Our picks this week
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War wounds: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. A beautiful book about war. One of my all-time favourites, it is a series of short stories about Vietnam and, as the title alludes to, the burdens - physical and emotional - borne by the soldiers. - Tom
Big in Japan: All The Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami. Kawakami is a fascinating writer. She was raised by a single mum, in a country where this is frowned upon, in a house without books, and started working at 14 to support her family. Her books are brimming with social commentary and observations on gender relations in a patriarchal society. All the Lovers in the Night is the story of Fuyuko, a 35-year-old proofreader who lives an ascetic life centred on her work. Gradually, she opens up and explores different ways of being through her friendship with a free-thinking colleague called Hijiri and an older man, a physics teacher, with whom she starts a relationship. - Federica
Only Connecticut: A Little Hope by Ethan Joella. Is this a novel? It is a novel, but it’s also a series of vignettes that become a greater whole. The stories in A Little Hope, Joella’s debut, are based in a small, fictional Connecticut city. The characters, including a grieving widow and a family growing dysfunctional, are nicely developed. I had a sense of the characters’ lives and what was at stake within a couple of paragraphs. Even the more ambitious chapters (which I keep calling stories) land very, very well, brimming with drama. - Rhys
Technically, card readers are called PDQ machines. Apparently this stands for “Process Data Quickly”, but I prefer the slang: “Pretty Damn Quick”. They really are. I have an especially whizzy one that comes at a discount from Shopify, the e-commerce people who provide the plumbing for my website (frequently confused by me with the people who provide me with endless replays of last night’s Eurovision tunes). And it is certainly Pretty Damn Quick.
Or so I thought until Friday night. A new friend I made through this newsletter had very kindly invited me, via his American publicist, to sell books at a speaker event at the Frontline Club, the Paddington hangout for foreign correspondents and various other cool and somewhat dusty types.
So there I was, laying out my wares in person for the first time, the Del Boy of paperbacks. I had charged up the Shopify gadget and even sold a book to myself to test it. (Sorry Mum, I am Backstory’s best customer so far.) Best of all, the club suggested I set up the books - two by Lauren Walsh, director of the photojournalism lab at NYU, including Conversations on Conflict Photography, and one by Clarissa Ward, CNN’s chief international correspondent, On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist - at the bar, so that I now think bookselling smells like Merlot.
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Then came the customers. My god, the customers. They do not arrive in an orderly trickle, spread evenly through the evening. Far from it: they hurl themselves at the counter in the five minutes immediately after the speakers have finished, their eyes pleading for the chance to part with their money for a weighty tome. (And how. Carting seven boxes of books up two flights of stairs has forever changed the meaning of the phrase “a heavy night”.)
Before the event started, I neatly laid out a new page in my notebook to tally sales of each book. Well that went out the window. According to the machine, I processed 13 sales, several for multiple books, between 8.07pm and 8.17pm. I barely had time to give each customer one of our lovely new Backstory bookmarks (free when you place your next order!), let alone write down who bought what.
And suddenly the PDQ didn’t seem quite so damn quick after all. More of a RRS: Really Rather Sluggish. Pressing ‘custom sale’, entering the amount, pressing ‘next’, clicking on the basket, clicking ‘checkout’ and then surrendering the machine to the customer: it all takes a matter of seconds, and also an age.
No surprise, then, that in one case I only spotted a customer’s card hadn’t gone through by the time she had left. Memo to self: retailers consider it best practice to charge the customers.
But it was also so much fun. The event itself was interesting (and a bit of a busman’s holiday - I seem to have quit journalism to spend more time talking about journalism). Even better, though, was meeting actual customers in the flesh. And seeing people seem genuinely excited about visiting my bookshop. Amazing!
A few weeks ago a bookseller told me to design systems not so they run smoothly now but so they run smoothly in December (ie, the busiest time of year). Friday night was a great case in point. Apart from the not-charging-someone blip, it went fine. But I should have tested the card reader in a busy setting first, and had a quicker way of recording sales.
Helpfully, I get another go this coming Thursday. I’m excited to be chairing the launch of the Bank of England’s first-ever book, Can’t We Just Print More Money? Economics in Ten Simple Questions, by two of their economists, Rupal Patel and Jack Meaning. And I’ll be selling books there, too. So I can test myself, and my PDQ, once again.
And if you’re hosting an author event or a festival this summer and need someone to sell some books, look no further. Please just shout! And who knows? Someone in the audience might even end up with a free book.
Tom
Free books!
You weee lucky they didn’t actually think the books were free. Back in the day when I did this at science conferences, the Russians and Eastern Europeans would just take the books off the stand thinking they were free!
PDQ. Punters Don't Queue at events like that. Sounds like it went well, nonetheless. Here's to many more and a lot more sales.