Every once in a while there are days that make a bookseller crazy crazy. Wednesday was that day for two reasons.
\nThe first reason is the book fair we’re doing for a local school. Only two grades had notes go home to parents reminding them of the book fair so the kids came to school with money. The rest of the grades walked through with only a dollar or two. One thing the school does is have a used book fair at the same time as the new books book fair. This tradition is started to really cut into the new book fair. While I understand the allure of a used book fair for budget-conscious families, it does make a new book fair a really hard sell. A bag of a books for a dollar, or a hardcover for $17.99?\u00a0 We just can’t win. Consequently, we’re not exactly selling new books hand over fist. And to top it off, several people have questioned that our giving a percent of the proceeds isn’t enough. Several people have implied that we should be giving all the proceeds of book sales to the school. While that would be lovely, we actually have expenses that need to be\u00a0 paid. Expenses like the books, the staff time to process the books, the staff time necessary to return all the books that didn’t sell, all need to be factored in to the discount we give back to any school. It’s also hard to be enthusiastic about a book fair when a teacher was overheard telling a student that a book could be bought much more cheaply through another venue, rather than the book fair hosted by the local independent bookstore. Ouch. This kind of attitude flies in the face of the dedication we feel from so many of our customers, who shop us every day and continually support us and want us only to thrive.
\nThe second thing that gave me fits was a call we got at 5:45 pm on Wednesday. A teacher called and asked about the pricing\/discount we could offer on 106 copies of a book. I quickly did research and knew that this being a Simon and Schuster book, we could offer a slightly better discount because we could do a Business to Business order and get a better percentage, which I could pass on to the teacher. I called the teacher back and told her about the better discount I could offer her. Then I asked her when she needed the books. Monday. This Monday? Yes, she said completely seriously. Monday? Really? I kept asking. So, it’s now 5:45 on Wednesday and you want 106 books by Monday morning. Sure, I can do that. I could. I did it by going to a distributor, not the publisher, thus losing some percentage points. I had to lower the teacher’s discount to adjust for the change in purchasing. The teacher was very understanding about it. If everything works the way it should, we will get 106 copies on Friday.
\nThen the teacher asked if we delivered. I just laughed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every once in a while there are days that make a bookseller crazy crazy. Wednesday was that day for two reasons. The first reason is the book fair we’re doing for a local school. Only two grades had notes go home to parents reminding them of the book fair so the kids came to school […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3341","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\/3341","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\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}