Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

I sit here about to write something which fills me with fear: I’m closing the bookselling arm of my business. It’s been like a comfort blanket for so long. I love being surrounded by books; I love reading them; I love hunting for them; I love sharing them with other people. What can be better than to spend your life with books? The problem is that over the past few years it’s been a case of ever-increasing work for ever-decreasing profits. Much as I love my books, and my customers, the cold hard fact is that I need to make money. I can’t just do books as a nice little hobby. Or a lifestyle business (whatever that is) as my lifestyle demands that I eat. The books have been very good to me. If it wasn’t for my decision all those years ago to specialise in pony books, I wouldn’t have been asked to write Heroines on Horseback, my book on the world of the pony book. Neither would I have been able to indulge my passion for research and produce my website. Perhaps they were the pr...

As from 30th April, the British Post Office is raising its prices. They usually raise them every year, but this year they are going up by a lot. The main burden is falling on small parcels and overseas mail. What affect will this have on my prices? For UK customers, not a huge amount. I will be increasing my standard charge from £3.25 to £3.50.  A single paperback will go up to £2.00, from £1.80.  The rates for additional paperbacks will have to go up from £1.00 to £1.50, as once the parcel is past a certain thickness (and 2 paperbacks will do it ) they have to be sent via packet mail, for which there is now a flat rate of £2.70 up to 750g. The Post Office has raised its overseas charges some cases by nearly 40%. This does alas mean I have to make increases in the p&p charges for orders going overseas. Australisia has now been placed in a zone of its own, which is even more expensive, but I not be making any extra charges for Australian customers, other than the genera...

Last week I spent the holiday money.  Business has been up and down of late (though I seemed spectacularly unaffected by the Royal Wedding - it's school holidays as does me down) so I was mulling on whether or not to invest in the business, which is still making a profit, just about, or hang on and have a couple of days away, though even this might have come to naught anyway because of other family pressures. Anyway, when the chance of new stock came up; and a lot of it at that, I took it. We will be having family days out.   New stock doesn't always come along when you want it to in my line of business: once I knew I was going to buy this, of course someone else contacted me with another large collection they thought I might be interested in.  It was mostly children's books, rather than horse, so I didn't feel as bad as I might have done at turning it down, but I felt a pang. So, off I went last week to the deepest Midlands.  Here's some pictures of what I boug...

On a listing on ABE for Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven: "Don't forget that buying this book means my Jack Russells get their supper!" And I have wondered over the years exactly how the industrial booksellers work.  There is one similarity between us that might not occur to you straightaway:  central heating obviously isn't an issue in the warehouse, and it doesn't tend to be much here either so I can sympathise with the workers in their coats .

I've managed to survive as a profit-making bookseller for some years now, but not without the odd self-inflicted wound.  Of course I may well be inflicting others on myself even as I write, but I haven't yet realised what they are. Overpaying for books does not help your profit margin As I deal in the books I like to read myself, occasionally I get carried away because I see a book and I want it myself.  My most spectacular effort in this direction was a  copy of J A Allen's reprint of Stubbs' The Anatomy of the Horse. The seller no sooner mentioned it on the phone than I was practically biting her hand off; offered her far too much, and realised as soon the book arrived and I had come down off my cloud of excitement at seeing the book for the first time that no way was I going to make anything on it.  I didn't.  I had the book hanging around for 2 years because I was desperately hoping to sell it at the top of its price range.  I eventually decided...

Here's a truism for you: attempting to browbeat your customers by making them feel guilty for shopping elsewhere is a surefire way to make sure they carry on shopping elsewhere.   No one likes to shop somewhere you feel obligated: that's not the sort of relationship we have with shops.  I like to shop in places which make me feel good, not one where I buy something; anything, out of duty and then scurry out, feeling the accusatory eye of the owner upon me. But what do you, the shopkeeper, do when things are bad; so bad that you can see the writing on your bank manager's wall and none of it is positive?  When you provide services by the plenty that people happily use and like, but which aren't paid for?  When despite all those said services and added value, your core business is not actually making you any money?   I commend the Wood Green Bookshop for coming out and saying OUCH - we are in danger .  It's the great big elephant in the bookselling room at th...

packing up a parcel of 15 books with great thoroughness and a lot of parcel tape, only to discover one you have missed.

I haven't catalogued anything for ages, so have boxes and boxes of books lurking. So, it is about time I got on with it, and I am tackling my main love, the horse and pony books, first. Sometimes it's a good job, mine. Particularly gorgeous is C W Anderson's Heads Up - Heels Down , which will be in the next set of books uploaded to the database, hopefully at the end of this week. I had to have another look at this book to restore my faith in readers after opening the next book in the pile. It was obviously owned previously by a very, very heavy smoker. I was knocked back by the reek. The book is now consigned to the book deodorising crystals, where I think it might have to be for some time. This wasn't such a grim experience as some I had when I worked at the library. This was in the dim and distant past when we still hired out videos (them new fangled DVDs were few and far between). When one came in, we had to open it up to check the video was actually there, a...

Many bookdealers get Sheppards newsletter every week (they publish a directory of bookdealers), and two weeks ago the editor, Richard Sheppard, put on a poll to gauge what bookdealers were going to do with Amazon's new diktat . I can't seem to put a table into this blog (sure I could if I fiddled with the html but I think I'll give that a miss in the interests of finishing work before Glee starts), so here are the non-tabulated results to the question "Will you accept Amazon's Pricing Parity policy?" 506 votes were cast. 11% will accept because Amazon is such an effective site for selling books 9% will accept the policy for the time being and plan to move away 23% will accept the policy for the time being but join with others to oppose Amazon's policy 11% will accept the policy out of fear of being banned from Amazon 46% will quit selling through Amazon as soon as practical As Richard says, " as with all polls, it is one thing to express one's ...

I freely admit I've bought more than my fair share of books from Amazon in the past years, but now I've taken the vow of abstinence and avoidance as far as they're concerned, I have to look elsewhere. Get your act together, guys. I tried to buy a recently republished book - The Sweet Running Filly by Barbara van Tuyl. It will cost you £7.00 plus p&p on Amazon; delivery time 2-3 weeks. I'll go direct to the States, I thought, as it's an American book. So, I tried Barnes & Noble . Good, smooth ordering experience, shipping pricey (a bit over £8.00) but that's not surprising from the USA. Ordered yesterday - today get email cancelling, as they're out of stock. No option to re-order, no idea of when it might be back in again. Yesterday I tried to find a British seller, so tried The Book Depository - a dead cert, I thought, as they list the book on Amazon at less than Amazon are selling it for. Is it on their own site, which would presumably ...

Perhaps it's not as difficult as it might appear. If individual titles can be tracked , so can sellers.

Amazon have also succeeded in infuriating the new book trade. More here from Scotland.

In the early days of internet bookselling, there was AbeBooks , a Canadian company launched in 1996 whose mission was to provide a platform for booksellers to reach a wider audience, whilst maintaining their individuality. You paid Abe a monthly fee for listing your books, and another fee when a book sold. AbeBooks was a success: after all, it made sense to join together with other booksellers who had different inventories to yours. You reached customers you could never reach on your own, and life looked good. Abe launched the British version of the site in 2002, and I joined in 2003. In those days, Abe were keen for you, the bookseller, to promote yourself. You could buy Abe bookmarks on which you were encourage to print your own details; you could have your own website mentioned on the page on which the details of your book came up. Abe carried on growing, and started to feel the pressure for ever increased profits from its shareholders. Booksellers started to feel the pinch...

I've done a bit more digging since my last post, and Farmlane Books are absolutely right: this policy has already been running in America for a couple of years. There's been no movement from Amazon, unsurprisingly. I assume they have had their lawyers make as certain as they could that what they were proposing was legal under EU legislation: the same change will also apply to Amazon in France and in Germany. I suppose in a way I am lucky because I can manage to extract myself from Amazon and only (only!) lose 20% of my income. There are many, many booksellers who cannot possibly afford to leave Amazon and so will have to comply with this policy. Anyway, I need to take up the slack somehow, so am going back to listing books on Ebay. I stopped doing this in August last year after Ebay imposed a free postage policy on sellers in many categories, which included books. They have now decided this wasn't wise, so I shall trot back into the arms of Ebay. Watch this space.

I sell some books on Amazon, and they've just decided that you can only sell on their site if your prices there are at, or lower than, the prices you charge elsewhere: eg ebay, or abe (which they own, for goodness' sake) or your own site (and they also own Chrislands, who provide my sales site, so goodness knows what the long term implications are there). This is added to the fact that Amazon already hit you for 17.5% commission every time you sell a book, in addition to the hit on the postage credit - currently 49p. So yes, the buyer may think every time you pay the £2.75 that that's going to the seller, but Amazon take their cut of it. Why? They're not buying the packaging, doing the packaging or taking the postage. And you pay a monthly fee (£28.75) as well for the privilege of listing on their site. On my site I deliberately charge less than Amazon so that I actually sell paperback books. I think my paperbacks are generally very good value compared with Ama...

The non-recycleability of some of the packaging materials I use has been nagging at me for a while now. I've now decided there's not a lot of point my carefully composting, giving scraps to the hens and filling the council recycling bin when I'm contributing to the waste because of my use of padded envelopes and non recycleable bubblewrap. So, paperbacks will now be posted in little paper padded Jiffy envelopes. You can use them again yourself, and they should rot down nicely on the compost heap too. Hardbacks will be sent in cardboard book boxes (when they arrive - they're still somewhere between the factory and here, after they attempted to deliver at the one time I went out yesterday). Anything that needs bubblewrap will now have a new green - quite literally, as it is green in colour - bubblewrap that will break down rather than rot in landfill for ever. I'm still using the corrugated card and brown paper I always have used, and I moved a while ago to usin...

Blogging has been a bit on the back burner just lately: my life generally is just about copable with until I buy a collection of new books. Most booksellers I know have piles of books here and there: they may have been bought well into last year, but the time to deal with them just isn't there. I imagine most booksellers' families (those that work from home, at any rate) are used to the sudden decrease in living space once the bookseller in the family has been buying. I do try and keep the piles within bounds, but it is nearly impossible, particularly when it is, as it is now, stocktaking time, and piles of books are washing hither and thither. Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to someone out there to see what I actually do with my days so here is a blow by blow description of the minutiae that overwhelm me when I've been buying. Actually it isn't quite a blow by blow description because that would be quite unbelievably dull, so here are the edited highli...

I'm always amazed by the sheer effort of extracting myself from my life for even a week, but we're now back, having had an excellent week, and I have now downloaded my emails. This has reminded me that I now of course have to lever myself back into my life..... Even after I'd deleted the 250+ spam, I still have 262 emails to deal with. So, if you've emailed me over the past week, please be patient. It is going to take me a time to get through the backlog.

I hadn't realised until I looked at the date of my last post quite how long it had been since I last blogged. The long gap is due to what usually poleaxes me from contact with the human race: my accounts. I am determined this year not to turn into the usual bad-tempered, snarling and stressed out creature I become at the financial year end (it's not, after all, as if its coming is a surprise: it's been the same date ever since I started being self-employed way back when). So, the books went off-line, and the accounts, statements and a million and one receipts and I have been locked together. And I have managed to get everything up to date and sorted out. I don't feel smug about it however, as I know there's still a few weeks to go, and I have got to keep disciplined and not put off updating things because I'd rather be writing or researching. I have a genius for galloping off down other avenues when I should be doing other things. I've also been h...

it's all going to go quiet it is anything but. Normally orders slow right down the week before Christmas, so I'd made all sorts of mental lists about what I was going to do: finish the Gillian Baxter interview, finish the Josephine Pullein-Thompson interview, do some much-needed work on the website.... Oh, and disinter the presents I have bought from the Amazon boxes and sort out what I still need to get... But no. It's been frantic, and all I seem to have been doing is pack - but it did fall to my lot to walk the dog this evening. Fortunately the dog has moved on a bit since we got her. When we first had her, she was so nervous that if she wanted to bark at something, she would have to go behind a tree and do it from there. She was scared of the dark, and would only go outside after dark if one of us came with her and held her quaking labrador paw. Now on our evening walks, which always happen after dark, she takes off up the dark track like a rocket. I'm v...