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It’s funny - when I was packing up our 20,000 books and all of the
associated detritus that collected along with them over the past five
years, I swore that had to be the worst part of the move. Before that,
when I was pulling down pink plywood, plastering over holes, sheet rocking
and painting, I pretty much figured that was the worst part. It should
surprise no one then, given my track record, that the worst part is the
interminable unboxing and reshelving of books. Adding to the
unpleasantness is the fact that we’ve decided to rationalize (that’s a
euphemism for make some vague sense out of) our internet cataloging
system. This brings me, somewhat obliquely, to my first bits of advice:

1 - Make sure your system of arranging books that you sell online makes
sense and is scalable (not in the arranging them in the form of a ziggurat
sense, but in the functions well under large numbers sense) ; it’s going
to be a pain to fix five years down the line

(you’ll notice that much of this “advice” is of the “I climbed a water
tower and fell off and now travel high schools telling kids not to climb
water towers” variety).

2 - Don’t put a box of books in your basement unless you’re pretty sure
you want to carry them back upstairs, load them into a truck and move them
across town. Also, don’t put 200 of these in your basement.

3 - Be organized in your move - stack sections together and in the order
you’d like to use them. I actually thought of this one beforehand, but
I’m constitutionally incapable of this level of organization - if you can
do it though, your present self will owe your past self a debt of
gratitude (as a friend of mine likes to say).

All of which adds up to the fact, some may say obvious fact, that moving
something as heavy as a used bookstore should not be done without the best
of reasons. Ours were complicated - rising rents, static foot traffic
(static at a bad level - the U.S. obsession with growth has made static a
bad word when it could be lovely. Why does no one ever say statically
good?), and a commercial district that has begun to favor restaurants.
Now, I love restaurants as much as the next guy who can’t afford to go to
them very often, but a certain percentage of restaurants in a commercial
district is pretty much a death knell for traditional retail. The hours
are just too different for them to work together - it’s possible all those
mom and pop shops should just be open from 5 PM - 12 PM, who knows. I’ve
worked in too many restaurants though - those hours will really mess with
your head.

So with rents and changing dynamics, it was time to go - luckily we
actually learned a few things since our first opening.

Don’t settle for two many “this should be ok”s when choosing a space. If
you leave yourself enough time to look, you should be able to find the
right space (this goes for opening the first time as well, of course).
Our first shop was a good size but had too many strangely shaped spaces
and quirks that we were paying for - we also were about 200 feet from
where we needed to be and when those pedantic jackasses say that the three
most important concerns in retail are location, location, location,
they’re not JUST being annoying.

Try not to cut too many corners - this can be difficult when working on a
shoestring budget, but try to do things properly or not do them at all.
Half-assing a few things here and there (e.g. buying an area rug to
disguise an ugly floor instead of replacing the floor) is appropriate,
but, at least for me, these half measures get a grip on you after a while
and start being too obvious - eventually the enterprise takes on the dull
sheen of half-assedness. If you think the color of your walls is ok,
paint them the color you really want, you won’t regret it (joyfully, the
pink walls at our new store left me no half option on this one).

And oh yeah, lift with your legs.

Here’s a few pictures as order begins to emerge from the chaos:

Aisle one of internet books in the basement. We enlisted the help of
local street urchins to shelve the books.

Aisle 2. Anyone looking to purchase 500 slightly used boxes?

Street urchins are also useful for book cataloging.

Not so much for the hauling of heavy boxes as my brother apparently notices.

This last is from our moving fundraiser. This, which I must admit I was
skeptical about, turned out great. We had a bunch of silent auctions,
collected donated items from local friendly businesses (and gave them
great advertising - or tried), local urchins ran a hot dog cart, and we
had a keg of beer and a band (pictured - if you have kids at your party,
get a guy with a pink suit, they went nuts). All of our intensive studies
show that customers purchase at least 30% more when drinking.

– Pazzo Books 4268 Washington St. Roslindale, MA 02131 pazzobooks.com 617-323-2919

Signage, the bane of every retail store’s existence. It often seems like customers don’t read signs at all. A good sign can increase business and make your store easier to navigate. A bad one can just be a big waste of money. So here’s some tips for getting you sign noticed. This applies both to longer informational signs and simple section labels.

MAKE IT BIG!
If you can’t read at least part of it from 6 feet anyway, it’s too small. As people get closer, they can pick up more detail. So make the grabbing headline big and then as you offer more info, it can be in progressively smaller type as they get closer to read it all.
I suggest making the smallest type 14 point.
For large section labels, apply the 6 foot rule. For things that really only need to be read while you’re actually standing there (price labels) they can be closer to 14 point.
Don’t forget to include the ANGLE the sign is read at in the distance calculation. Signs above people’s heads or below their knees need to be bigger than ones at eye level to compensate for being read at an angle.
And this is a nonbrainer, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bookstore do this: MAKE THE SIGNS IN THE LARGE PRINT SECTION BIGGER. I’d suggest doing the same in the books on tape section too, as often they’re the same customer.

Keep it simple, stupid.
Oh, the lure of exotic typefaces… just say no to crazy scripts. Most “handwriting” scripts are difficult to read quickly. As someone walks past the sign, you only have a split second to catch their eye. If that second is wasted on them trying to recognize the basic letters in the typeface, they won’t actually read the sign. Keep it clean and easily recognizable.

Just say no to reversed text
White lettering on colored background looks cool, but its murder on the eyes. It’s fine for a headline, but don’t write any of the details in this color scheme.

Use a limited color palette
Often the best sign is a crisp black and white because it’s uncluttered. In a retail store, there’s a lot going on. The starkness of a black and white sign draws the eye. If you decide to go with color, pick ONE. Text should be black on a light colored or pastel background. If you simply must have a more colorful background to match the décor or to contrast with a large stack of black and white items, use color complements. Use a darker one for the text. Cool colors work better for text in most cases. This will make the color ‘pop’.
Complementary colors are the ones that appear across from each other on a color wheel. I’ll just list them here for ease of use. (I’ve put the cool color first)
Green & Red
Blue & Orange (gold)
Purple & Yellow
You can do more complicated splits, but there’s a reason these three appear so often, they work!

Make space for space!
A clear, concise sign is more effective than a cluttered one. Make sure there’s space so people can break the text and pictures up into easily digestible chunks. They’ll retain more info that way. If it’s one big mass of text (or too many pictures) they won’t be able to parse it as they walk past.

They aren’t looking at it straight on.
People are rarely facing a sign dead on. They’re often walking past or approaching it at an angle. Make sure the sign is recognizable (and legible) when viewed at an angle. Stick it above your head, near your waist, and to left and right of you so you can see what it looks like from various angles.

Proofread! Proofread! Proofread!
After you have designed your sign, take a break. Ideally, leave it be for at least a day. THEN proofread. All the errors will jump out you. If you do it too soon after writing it, you will see what you think you wrote, rather than what you actually wrote. (a classic example of good signs gone bad: http://www.fugly.com/pictures/16785/kids_with_gas_eat_free.html Remember, if its REALLY bad, it may take the internet by storm!)
Show it to at least two other people. They’ll pick up some more mistakes and point out spots where things are unclear. You may know what you meant, but that’s doesn’t mean you wrote it as clearly as you could!
Special note: If you are in a multiethnic area, grab someone from each of the main ethnic groups to proofread. Its embarrassing to find out what looked like a great sign uses a slang term that is either offensive, confusing, or just plain really funny to your customers. If you’re living somewhere other than your birth country make sure to double check your spelling matches the local spelling! British and American English have lots of spelling differences that can trip you up.

Make a mockup
If you are having fancy signs made that will be near permanent fixtures (such as section labels), have a friend or employee walk around the store with a mockup and hold it in various places so you can see how it will look. You may discover its not big enough, a bad color scheme, looks strange under your lights, the finish is too reflective and its unreadable, its too cluttered, etc. Nothing beats actually seeing the sign in action.

Put the sign in the right place
This should be a no brainer, but how many times have you come in and seen the “big sale!” signs clustered over the checkout? If people are standing in checkout, telling them about the great sale on something in back of the store is not going to work! Sale signs should be where people can act on it. This means either at the entrance or somewhere people can be drawn towards the sale section.
Signs at checkout should either relate to something the customer can get right now (impulse buys), can do at checkout (sign up for our e-mail list), or relates to an event in the future that they might wish to come back for (come see author X next week!).

Don’t lay it flat
Flat is great for eye level or things that are hanging and have writing on both sides. However, if at all possible, signs above most people’s heads should be tilted slightly down so they will appear at a 90 degree angle to someone’s plane of vision when they look up. Signs below the waist should be similarly tilted up slightly. Use a yard stick or long rod on your shoulder to gauge angle. Tilt it so it follows your line of vision to the sign. (if you’re exceptionally short or tall, have an average height friend do it instead)
For signs that are only meant to be seen close up, like price labels, adjust them to be visible that way. They may be invisible from farther away. Don’t worry about this. For ones that are meant to be seen from several points farther away, you’ll want them at shallower angle so they can still be read from very far away. Try several different angles before you secure the sign.
You may even want to have two sets of signs! One large sign that can be seen from across the length of the store, plus a smaller one tilted so that people standing within 3 feet of the display can easily read it.

Put it next to your face… or put a face on it
Most people prefer to look at other people’s faces over anything else. Our brains are exceptionally good at recognizing faces and we naturally turn to look at them. Even things that only vaguely parse as faces will get our attention. It’s why the Virgin Mary turns up on trees, toasts, and rust stains so often. It’s hardwired into the brain.
If you REALLY want people to see the sign, stick it next to the cashier’s head. Or get the cashier to wear it. Don’t block the view of the cashiers face, or have cashiers head in front. You want it where it’s in the sweet spot around the face so its in line of sight, but not distracting.
If it’s a sign that will be nowhere near stationary people, you can cheat and put a face on the sign. It doesn’t even have to be a particularly accurate face. WalMart, love ‘em or hate ‘em, has perfected the “look at the face” trick with use of the smiley face to draw attention to signs. A symbol that didn’t read as a face wouldn’t draw nearly as much attention.
You can try a variation on “look at the face” for large signs by sticking it next to, or in the arms of, a stuffed animal. Animal faces work almost as well as abstracted human faces. Or, if you’re really going for attention, stick a mirror there. The only thing better than someone else’s face is the customer’s own face!

No matter what you do, you’ll still have some customers that don’t read the signs, but now you have a fighting chance!

This post was written by Nora O’Neill of

Rainy Day Paperback Exchange
Bethel, CT
gently used books for kids and adults
http://www.rainydaypaperback.com

Chapter 1 of this story: Opening a Bookstore

A Book Nerd’s Dream: Stories Toward Opening My Bookstore

This is the beginning of a story that (I hope) will have in it the part about me opening my own bookstore. I hope the story doesn’t end there – as you booksellers know, it’s the ongoing narrative that’s the stuff dreams are made of, not the single moment of opening the doors. I’m a bookseller too, and have been for quite a while, but I haven’t yet made it to that climactic moment of owning my own store. In hopes that it will prove interesting both for booksellers and for those with entrepreneurial ambitions, I’d like to offer my story, unspooling behind me as it unfolds ahead of me, for the Bookshop Blog.

Chapter 2. The Epiphany.

I loved working at Three Lives when I was an undergraduate. Coming into the bookstore from the hectic streets and the stress of classes was like taking a deep breath. The quiet, the smell of books and wood and candles, the green glass lampshades, the colleagues who mothered me and gossiped with me and taught me about contemporary literature (which, despite my English major, I knew nothing about) – it was like heaven. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid for it. And I was learning to be a good bookseller – it was a great shop for handselling, and it was small enough that every employee had their hands on every aspect of the store.

During my senior year, I came back from Christmas break to be told that Jill and Jenny had sold the bookstore – what?!? – to Toby Cox, that guy who had been hanging around for the last couple of months. It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened for the bookstore and for me at that point. Toby was, if possible, an even better boss than Jill and Jenny. He had come from a publisher (Crown), but before that had worked for many years at the Brown University Bookstore in Providence, and brought a lot of experience and love to bear. As he promised, he kept the feel of the store intact, but made some practical internal changes that were all for the best, and was both reasonable and generous with employees and customers – a true book person, and still one of my best mentors.

And yet, as graduation approached, I announced that I would have to leave the bookstore to find a “real job.” I was a BA now, and BA’s worked in offices, or in universities. I wasn’t ready to commit to academia, though I still imagined I’d be a professor someday, so I opted for the English major’s fallback job: editorial assistant in a publishing house. I followed up on some leads, applying to Knopf and some educational publishers. Again it’s strange to ponder what a different life I might have had if I’d gotten hired at Knopf – that might have been my dream job, but I didn’t make the cut.

I ended up working at Bedford St. Martin’s, a college textbook publisher, in the Communications department. It wasn’t trade publishing, but it was publishing – I would have my hands on making books, and a steady if small salary. I had a good feeling about the people there, which turned out to be accurate – one of my office mates became my boyfriend and, much later, my husband.

But that was the only thing I was right about. I was a terrible editorial assistant. I found I didn’t much care about the books we were publishing, and I didn’t like the busywork that was my responsibility. I was unorganized and inefficient. I hated sitting in a cubicle. I hated the office politics and the early mornings. I cried a lot, seemingly unreasonably – there was no real suffering in my job, but it just felt so wrong.

I started working some weekends at the bookstore, for a little extra cash, and despite the six-day week, looked forward to it. At the bookstore I could do things right, and make people happy, and make up for the frustrations of the rest of the week. But I knew I couldn’t do this forever.

So I started applying to graduate school. Cocky because of my 100% acceptance rate as an undergrad, I stuck to the top tier: Literature PhD programs at Stanford, NYU, Columbia. It was time to live up to my potential, I figured; I would read and teach and write brilliant exegesis on Woolf and Bishop. I wrote my essays and got my transcripts sent off and waited.

And I got rejected by every single program (except NYU, my alma mater, which offered my a master’s program with no financial aid). I cried some more, but the reasons were obvious. I hadn’t published anything since graduation; I wasn’t versed in literary theory beyond my freshman seminar; I loved books, but I was faking it as a potential academic.

One evening at my boyfriend’s house, I was crying again over my rejection and the new open-endedness of my plan for my life. That was when that long-suffering man, himself a serious book person (referred to on my blog as the ALP, for Adorably Literate Partner), offered the observation that changed my life.

“It doesn’t seem like you really wanted to be an academic, any more than you want to work in publishing,” he said. “The only job you ever really liked and were good at was working in the bookstore.”

My lightbulb came on like a dimmer – slowly, but steadily. I loved writing and talking about books, but not as a theorist – as a chatterer, a handseller. I loved the experience of being a reader among other readers, not in the rarified world of academia, or the removed and abstract one of publishing. I loved the space of the bookstore, the physical tasks, the making and maintenance of beauty and order and comfort. I was a bookseller.

I can’t remember whether I shared this epiphany with Toby, but somehow, for some reason, he offered me a full-time job at the store. I didn’t hesitate – I walked into my boss’s office at Bedford and gave two weeks notice. My first day back at Three Lives, my mom sent flowers – it was May Day, and there was reason to celebrate.

It took some more conversations to figure out that this was not only what I wanted to do now, it was what I wanted to do for life. A friend working in urban development helped me articulate the importance of bookstores in community life, and my first regional bookseller conference showed me the wider world of bookselling. But that moment in the ALP’s bedroom was the one all of us booksellers have at one point or another: the moment when we realize this isn’t just a retail job, it’s our calling. The rest was history – or at least, it will be.

Posted by: Jessica Stockton Bagnulo

www.writtennerd.blogspot.com

Radio 3's The Verb will be up for another five days. You can get the link to the show and who's talking at at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/theverb/ or listen directly to the one with me in (until Friday) at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?radio3/theverb.

I don't think we talked about North and South poetry, which is how it's advertised.

You can hear me read the first page and a half of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, though, and talk about writing and blogging, and listen to lots of other discussion about language, poetry and literature and words.

My favourite conversation about language and words was before we went on the air, when Ian told us not to swear (as Radio 3 is only allowed one serious swear word per show) and also not to answer any question with an enthusiastic "ABSOLUTELY!" (which is apparently what writers tend to do). And when I said that I thus presumed that "absofuckinglutely" was right out, Deborah Cameron (Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford) enthusiastically explained to me that swearing is the only example of infixing in the English language and I was happy, for I had learned something.