{"id":24109,"date":"2018-01-03T07:30:04","date_gmt":"2018-01-03T12:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=24109"},"modified":"2018-01-03T07:30:04","modified_gmt":"2018-01-03T12:30:04","slug":"many-happy-returns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=24109","title":{"rendered":"Many Happy Returns?"},"content":{"rendered":"

My heart goes out to publishers this time of year. Here it is, January\u00a0\u2014 bookstore\u00a0inventory time,\u00a0 heading-into-the-lean-retail-season time, time to return excess\u00a0inventory and pay our bills.\u00a0If we booksellers dread seeing customers return books to the store, I can only imagine how publishers feel, waiting to see how\u00a0many copies of which titles will come pouring unsold back to their care and keeping.
\nOur staffer Laura (our returns czar) called\u00a0a publisher yesterday to get some returns approved and found herself transferred to their warehouse. The voice at the other end said wearily, “And how many pallets\u00a0will\u00a0you be delivering?” Laura laughed and said, “It’s just one box.” It made us think how grateful we are that customers, while they might bring back a book or two, never show up at the door with hundreds of returns for us.
\n
\nSadly, returns are\u00a0rarely books\u00a0you’re\u00a0happy to have extra copies of,\u00a0like\u00a0Pachinko<\/em> or Prairie Fires<\/em> or Lincoln in the Bardo<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 all books that were\u00a0scarce at one point or another this December. Instead, into the store straggle odd birds, a nonreturnable middle grade\u00a0book no one had looked at in years that you thought had *finally* found\u00a0a good home, or a curiously specific nonfiction title a customer had\u00a0you special order, and then changed his mind\u00a0five days later. Once, many years ago, a man had us order an expensive university press hardcover called\u00a0The History of the Penis, <\/em>which he planned\u00a0to give to his adult son as a present, and then he returned it a few days later because “it wasn’t what he thought it would be.” I’m not sure there’s ever been a title that more clearly trumpeted its contents, but we were young booksellers and hadn’t yet carved out the parameters of\u00a0our bridge too far.
\nThis week, we’re\u00a0closed to prepare for inventory, which is a surprisingly daunting task. We have more than 35,000 items in the store, and we have to get every\u00a0book into its proper section, so we are\u00a0dismantling\u00a0multiple themed displays, bestseller shelves, and endcaps in order to move books into their permanent sections. We’re fixing negative numbers, resolving incomplete purchase orders,\u00a0 special orders,\u00a0returns, and missing category information. We’re making sure section divisions are clear on the shelves, and that anything not being inventoried is labeled. We’re checking each section to make sure no wanderers from, say, Sports have wandered into Action\/Adventure. We’re rescuing a surprising amount of YA from the middle grade section, and teen fantasy from adult fiction.
\nAnd yes, we are pulling returns to publishers so we can get them out the door before the RGIS folks arrive with their scanners on Sunday to do the count. But we can promise that we won’t come close to returning even one pallet’s worth of books. Laura doesn’t like me nearby when she’s processing returns, because I pull books out of the stacks to rescue them. She patiently reminds me that, while I have great affection for that picture book with the fabulous art, it hasn’t sold in three years and its chance may have fairly passed.
\nAt the moment, our sweet store currently looks\u00a0a stark contrast from its chock-full holiday cheer, not only because we’ve pulled\u00a0some returns, but because we’ve undone all of the face-outs on the shelves to make the scanning process easier. That means an empty foot or two on each shelf. There are two empty bestseller bookcases \u2014 all of their contents temporarily reshelved into their various mystery, fiction, history, nature, and memoir sections. The tabletops are clear.\u00a0We’ve discovered books that had been needles in\u00a0a haystack, and had to make decisions about unusual books we’d added to displays partly because categorizing them was a challenge.\u00a0There’s a restful quality, and a sense of\u00a0orderliness as we herd everything into its rightful place.
\nWe have miles to go before inventory is done, but after the great rush of December, it’s a luxury to have a chunk\u00a0of time to lavish some much-needed attention on the store, and to think about what new themes and displays and books we can’t wait to set up. I’m not sure “many happy returns” is an appropriate greeting at this time of year in our field, but I hope all of my fellow booksellers and publishers have exactly as many as are needed, no more and no less.
\nHappy New Year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For booksellers and publishers, it’s a mixed greeting this time of year, to be sure.<\/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-24109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}