Selling books is one thing, but add the word 'children's' to booksellers' duties, and many take on a panicked look as if they'd just been asked to walk on hot coals. In New England, finding booksellers willing to cross the line dividing general books from the kids' section is so problematic that NEBA addressed the situation at its convention last fall with a panel on 'Surviving the Terrors of the Deep Children's Department.'
That's not to imply that the fear of selling is limited to the Northeast. Wendi Gratz, category manager and buyer for children's and young adult books at the Joseph Beth/Davis-Kidd six-store chain in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee, says, 'Getting booksellers to work in the children's section is a huge problem. I think it's the questions that faze booksellers. Customers aren't going to ask for a specific book. They're going to ask for a book for a gifted nine-year-old. They're all 'gifted.' '
At Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, Calif., assistant general manager/children's buyer Lauri Smith also blames questions for making would-be children's booksellers quake. 'People are afraid of children's, because it's a longer interaction with the customer,' she says.
So what's a bookstore owner to do? Toss out Pat the Bunny and Toot and Puddle and sell only a few established crossover titles like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings? To find out how some stores are quelling fears of selling children's books, PW talked to booksellers across the country about how they keep their children's sections staffed and stocked for optimum buying--and selling--pleasure.
Up and Over
'I do the hiring for the store, and occasionally I get lucky,' says Smith, who has trouble finding employees in general. When new hires express an interest in children's books, she'll assign them to work on the second floor, in Vroman's 2,000-square-foot children's book section. Children's books, toys and stationery are all located upstairs, while general books are on the main floor of the 30,000-square-foot independent.
Even so, there aren't usually enough people to keep the children's section covered all the time. 'I work with the book department manager downstairs,' Smith explains, 'and she's good about sending people up. They know that when they come up they have to read. We let them read picture books in the store, but the rest they have to take home.' Booksellers are expected to write reviews of the books they've read for use in shelf-talkers, the store's print newsletter and its Web site, www.vromansbookstore.com. 'Sometimes,' Smith acknowledges, 'it doesn't work out, and we let them go back downstairs.'
Since general booksellers are also needed to cover during lunch, Vroman's does a lot of children's displays, often tying books, toys and even stationery together, to make it easier for staff and customers alike to find new titles. 'During the Christmas season, we had four tables with stars of the season,' Smith says. 'That helps the people coming up on lunches know that these are the books that staff recommends. They have to have been published in the last six months.'
To solve staffing problems at The Golden Notebook in Woodstock, N.Y., Gaela Pearson, buyer and manager of the children's store, avoids leaving the store during her shift. 'I don't take very many breaks,' says Pearson, who has been with the store for 21 years. Since the children's area is so small--it's located in a separate building next to the main store with an archway connecting it to the gift store--only one person is needed. 'A lot of people feel inadequate at recommending,' observes Pearson, who has set up the store by ages to make it easier for the staff who help out on her days off and when she is called away to the main store. New books are on a display table in the center of the store and are surrounded by two spinner racks. During the busy holiday season, Pearson also keeps a list of recommended books broken down by ages and answers to frequently asked questions to help new booksellers assist customers more readily.
For LeeAnne Zwinkel, children's frontlist book buyer at University Book Store in Seattle, the problem is not so much luring children's booksellers in but getting them to stay. 'So far,' she says, 'I've hired a lot of people who have followed their dreams. They say, 'My band is doing really well, and I'm going on tour,' or 'I'm going back to school.' ' To her it is essential to find the right staff, but that doesn't necessarily mean parents or former teachers or librarians. 'So far,' says Zwinkel, who has been with the store for eight years, 'it's been half people who had no book experience and half who have worked in adult books. When I'm interviewing people I can almost feel if they'll fit into the family atmosphere. We're in a big store, but there are only six people in the kids' department.'
Zwinkel looks for a level of enthusiasm about kids' books rather than an in-depth knowledge to start. 'We train new booksellers to use the computer system, but we don't train them on the books. We do a lot of shelf-talkers, and we have a display with our favorite 30 titles. For the first month or two, they're selling the same four books,' says Zwinkel. Then as the new booksellers read more, she finds that they're able to recommend more titles. And Seattle, she notes, is conducive to reading. Most staffers have a 20- to 40-minute bus ride each way as part of their commute.
On-the-Job Training
Unlike Zwinkel, Jill Brooks, children's events coordinator and former children's manager and buyer at Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville, Ill., prefers working with children's booksellers who were former teachers and librarians. For her that's a necessary plus, since the children's section, including both books and educational toys, is so integral to the store, taking up half the sales floor. New children's booksellers at Anderson's already know a lot about the books and terminology--chapter books, picture books and reading levels. 'For the staff that is not hired specifically for children's,' Brooks says, 'we give them a detailed tour of the section.'
The Naperville store is one of three Anderson's bookshops in suburban Chicago and has experimented with various training programs to keep the children's and general books staff up-to-date on new titles. The newsletter, which comes out five times a year, features children's books, which are displayed together with their reviews in the children's section. In addition, Anderson's holds an hour-and-a-half-long Book Gossip every six weeks for booksellers to talk about their favorite books. The Gossips are usually on payday and are timed to coincide with the beginning and ending of shifts. 'As an extra incentive,' Brooks explains, 'participants receive the best employee discount offered for any purchases they want to make on that day.'
Booksellers at Anderson's are also encouraged to attend the store's spring and fall review sessions with buyers and reps, open houses for teachers and book talks for children's literature classes. 'These give adult and kids' staff an opportunity to hear points of interest and gives them a presentation angle,' says Brooks, who makes getting all staff to read children's books a priority. In children's, she says, 'we have a habit of looking for those great picture books that everybody will love and giving them to the adult staff at the register or service desk. This gives them a new favorite to show. If they like it, we give them a small stack, and they sell it as they assist customers.' Some recent books that Anderson's promoted this way include Francisco Pittau and Bernadette Gervais's Elephant Elephant: A Book of Opposites (Abrams), one of Brooks's personal favorites; Petite Rouge: A Cajun Little Red Riding Hood by Mike Artell, illustrated by Jim Harris (Dial); and Elizabeth Laird's A Book of Promises (DK), illustrated by Michael Frith.
'At the Toadstool, everybody knows a little bit about the kids' section,' says Maude Odgers, one of two children's specialists in the 5,000-square-foot Peterborough, N.H., store. Altogether in the state there are three Toadstool bookshops, which sell new and used books. The one in Peterborough is set up like a maze and mixes children's and adult books up front and in the used-book section. To help new booksellers familiarize themselves with the store, Odgers explains, 'when they first come in, we show them the store and give them hours to look around. Then we work in teams.' The teams start with receiving so that new booksellers can familiarize themselves with the store's layout and its coding system.
When the bookseller feels ready, Odgers continues, 'we'll type up this little task sheet with the most common books in both children's and adult like Goodnight Moon, Make Way for Ducklings and The Perfect Storm, and ask them to find them. It's a really good way to learn the store.'
This is not a mandatory part of training, and one bookseller, who has been with the store for five years, refuses to go into the children's section. On the other hand, Odgers says, 'if we talk about a book like Olivia with her, she'll talk about it with customers.' Discussing new children's books with the rest of the staff is one of Odgers's promotion strategies. 'We don't have staff meetings; we don't have time,' she says. 'But if we love a book, we tell staff people about it.'
Getting the Goods
At the Joseph Beth and Davis-Kidd bookstores, 'part of every new bookseller's training is a comprehensive tour of the kids' store,' says Gratz. 'It usually takes an hour. The last step of training is to shadow someone for a day or two.' But even that isn't necessarily enough. 'You really have to know the kids' inventory well to answer questions like, 'I need a book for my eight-year-old granddaughter who likes horses,' she adds. The stores' policy is to make booksellers work in both the children's and adult books sections. Children's specialists typically spend an hour or two every day in the main store.
Our goal, says Gratz, is 'to make it easier for everybody to find things. One of the things that's been successful for the holidays is I did a presentation to all the booksellers. These are my top three picks for picture books, beginning readers, intermediate readers. And I promised them that they would all be face out.' In addition to face-outs, Gratz always has a new book table so it's easy for customers to pick up a book for a birthday present and know that the child hasn't already read it. She also tries to keep a 'staff recommends' table or endcap in each store, depending on space. Like all the booksellers interviewed, Gratz makes use of shelf-talkers to give both parents and booksellers a hint at what a particular book is like. And she includes a children's section in the stores' holiday catalogue, broken down by category.
Kathleen Caldwell, children's buyer and events coordinator at Readers Books in Sonoma, Calif., has been experimenting with a variety of ways to get word-of-mouth going for her favorite kids' books. In the children's section, which occupies one of the store's four rooms, she has a shelf with what she considers to be the best books of the season and a big table of picture books. Later this month, Caldwell says, 'we're going to start doing windows where the kids write a review and we put them up.' Children help the store with promoting books in others ways as well. 'There are two or three kids that I give galleys to,' she says. 'If they read a book, they'll tell me what they thought. I think your customers can be your best asset.'
Tatnuck Bookseller & Sons in Worcester, Mass., the largest independent bookstore in New England, may have enough square footage for both a teachers' resource room and a good-size children's section, but even so, it faces many of the same staffing problems as smaller independents. 'We often have to run separate ads for people to work in kids',' says children's, teachers' resource and kids' sidelines buyer Lorna Ruby. 'A lot of people don't feel comfortable walking down into kids' and having a customer ask them a question, much less working in kids'. It's crazy, because we shelve books just like everybody else does in the store--there's a kids' biography section, a kids' history section. It's totally organized for the ease of both customer and staff, but some of the staff thinks it's too complicated.' To further simplify things, the store's training manual includes specific guidelines for shelving children's books, and Ruby keeps a laminated list of children's award winners in the section to assist parents and teachers.
Instead of trying to force general booksellers to become familiar with the kids' section, Ruby uses the computer to keep them up to date. At the end of each day the two children's department heads write up a detailed account of the most frequently asked-for books, titles featured in the local newspaper that sold well, holiday displays that have just gone up such as one for National Pig Day, and new shipments. That information is then emailed to the other department heads to keep them up-to-date on the section and to answer many of the questions that come to the store's central customer service desk. It's also a good assist for department heads when they do their weekly stint in kids'. Other booksellers in her store do not have to rotate through each section.
To keep booksellers reading, Tatnuck has a liberal book-borrowing program, and Ruby shares her advance reading copies and f&g's with the rest of the staff. 'I put them out as soon as I get them. Then I mark the ones that I want back,' she says. Not only do booksellers read the galleys, but sometimes they'll set themselves special projects. Last summer, for instance, the two children's department heads read through several decades of Newbery Medal winners.
For Ruby and other children's booksellers, finding dedicated staff may not always be a simple matter, but it's important to make it easy for customers and general booksellers to find the children's books they want without much ado. As for handselling children's books, there's nothing to fear but fear itself, to paraphrase one of America's most popular presidents. Or, as Carol Chittenden of Eight Cousins in Falmouth, Mass., pointed out to reluctant children's booksellers at the NEBA panel, 'Any book that you know and feel good about, you can hand-sell. Chances are no matter how little time you have spent in your children's section, you will have spent 90% more time than your customers.'
Secure in that knowledge, children's doesn't have to be such a scary place to visit. General booksellers may even find that they want to stay.
