Originally published in the January 29, 1996 issue of AB Bookman's Weekly, a Magazine for the specialist book world.Chapter Four: The Used Bookstore.
Other book dealers can be your salvation. They can be equally important as customers and suppliers, and they can send you a lot of business through referrals. In short, other booksellers, especially those in your immediate area, can mean the difference between a profitable and unprofitable year for you. There's certainly no doubt that you should cultivate friendships or at least working relationships with as many book dealers as possible and make an effort to maintain these relationships over the years. Of course, this means that you have to play an equally important reciprocal role to ensure that the other dealers benefit as much from your relationship as you do. It's an accepted part of the trade that booksellers buy books from each other. Everyone is trying to satisfy individual customer needs and for specific wants other bookstores are a logical place to look. If it wasn't for the time constrictions of the daily running of our stores, we booksellers would be spending a lot more time in each other's stores buying books! But, as it is, we make far fewer visits than we'd like. At the very least, you should try to set aside at least one day a month in which to visit some of your colleagues' stores. As your knowledge of books increases, there should come a time when you can go into almost any other bookstore and buy specific books for your customers. Even if the profit margin is much less than usual, you accomplish two things: you maintain an ongoing relationship with the other dealer, and you further cement your good relationship with your customers. With some very few exceptions, you can buy a book from another dealer with your dealer discount (usually 20 percent) and then add 10 percent to that dealer's price to arrive at your customer's price. Therefore, on a $10 book, you make $3. There's also the possibility of added joy and profit if you happen to know that the book you want is worth more than the other dealer has it priced. Of course, the reverse has to be allowed as well. You can't become upset when other booksellers come into your store and buy good books from you, take them away and sell them for much more than you thought they were worth. It's not the worst thing in the world if you acquire a reputation of having some sleepers on your shelves. Also, if you encourage other book- dealers to visit your store to buy books, you can start depending on their purchases becoming a large portion of your yearly sales. I love selling books to other dealers. It confirms in my mind that I've been buying the right books if other dealers are willing to buy them from me. And, every time I see certain colleagues entering my store, I know they're going to spend several hundred dollars before they leave. That always helps to alleviate the cash flow problem. I try to always be friendly to visiting dealers--whether local or out-of-towners--because I want them to come back.
Doing Business With DealersDealer Discounts
I often price many books at slightly lower than the going rate so as to give other booksellers a little extra margin of profit and I always (ALWAYS!) extend the traditional 20 percent dealer discount. If there's one thing that really annoys me about some other booksellers, it's the fact that a few of them refuse to give a discount to fellow dealers. The least that should be expected is a courtesy 10 percent discount, but I feel that the full 20 percent can be extended without seriously hurting any bookseller's profits. The few booksellers--and it's only a small percentage-- who refuse to give dealer discounts are being awfully short- sighted and they quickly earn a reputation of being unfriendly. We have a couple of such dealers in our area and I've encountered some others on trips. These people usually have two flimsy excuses to give you in defense of their no-discount policy. Number One: their books are so low-priced that they don't feel they have to give a discount to anyone. A few minutes of investigation by a bona fide bookseller usually reveals that at least half the stock is overpriced! Number Two: "If we gave discounts to dealers, they would come in and buy all of our good books." Actually, booksellers are good customers. They don't usually make the trip to your store just to buy a book or two. In fact, many dealers who visit my store leave with two or three boxes of books each trip. That usually translates into several hundred dollars (even after a 20 percent discount), and I don't care who you are, several hundred dollars a couple of times a month from other dealers will make a welcomed difference to your monthly bottom line. One visit to your store to find out that you don't extend a dealer discount, and 90 percent of the dealers aren't going to put your store on their next shopping route. I simply don't see how any bookseller can afford to throw away that kind of business. Aside from the fact that other book dealers accounted for about 35 percent of my consignment sales of Rubaiyats in fiscal 1993-94, they were also responsible for more than 15 percent of my regular sales. Clearly, dealers contributed significantly to my take-home pay that year, as every year, and for that I am grateful. The other thing to remember if you refuse to give trade discounts is that you lose the opportunity to make money on books you could buy from other booksellers. The very booksellers to whom you refuse to give discounts, aren't going to be overjoyed to have you visit their stores. This situation can escalate to where you become a total isolationist. Is that what you really want? Is that good for your business? Is that fair to your customers? I don't think so. You owe it to your customers to keep all avenues open through which you can obtain books for them.Specialist Booksellers
Probably the wisest thing for a beginning bookseller to do is to try and specialize in one or two subject areas. I don't mean specialize to the exclusion of all other categories; I simply suggest that you concentrate on building one or two very strong sections. For instance, I have (through choice) large detective fiction and children/s/illustrated books sections and a substantial aviation section. It is extremely difficult and usually impractical to attempt to specialize exclusively in one or two book categories in any book market of less than a million people. But many dealers do very well by having a couple of specialties in conjunction with a general stock. In this way, they derive the satisfaction of having major dealings in one or two subjects they're especially fond of (and thereby meeting many people with a shared interest), as well as catering to a general audience who will buy many varied books to keep the sales figures sufficiently high to pay the overhead. Of course, you have to know what you're doing! There's no sense in announcing that you specialize in children's books if you don't know the difference in value between a book illustrated by Arthur Rackham and one illustrated by Peter Hurd. If you say that you specialize in children's books, for instance, two things are going to happen: (1) people will come to your store expecting to find good quality and collectible children's books, as well as expecting you to be knowledgeable in the field; and (2) other people will be bringing you some good quality and collectible children's books and expect you to offer them fair prices for them, based on your specialized knowledge. If you decide on a specialty, go out and learn all you can about those books as quickly as possible. Perhaps you already had a large collection of philosophy, or history, or art, literature, or science fiction, when you decided to open a bookstore and you planned to sell all or most of your collection through the store. Great! Use the knowledge you've obtained as a collector (information on authors, first editions, prices, etc.) to your advantage and use this one subject area as a focal point of your business, then build on it. Otherwise, you may want to take up to a year to make your decision on what to specialize in. Two factors that will influence your decision will be customer demand during that time and buying opportunities. I never was particularly interested in aviation, but, about seven years ago, a friend of mine who had been a mail-order bookseller for a number of years decided to sell off his existing collection of aviation books. He offered them to me at a reasonable price (I think it was 65 to 70 percent off his retail prices) and I decided to buy them. Ihad carried a few aviation books before, but all of a sudden, my aviation section expanded from around 30 books to about 500 books, including duplicates, and I had another specialty on my hands! It's interesting how opportunities present themselves. About a week later, I spotted an ad in a local paper offering aviation books for sale, $1 to $20. I went to the man's house and bought the lot (close to a hundred) for $350 and I was now well on my way as an aviation bookseller. My friend who sold me the big lot of aviation books supplied me with a number of catalogues he had issued on the subject, as well as many catalogues he had received from other dealers with lists of aviation books for sale. All of these catalogues proved invaluable to me for pricing information then and subsequently. There's no doubt in my mind that a bookseller with one or two (and even three!) specialties will have increased sales over a general bookstore with approximately the same number of volumes. To me, there are marked advantages. First of all, if you and your store become known as having a good selection of a particular type of books, people will seek you out. It will make no difference if your store is even out of the way. That's because you are now dealing with collectors, not just casual readers! To add to their libraries, book collectors of all kinds will be quite willing to travel for miles, for hours, for days, stay overnight, just to get into your store and peruse that big section of books in which they're interested. If they're successful in purchasing some books from you that they've desperately wanted and have been searching for, they'll probably become a source of income for you for life. If you keep your part of the bargain and maintain a good supply of books in the pertinent sections, these collectors will keep coming back. You'll put their names, addresses, phone numbers, and special interests into your card file or computer system and notify them every time you feel you have something of interest for them. The more collectors you have in your customer file, the more your business will prosper. To help your business grow in these areas, you must continually buy titles in your specialties wherever and whenever you see them, and keep encouraging your bookscouts to bring you more and more material. It also helps to have other dealers refer people to you who have small or large collections of books for sale that fall directly into your line of expertise. The better the relationships you have with other dealers, the more books are going to come your way. These same dealers will also send people to you who are serious buyers of books in your specialized fields. And you'll reciprocate in kind.Local Bookseller Directory
In our greater metropolitan area of Vancouver, about 40 booksellers and print dealers cooperate by producing together a small brochure which we all carry on our premises and make available free to our respective customers. We revise this directory once a year and it costs us about $40 each for the printing costs. The financial rewards far exceed this modest cost. Many is the time people have come into my store waving those brochures and proclaiming that so-and-so of such-and-such bookstore sent me out here because he (or she) thought you might have what I'm looking for. And this is a marketing tool that works well for everyone involved. So, if your surrounding group of booksellers don't already have a similar brochure, get busy on it! It needn't be fancy, and it simply has to state the dealer's store name, proprietor's name, address, phone number, hours of business and a brief one or two-line description of the stock. In addition to having generally good relationships with as many dealers as possible, you're bound to develop special friendships with two or three other dealers. These people you will probably see quite often in their stores and yours. With these dealers you will also probably do a fair amount of business. Because you see each other's stocks so much, each of you will remember certain books you've seen in the other's stores and extra business will develop out of that. These "close" dealers will tend to phone each other first when looking for particular books for customers. This is a good symbiotic relationship to tet into. I enjoy stopping by a couple of other bookstores two or three mornings a week for coffee and a general chat on what's going on in the book trade. As in other facets of our lives, certain booksellers who are privy to fast-moving developments in the book trade enjoy passing on this information within our own group. It's always interesting to hear of new secondhand bookstores opening, who's enjoying good sales, who's not, who's having a sale, who's just bought a collection, and so on. I love it! There's a funny story concerning book dealers that used to be told often by a Vancouver bookseller. I'm not sure where the story originated but I think some version of it has been circulating for decades. At any rate, there are two dealers, friends, who visited each other's store quite often, perhaps two or three times a month. Well, they'd usually buy a few books from each other on each visit. One day, they noticed that one particular book had traveled back and forth between their stores three or four times; and, once they had remarked on it, they began to make a point of looking for that specific book when they made their visits. This went on for three or four years; every so often one dealer would buy the book and take it back to his store, and then a month or two later, the other dealer would buy the book back. Each time the price of the book went up a little. What started out as a $5 book eventually became a $50 book, then a $75 book. One day, one dealer was in the other's store, and he was looking around for about 15 minutes, when he finally asked his friend, "Where's our book? I'd like to buy it back." His friend looked sort of sheepish, but he finally blurted out, "I sold it." "What do you mean, you sold it?" "Well, a fella came in and took it off the shelf and bought it." The visiting dealer was beside himself and he marched up to his friend and said, "Now, why'd you go and do that? Don't you remember how much money we made on that book?" Before I leave the subject of dealer relationships, I must relate two incidents that occurred a little over three years ago. The first anecdote will show how a novice bookseller who knew nothing of books demonstrated his paranoia of being taken advantage of. The second incident is a good example of how decent and commiserate booksellers can really be toward each other. A friend and a customer had told me of two golf books which were on the shelves of two local bookstores. Since I had customers looking for both of these books, I phoned the dealers in question and asked them to hold the specific book in each case until I could pick it up in a few days. Both dealers were in the same part of the city. When the day came, this part of my trip went smoothly. At each store, the book was waiting for me. I bought a few more books from each dealer and had an enjoyable chat with each gentleman, neither of whom I had met in person before. Needless to day, both dealers extended a 20 percent discount. One dealer told me a secondhand bookstore had just opened a few doors down the street. He expressed some slight worry that the new store was so near and that they were reportedly planning to sell books at cut-rate prices. I decided to check it out. The sign on the door was an immediate tipoff that this was not a regular used bookstore and that the owner was indeed a novice. The sign outlined the pricing "formula" used in this store and , sure enought, there were no prices on the thousands of books on the shelves, neither on hardcovers nor paperbacks. The price was determined as a percentage of the new price of the book and fluctuated according to the condition of the book. After some discussion with the owner, I discovered that the reasoning behind this bold marketing move, was that if he did not spend the time required to physically price each book individually, he would get the books on the shelves much faster. Furthermore, because he was saving his own high-priced labor costs, he could therefore sell his books for less money than the other used booksellers in town--who, incidentally, he claimed were all selling their books at unreasonably high prices. I told this man that in my opinion you could not sell hardcover books by formula, and that even with paperbacks there would be many exceptions. It would be simpler for the customer if all books were priced. Did he not realize how many customers he was going to annoy if they had to bring each and every book up to him and ask how much it would cost? And what if four or five customers were doing this at the same time--it could get very hectic and frustrating for everyone. (Not that I could really see this situation occurring, considering the quality of the stock he had.) He replied that the only people to complain so far were dealers. I said that he should take some advice from people who had already been in the business for 10 to 20 years. But no, he wasn't going for that. Well, I thought I'd test his system. I spent the next 25 minutes or so examining his hardcover stock and I chose about 20 books. This wasn't easy. It was obvious that more than half of his hardcover books had come from library sales--each of these had a large-print "DISCARD" stamp on the top-edge, as well as more stamping inside. These books were at best reading copies. The rest of his hardcover books were mainly book-club editions that he'd probably purchased by the box at garage sales and flea markets. Most of his non-fiction books were out-of-date technical material; again, next to worthless. There was a children's book section, but most books in this section were in poor condition-- more cast-offs. So, the 20 or so books which I picked up were just about the only ones that had any reasonable resale value. Even at that, the selling prices of these particular books in my store would be between $3 and $20, with a total value of about $225. I took these books up to the owner, put them on his counter and said "Well, I guess you'll have to tell me what these books will cost". He answered, "Well, I may have to invoke this clause here," and he pointed to a line at the bottom of his notice outlining his pricing policy. This sentence more or less said that the manage- ment reserved the right not to sell certain books that may be deemed to be collectible or rare items that may be unwittingly on the regular shelves and unpriced. Knowing that I was an experienced bookseller, the owner naturally lumped all the books I had chosen into this category. I protested that these books should not be in general stock in the first place, but he answered that he simply had not had time to separate them. I was reminded of a line that a local antiquarian bookseller used to use with general booksellers like myself: "Just because I buy a book in your store, you don't need to immediately jump to the conclusion that it's a valuable book and that you've sold it for much less than it's worth. I could simply have a customer for that book and I'm going to flip it to him for a small profit." So I parroted this viewpoint to the owner of this store. It had no effect, and the reason for this was because he was afraid. He had no knowledge whatsoever so he was afraid of being taken advantage of. He put his hand on the pile of books and said that he could take my name and phone number and let me know what the price of these books would be. I said, "Do you mean to tell me, that you can't look at those books right now and tell me how much they'll cost?" He said no, he'd have to research them all first. Three of them were recent editions of "Hardy Boys". I'm afraid that I lost my cool a bit at this point, but could see no point continuing with this farce. "Well, I'll be damned if I'm going to do your work for you," I said. Then I grabbed all the books off the counter, except for the Hardy Boys (I don't know if he was able to pick up that subtle message or not), and quickly walked around placing the books back on the shelves, one here, one there, much as I had found them. Then I left the store. I immediately went up the street to the ligitimate bookstore and related the incident to the owner there. I concluded by saying that he should have absolutely no worries about losing business to the store down the street. Firstly, the man has no books and secondly, no knowledge of books or how to sell them--he won't last more than three or four months at best. Surprisingly, the novice is still in business. However, not surprisingly, someone I know has recently asked him how he's doing, and he answered that he was "paying the rent"; which is to say, that's all he is managing to do. In the first week of November, 1991, a woman came into my store. She was in her mid to late fifties, nicely dressed. She asked if I had a set of Will Durant's "The Story of Civilization". I replied that I had not had a complete set of 11 volumes for some time. She asked if I could get heer a set so I took her name and phone number and put her request in my card file. I asked if there was any hurry in getting the set and she replied not really but it would be nice to have a set by Christmas. She asked how much a set would cost and I suggested between $150 and $200. She said that would be fine and left. I made a few inquiries over the next few days but didn't locate a set of these books right away. A couple of weeks later, a dealer friend mentioned that he had an incomplete set--10 of the 11 volumes. The first 10 volumes were issued together, while the 11th volume, "The Age of Napoleon", was issued some time after. I had seen this volume many times and thought there would be no trouble picking up a volume to complete my set. So I paid 4110 plus tax for the 10 volumes, put them on a high shelf in my store and set about finding the Napoleon volume. Over the next few days, I phoned most of the local dealers and no one had what I needed. I asked several of these dealers to keep me in mind should a copy of the book come their way. It took a while. Itwas not until a few days before Christmas that one bookseller called me to say he had a copy of Volume 11 if I still needed one. I said "Yes" and he said it was mine for $20 in trade. I said that was fine but since he had to come to my store in order to use his trade, could he deliver. This was a Saturday, the following Wednesday was Christmas Day. The dealer said he'd try to get the book to me that day or Monday. I phoned my customer and told her she could pick up the set of books on Tuesday and still give them for Christmas. She said no, that she would pick them up on the Friday or Saturday after Christmas. I said that would be fine. "Merry Christmas!" Late in the afternoon of the Saturday following Christmas, the customer had not arrived, so I called her home and spoke with her husband. He said that they had been away over Christmas and just returned. He was certain that his wife would be in to pick up the books on Monday. She finally turned up on Tuesday. I showed her the books and I was privately rejoicing that I would be finally selling these books and recouping my investment in them, which was considerably more than usual. It was only because I had been expecting a quick sale that I had paid so much initially. The woman looked the books over pretty carefully and asked how much I wanted for them. I reminded her that I had told her the set would cost her between $150 and $200 and because I had to buy the books from other dealers, I would have to charge her closer to the higher figure: they would be $195. She replied that she had a problem with that because she had just the day before seen another set in slightly better condition for only $175 and she thought she'd buy them instead. Needless to say, this was an annoying development. I said to the woman, I understood us to have a contractual agreement here: I agreed to find her a set of these books within a precise price range and I had. I had fulfilled my side of the agreement. She said yes but these other books were less money. I said that if I had been able to buy a set of these books from an individual or an estate, I too could have offered them for $175, or even less. However, even at $195 my markup was less than usual. But, considering the circumstances, I would even drop my price by $10 and sell them to her for $185. With no further hesitation, the woman said "No, I really would rather go and buy the other set for $175." I looked at her for another minute, then said "Fine, you go and do that, but don't ever come into my store again." She left, saying "I won't." After she had left, a regular customer there at the time said, "I thought you were kidding when you said that but when I looked up and saw your face, I could see that you weren't." Another customer said, "No, he wasn't kidding, and he shouldn't be. People like that woman shouldn't be allowed in bookstores." I had to agree with him. Over the next few days, I related the story to two or three other dealers. At the time it happened, I had briefly considered phoning around after the woman had left, to discover who had those books for $175. I could have explained my situation to them, and they probably would have withheld sale of the books or at least sold them to me so that woman could not buy them. But, I quickly gave up that idea as being to petty and I realized I would be in danger of reducing myself to her level of non-thical behavior. The dealers I did talk to after the incident didn't have the books in question, but one of them in turn obviously relayed the story to the dealer who did sell the books. About a week after the non-sale, I received a phone call from a colleague I had known for many years. He had worked in bookstores but had purchased his first store only within the last year. He started out the conversation by saying that he phoned to apologize to me because he was the person who had sold the Durant set to that woman and he felt that he should compensate me in some way for the loss of the sale. Had he known of the circumstances, he certainly would have refused to sell the books to the woman upon her return, saying that they were already sold. He had met the woman accidentally at a Christmas party; she had found out he was a bookseller, asked about the books in question, discovered he had a set, asked the price, and subsequently had gone to his shop and seen them. He felt bad that she had bought his set instead of mine. Naturally, I told my colleague that in now way was he at fault here, and I certainly could not be upset with him for making the sale. No, I did not require any compensation for loss of the sale. He kept insisting that I was entitled to part of the money, so I told him that perhaps one day I would just get a good buy on a book at his store. He said "Anytime!" So there's the story of two people with two entirely different sets of ethics, the second even willing to atone for the lack of common decency in the first. Be wary of those kinds of customers, and be happy that there are plenty of fair and honest booksellers out there for you to interact with. (Incidentally, I sold my 11-volume set two weeks later to a regular and valued customer for $185.) XXXXX Terry A. Stillman
CATALOGUE MENUS: