Bookselling stuff.

It's always a bit strange in the bookshop in January. After the buzz of Christmas, where you're sometimes so busy you don't get time to think about stuff, the New Year offers a slightly different challenge.
In most cases in the shop, the stuff we buy in December has to be paid for by the end of January. Obviously we buy a lot in December, both to fill the shelves with joy and wonder for our customers, but also to get in the books that we don't have that our customers ask for. Most of those we can get with 1-2 days.
So at the end of December our bills are big. Ideally, we'd like to minimise these bills, so it is traditional that January is a good month to do returns. Returning books that haven't sold, is something I don't enjoy doing. It is, in a sense, an admission that the books that you chose to sell in the shop were the wrong ones. Obviously you can't get it right all the time, but it still makes me sad. I think that we had a pretty good range of titles this year & were able to pick up on titles that we'd originally missed very quickly. Probably better than the last couple of years, if i'm honest. However, we still have lots of books to send back, so for the next week or two we'll be clearing the shelves of slow selling titles.
January is also the month, where for no other reason than the fact that it is a new year, people traditionally make resolutions. We do this for the shop too. One of these is that I will do more blogposts. Sadly for you, this means that there may be lots of dull posts like this one. But you never know, I might occasionally do something relatively interesting. Who knows.
I plan on doing book reviews, getting guest bloggers, talking about the everyday business of running the bookshop and also announcing new stuff that we have planned. But what else do you want to see on here?
If there's something about books or small businesses or the local community that you'd like to see more of, let us know.