Back in the Swing

OK, i've been back a few days now, so it's time to write bookshop type stuff on here.
With 2 months to go before xmas, we thought it would be a good time to talk about how we were going to sell lots of books over the festive period. A new challenge for us is budgetting for something like this with our own cash. We decided way back that there was no point in ordering our xmas stock to come in during September (when all the 'big books' are published by the silly old publishers). The way it works is that what you get invoiced for one month you have to pay for by the end of the following month. So filling our shop in September with cookbooks and celebrity biographies would have been a real hit on the bank balance this month. So we're going to do our xmas order in a weeks time, at the beginning of November.
Anyway, the shop is far too busy at the moment with other stuff to be worrying about chrimbo. We've had our 4 busiest weeks since we opened in the last 5, and we're trying to put together a big events programme for the new year. We've got two events this week, which should be great.
Firstly Myra Schneider is returning to the shop to launch her latest collection of poetry on Thursday, which is promising to be a full house.
And on Friday we're pleased to be launching a cracking new thriller from Éanna Cullen called The Dark Pupils. If you're around and fancy either of these, please come along.
It's half term this week, which means it'll probably be a bit quieter than usual, but in a way, that'll give us a chance to catch up on a few things. Tim's going to be making 4 tables on Tuesday. He's bought a large sheet of MDF or something similar, and has produced an excel spreadsheet showing where he needs to cut the wood. It's all colour coordinated and if I had the skill i'd show you a picture of it. He's quite handy.
I'll be finishing off the new flyer design, which we intend to deliver to 10,000 homes in the next fortnight, just to remind people about us again.

Today was our kids reading group and we discussed Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver. It got an excellent response, and I enjoyed it too (although I thoought the ending with the bear could have gone on a little bit longer). I'll be reading part 2 soon.
We chose Tom Fletcher and the Angel of Death by Sarah Matthias as next month's book, which i'm really pleased about, as I tried to persuade them to choose this a couple of months ago (democracy eh?). I failed to persuade them to choose the Book Thief this month, so hopefully we'll choose that next January.

There's a ton of returns that we want to do in the next 3 weeks to clear some space for xmas, and also to free up some extra moolah, and we're trying to work out if we can use Batch Returns to return books that we recieved before we went onto Batch (if anyone out there knows the answer that'd be a help). Sorry for that boring industry-speak. Back to reality.

I'm going to be getting in touch with our website designer this week, to see if we can get something together before xmas. It seems a shame that we have this little blog, but our website is only a homepage at the moment. It's entirely our fault, so we'd better shake a leg.

We're also looking at stuff to sell that isn't books. We have cards and bookmarks in the shop, but we think we can make a few quid on other stuff aswell. If anyone has any suggestions, they'd be very welcome.

And finally, I predict Spurs will win for the first time this season against Bolton this afternoon. Always end on a joke.....