One of the biggest challenges about arranging author events is deciding how many books to order. Especially when the event will be a large off-site event requiring you to move books to an out-of-store location and then move what doesn’t sell back again. You don’t want to under-order, because running out of books makes you look incompetent and means you will miss out on sales. But you also don’t want to over-order by any large margin, because then you’re paying chunks of money in return shipping when you send those unsold books back to the publisher.<\/p>\n
Having played the event-ordering game for almost ten years now, I think I’ve got it mostly figured out. I generally err a bit on the high side, but usually not so high as to leave us in shipping payment jeopardy. Every now and again, though, I have to place an order for an event when I’ve got NO IDEA what kind of numbers to work with. And I recently faced what might have been my biggest event-ordering challenge yet. <\/p>\n
Imagine for a moment that Mary Pope Osborne<\/a> is doing an off-site event with your store, at a local middle school, and you’ve got to decide what quantity to order of each title in her Magic Tree House<\/a> series, of which there are 40 fiction titles, and 19 non-fiction (the "Research Guides"). You know that, for each person in the signing line, Mary will (time willing) sign an unlimited number of hardcover MTH books but only two paperback MTH books. This suggests that, because so many families do own at least two of her books in paperback and are likely to bring them from home, you should order primarily hardcovers. But how many of each title? (Take into account the fact that the most recent MTH book was published four months ago, so there’s no hot-off-the-presses frontlist title driving hardcover sales at your event.) What about those people who don’t own MTH paperbacks but will want to buy them at your event? You can’t leave them high and dry, so you’d better order some copies of each title in paperback. But how many of each title? And what about M.P.O.’s non-MTH titles? How many of those should you order?<\/p>\n This all depends on how many people you’re expecting, right? Well, let’s say you have no clear idea of how many people might attend this event, because you’ve never hosted M.P.O. for an event before. You’re guessing the number could be anywhere between 400 and 800 people but guessing that the number will be close to the 500 or 600 mark.<\/p>\n So, let’s say there are 500 Magic Tree House fans at this event and 450 of them come with their own paperbacks from home. The remaining 50 people are each (possibly) going to purchase two paperbacks apiece. Are they more likely to want the first titles in the series or the most recently published titles in the series? Or do they have favorites in the series that they’ll want to buy? The same question applies to buying hardcovers.<\/p>\n Let’s say you order 100 boxes of books for this event. Question number one is, WHERE are you going to be able to store them in your bookstore between now and the event? Question number two is, how are you going to be able to GET all of those boxes to the event and how long will it take you to set up the book sales table? Question number three is, how many full-length tables will it take to display all of M.P.O’s titles in both paperback and hardcover? Question number four is, since you don’t have actual off-site cash registers that record ISBNs, how are you going to keep track of exactly which titles we’ve sold and in what quantity? Question number five is, HOW ANNOYING IS IT that the most recent paperbacks in the series are priced a dollar higher than all the previous books in the series so (grr!) you can’t just tell your booksellers that "all paperback MTH books except the Research Guides cost X"?<\/p>\n