ShelfTalker: A Children's Bookseller's Blog   

What's it like to spend every day drawing comics in the company of and under the tutelage of other comics pros? Last November my fiancé Gareth Hinds and I got a taste of this life when we spent the better part of a day at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vt. We were there to give a joint lecture (our first!) to CCS students as part of their "Professional Practices" course, at the invitation of CCS Fellow Alec Longstreth. What we quickly discovered was that our hour-and-a-half talk could easily have been twice as long,...Read More

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They are priceless, we all know that. But when a pregnant woman comes to the store for the first time and tells me she's just moved to town, part of me thinks, Ka-ching! I know that sounds mercenary, but I'd always had a hunch that new families were good for the bottom line, and I was really curious how much money a new family can spend during a pregnancy through the first two years of a child's life. Well, I was right. A new baby is worth just under a thousand dollars, actually $879.32 over two years.

How do I know this?  I found the perfect family to chart. Doug and Shannon are the young parents of Finn, a large, thoughtful, smiley 20-month-old boy, Guthrie.  They gave me permission to look up their purchases for this post. They only buy books for their son and twice a year for each other, so they are an excellent case study for purchases just for a new child...Read More

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My store is in a tourist area and we see a sizeable bump in our summer sales because of them. We don't have the increase in population that the Cape or Martha's Vineyard sees,  but we do get an influx of new folks to the store that make summer our next best sales period right after the Christmas holidays. 

The summer people are different from our regulars in a few ways. First, they are on vacation, so the entire family comes into the store, not just a parent, and each needs a book, or two. This can make for a store that's noisy, bustlng and sometimes understaffed. I love the challenge of a large family coming in with three to four kids ranging in age from five to thirteen, all needing new books. It's like a never-ending book talk some days. The pace of the day is frantic, fun and often filled with many discussions of books read and loved over the year. These fo...Read More

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One of my favorite books to come out this season is Adventures in Cartooning: How to Turn Your Doodles into Comics by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold, and Alexis Frederick-Frost (First Second, March 2009). What I love most about this book is that it is not a dry how-to book. In fact, it hardly reads like a "how-to" book at all, most of the time. (You can read the first several pages of the book on the web site of First Second to see what I mean.) This is the entertaining story of a brave knight who rushes off to rescue a princess from a fire-br...Read More

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First, the bad news: we read fewer than 10% of the email promotions we receive. The good news: sometimes even an unread email leads to sales. (More on that in a bit.)

Just like everyone else in this information-overloaded world, booksellers are inundated with page upon page of electronic mail to assess and dispatch. Our inboxes are overflowing, and the problem just keeps getting worse. So how do you, publishers and authors, better your chances of getting read and building buying momentum via email?

There are a few tips that hold true in our store, so we'll share them and let other booksellers share their approaches to the glutted-inbox dilemma.

FOR PUBLISHERS

In a subject header, less is sometimes less.

I admit it. I am less likely to open an email titled New Spring Releases than...Read More

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I find the best websites when I'm procrastinating working productively. Usually they come courtesy of another writer friend, via email or Facebook links — seductive little snippets with irresistible headlines. So when Lisa Yee (Absolutely Maybe) pointed some fellow writers to a cathartic website aimed at easing the pain of bad reviews, I had to check it out.

The Worst Review Ever blog was established by YA author Alexa Young (Faketastic) in a spirit of self-preservation and camaraderie with her fellow writers. It provid...Read More

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Let's face it, bookselling is fairly routine. We restock books, we order books, we take special orders, we have story hour and sometimes we staunch the flow of blood on a customer's head. Admittedly, the staunching happens only very rarely, but when it does, it reminds you that our customers can get injured at the store.

I feel I need to explain about the blood. A very fit woman in her early thirties tried to leap over the flower bed onto our deck rather than walk around to the stairs. Well, she didn't quite make it and wound up clipping her head on the toy store's metal sign.  She came into our store with blood flowing down her face from a gash in her head that was apparently spurting blood. (Why she didn't go the toy store is beyond me -- they were two feet away.) Ironically, I was not at work yet; as a former EMT who ran the local rescue squad for five years, I cou...Read More

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Here's a random fact I stumbled upon recently: Recycle Bookstore West in Campbell, Calif., has a store cat named Isbn. Yes, Isbn, as in ISBN. How clever is that?? Without a doubt, this is the best name for a bookstore cat that I've come across as yet in my many years of bookstore travels.

The photo of Isbn below is one that appears (along with some very favorable reviews!) on Yelp, but others can also be found in the Flickr accounts of Klara Kim and meowhous.

 ...Read More

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Training staffers to read customers' signals can lead to much better, more successful experiences for both customer and bookseller.

In Robert Altman's delicious film, Gosford Park, Helen Mirren plays Mrs. Wilson, the impeccable head housekeeper of an English country manor. Toward the end of the film, Mrs. Wilson reveals the secret of her efficacy to a young lady's maid: "What gift do you think a good servant has that separates them from the others? It's the gift of anticipation.... I know when they'll be hungry and the food is ready. I know when they'll be tired and the bed is turned down. I know it before they know it themselves."

While retail is certainly not servitude—though it can feel that way sometimes, har har—it ...Read More

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I've noticed a strange trend among grandparents these days, and sometimes among parents: the tendency to reject a book for not being specifically, literally representative of their child's world. "Oh, he won't read that," they might say. "It's a city book, and they live in the country." Or, "Oh, no, she's got a little SISTER, not a little brother. Do you have something with a little sister?" (Yes, we do, but maybe that book is a little less wonderful than the one with the little brother.) Or, most disheartening of all, a whispered, "I don't think he'll really be interested in that," when the child's skin color on the cover does not match the child's skin color in real life. (I'll add here that only white customers make this kind of comment; customers of color — even if they were so narrow-minded — wouldn't have the luxur...Read More

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I am impressed. Last week when I asked for summer reading suggestions, 31 people offered some truly wonderful suggestions. Click here and you'll be able to see the whole list.

It would seem that just about everyone suggested The Hunger Games — clearly this was the most popular book on the list. This book is a smart choice to have a reading list because the kids will be excited to see it on the list and even happier to read it, especially with the sequel coming out in September. Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was equally popular. There were 87 books on the list, and 57% of the authors were women. This is the striking difference wi...Read More

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Now that schools in Vermont are officially on summer break, I've noticed something I'm not sure how to handle.

School let out on Friday and since then I've had four nine-year-old girls ask for one or more books in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. Now, don't get me wrong, I think Twilight is a fine series. I enjoyed it immensely when I read it. I am forty-four, not nine. I'm not sure what to do with this current phenomenon. I don't like to judge purchases by anyone in my store, but this troubles me.

These bouncy, pigtailed nine-year-olds seem to have no reason to read these books other than "my friends are reading it." They don't even like boys. I find asking them "Do you like boys?" is a great weeding-out question for some of the younger set. A giggle, and a sheepish "no" can usually sway them aw...Read More

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