One of the nice things about buying and handselling is being pushed out of our comfort zones and appreciating the pleasure other readers take in genres to which we are not naturally inclined to give our own custom. Nonetheless, we all have very real blind spots as buyers. Categories we loathe, categories we like too much, categories that decline to offer us any personal interest, all offer the opportunity to incur the ill considered fruits of bad buying decisions. How to overcome our own biases and pull the best titles across these perilous areas and into our stores?
To explore this idea I have put forward some examples into a spreadsheet, which, as we all know, confers a strict scientific character to any enterprise in which they are employed.
|
Category |
Problem |
Solution |
|
Cat Books |
They are not dog books |
Show them to cat people |
|
Meaningful books |
I have the spiritual depth of a goldfish and only the vaguest idea of how deep minds work. |
Study the track record of the author. Compare them in your mind to other meaningful books that have sold in the past.
|
|
Picture books that demonize electronic media and celebrate reading and physical books |
Preaching to the choir, agree with too implicitly |
Attain a zen-like calm and be fair-minded and critical |
|
Picture books with goopy rhyme schemes |
As Andrew Lang once said, “The urge to parody is really too strong.” |
Flippity flappity flunk |
|
YA books in which the female protagonist’s stomach does flips when exposed to the love interest |
Physical inaptitude for understanding |
Iron-willed suspension of disbelief
|
This is just a tiny sampling of the epic shoals that lurk beneath the surface of unwary buying. If anyone wants to confess their own greatest challenges in this area and share their best solutions, toss them in below!
Kenny, you crack me up! I particularly like the little poem, which I’ll mutter under my breath at sales meetings from now on….
Oh, the temptation to riff on this.
Starting with:
Category: Fiction
Problem: Repressed memory as a cheap plot device.
Solution: Repress the annoyance, remember the sales, remember the sales, remember the sales.