The Tip Sheet called up Sarah Bagby, owner of Watermark Books in Wichita, Kan., to find out what’s coming back into the store during the annual post-holiday gift-correction season.
So what’s getting returned?
We got a smattering of returns because they were duplicate gifts or the person had already read it, largely our bestsellers, the books we recommended. People want to exchange or get store credit, especially regarding a local cookbook put our by the Junior League—they just wanted another cookbook. We recommended The Destiny of the Republic, it was one of our bestsellers, and the new book by Horowitz about John Brown [. There were a couple local books, including one that we published that was a huge seller—a book called Radiating Like a Stone, a local social history of the feminist movement in Wichita, it has 79 contributors ad 69 essays, mostly by women in their 70s and 80s who did something fairly brave to further the feminist cause. In three weeks we sold a third of the print run, and we didn’t get any returns on that.
What are people exchanging for?
Mostly, they have a particular book in mind that they wanted [rather than the one they got], but there’s no real trend—except that they don’t want refunds. They all want to exchange or get store credit! We’re always happy about that. It’s been a good year, and we expect good things to come too.
