"Opinionated bookselling": yes, but I remember an acronym from my (sadly lost) copy of Drif's Guide to Secondhand Bookshops which offers a warning about doing this too intrusively. Some owners, he said, were FARTS (Follows Around, Recommending The Stock).
So cool of you to share your process and I’m glad you came to the conclusion you can’t please everyone and you want to have a shop you want to work in. I’ve almost finished my website and my mentor advised me to write as if I’m sat on my ideal client’s couch and we were having a chat. That really helped!
I think that all of that feedback proves one thing – you going with your gut, creating the book shop that YOU want and feel most drawn to create is the absolute right thing for you to do. You can never please everyone but a book shop that is the one you've dreamed of, imagined, sketched out on paper and in your head will be a place where you thrive. And in turn the joy that you exude will draw in all the folk who will love your shop, and your books, too.
In my opinion, as with everything it’s quality (of food, coffee, Rioja and more important than all, experience) which counts. The chain/franchise coffee shops in large bookstores are uniformly grim. However I stopped in a small town independent book shop in Ireland en route to a wedding once, and they were happily giving customers coffee and tea in assorted mismatched mugs and it was wonderful. It was like you were having a chat with your friends in their kitchen about what you were both reading.
"Opinionated bookselling": yes, but I remember an acronym from my (sadly lost) copy of Drif's Guide to Secondhand Bookshops which offers a warning about doing this too intrusively. Some owners, he said, were FARTS (Follows Around, Recommending The Stock).
So cool of you to share your process and I’m glad you came to the conclusion you can’t please everyone and you want to have a shop you want to work in. I’ve almost finished my website and my mentor advised me to write as if I’m sat on my ideal client’s couch and we were having a chat. That really helped!
I think that all of that feedback proves one thing – you going with your gut, creating the book shop that YOU want and feel most drawn to create is the absolute right thing for you to do. You can never please everyone but a book shop that is the one you've dreamed of, imagined, sketched out on paper and in your head will be a place where you thrive. And in turn the joy that you exude will draw in all the folk who will love your shop, and your books, too.
In my opinion, as with everything it’s quality (of food, coffee, Rioja and more important than all, experience) which counts. The chain/franchise coffee shops in large bookstores are uniformly grim. However I stopped in a small town independent book shop in Ireland en route to a wedding once, and they were happily giving customers coffee and tea in assorted mismatched mugs and it was wonderful. It was like you were having a chat with your friends in their kitchen about what you were both reading.