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![]() And, of course, most titles didn’t make them. That’s one copy for every 50 stores to make these lists. ![]() The “warm” list was every title that sold more than six copies in the chain in a month. On the “hot” list was every title that sold more than six copies in the chain in a week. Although there were holes in the system, Dalton was then able - for the most part - to tally what they were selling across what was then about 300 stores (a number plucked from memory here, and this is in the neighborhood of 40 years ago, but I think this is right…) When I first started selling to Dalton in 1974, they had two lists of titles they considered worth tracking: a “hot” list and a “warm” list. Dalton chain of mall stores hooked up computers to their cash registers in the 1970s. Stores can see what Ingram, in many cases the supplier from which they buy more than from any single publisher, is stocking and selling, which also provides clues for them.īut the best tool for more nuanced inventory management, for a long time, has been to have a bookstore chain. The inventory management system Above the Treeline shares information among its stores so each one can get a picture of what is doing well in the aggregate. In the past decade or two, there have been a few tools developed to help the independent. What’s a store trying to determine what to order next to make of that? And, of those that do sell, the vast majority of those will sell one copy. The majority of the books they carry will sell zero in a week or a month. A single store will have sales for a week or a month across its titles that show multiple copy sales for a small percentage of the titles they have in stock. And the cold hard fact is that, for most stores, for most books, there is not sufficient data to tell anybody anything. But except for the small percentage of the published books that are widespread bestsellers, stores depend primarily on their own sales data to decide what to reorder or keep as backlist. Usually stores - independents and chains - will be guided by those expectations because any other evidence is non-existent.Īfter a book is published, of course, there is real sales data to guide stocking decisions. The publisher through a rep or a catalog states expectations, sometimes based on “comparable” titles (which were, of course, published previously at what might not have been a comparable time!) and sometimes based on the publisher’s hopes, all of which are connected to the publisher’s promotional promises. ![]() All advance order purchases (placed by a store long before the book is published) are based on speculation and guesswork. The fact is that a single store, almost regardless of the quality of its systems and its management, has to guess at what will be the right books to order most of the time. The performance of inventory - how many times it “turns” in a year and how successfully the store manages to buy what it needs without wasting investment (tying up cash) and incurring margin-destroying revenueless-costs (return freight, probably added to inbound freight, plus wasted labor shelving, removing, packing, and shipping) - is, by far, the single biggest determinant of whether a store succeeds commercially or fails. A bookstore’s inventory is its biggest investment. This is an existential problem for a bookstore. One of the most underappreciated realities of the book business is how hard it is for a retailer to manage an inventory of trade books.
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