Revving Up for the Holidays: Preparing Store Operations, Predicting Big Sellers, and Avoiding Mistakes

Yes, Virginia, the holiday season is really only three weeks away... so Bookselling This Week decided to ask 12 independent booksellers to predict their holiday bestsellers, explain how they reconfigure store operations to meet the rush, and reveal one mistake they vow never to make again. Here's what we learned....

The novel that Karen Corvello of R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut, is most excited about selling this holiday season is Maynard and Jennica (Rudolph Delson, Houghton Mifflin). "It's a first novel set in New York City about a quirky couple and their relationship," she explained. "It's told through 35 characters. It's very funny, and is one of our fiction picks." Other holiday handsells will include Training People: How to Bring Out the Best in Your Human (Tess of Helena, Chronicle) and Letters From Nuremberg (Christopher Dodd, Lary Bloom, Crown).

This year, R.J. Julia is relying more heavily on e-mail to communicate with customers, said Corvello. "We're fine-tuning our e-mails and trying to figure out the balance between enough and too much."

To prepare for the holiday rush, R.J. Julia holds a staff meeting at the beginning of November to discuss staff picks, as well as to review the locations of everything in the store. Staffers also create a list of surefire titles to recommend as gifts for the "hard to shop for" person.

Corvello is optimistic about holiday business. "I think it's going to be pretty good. We've got a good list of titles. They've been hard to narrow down, which is always a good sign."

At Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville, North Carolina, General Manager Linda Barrett Knopp said, of course, she planned on stocking up on bestsellers I Am America (And So Can You!) (Stephen Colbert, Grand Central) and Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert, Penguin). "We'll keep at least 200 copies on hand of I Am America," said Barrett Knopp. "It's frustrating to run out of a bestselling title. I can see recommending it to so many people as a gift." Other picks include An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (Brock Clarke, Algonquin) and The Air We Breathe (Andrea Barrett, Norton).

To guide customers, Barrett Knopp said the store creates a variety of displays and positions them as close to the front of the store as possible. "We do well with the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) holiday titles, as well as the Best Books of the Year from different publications -- the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. We also display our own staff choices. We really stock up on those and promote them heavily."

New this year for Malaprop's is a brochure in which store staff members discuss their favorite books to give and receive. The brochure will be inserted in the bookstore newsletter and will be distributed as a handout. "It'll focus on the lasting quality of books as gifts," said Knopp. "I've been reading everybody's stories, and they're great."

As in years past, Inkwood Books in Tampa, Florida, will hold a storewide sale on the staff's top 25 picks, which are featured in Inkwood's e-mails and on its website. "One of my picks is Loving Frank (Nancy Horan, Ballantine)," said co-owner Carla Jimenez. "Porn for Women (Susan Anderson, Chronicle) is a cute stocking stuffer. Someone else is recommending the illustrated Life of Pi (Yann Martel and Tomislav Torjanac, Harcourt). We need to pick out a cookbook and find a paperback mystery [to recommend]. We like to find a wide range of categories and prices."

Inkwood creates a display of pre-wrapped featured titles. "It's terrific. During the last two or three days before Christmas, it becomes very popular." For customers who don't wait until the last minute to do their shopping, Inkwood hosts a Holiday Preview night with snacks and door prizes in mid-November. "People do a stack of shopping," said Jimenez.

To gear up for the season, Jimenez said she encourages staff to think about handselling titles that will be given as gifts, which is a little bit different than a direct recommendation, she said. She also ensures that staff members share their recommendations with each other to fill in any gaps. "We do a pretty good job on that all year, but we really focus for the holidays."

Beth Black of the 6,000-square-foot The Bookworm in Omaha, Nebraska, noted that it's tough to predict exactly what titles will take off during the holiday season. And "therein lies the hard part," she said with a laugh. In the store's Children's section, she believes Robert Sabuda pop-up books and The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden (Collins) and The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz (Collins) will be top sellers this year.

As for adult titles, The Bookworm has stocked up on The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945 by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf), the companion to Burns' PBS documentary, and Black expects Write It When I'm Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations With Gerald Ford by Thomas M. DeFrank (Putnam Adult) to do well. Overall, the store stocks up on titles featured in the Midwest Booksellers Association winter catalog, "especially the regional interest," she said.

Titles in the Midwest Booksellers Association's winter catalog "always sell very well for us," said Nancy Simpson of the 2,300 square foot Book Vault in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Simpson, like Black, is also banking on regional titles -- such as Driftless: Photographs From Iowa by Danny Wilcox Frazier (Duke University Press) and Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (Bantam).

And though the Iowa primary looms right after the New Year, Simpson doesn't expect political titles to fly off the shelf. In fact, she doesn't expect a run on political titles because of the January primary. "We're blessed here in Iowa by being able to meet any candidate running for the presidency," she explained.

David Bolduc of the 34-year-old Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colorado, is expecting I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert (Grand Central Publishing) and Run by Ann Patchett (Harper) to be top sellers this holiday season.

Regarding personnel and store operations decisions, Bookworm's Black told BTW the store does not hire extra sales floor personnel for the holidays, and for a reason: the importance she places on the handsell. "As an independent bookstore, it's important that our people know the books," Black said. "You can't learn that effectively in a couple of weeks. We have our part-time employees work more hours." The store will bring in someone to do gift wrapping on weekends, starting right after Thanksgiving.

However, at Oskaloosa's Book Vault, Simpson said, "We're planning to have one part-time temp person for the busiest hours in the middle of the day, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. And we'll be expanding hours... by an hour." She is hoping to hire the temp by the second week of November so that he or she is thoroughly trained by Thanksgiving.

One change the store is making this holiday season is stocking more "gifts in the price range of stocking stuffers," Simpson said. "More gifts under $20, so people coming into buy books can do some impulse buying."

For the holiday season, Boulder Book Store's Bolduc said that everything is geared toward furthering the store's relationship with its loyal customers. "We use this opportunity to express appreciation for our best customers," he said. "We have nice books that we give out to our frequent buyers... it's giving them a year-end Christmas gift."

At present, Boulder Bookstore is training temporary staff and Bolduc said, "Some could stay on permanently depending on what happens after the holiday." New this year, the store will no longer stop author signings right after Thanksgiving. "We'll have book signings until mid-December," he said. "We had requests from publishers [to extend the signings] and we felt we can handle doing weekday signings."

For the holiday season, at the 40,000-square-foot BookPeople in Austin, Texas, Steve Bercu is stocking up on Colbert's book... and refrigerator magnets. Of course, he was not talking about just any refrigerator magnets: BookPeople sells the "Leslie's What to Wear Refrigerator Magnet Set." Leslie, known affectionately as the "Queen of the Night," is an Austin icon -- a homeless cross-dresser (who also ran for mayor and came in second). The magnet set comes with various outfits that can be used to dress Leslie, from a leopard-skin dress to flashy orange skirt to a tiara and Fender guitar.

"We will be selling an exclusive BookPeople Christmas magnet," Bercu said, adding, "We'll be selling lots of books, too." He reported that Giving by Bill Clinton "continues to sell well."

Mary Gay Shipley of That Bookstore in Blytheville (Arkansas) said, "We're really excited about The Book of Marie by Terry Kay (Mercer University Press). And we're selling a lot of Playing for Pizza (by John Grisham, Doubleday) -- signed copies."

At Bohannon's Books With a Past in Georgetown, Kentucky, Kay Vincent said that The The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden (Collins) and The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz (Collins) "will do well." Also, she expects to be selling a lot of Purplicious (written by Elizabeth Kann and illustrated by Victoria Kann, HarperCollins) and Boone: A Biography by Robert Morgan (Shannon Ravenel). "Our cookbook section does very well, and all year, we do good business with our horse books," Vincent told BTW. She cautioned, however: "You can't predict what people will buy." The store also has a display featuring titles from the SIBA catalog.

As for store operations, BookPeople will be doing what "we do every year: hiring temporary cashiers... and a few extra booksellers," said Bercu.

At That Bookstore in Blytheville, "we're trying to make sure that everyone stays well and comes to work!" said Shipley. "I get to come in every day.... We will get busy, we're already getting busy." She noted that the first week of December is usually slow in comparison to Thanksgiving week, and "you wonder, what happened?" However, things pick back up starting the second week of December. "We extend our hours closer to Christmas," she added.

Each year, That Bookstore in Blytheville has the 32-page Southern Independent Business Alliance (SIBA) regional catalog inserted in a number of area newspapers. But new this year, the store will be offering a $5 discount coupon on any book featured in the catalog.

At Bohannon's, Vincent reported, "Normally we have one person working at a time, and we'll increase personnel somewhat." Overall, she will increase the amount she orders and "try to get some diversity in my orders for the holidays." The store will also be giving away a full-size American Girl doll and "that increases traffic a lot." In addition, the store will stay open later on Friday and open on Sunday afternoons.

New this year, "we will be distributing the [regional] catalog in our local newspaper and two surrounding county newspapers."

City Lights Books in San Francisco always has a very store-specific list of hot titles. Paul Yamazaki expects that Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg titles will continue to do well through the holidays, along with owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Poetry As Insurgent Art (New Directions). Other expected top sellers include work from local authors Beth Lisick, Michelle Tea, and Peter Plate.

Yamazaki said City Lights highlights the best books of the year during the holidays. "The store comes out with a big Staff Recommends list. Our emphasis is on emerging writers who we're really excited about."

In Bellingham, Washington, Village Books' Rem Ryals listed The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes From a Delicious Revolution (Alice Waters, Clarkson Potter) as one of the titles expected to be a top handsell at the store. Other choices include The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest (Lawrence Kreisman and Glenn Mason, Timber) and 30,000 Years of Art (Phaidon Eds., Phaidon).

Village Books will once again be participating in the coupon book put together by the local business alliance, Sustainable Connections. The bookstore offers a discount coupon good on any title in the store, and that is a huge incentive for customers during the holidays, explained Ryals.

Stephanie Griffin of Twenty-Third Avenue Books, who bought the Portland, Oregon, store about a year and a half ago, has been through one holiday season so far, and the one thing she plans to do differently this year is hire extra help. The title she'll be handselling is Frank Sinatra: The Family Album (Charles Pignone, Little, Brown). "I haven't really seen this type of book about him before," said Griffin. "You always see this kind of thing for Elvis, but not for Sinatra."

Griffin said, "I'm looking forward to being busy. And I want to wish everybody a great holiday season." --David Grogan and Karen Schechner