With the holidays only a few weeks behind us, bookstores around the country have started adding up their figures and assessing the season. We contacted a number of children's booksellers to find out how they fared over the holidays.
At Kids' Shelf in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, sales were "so-so," according to Bonnie Pryor. "Christmas wasn't terrible but it wasn't good." For Dana Harper at Brystone Children's Books in Fort Worth, Tex., sales were down from last year, "but it wasn't as bad as we felt it could have been. We were expecting the worst."
Tina Moore at the Blue Marble (Ft. Thomas, Ky.), said her store's Christmas business was "surprisingly better than last year. December started out kind of slow, but it was very steady. We were up by maybe three or four [percentage] points." And at Secret Garden Bookshop in Seattle, manager Susan Scott, who termed holiday sales "fine," explained, "We didn't break any records. I would say that generally it was better than we anticipated."
The titles that were selling the strongest caught few booksellers by surprise; the books had either already been selling well before the season kicked in, or else booksellers had ordered enough copies to meet demand. Among the picture books most often mentioned: Robert Sabuda's The Night Before Christmas; I'm Gonna Like Me by Jamie Lee Curtis and Laura Cornell; Who's That Knocking on Christmas Eve? by Jan Brett; and Stranger in the Woods by Carl R. Sams II and Jean Stoick.
In the fiction category, Carl Hiaasen's Hoot garnered a lot of mentions, as did Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events ("we could hardly keep them on the shelves," said Lori Squires of B Is for Books and Beyond in Bolton, Conn.) and The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke. Hoot, The Thief Lord and Harry Potter titles were big movers at Inkwood Books in Tampa, Fla., said Carla Jimenez. "[Hiaasen] is a Florida author," she said, "and he's been to our store a number of times."
At Blue Marble, Moore sold 100 copies of B Is for Bluegrass: A Kentucky Alphabet by Mary Ann McCabe Riehle and Wes Burgiss; other booksellers also reported success with titles specific to their region or written by a local author.
Pat Kutz, co-owner of Lift Bridge Book Shop in Brockport, N.Y., observed, "There didn't seem to be one hot title for the season." She found that customers were especially looking for mystery books, detective novels and books with secret codes. "Our surprise hit was the Nancy Drew backlist," she said.
For Candace Moreno at San Marino Toy and Book Shoppe (San Marino, Calif.), the surprise in fiction was All American Girl by Meg Cabot: "I thought it would sell, but not this well. It seemed to really go." Collections and boxed sets did especially well at Wellesley Booksmith (Wellesley, Mass.), according to children's buyer Alison Morris.
And if there were no breakaway hits, there were also few true flops of the season, according to the booksellers we spoke with. A few expressed disappointment that Chris Van Allsburg's Zathura had not sold better, and Sheila Egan at A Likely Story (Alexandria, Va.) mentioned Summerland by Michael Chabon and City of the Beasts by Isabel Allende as two titles she'd expected to sell more copies of. But in general, children's booksellers said they knew their customers, and didn't order big on anything they thought wouldn't sell.
And unlike some past Christmases, when a number of the bigger-selling titles went out of stock, things went much smoother this holiday season. "It seemed like the distributors were well-stocked," said Harper at Brystone Books. "We pretty much got everything we needed." Egan of A Likely Story had some trouble getting How Murray Saved Christmas by Mike Reiss and David Catrow, because of a mention on a National Public Radio segment before the holidays. Egan also couldn't restock Murray, and said she had "ordered big on the Jan Brett to avoid a similar situation." As Moore at Blue Marble put it, "We did not have one big runaway winner that everyone was looking for."
As a gauge of which books and authors have seeped into the book-buying public's consciousness, we asked booksellers to tell us what children's titles had been specifically requested by customers. Several mentioned the new Nancy Farmer novel, The House of the Scorpion (after it won the National Book Award in November); other specific book requests included The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg, Summerland, The Thief Lord, Who Moved My Cheese for Teens by Spencer Johnson, "anything Olivia," and "the gold and the silver books" (Artemis Fowl and its sequel).
By and large, picture books tend to sell better at the holidays, but this year, fiction gave them a run for their money. Scott at Secret Garden, where fiction outsold picture books, said, "The children's picture book side, we thought, was not the most exciting." For Kutz at Lift Bridge Book Shop, "Lots and lots of people came in to buy paperback kids' fiction. Everyone wants a book for Christmas." Conversely, picture books were the strongest category at A Likely Story; Egan also reported that children's books on tape sold well over the holidays. "I heard more families saying 'we're listening together,' " she said. "There's been a trend toward family things [since September 11]." And at Hobbit Hall in Roswell, Ga., manager Leah Lewandowski observed, "A lot of families were looking for books that they could sit down and read together."
Children's booksellers typically move a sizable percentage of their books through handselling; this becomes especially important during the holidays, when adults arrive in stores with no idea what to purchase for the children on their lists. Egan said that perhaps 75% of her holiday transactions involved handselling: "We have a huge customer base that is used to us picking. People come in with their lists and then we pick books for them." Harper at Brystone Children's Books, who estimated her store's holiday handselling transactions at 60%, observed more of a need for help in fiction, saying, "Most people were able to pick out their own picture books." Nikki Mutch, children's buyer at the UConn Co-op (Storrs, Conn.), put the figure for the children's department at 70%—75%. "A lot of grandparents come in and they don't know what to get their grandchildren," she said.
Among the titles most often recommended by handsellers at Hobbit Hall: Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman, Eloise Takes a Bawth by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight, and Coraline by Neil Gaiman.
One of the thornier issues in selling children's books to adults to give as gifts is that they tend to reach for what they know, while booksellers are well versed in newer offerings (which might be of more interest to children). For Scott at Secret Garden, "The vast majority of our customers put themselves in our hands. A lot of people, especially at Christmas, are clueless, and are desperate for your help." Egan said she is "definitely able to steer adults away from the classics—they are very amenable to that. Many times I get two sales out of it; they still want Kidnapped, but they also bought Will Hobbs." But Barbara Wilson, the new owner of Butterfly Books (DePere, Wis.), said, "Grandparents come in looking for books for their grandchildren, and they are always shown to the classics. They want the old favorites." Pryor at Kids Shelf uses the opportunity to sell add-ons: "We also have toys," she said, "so we tend to try to match books with toys."
Sales on the Side
When booksellers were asked what sidelines sold well during the holidays, many mentioned Harry Potter audio books, wooden toys and puzzles, various crafts items and Folkmanis puppets. "The Toot and Puddle plush sold like crazy," noted Morris of Wellesley Booksmith, though Will Peter, manager of Annie Bloom's (Portland, Ore.) finds that Christmas is not a particularly good season for sidelines in his store.
Holiday displays seemed popular at bookstores throughout the country. At B Is for Books, Squires said, "We tied a bunch of winter-themed books together, with recommendations from Book Sense." At Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino, Calif., owner Tony Miksak created a display that included various editions of The Nutcracker and The Night Before Christmas. "Those displays definitely helped increase sales for those books," he said. Secret Garden in Seattle assembled a display of adult authors who had written books for children, and A Likely Story featured fairy books ("fairies were very big this year," Egan said), as did Wellesley Booksmith, whose display highlighted David Ellwand's Fairie-Ality.
Overall, according to the retailers we polled, the mood of consumers tended to be upbeat. "I found the average buyer to be pretty happy to be buying books," said Moore of Blue Marble. "We sold a lot of gift certificates this year. The feeling I got was that they are realizing that books make the best presents." At Brystone Books, Harper observed, "Usually, throughout the year, people complain that they can't believe how much they are spending, but this holiday season they seemed to buy pretty freely."
Miksak at Gallery Bookshop reported a fair number of "harried," last-minute shoppers (especially grandparents), while Lift Bridge's Kutz found that customers were "careful and considerate" this year. "People wanted to buy something and they wanted to know that they had made a good choice. They weren't overbuying, and there were few returns."
Cautious shoppers were also seen by Mutch at the UConn Co-op, who said, "Customers were just trying to get the most for their money." For Jimenez at Inkwood Books, customers who came to the store "were in terrific spirits," but, she said, "they were not spending as much." However, at Butterfly Books, Wilson said, "Overall, customers seemed happy with the quality of the books they were getting for the price they were paying."
The average purchase per customer varied quite a bit from store to store, though the median response was about $30—$40 per transaction. Jimenez said she sold roughly three to four items to each holiday customer, adding, "A lot of people walked out of here with two bags of gift-wrapped books." At Brystone, Harper guessed at an average transaction price of $20. "It was such a wide range," she said. "Some customers only bought one book, and some bought 10 or more. A lot of our customers are teachers, and they like to buy books for their students."
Many booksellers reported a similar pattern in holiday sales: a slow start to December, with business picking up dramatically as Christmas got closer. "The first week of December, I thought nobody was going to come to the store," said B Is for Books' Squires. "But then we had record sales the Monday before Christmas." For Harper at Brystone, too, "The first two weeks [of the month] were slow, and we got a little scared. The week before Christmas, it picked up quite a bit and we got very busy."
At Butterfly Books, however, sales stayed fairly steady throughout the month, as they did at Annie Bloom's Blue Marble ("I didn't see this big rush," Moore said. "It wasn't particularly frenzied").
And looking ahead into 2003, booksellers voiced a range of moods, from "nervous" to "cautiously optimistic." Scott at Secret Garden put it this way: "I'm not real optimistic about the economy, and I want to be cautious. I want to weather this comfortably." Things were slightly more upbeat for Moore at Blue Marble: "I'm very optimistic about the future. This is our 23rd season. Looking over the figures, I was very pleased to see a constant level of sales."
Annie Bloom's Will Peter said he was "not pessimistic, but not particularly optimistic, either. I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude, because of all that is going on in the country." Morris at Wellesley Booksmith said she is "guardedly" optimistic about sales in 2003. As Jimenez at Inkwood Books put it, "I think it's a serious time in the country. There's a lot of uncertainty. Bookstores are a place where people can learn about the world and other cultures, as the world gets smaller and smaller and scarier."
