in Newburyport, Mass., spoke about how to make remainders profitable. Concannon recommended that buyers go with bargain books that are in the same categories that work best in their store whether it’s children’s, literary fiction, cookbooks, or military history. “Even if they’re bargain books, they’re the books you want to put in the hands of buyers,” he said.
For Little, who added bargain and remainder titles 25 years ago, remainders are a way to lure readers to her 7,000 sq. ft. store. She prefers to buy 1, 2, or at the most 3 copies of a single title to add a range of low-price books to Jabberwocky. She shelves them alongside new and marks them on the front and spine. Hess’s strategy is the opposite. She buys 200 or 300 copies of a single title. It’s not unusual, she said, for the same book to be in three different sections—used, remainders, and new. One of the biggest changes she’s seen in remainders since she started buying for Brookline Booksmith a decade ago, she said, is: “a shift toward trade paperback remainders. People don’t want to lug a hardcover around.” About 70% of the store’s remainders are now trade paperback.
Just having inventory though is not enough, pricing can be tricky and needs to account for freight costs without being too high. As with new book buying, not everything sells. But remainders are bought nonreturnable. Little has trained her customers that she does an increasing discount on remainder books for her clearance sales to get rid of overstock: 20% on Wednesday, 30% on Thursday, 40% on Friday, and 50% on Saturday. Then if it still doesn’t sell, she moves it to used.
Pricing can be an even trickier issue for online retailers as Barbara Seibert, founder of Purple Turtle Productions (www.purpleturtleproducts.com), which ships 400 books a day, and David Strymish, cofounder of 12-year-old e-tailer Jessica’s Biscuit (www.ecookbooks.com) and co-owner of New England Mobile Book Fair in Newton Highlands, Mass., pointed out in a panel on the buyer’s perspective on publishing trends. “Pricing,” said Strymish, “is not as simple as what each book costs. Most things when you buy them are worth the same or less than you pay for them.” And new scams arise all the time. Strymish said that his staff spends half their day making sure orders are legitimate. Penny sellers, said Seibert, will bring down the price. Then when it drops they buy up everything and raise it. For her, price erosion is the biggest challenge facing bargain book e-sellers.
Other programming included a presentation by Karin Wilson, president of Page & Palette in Fairhope, Ala., on bookseller tips and a panel with publishing consultant Michael Friedman and World Publications Group president Jeff Press.
