Yesterday’s stall bestsellers
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe - Backstory book club (meeting #1 - 17th October)
Lessons by Ian McEwan
The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Treacle Walker by Alan Garner
Brrr! It was a bit parky at the pop-up yesterday. So for shelter alone, I’m looking forward to moving into the shop in a couple of weeks, even if the consequent heating bill is a rather less appealing prospect.
Now that paint is on the walls and the bar counter is in place (cheers!), it’ll soon be time to unbox 3,000 or so books and put them on the bookshelves. (If any Marie Kondo types have tips for how to do this without moving all the “R”s four times in the process, please do shout.)
This impending transition, the step up from stall to shop, got me thinking yesterday about what I’ve learned in the last six months. There’s a lot, of course, from mastering business taxes and post-Brexit customs arrangements to how to haggle with publishers.
But the stall has taught me the most. Hawking my wares every Saturday on Hildreth Street has been a great way to learn the basics of this new trade. Here are six things that have surprised me, and that I will try to take with me to the shop:
Do judge books by their covers. Pretty books sell; dull ones don’t. (The exception is kids’ books: the ghastlier and more garish their covers, the better…still no luck for dull ones, though.) I can now usually tell as soon as I unbox a book and certainly before I read it whether or not it will sell. But perhaps more important than looks is clarity. Just as in a headline, one idea on a cover is better than ten. Early on, I ordered 20 copies of a book I thought would provide background to the Ukraine crisis, but didn’t sell a single one. In retrospect, this doesn’t surprise me: the cover doesn’t make it plain enough what the book is about. I am also learning to be sceptical of clever covers. I have sold lots of copies of The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel online, but none at the stall. Perhaps this is because “Without Men” is much harder to read than the rest of the jacket: a neat conceit that nonetheless makes it trickier to grasp the book’s content in a glance. (As an experiment, I’ll put a sign with the title next to the book next week.)
Bet little and often. To begin with, I lugged five copies of each book - sometimes more - to the stall. My back clocked this error before my business brain. I was far too bold with ordering from publishers, too, putting in for ten or 20 copies of titles I liked the look of. I soon learned that I was more likely to sell one or two copies of a large variety of books each week than big numbers of a few titles. With a few exceptions (I ought to have known I would sell more than the four copies of the new Ian McEwan I took to the stall yesterday), I now know to start small then replenish quickly when I’m on to a winner. This can be a tricky balance to strike: I had to scramble to get hold of hundreds of copies of Killer in the Kremlin, for instance, when the author, John Sweeney, tweeted that I had some signed copies.
Do talk about the weather. I’ve been astonished by quite how much difference the weather makes to sales. Saturday takings were down by half during the heatwave. Nor is there much point selling in the rain. The ideal bookselling day is dry but dull. Good thing I live in London, then.
Dust that window. Even on a 3m x 3m market stall, there are “hot” and “cold” spots for selling. I soon learned to maximise the “window” by putting two trestle tables at the front of the stall, where passers-by are funnelled on their way down the street. I thought one early customer was a little too cynical when he suggested moving children’s books there (I originally had them “inside” the stall), but he was right that people weren’t spotting them. Now, prams come to a swift halt as the picture books are pored over. Almost regardless of what I put on the “adult” side of the window, it sells. One week I brought 10 different editions of the gorgeous Passenger travel series and displayed them on the front table: most of them went. But on weeks I put them “inside”, only one or two sold.
Novelty is over-rated. In my old job, perfectly good stories were often dropped when a rival newspaper covered a similar story. The story was “old”, even if only by a day. I understood the professional pride, but I often wondered quite how many Telegraph readers also read the Mirror every day. I have been trying to resist a similar urge not to take to the stall a book that has been out “ages”… ie, about two months. Of course, customers are excited to get their hands on a new book that they have just read about in a paper or the latest book by an author they’ve been reading for years. But news filters out slowly, and having the book on display may jog people’s memories of a review weeks or months later. And I’ve discovered that people are just as eager to buy a book I rave about that was published nine years ago, like Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler, or that everyone knows is brilliant, 30 years on, like The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I’ve been struck by the number of times people have asked questions along the lines of “what are you recommending this week?”. Mostly, they don’t seem to care when the book was published, they want to hear why I’ve put it on display.
Events are unpredictable. Obviously. But I’ve been surprised by just how hard it is to gauge turnout at the signings and talks I’ve hosted or external events where I’ve been invited to sell books. The weather and time of day has hugely affected turnout at stall signings. And even with turnout, sales are not guaranteed: I went to a packed-out talk recently and came home with most of the books I took with me. (Several people in the audience had apparently already read it.) By contrast, I sold boxes and boxes of another book at a small, private party where some guests bought four or five copies each.
I will try to hold on to some of this as I make the move down the road - especially the fifth point, as it can be very easy to get swept along by the constant barrage of catalogues and new releases sent by publishers keen to hawk their “frontlist”.
For now, though, there are quite a few boxes to open. Wish me luck…
Speak soon,
Tom
This is fascinating, Tom, thank you for sharing.