Thursday, March 03, 2011
Merchandising brilliance beyond my puny understanding
I saw mention recently that buzz around the upcoming HBO minseries has been boosting book sales of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones. In light of my recent unsuccessful effort to buy the book, I wondered how that could be. I have errands in Macon today, checked ahead on bn.com, and this location was supposed to have it in stock. When I went in, though, it wasn't on the shelf in the scifi/fantasy section. I figured maybe someone thought it "transcends the genre," and shelved it in general fiction, but no, wasn't there either. This time, instead of just looking on one of the in-store terminals, I decided to ask an actual human about it. Forthwith, the cute girl from the Information desk led me over to a nook (not the Nook reader--I mean a literal nook) where a spinner rack of "Hot Items!" or something was gathering dust. A whole bunch of copies were on it. What do I know? At least this time I got the damn book.
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Speaking as a former bookseller, this is all too often par for the course. Although I usually tried to make an attractive face-out display for new books in the appropriate section, sometimes we were required to place ALL copies on the front-of-store feature racks. Naturally, most of our actual literate customers would walk right past the feature displays and go to the section they "knew" that the book would be in, and hilarity would ensue. In a way, I'm not necessarily sad to see the big-box corporate bookstores die off; so many of the merchandising decisions were made outside of the store by people who didn't really understand how things worked at the store level.
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