A new Year walks among us now and she has graciously offered to provide her insights into what lays ahead, in this exclusive interview!
Kenny: Thank you indeed for taking the time to speak with us.
The Year 2016: Happy New Year to you Kenny!
Kenny: Are you all right? You look a bit peaked.
The Year 2016: Oh I’m fine. 2016 is a Nithos Bell Ringing year and I just completed the ringing. It is a very exhausting ceremony.
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Recently, when we were all a little punchy from the pace of holiday sales, Josie’s friend Patty created a hilarious Bingo game for us to play as a way to let off a little steam. It was such a great idea that I couldn’t resist taking it and adding some things here and there. For anyone who works retail or has a job involving customer service, some of these squares will be very familiar. Ditto for anyone with co-workers. I encourage all librarian and bookseller friends to make your own Bingo boards.
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As the new year starts, it occurred to me that maybe this year I would set a reading challenge or two for myself. I have not normally done this, but a friend shared a challenge on her Facebook wall that got me thinking about the nature of a reading challenge. Why a challenge? Well, as a bookseller, surprisingly there are many things I don’t read. Not because I don’t want to, but because I’m reading for the store. Two staffers regularly read heaps of adult mysteries, so I tend to skip all but my favorites in this genre. I avoid adult nonfiction because I’ve convinced I don’t care for it (which is silly because so often I adore memoir, I just don’t like history books). I read young adult and middle grade novels because they are the ones I enjoy the most and the sections of the store where people often need more help. But this year, I’m going to do a challenge. Continue reading →

This will be ShelfTalker’s last post of 2015! The next post will be on January 4th. For this serious, last of the year type of undertaking, given that I’ve been spending most of my waking hours in December matching up customers with gifts for their loved ones, and turnabout being fair play, I decided to ask some of my customers what they wanted from DDG in 2016.
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In October, Elizabeth wrote a blog When a Self-Published Book Is Done Right about the book Sweet Pea & Friends: The SheepOver. The authors, John and Jennifer Churchman, got an agent two days later and then the book went to auction; 10 days after the blog post ran, the Churchmans got a three-book deal with Little, Brown. We have been selling the book like crazy since we got it, but then last night the CBS Evening News ran a story on the book. Our website has exploded with orders that can be directly tracked to when the news aired across the country. Yes, we’ve been selling hundreds and hundreds copiesmof this charming book, which is a delightful holiday story for our small independent bookstore in Northern Vermont. But the book and the subsequent news coverage has meant much more.  Continue reading →

Like many indie bookstores with similar “book angel” holiday drives, the Flying Pig’s Snowflake Giving Program helps local children receive wonderful gift books every December. Our customers look forward to this as part of their own tradition each year, and it’s especially fun to see parents and kids conferring earnestly and happily about which family book favorites they most want to share with another child.
While we won’t list all 160 titles people bought, we thought it might be interesting to gather a sampling of the choices that people purchased for one of the organizations, who supplied us with gender, age, and a special interest of each child (family, animals, fairy tales, humor, farm, space, etc.). Sometimes customers ask for help choosing books, but most often, they choose their own. Here’s what went out to these kids, from the sublime to the silly: Continue reading →

This time of year finds bookstores feeling under-staffed, mightily worked, and exhausted. There are so many things happening at stores, especially smaller stores, that things can get really hectic. We have ordering deadlines to meet which often find us scrambling to restock books that are selling better than expected, doing back flips to get special orders in, and mailing out books in addition to helping customers find just the right books for everyone on their list. We are fried. We are brain-dead by the end of the day, usually because no one has stopped long enough to eat lunch. We are seriously over-caffeniated and are doing the very best we can. The list below are ways to hinder or help your local bookseller. Continue reading →

I’m on the ABA’s Revise and Revisit Kids panel, whose reason for being is to select great, languishing backlist titles to be featured in the Kids’ Indie Next List. One of my ambitions was to pitch the selection of an all-time personal favorite book, Ant and Bee by Angela Banner. I was thrilled to find that my colleagues were like-minded about this first book in a glorious series which has brought inter-generational joy and knowledge to so many children and parents.
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A few months ago, I listened to a guy tell a great story in a barn. He told the listening crowd that as a younger man, he had been an aspiring writer who took a job as a bartender at a fancy restaurant. He liked the idea of being a bartender because, unlike the busy wait staff, he envisioned having time to connect with patrons while polishing glasses, looking wise, and dealing out “life-changing pearls of wisdom” at just the right time. (He did get his chance to do all of that, but that’s his story to tell.)
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Bookstore events during the holidays boil down to creatively having people in the store but not interrupting business. Yesterday we had the Churchmans and their dog Laddie for an event celebrating what is turning out to be one of the best-selling books we’ve ever had, Sweet Pea & Friends: The SheepOver. We tried to have the event off-site, but between church on Sunday and holiday bazaars and craft fairs, no spaces were available. That actually turned out to be a good thing, because all these new customers came into the bookstore. But we had to get creative. Continue reading →