Annals of a Bookstore Manager

General Notes on Booksellers

With a little verbal eye squinting, you can conclude there are four general types of booksellers. There is a good deal of bleeding over, and many will switch types in their career, but the rough quarters somewhat hold.

The first type, and the rarest, are the "true lovers of the bookstore" (TBL). These are the people who delight in actually promoting reading, as much as a retail store can, in organizing books. They delight in recovery, in dusting, in conversing with people about books diverse. They will take home books in categories they have not read from time to time. They will often buy subscriptions to trade magazines. They make, generally speaking, poor retailers overall and probably are not the best sort of bookseller. They are as apt to recommend you support Project Gutenberg as actually buy some classic from them. You should always have at least one of these on your team, though a greater number than one out of five is probably not good for your daily sales scores. Ultimately, these people should be shunted into a library system, or set up with some sort of welfare system where they can sit around and read all day. Or, just maybe, you can contact them via their website and offer to give them money so they don't have to have a real job. That works, too.

The second most rare (though they make up maybe 60% of the applicant pool) is the "non-book person" (NBP). I could not begin to theorize how they make it through the interview process (one of them asked me if a bookstore meant you owned books after you pay for them, or if you had to bring them back, and declared her favorite genre of books to be "wordsearch puzzles") but they do. They apply for the job because, as non-book people, they assume that book people are slow and lazy milquetoasts and so a job dedicated to them must require the most minimal work known to mankind. They invariably hate shelving, dusting, organizing, and pricing, or anything that makes them move more than fifteen minutes in their shift (especially reshelving books, though they often are the kind who would leave books in the wrong place if they were out shopping), but they tend to be tolerably good at customer service. If you have a good in-store database, it might not be a bad idea to hire one or two, because most of them that make past the first week of having to actually do any work tend to start picking up a few books here or there. Besides, they have an attitude towards books like most of your customers will have, and so it helps you to study "the other side".

Possibly the most plentiful is the "genre-whore", though the term can be a little hard to nail down. Genre-whores might be into classics, or mystery, or romance, or children books, or cookbooks; and they will announce, often with a sense of glee, that they "don't have time for those other books". Most GWs flock to bookstores as a good way to get discounts on their favorite genres, will invariably identify themselves as "book lovers" in interviews (though this is only half the case), and will work pretty hard to keep that discount into place once they get it. The majority of GWs actually have two or three genres to which they feel attached, and these can be sort of exclusive to each other, or at least show only the most tenous connection. Romance and Mystery. Children's Books, Horror books and Classics. Health books and Biography. I have seen many odd combinations.

Because of their die hard nature, they are sometimes bad booksellers, occasionally very bad booksellers. I have seen them mock customers (in one extreme case, often and to the customers face, though I can proudly say that I did not hire the one who did this). I have seen them shrink sections that are selling well because they feel that it should go (and expand sections where there is not enough stock to justify it so they can feel like they carry more of something they love). I have seen them go out of their way to design displays to mock a section, or make displays of books that the average buyer will never care about because they sure everyone loves them as much as they do. Most commonly, they will put off shelving books in unloved sections, sometimes going so far as to put them immediately into overstock without trying to sell them. If the store has an order system or request system, they will sometimes fabricate orders in the genres they like. It can be all sorts of fun.

There are two subtypes of GWs that are worthy of notice. The "genre-hater" (GH) is the person that overall likes most books, or at least can tolerate selling them, but can not stand one or two genres (as above, these can be very distinct and seemingly exclusive). The rules still apply as above, but they tend to be more likely to spite one or two sections, instead of the majority of your stock.

The second subtype, and one of the strangest booksellers you will meet in general, is the "indirect genre-whore" (the IGW). They will show every symptom of GWism, but strangely will dote on sections they do not read and often have only assumed knowledge of. Sometimes, it is a "non-book person" who has a few that are their favorite to sell. Sometimes their family and friends like a section and they support it. Then there are those I feel are compensating for some sense of guilt, or are trying to promote an "idealized" image. You will get IGW who brag about classics, for instance, though they cannot read them. You will sometimes have New Age materials or cookbooks treated like Bibles, though the person really partakes in little.

The most stereotypical I have seen is the couple of cases where a young, white female promotes African-American (a section I tend to hate to separate, but have always been forced to by higher management) books without ever reading them. They get, pardon the term, almost militant about it at times. For those not in the know, African-American books tend to be of two types. There are the vast majority which might involve "black people and settings" but are overall good books and have no basis for segragation besides the color of their author's skin, no more than books written by Southerners should be separated or books involving horse racing as a plot point. They might appeal specifically to type of audience, but race can be a poor reason to "go one step further". The second rough type are crappy little books with bad formatting and worse binding that are "urban realism", more often than not crappy little excuses to write (in fifth grade level English) violence, sex or drug abuse. The former can only be hurt (in my opinion) by making a bigger deal about their author's skin than their literary merits and the latter should never be promoted more than you promote any trash. In this way, I find this last type of GWIs to be quite infuriating and superficial.

Hiring GWs can be tricky. The general rule I would like to say I follow is hire those that attach to those sections you are already doing well in. You only need one per section, and if you hire one, you need to hire a few in competing sections so that the overall average works out. Use them with caution, and you should be ok.

The last big group of booksellers, not the majority but the most effective, are the "non-books specific retail worker". They will have more than one job on their resume, and probably worked in an electronics store, a pet store, or a clothing store. They will know the basics of selling things, though not necessarily books. They approach books as another "accessory", and so make good handsellers, and can often win tough customers over with tact and supreme service. If they are retail workers who are sticking with, though changing product, they are probably good at (occasionally bad at it, but there you go). Most of these read some of the time, some even read a good amount. Few read anything outside of "pulp genres" and have a stack of broken spine mass-markets, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.

The reason they are the best to hire is because they lack the passion that holds the TBL and the GW back, but can respect the product in a way that a NBP rarely can. It is a veritable best of both worlds. Talking to them about books usually means you have to talk to them about a fairly limited genre, there are a lot of "standards" they have no read and never will, and they will quite often browse books or read back covers or occasionally make a best guess and play it off to customers that they have read them (I have seen customers demand books be returned because the bookseller lied and said they had read it and it involved no sex scenes or no cursing). If you keep track of individual sales, they will probably double the mark that the others make.

Practically speaking, you should definitely hire them but keep in mind that they will be confused and upset by quirks of the bookselling profession. They will get rid of beloved favorites because some children's book sells better. They will design displays based on nothing more than appearance. And, as though part of some vile pact to drive you insane, customers will respond like mad to them.

Though rarely chosen, they actually make the best managers in the trade because they can make decisions purely on an economic standing. Let's face it, we are past the days where customers want to shop a bookstore full of handpicked books. We are now all about having Amazon.com levels of stock. In this world, the manager that can sell socks as well as James Patterson will be the one to survive.

With that being said, see above about sending me money so that I can sit around and read all day.