With Rainy Day Books celebrating its 35th anniversary today, bookseller Geoffrey Jennings, son of store founder and current owner, Vivien Jennings, insisted that the secret to store’s longevity is simply that they are doing what they’ve always done since his mother opened a 450-square-foot used paperback bookstore in Fairway, Kans. in 1975: sell books.
“We have no café, we have no toys,” Jennings declared, “We’re doing what we should be doing as purveyors of culture.” He conceded, however, that Rainy Day, which currently occupies a 3,000-square-foot retail space and sells only new books, also sells greeting cards, notecards, blank journals, a few regional magazines, and bags of chocolate almonds made by a local chocolatier, though the “only reason we sell the chocolate is to save people 10 minutes, so they don’t have to drive into Missouri” to purchase the product directly.
While it does not sell devices for reading e-books, Rainy Day has begun selling e-books on its website through the ABA’s IndieCommerce program. There are also plans in place to set up high-powered Macintosh computers inside the store for customers’ use in purchasing e-books. Thus far, only a “token amount” of e-books have been sold through the store’s site.
“Vivien [Jennings] is intuitively adaptive to what the market needs from a bookstore,” Jennings explained, of the store’s concession to current trends while remaining true to its mission. “Roger [Doeren, her life and business partner] knows how to execute that change.”
Rainy Day grossed $1.5 million in sales this past year.
Although Rainy Day maintains a website and a Facebook page with 1,600 friends, and Jennings himself regularly tweets store happenings and book news, he downplays the importance of social media in favor of good, old-fashioned human interaction. For Jennings and his 16 full-time and part-time colleagues, it’s all about cutting through the noise and distractions in an increasingly technology-obsessed society to continue handselling books in their community and, in doing so, build a loyal customer base. “What’s real, what’s authentic, is what’s happening in the store,” Jennings said, “You can sell a lot more books if you actually have the customer in the store, and are engaging with them, rather than e-mailing someone.”
One method that’s worked well for Rainy Day in effectively building up and maintaining a loyal customer base is hosting author events in collaboration with local businesses and organizations, with the price of admission being the purchase of a book. “Across the board, large or small, it doesn’t matter; people have to buy a book to attend,” Jennings explained, “After all, there’s the expectation on the part of authors and publishers that we sell books. Some authors [like David Sedaris] are insisting on it.”
The store hosts more than 250 public events each year, with audiences ranging from 20 to 2,000. In September, a “Celebration of the Book,” of back-to-back appearances over the course of four nights featuring Susan Casey, Terry McMillan, Jonathan Franzen, and Diana Gabaldon, attracted a total of 2,000 booklovers to the store’s regular offsite venue. A few weeks later, an appearance by Rick Riordan, promoting his latest middle-grade novel, The Lost Hero, drew 1,285. On October 25, in partnership with the Kansas City Public Library, Rainy Day hosted an appearance by the famously reclusive cartoonist Garry Trudeau, discussing his life and career on the eve of the release of 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective (Andrews McMeel). The event drew 700 attendees to the Kansas City Public Library.
Looking into the future, Jennings doesn’t anticipate that Rainy Day will change its emphasis on handselling books and promoting authors. “The value we will continue to offer is matching people and books, not just selling them something lying on the counter,” he insisted, “You can’t put a pricetag on that or electronify that.”
