So I think that, as Patricia said, if they put those bestsellers, those “guaranteed” moneymakers in a place that’s harder to dash into, they might not end up selling as well, since people can skip getting the new bestseller the way they can’t skip buying food.

Lori, I haven’t seen Blood Diamond, but that line reminds me of Chinatown.

Good topic!

The placement of Romances at local bookstores really ticks me off. At Borders in Glendale, CA, after the store was recently refurbished, Romances (bought by buyers who average 100 books a year) have been relegated to the back of the 2ND FLOOR, where older people, who can’t manuever stairs, can’t have access. (There is one lone elevator, if one doesn’t have claustrophobia.) If one wants to dash in & buy a book, it takes a good 20 mins. to run up the stairs, find the book & run back downstairs to check it out. Now, if a customer buys about 100 books a year, wouldn’t it make sense to allow them to pass by those books SOMEWHERE on the lst floor?

I complained about the change & was told that top 10 Fiction were placed with MAGAZINES & the Starbucks counter on the lst floor. All others, moved to 2nd floor. Now, that certainly made sense to me. My solution, never to go there again. What jerks!

Patricia

I recently saw the movie Blood Diamond, where the characters would shrug and say TIA (This is Africa) when something really screwd up happened or there was some policy that made no sense. LIke Africa was beyond explanation. I decided writers need TIP (This is Publishing)

Some stores are good about doing that, but I wonder if the co-op marketing situation comes into play. A publisher paying big bucks to get their lead author’s new title displayed front and center isn’t going to want some other book to be a distraction. Going back to the Harry Potter example, the big Harry Potter display is only HP stuff in my neighborhood store. That seems like a huge wasted opportunity to grow readers when they’re doing the midnight release party. Anyone going to the midnight release party probably already has a copy of every other book in the series. A more valuable display would be of books you might like if you like Harry Potter, because you’re going to need something else to read and get hooked on when the series is finished. All those people hanging around in the store waiting for midnight need something new to look at.

And I’m not just saying that because my books would probably be on the “if you like this, you’ll also like this” Harry Potter table. :-)

I bet independent stores that aren’t quite as tied to publisher co-op money do a better job of this, but alas, there are none in my area.

Bestsellers should be easy to find, since lots of people want to buy them, but it’d be nice to have similar authors ‘if you like x you’ll like y’ placed close by, maybe with one of those little card reviews that one store (Ottaker’s?) sticks on the shelf. I think it’s boring and unimaginative the way they use the space. All that imagination and adventure inside the pages, but none in the stores. Good job I’m overexcited when I find a good bookshop and will happily search for what I want/think I want.

Actually, there are a lot of other things that bother me about bookstores, which is why I tend to use Amazon/Abe…

I have seen some lovely independant shops lay things out like a tantalising buffet table. I’m so much more likely to pile up 10 books from these places.

I know I am a spontaneous book shopper most of the time – I might walk in to buy one or two books, but end up with five. Not unusual, though I read romance, which is usually located near the back of the store, by the bathrooms, where there is heavier traffic – I really hate that LOL.