{"id":11869,"date":"2013-10-15T08:00:29","date_gmt":"2013-10-15T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=11869"},"modified":"2013-10-15T08:00:29","modified_gmt":"2013-10-15T12:00:29","slug":"great-expectations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=11869","title":{"rendered":"Great Expectations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello there!\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s resident New-Girl-at-the-Bookstore Laura, guest blogging for my lovely bosses Josie and Elizabeth. I\u2019ve been working at the bookstore for two and a half months now and I thought it would be fun to share my bookstore expectations vs. bookstore experience with all of you.\u00a0\u00a0Here are a number of observations I\u2019ve made:
\n1.\u00a0\u00a0People Want to Talk About What\u2019s New
\nI recently graduated from college with a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing and I was thrilled to find a job in my field of study. But it turns out that my degree has nothing to do with bookselling at all! For what feels like my whole life, I\u2019ve been studying the works emphasized in most curriculums\u2014that have\u00a0withstood the test of time<\/i>. I haven\u2019t had\u00a0time<\/i>\u00a0to read new releases because I\u2019ve been immersed in Ovid, the Bible, Thoreau, the original (and delightfully strange)\u00a0Beauty and the Beast<\/i>\u00a0etc. If you try to convince a customer that she should purchase a copy of Gawain and the Green Knight<\/em>\u00a0because the poet\u2019s subversive portrayal of gender and homoeroticism is so ahead of his time\u00a0<\/i>she will likely not be convinced that it is the right book for her. Of course! And while I didn\u2019t think I would be selling copy after copy of\u00a0Beowulf<\/i>\u00a0(though we do have the late Seamus Heaney\u2019s wonderful translation on the shelf) I did sort of think that I was well on my way to reading many of the Great Works that people might come into a bookstore wanting to talk about. It turns out that people who are interested in classics have already read them\u2014or at least don\u2019t need my recommendation to know why they\u2019re great. People want to know what\u2019s new\u2014what they couldn\u2019t possibly have an opinion on yet\u2014which brings me to my next point:
\n2.\u00a0\u00a0It is Useful for Publishers to Send Free Books
\nHallelujah! There are so many galleys in the back room that they\u2019re stacked in double rows on the shelf. And while it feels a little bit like I\u2019ve cheated the system or something, it turns out that I\u00a0am<\/i>\u00a0much better at recommending a book if I\u2019ve read it, and that I\u2019m much better at reading it if it\u2019s free and sent to me without my having to ask. I shouted for joy when the advance copy of the new Mollie Katzen cookbook came in the mail\u2014and after trying it out, I\u2019ve recommended it to\u00a0everyone<\/i>\u00a0I\u2019ve seen poking around the cookbook section. I think the technical term is symbiosis.
\n3.\u00a0\u00a0There Are a Thousand Tiny Ways to Disappoint People
\nIt turns out that much of the job is crisis-aversion. I told a customer who finds it difficult to read small print that I would order a book for her and later found out that it is published only in mass market. I\u2019ve given a teacher a quote on a discount only to later discover that the particular book she was interested in purchasing couldn\u2019t be discounted. I have looked up books in our inventory for customers over the phone and discovered that the copy is missing once they drive to the store. And worst of all is when you haven\u2019t read any of the books a customer is interested in asking about. Once, after a customer asked me about three mysteries in a row that I had not read, she said \u201cYou haven\u2019t read that either? Don\u2019t you\u00a0live<\/i>\u00a0in a bookstore?\u201d much like a child might assume his teachers live in their classrooms. Having not read any mysteries since Nancy Drew, I struck out book after book after book. It seems like there are a thousand things to learn, and about a billion books to read and it can all be overwhelming, but it\u2019s okay because:
\n4. People Are Generally Very Nice
\nPeople are really quite patient with me. When I\u2019ve charged someone\u2019s credit card for the incorrect amount and I have to call them up to fix it, or when the computer is taking a thousand years to look up the book they\u2019re trying to order, or when I forget a customer\u2019s name for the millionth time, everyone seems cheerful and ready to forgive me. And not only ready to forgive me but\u00a0excited<\/i>\u00a0to talk to me about the talk that Billy Collins gave, or that hilarious interview we both saw on Jon Stewart. Despite all the chaos, and my being woefully underprepared for many aspects of the job, there is something very exciting about working here: I think it is the potential of all those beautiful sentences sleeping in their books waiting to be read by the person who will take them home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our newest Flying Pig staffer dishes on the surprising aspects of bookselling life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}