Fake penguins

At Mostly Books we pride ourselves on our stock selection - and more importantly, that what we sell is up to our high quality threshold (particularly at this time of the year). What we would hate to happen is to recommend a book to a customer that turned out to be not quite what they were expecting.

So all the fuss about the BBC's Frozen Planet and possible faking of scenes is a bit of a concern. We have copies of Frozen Planet in the shop, and so this morning I went and inspected a copy to see if I could make out any hint that photographs in this gorgeously produced book have in any way been faked.

However, after taking it off the shelf and inspecting it more closely, I found this picture on pages 57-58). On the face of it - a touching encounter between the baby polar bears, their Mum - and a penguin. But look more closely:

Real or fake? The BBC need to be asked some very searching questions...you be the judge...

Bookshop Intelligence

Tens of thousands of books published each month, and we have room for about, ooh, 60 new ones - so how do we pick? In the good old days (or bad old days, if you're looking at these things from a financial point of view), we tended to sit down once a month, look through the new Gardners catalogue and try to spot those titles that we thought would go down well in the shop. We ordered them in, they sat there for a bit, and then - in the days before many customers - many of them went back (particularly hardbacks) as part of our returns allowance.

As time went on, and we got to know our customers a bit better (and there were more of them), we became a bit more adept at spotting books that people would buy (luckily for us). But from day one we did something else: we began to talk to people about books, asking questions when taking orders (especially if the title looked intriguing, or where the author was unknown to us). At the same time, we started running our bookgroups, meeting with reps, getting hold of proof copies, having authors meet us in person - and we started to follow literary bloggers and review sites. In short, we were building our bookshop intelligence network. We're still building it, and although it's not perfect (no network is), and even though it is constantly changing, it does occasionally give us an early warning system when a special book materialises onto the scene. 

This happened in the Autumn last year, when a customer came in (thanks Vicky!) and ordered a copy of a book by a new local author. When it arrived, it looked gorgeous, and one of our staff members ordered another, then whisked it home, then whisked it back to the shop a few days later begging everyone to read it. Eventually we loved it so much we made it one of our Christmas books. We also got in touch with the author, and so the first event in 2010 was welcoming Ali Shaw to the shop to talk about "The Girl With Glass Feet". Since our original 'discovery', the book has been shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, and has received rave reviews from lots of different quarters. It's also not doing badly in the US, and (as of last night) was the fourth most wished-for book on the IndieBound Wishlist. How lucky are we that Ali lives in Oxford and can get to us on a short bus ride?

 
Ali talked about his experiences to date with writing, his many jobs (including working at Queens Park Books and The Bodleian) and the 'tricky second album' situation he currently faces (although he did promise to get the first draft finished the following week). As always, Gaskella has written a wonderful review of the evening here.  
It's always exciting to discover a new author, and we've picked 'Girl With Glass Feet' as the first book for our newly revamped and relaunched Wednesday evening bookgroup next week. Our thanks to Ali for coming down to Abingdon, to him and everyone who packed in to make it such a great evening. Sticking on the 'intelligence' theme, we're looking forward to an event with Ben Macintyre on February 11th (discussing his latest book Operation Mincemeat) and then on Friday, February 19th we're very excited to have the legendary Sara Paretsky coming to Abingdon to talk about her latest book 'Hardball'. I've just finished reading both for the BBC Oxford Afternoon Book Club, and my thoughts on both these cracking books will feature on here shortly...

Bookshop Feng Shui, or "Giving the shop a good stir"

I'd like to say that stocktaking is one of those wonderful, quintessential experiences of bookselling, as enjoyable as spending time with a customer and pressing two or three hitherto undiscovered titles in their hand and watching them leave happy. Well, it may be quintessential, but in my experience stocktaking is tedious, laborious, exhausting and deadly dull. So perhaps we're doing it wrong. (Actually, I know doing it wrong. We use the Gardlink system, and unfortunately - and naïvely - we requested the handheld scanners too late this year, so none were available. Consequently we've had to bring the books to the scanner at the till, slowing down the process considerably. We won't do that again. Grrr.) Anyway, there are several upsides to stocktaking (no really). The big one is the opportunity to give the shop a bit of a spring clean, dig into all the dark and dusty corners and re-aquaint ourselves with some of the less popular titles: dust them down (literally in some cases) and bring them blinking out into the light for customers to see. I like to think of it as giving the shop a big stir. Or bookshop Feng Shui. I'm always amazed how even a minor reshuffle on the shelves can result in titles that have sat quietly for months with nary a glance suddenly get picked up and found a new home. So - what other things have we learned from this annual ritual? Books, CDs, etc with no prices on don't sell. Because the vast majority of books that come into the shop have RRPs (Recommended Retail Prices) on the covers, we've been a bit lax in pricing up those that don't. Audio is particularly bad for this. Customers feel uncomfortable when there isn't a price - I guess it breaks a cardinal rule about how a shop is set up (or perhaps they get a bit intimidated because of the old cliché "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it"). Either way, people can get quite cross when something isn't priced, bringing it to the till and demanding to know what it is. It's been a bit of an eye-opener just how many items weren't priced correctly, so we've been remedying this (he says guiltily). Books wrapped in cellophane don't sell. When we first opened, some of our initial stock orders came in wrapped in cellophane. "Ooh, dead posh" we thought, "That'll keep the books nice" - and promptly put them on the shelf still wrapped. A few seconds thought should have told us that one of the advantages of coming into a bookshop rather than, say, buying off the web is that you can have a good browse of the books. We had a gorgeous Thai cookbook that sat for a year in cellophane and sold 3 days after we took the cellophane off. Slap. We're less precious about unwrapping them now (or - in the case of very delicate, expensive books with cream coloured jackets for example, we'll have two: one wrapped, one for inspection. You can't do that with every book however). Author balances can get out of whack. Some of our juxtaposed authors were out of kilter. For example, we had - inexplicably - 6 titles by Adriana Trigiani and nothing by William Trevor. Now don't get me wrong, Adriana Trigiani is a fine author, and we have some devotees who come into our shop, but I think we have to work harder at the whole Trigiani/Trevor balance here. We're a small shop. I mean, we only stock a maximum of six plays by Shakespeare... Bookshops get really dusty. Boy, oh, boy. I was like a bituminous miner at the end of Sunday... But the biggest discovery is (as last year): we've got too much stock. We knew we had too much stock. We always have too much stock. We probably always will. We love books. We can't help ourselves. We order more of them in than we should do, and I guess we'll just have to do better at selling them...

Mystery Shopper Update

Following my post last week about being mystery shopped as part of our nomination, I thought I'd update you because I am convinced I served one of the Mystery Shoppers earlier this week. I'm a bit twitchy and eager to impress at the best of times when someone new comes into the shop, but it's been much worse since last week. Anyone I don't recognise has been getting a full-on dose of my particular brand of caffeine-fuelled, slightly overenthusiastic bookselling. Other members of staff try to alleviate the effects by jumping on me or giving me suddenly-urgent menial jobs to do to stop me scaring off potential customers. Anyway, a very nice lady came into the shop on Wednesday, and here's the clues that led me to suspect she was in fact a Mystery Shopper:

• Entered the shop, and spent at least one minute "taking stock" of her surroundings
• Upon being greeted, she gave me a winning smile, but did not engage in any banter
• Exuded air of confidence in the retail environment
• Was dressed smart but not showy, business-like but not corporate
• Carried smart business-like portfolio, or the kind that I imagine mystery shoppers would carry (containing mystery shopper questionnaires, review documents, feedback forms, training material, etc.)
• Spent several minutes casually checking the shop
• Selected a popular title off the fiction shelves from an author who doesn't do well in the shop normally (marking her out as "not a typical Mostly Books customer" and "a stranger in these parts" - that last expression to be said in Oxfordshire or West Country accent)
• Asked tricky questions about recommendations for a 12-year-old nephew (unnamed). Fortunately, "books for 12 year old boys"would be my chosen specialist subject if I ever appeared on mastermind - ha ha!
• Appeared slightly stunned once I'd loaded her with books, explained the loyalty card, gave her the current issue of the newsletter. Nevertheless, she clung determinedly to initial purchase selection, and simply said she'd have to "ask about which book her nephew might want".
• When engaged in casual conversation during sales transaction about where she was from, said she was just "passing through Abingdon" on "business".

So what do you think? Prime candidate or what? Or perhaps I simply need to go and lie down... ...or alternatively spend a day stocktaking, which is (groan) what will be happening in the shop all day tomorrow...

The Great Carnegie Book Hunt

Last year, when the Carnegie and Greenaway shortlists were announced, we naively thought "ooh, we'll have one of each of the shortlist for the shop, make a nice display". After a quick call to one of the major wholesalers, it dawned on us that we had somewhat missed the boat. 'Ere, Bert, gentleman on line two says he wants some carnegie shortlist titles dear oh dear, you're 'aving' a laugh, etc. It quickly became clear that a) before the shortlist was announced, half the titles were OP in hardback and not yet published in paperback, and b) the ones that weren't available were snapped up by 8.15 the following morning. So this year we were ready. This year, we have launched a Greenaway shadowing group in the shop, and we also had some orders for titles off the Carnegie list to fulfill, so the whole thing was planned like the proverbial military campaign. First, the entire longlist was recced, titles were noted in terms of availability in hardback, paperback, stock amounts for all major wholesalers. Then a number of pre-order baskets were prepared ready for the off. After staying up past midnight (joined by Timothy who wanted to know what all the excitement was about) the moment the shortlist came through on email, the baskets were stripped to their shortlisted essentials and sent off ASAP in the wee small hours. We will discover Saturday morning if our meticulous planning has paid off...read more about the Carnegie shortlist here. Mind you, 3 out of the 7 titles could not be had for love nor money. Elizabeth Laird's Crusade, Tanya Landman's Apache and Meg Rosoff's What I Was are not yet printed in paperback (well, not that we could see) so we have four of the titles coming in (hopefully). It must be a total nightmare for publishers if you have a title on either of the longlists. You can't rush forward the publication date or go for a reprint before the list announcement, just in case it isn't shortlisted. But as soon as it *is* shortlisted, everyone wants a copy. Ho hum...

Someone tell Dan Brown...

..we sold our first copy of the Da Vinci Code today, ever, since we opened. I can't work out whether this is a good thing or a bad thing (from an independent bookshop POV). Still, it shows we get some different people in here at Christmas time. (Mind you, someone was in after that Peter Kay book today, which we didn't have. But she ordered it - hooray!)

QS - Quite Sad

Yesterday, I made one of my periodic trips into Oxford, on what is usually a mixture of business and pleasure. In this case, an emergency trip for a stock item that we screwed up on (this music ordering is still proving a bit tricky), some general soul-enhancing bookselling inspiration around Blackwells and the QI Bookshop, and then on to some light cloak-and-dagger stock-spying in the big chains. It was a gorgeous day, lots of students milling about, throngs of bicycles in the Broadway - obviously if this kind of thing winds you up (bl**dy students, etc.), then you're not missing anything, but I do feel lucky that people travel from all over the world to soak up the Oxford atmosphere, and I can pop in whenever I like (sort of). Anyway, armed with Timothy in his buggy, and thus disguised as a sleep-deprived Dad (oh, actually, that's not a disguise...) I was deep undercover and began my mission. Within the space of about 1/4 mile on the Broadway, you have possibly the biggest concentration of retail bookselling anywhere on Earth. A few years ago there was Thornton's Bookshop as well, which sadly closed - although the shop lives on in cyberspace. The unrivalled staff in the Blackwells Music shop were absolutely brilliant. They helped me carry said buggy to the top of their building - and back down again five minutes later, without a grumble (akthough Timothy did his bit and delivered one of his winning smiles the whole time). I then went round the corner to the QI Building - home to the QI Bookshop. And discovered some sad news. The QI Bookshop is closing on December 22nd. This is Quite Sad. Quirky does not begin to describe the bookshop, with its idiosyncratic section layout and deliberate stocking of obscure and non-bestselling hardback fiction, it is a lovely, unique place to visit. And it was their Christmas catalogue last year (neatly tied with ribbon) that inspired ours. So - is this another "small independent closes in face of severe competition" story? Has the challenge of selling books around the corner from three enormous retailers taken its toll? Er, no. Apparently the company that makes QI was recently taken over, and the bookshop has no place in the new company's future plans. Which is Quite A Shame.

A fantastic day

We had a wonderful, inspirational day yesterday and visited the Independent bookseller of the Year, Wenlock Books in Much Wenlock.

The owner, Anna Dreda, could not have been more helpful or welcoming and gave us some brilliant pointers about ranges and titles to sell, new ideas (eg a children's book group) and was generally a source of much inspiration. Most importantly the whole bookshop gave us a first-hand feeling of how much atmosphere can be steeped into a good bookshop by someone with a deep love of books. Thank you Anna for showing us so much kindness and giving us something so clear to aspire to. I can heartily recommend a trip to anyone.

You can read in the visitors book that people literally come from all over the world to drop in and appreciate how a bookshop should be. Anna also dipped into our blog while we were digging around in her shop and commiserated with my enormous task of getting all the ISBN numbers for all the books we want to stock. This has taken an unbelievable amount of time, so much so that I started having nightmares that we would only get to 't' before we opened and wondering whether we could simply turn it into a quirk of the shop of the 'oh no we don't bother to stock anything after the letter T, don't you know no-one reads Minette Walters any more' kind. But I am getting there. I don't know exactly why I thought there would be a simple way, but slogging at the computer hour after hour is the only method I have come up with. Apart from bribing my eleven-year-old nephew with all the Dr Who and goosebumps stories he can read. He's been totally brilliant and we shall be assured a good range of Roald Dahl and Captain Underpants.

So with ten days to opening, how are we faring? Our first order has gone in with Gardners and they have been utterly brilliant and are delivering it TODAY. About twenty boxes. We are unfeasibly excited. The plan is still to sneak in our books around the cookware, building shelves in the evening and gradually turning the shop from mostly a cookshop to mostly a bookshop over the course of this week.

We did have a vague idea that we might not need to fix the bookcases to the wall until we were absolutely sure where they were going to go. But with the listing floor of our listed building we rejected this on health and safety ground as we didn't want anyone suing before we'd even opened by being trampled by 100 Lonely Planet titles.

The first stock order is mostly our cookery, garden, homes and lifestyle titles, which will fit in best with the current look and feel of the shop. These were the easiest titles to come up with, although it was a bit of a lesson because when I went through the list getting all the ISBN numbers I did slowly realise that actually most the stock in our shop is going to be a basic extension of the sort of books we have at home. And I thought I was being so objective.

Thus we have quite a stash of titles on healthy living, aren't trees wonderful, going for long walks and you too can grow carrots in an unfeasibly small space. And not a lot on, say, bonsai. (wouldn't every right-minded person prefer to grow tomatoes?) So as long as all our customers are slightly green, keen cooks who like getting their hands dirty we'll be fine.

The fiction has been more problematic as I have desperately tried not to be too judgmental and only include titles I feel I can personally recommend. So going through on my ISBN trawl I have been guilty of thinking 'oh no I read that and it was terrible' and then noticing it's the top one hundred bestseller and gritting my teeth and keeping it in the list. It has not been easy. Even worse, I notice that my highlighted list of 'hot summer reads' is actually mostly my personal list of what I would like to read after the pent-up demand of enforced non-book-buying over the last few months. And I do appreciate I have slightly quirky taste and am now pondering whether the biography of Mrs Beeton is really likely to be considered a 'hot summer read' by anyone other than myself. Still, there you go.

The other problem is that I have a vivid picture of myself slapping people's hand's away as they try to buy the latest Kate Atkinson and snapping I HAVEN'T HAD A CHANCE TO READ THAT YET. (Wouldn't you prefer a nice book on bonsai?) and keep sneakily hoping that no-one turns up to buy anything so I can just lock the door and get on with some serious reading. But it's probably just all down to too many hours at the keyboard tracking down ISBN numbers.

Anyway. We have chic and charming cards, penguin book mugs, charlie and lola notelets and pencil sets all converging on the shop over the next few days. All we need is some customers to buy them. Let's hope it rains. Our major disaster for this week was that we had called BT months ago to check how easy it was to change the phone line and keep the number and install broadband. As they said it was all perfectly simple and only needed a couple of days' notice, we shifted it to the bottom of our somewhat lengthy to do list. Only to discover on phoning on Monday that it's all hideously complicated and will take forever. Not ideal as we have our computerised real-time, on-line stock control and ordering system arriving on Tuesday, about three months ahead of having any phone line.

Mark did get slightly annoyed during the course of the conversation and I have to say, Mark never, ever gets annoyed with anyone. But the upshot is that we can actually keep the same telephone number, which is fortunate as it is appearing all over the 5,000 bags we have ordered which are also arriving just-in-time this week.

Anyway, I shall now let Mark put in some photos of Wenlock books and say thank you once again to Anna. And add what a pleasure it was to actually allow myself to buy some books. I am especially looking forward to Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now. We hope one day that Mostly Books will be the sort of treasure that people will come miles to visit.