Bookshop Layout.

A question was raised on Twitter earlier today by Brie (@14NC)

who like me would prefer bookshops to put all fiction together like a library rather than in to genres? 

 

It got a few people thinking, including me.

 

Despite the fact that a lot of libraries do separate genre fiction, the crux of the question was about the layout of bookshops.

 

When we first opened, we tried a couple of things. One of them was incorporating poetry into fiction.

I wrote this about it on the blog, way back in 2008.

 

" At the moment we've got poetry, essays and plays in with fiction. The reason for this was that we hoped people would be doing the usual thing of looking through fiction (the main section people look through) and would find a book of poetry 'by mistake'. It's worked well on some occasions, and I doubt we'd have sold 3 copies of Tarantula by Bob Dylan, if it had been in the poetry section, but at the same time we've uncovered a large population of local poets who are up in arms about this. So we've caved in."

 

Funny thing is though, looking back, we don't sell any poetry from the poetry section. And we did sell it when it was in fiction.

 

There's the argument that if a customer is, say, a sci-fi nut, who reads nothing but science fiction, he/she will want this to be a separate section. If Science Fiction was incorporated into Fiction, I'm worried that it will put those customers off.

 

It's the same with crime, horror etc. But I love the idea of serendipity when it comes to browsing. Finding something that you'd never expect to find. Perhaps having it all under the label "Fiction" will mean that more people will find something unexpected and try something different....

 

Oh man, this is tricky.

 

Daunt Bookshops do things differently again. They shelve books geographically - with guides, phrase books, travel writing, history and fiction grouped by their relevant country. This is brilliant and quirky. And it seems to work for them. But their shops are aimed specifically at book lovers with time to browse and also a bit of disposable income (their branches are located in the more well off areas of London).

 

I would love to integrate horror, crime, science fiction, fantasy and short stories into the general fiction section, but I need persuading that it's a good idea. Oh, and graphic novels too. Perhaps there's a way which the genres can be highlighted within the section. Maybe it doesn't have to be alphabetical. I don't know.

Some of our customers (particularly the ones who like specific genres) will not be keen on this idea. But there's something about it that I like.

 

Any advice or suggestions would be very welcome.

 

 

Reading Habits

Inspired by Scott Pack's blogpost on the same subject, I though it would confess my own personal reading habits.

1. 95% of the books I read are novels.

2. I have a Nook, but I rarely read books with it. I much prefer to read a physical book.

3. Only very very rarely will I read a hardback. I just don't agree with them.

4. I can't read if there are any distractions (TV, music, radio etc).

5. I read anything up to four books at the same time. A morning book, a train book, an evening book and a bed book.

6.Like Scott, I will flick ahead to see how long each chapter is before deciding if i'm going to read it.

7. If i'm reading a novel, I very rarely read the introduction.

8. I don't use a bookmark. I fold the corners down on the pages to keep my place.

9. Despite what I do, there are periods of up to a month when I don't read a book. There are also periods of time when I can read two books a day.

10. There are very few books i've read more than once.

That feels much better.

E-Books For Indies. An Update

I'm delighted that The Bookseller has written this great article about Read Cloud, the E-Book solution that I wrote about a few days ago. 

As I said in the blogpost, we're looking for independent bookshops, who are looking for a credible  opportunity to sell ebooks to get in touch with us. This seems like a very authentic solution. Here's what Readcloud offer.

• around a 35% discount on downloads
• bookshops don't have to do anything to process the sales, it's all done for you.
• The look & feel of the e-book section of your website will match that of your existing website. Here is an example of what it looks like. This is a test site for Nigel's shop.
• You can decide the books that are highlighted on the website.
• The prices of the books on sale are negotiable (not necessarily r.r.p.)
• There are over 100,000 books available to download (all major publishers are included, and many smaller imprints) and the number of publishers signing up to it is increasing all the time.

More than a dozen bookshops have expressed an interest already, including The Gutter Bookshop, Belgravia Books, Under The Greenwood Tree and Waterstones. At least one of these isn't true, but there's a real interest building around Readcloud. And rightly so.

Nigel French from Cole's Bookshop has been a real star. He's been championing Readcloud, and between us we're trying to work out a really authentic e-book solution that works for bookshops in the UK.

This is the big bit.

If you want to sell ebooks, this is a big opportunity. PLEASE get in touch. All you have to do say you're interested. You don't have to sign anything, you don't have to pay anything. You just have to get in touch.

WE NEED YOU TO EXPRESS AN INTEREST.

The more bookshops who get involved, the more chance it'll happen.
If you don't like it, you don't have to sign up, but please give it a look.

enquiries@biggreenbookshop.com
@biggreenbooks
020 8881 6767

I think this is a real opportunity.

COME ON!!

Ouch

Last Tuesday (10 days ago), after moving a washing machine in the flat above Tuffet's, Tim was just tidying up, when he tore a massive amount of muscles in his back.
He managed to get home, but spent the next 4 days unable to stand up.
He is still pretty much housebound, and has now managed to walk to the end of his road and back. But essentially, Tim's back is pretty fucked at the moment and he can't work at the shop.
Heroically, he's been sitting/lying (I don't know), at home doing our monthly accounts and making sure that we don't get told off by our suppliers for not paying our bills on time.

It was a huge relief that we've taken on Carmel, who started at the bookshop last Wednesday (9 days ago), otherwise we'd have been unable to keep the shop open. She was only supposed to work 3 days last week, but ended up working from Weds-Sun. Thanks Carmel

I've been at Tuffet's pretty much non stop for the last fortnight. I've been desperate to get down to Wood Green, because there's so so much to do down there. I did spend a day at the Big Green on Monday (we had to shut Tuffet's) and did a bit of tidying. Blah.

As I've mentioned on a previous post, things are a bit quiet at the moment at the shop. Tim and I have been putting a lot of effort into opening the new gaff and I suspect taking some of our energy away from Wood Green has meant that it's not the slick, well oiled machine it usually is *coughs*.
Less people have decided to come and visit us there. That's what happens (we knew this), and we'd been really looking forward to Carmel starting, so that we'd then be able to have some time to look at the massive list of stuff we'd had to put on hold whilst trying to sort out the new shop.
Despite Tim knackering himself, we're can't put it off any longer, so we're going to be throwing all our energy at getting Big Green buzzing again (not with flies), and Literary Festival plans are the main focus of the next few weeks.
All the regular stuff is still going to be happening , including our Comedy Night tonight, school visits next week, book groups, writing groups etc.and we'll also be selling books at "The Literary Conference" at the Free Word Centre next weekend.
Anyway, we've always tried to be honest on this blog before, so we just thought we should let you know about poor Timmy and how how things are.

Here's a picture of some puppies. 



E-Books For Indies. An update

A few months ago I wrote a blogpost asking Independent Bookshops to band together in order for us to see if we could get a better deal on e-books than we are currently getting. It was relatively successful and we had around 15 Indies get in touch to express an interest. Not bad.
The trouble was that we are all very busy, trying to survive and thrive, so the opportunity to get together and chat regularly wasn't possible.
However, this doesn't mean that we gave up. Oh no. Some wonderful groundwork was put in by Nigel French, owner of Cole's Bookshop in Bicester. He's been in touch with a company in Australia called "ReadCloud", who supply over 100 Indie bookshops down under with a platform to sell e-books. They're keen to work with us over in the UK too.

ReadCloud

It looks rather good too.
Here are the benefits of using ReadCloud

• the bookshop gets around 35% of the download price.
• bookshops don't have to do anything to process the sales, it's all done for you.
• The look & feel of the e-book section of your website will match that of your existing website. Here is an example of what it looks like. This is a test site for Nigel's shop.
• You can decide the books that are highlighted on the website. 
• The prices of the books on sale are negotiable (not necessarily r.r.p.)
• There are over 100,000 books available to download (all major publishers are included, and many smaller imprints) and the number of publishers signing up to it is increasing all the time. 

One of the big draws for me personally, is that ReadCloud is an Indie company, just like us. I like to support independent companies and I want to support this one. 

So, here's the deal. They need around 50 shops to sign up in the UK to make it possible. If they get 50 shops, the set up cost will be approx £950 (it's likely to be less if more indies join). There will then be an annual charge of £450ish after that. 

Phew, £950 sounds like a lot of money. But we broke this down into sales. That's about £3 a day. If you sell ONE e-book for £8.99, you've made more than that. 

We have customers who buy both physical books and also downloads. I'd like to think that if we sold downloads, then some of those customers would buy them from us. 

I realise the timing of this isn't great, but please get in touch with me or Nigel if you're interested or have any questions. 

Nigel can be contacted here

I can be contacted here, here or here on this blog. Or tweet me @biggreenbooks

We've already had a few indies expressing an interest, including Bob from the mighty Gutter Bookshop in Dublin. He knows a good thing when he sees one. 

Please share this with anyone who you think may be interested. 

Thanks. 

Indie Vouchers.

A question.
  If there was such a thing as a combined  Independent Bookshop/Record Shop Voucher, which was accepted in 90% of Indie Bookshops and Record Shops in the UK would you be inclined to buy them more than a National Book Voucher or a Record Voucher?

Things about Things.

It's been a while since I wrote one of these here blogposts. Let's see if I can still do it.

OK, we've opened Tuffet's Toys and Tales, our new little Bookshop/Toyshop in Brookmans Park.

Pretty Bookshop

Brookmans Park is a lovely little village and we've had a very positive response so far from the community. Obviously, it's still very early days, but we are slowly building up a little customer base.
I've been in touch with all the local schools, letting them know we exist etc, and seeing what it is they want from a local bookshop. I've had a meeting with one already and have arranged another meeting with another just after half term.

The Big Green Bookshop is quiet at the moment. Very quiet. Since we got the keys to the new shop, all the effort to open it and set it up has meant that we haven't spent as much time as we'd like on the good ship Big Green. This, among other reasons has meant that we've had a lot fewer people through the door.

But with a bit of luck, a succession of 16 hour days, no holidays and a tailbreeze, we can turn this around.

Over the last couple of weeks we've been interviewing candidates for a job at the bookshop. And i'm delighted to say that Carmel, for this is the name of our newest member of staff, has started today!
She'll be based mainly in Wood Green, but will also work up in Brookmans Park once a week. Carmel's role is essentially to look after the day to day running of the Big Green Bookshop.We want her to look at the place with a fresh pair of eyes and introduce new and exciting initiatives at the shop as well as revisiting the layout and general look and feel of the place. Tim and I are aware it looks a bit tired at the moment, so it's reassuring that Carmel will be there to breathe new life into the place. No pressure Carmel.

Work has started on the Literary Festival and in the next couple of weeks, we'll be able to give you a much more complete idea of how things are progressing. Suffice to say we are freakishly excited about it all.

Now that Carmel has started, I can now revisit a few of the other projects I've put on hold since the new year. It also means I can update the website more often, book some great new events, write more blogposts and generally be a lot more noisy about the bookshop than I have been.

Speaking of events, we have Ben Fountain coming to the shop tomorrow evening. He's going to be 'in conversation' with Guardian book critic Sam Jordison and it's going to be amazing. (TICKETS HERE)

Next week, it's our Big Green Bookswap, with the magical Matt Haig and Andrew J Lambie. (TICKETS HERE). I am particularly excited about this, for a couple o reasons. Firstly, Matt Haig is a brilliant writer, who I've been meaning to get to do an event at the bookshop for ages. And secondly, Andrew J Lambie has written a novel that made me go "ooh, blimey, this is good. Better than good actually".
It's called Carnival of the Flesh .

I'm going to try and embed a video on here now, of Andrew reading the first chapter. Let's see if I can do it.



Andrew J. Lambie reads A Carnival of the Flesh from Guerilla on Vimeo.

I can!!

It's a very enjoyable 8 minutes long.

Anyway, there. I've written a blogpost. I enjoyed it. I think i'll do it again tomorrow.

Name the New Bookshop - The Result

We ran a competition asking people to come up with names for our new bookshop/toyshop in Brookmans Park. The winner getting £50 to spend in the new shop and also having the privilege of cutting the ribbon on the opening day.
We had around 300 entries (292 to be exact), and last night was the night we chose the winner.

This is a blogpost all about what happened.
Are you ready to read it?
Good.

The process of choosing the name involved pens, cider, shouting, excel spreadsheets, telephones, lager and brains.

I put all the names that had been entered onto a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet was sent to 6 trustworthy and honest people who were asked to mark the ones they liked.
From the information I got back, I was able to put together six separate sh... ohh blah blah blah.

I went to the pub with Tim. Also with us was Helen Wright, a reporter from the Welwyn and Hatfield Times.


Helen ponders

I was drinking Grolsch, Tim was drinking Adnams and Helen was drinking Coke with lots and lots of ice.
From the 300 odd suggestions we had got it down to about 70 by the time we'd finished our first pint.
It was important to be brutal in these early rounds.
Names that had fallen by the wayside included;

Argonauts
Book Me Up
Brain Boggling Books
Diney land
Follow the Yellow Book Road
Goblins and Goggly Eyes
Kiddos
Super Tastie Books and Toys
Word

We then moved on to round 2.
Spreadsheets featuring popular and not so popular choices were scrutinised.

Spreadsheets. Mmm

We each went through the less popular lists and chose names we thought were worthy of further contemplation. Toys and Tales got through to the later rounds, despite only getting two votes from the six people who chose. Also, I was very fond of The Cave of Wonders, so that was pushed through to the later stages.
I should mention at this point that there were six names that were always going to make the finals. These had been chosen by pretty much everyone we asked as worthy of consideration.
These names were;

Books on the Green
Bookshop on the Corner
Brookmans Bookshop
Brookmans Books
Little Green Bookshop
Small Green Bookshop

We had worked our way through another pint now and another swathe of names had been discarded.


Grolsch. £4.00 a pint !

Including;

Wobbly Books
Twice Told Tales
Toy Train
Toy Story
Book Bash
Bizzy Bee Books
Bookbrilliant

So we got to the final few.

I'd been tweeting a few things throughout the evening and here was a massive online support for The Little Green Bookshop.

 

Tim and I had to decide whether this was the right thing to do. It was a BIG decision. We discussed what would happen if we opened a third or a fourth shop. Would we call it the Medium Sized Green Bookshop, or the Gargantuan Green Bookshop? We decided that it had to go.

so now we were down to these.

Carp....

Tuffets
Bradmore Green Bookshop
Brookman's Books
Brookmark
Books in the Park
Brookman's Books

We were down to six.

This was tricky now. So I put on my magic hat.

Left handed contemplation.

There were too many Brooks and Books. And we also had still got a big soft spot for "Toys and Tales", even though it didn't make it through to the finals.

Crossings out and more booze left us with the final three names.

Tuffets
Brookmark
Brookman's Books

What a huge decision.
When we named the Big Green Bookshop, Tim inserted 3 pens into his face. Let's relive that magic.



spectacular

OK.
Here we go.
THE RESULT
Remember that we all liked "Toys and Tales"? This made a big difference.






Brookmark? NO





Brookmans Books?  NO





Our new shop will be called;
      

Tuffets

toys and tales

I know! It was a real outsider.It kept sneaking through each of the rounds. But here we are. We loved Toys and Tales, but never thought it had the full boof to be a name on its own.  

But Tuffets gave it the full boof.

 

Let us know what you think.

x



Literary Festival - an announcement

Here is some stuff about the Literary Festival that we've been awarded £10,000 to put on.

1. It will take place from Friday October 11th til Sunday October 13th.

2. The theme of the Literary Festival is "London; a Celebration".

Storylines by dex available here

Once we get some of the money, we can really start work on the Festival, but now that we have a theme, we can start to put together some ideas.

Here's a few ideas we've come up with (and we're just spitballin' here):

• Future London
• London Crime
• Alternate London
• London authors
• Books based in London
• Literary tour of London
• Having the different venues we're going to use represented by tubelines.
• Each of these venues (or tubelines) specialising in a particular topic, ie Poetry, Children's, Art etc.
• Having a short story competition with the theme "London".
• An author from every borough of London
• A-Z of Literary London

Anyway, those are a few ideas.

The main target the Council has given us, having agreed to give us the money to put this on, is to get new people to come to Wood Green. What we want to achieve is to get people to come to a Literary festival in Wood Green, because it's a Literary Festival.
That fact that it's in Wood Green is just a bonus.

Now, we need your ideas.

Off you go.

Black Feathers book launch tonight at the Big Green Bookshop

  Tonight at the Bookshop, we're holding the launch party for Black Feathers, the spellbinding new novel by Joseph D'Lacey.

 

I am very excitied about this book.

Black Feathers

Those of you with good memories will know that I first met Joseph when he became the first author to visit the Big Green Bookshop. He turned up 15 days before we even opened!
His first published novel, Meat, is a truly staggering book, leading horror legend Stephen King to state "Joseph D'Lacey rocks!", and Joseph followed this up with the equally dark Garbage Man and Kill Crew (sadly no longer available).

 Since then, his career has been something of a rollercoaster. He got picked up by a US publisher and also one in Australia to publish a couple of novellas, but then his publisher in the UK went bust. It was a dark time for Joseph and it can't have been easy at all.
It was at this time that I approached him and told him that I wanted to publish his next book myself. And that's what happened. Splinters, a collection of the best of Joseph's short stories from the last 12 years was published last November, by Timeline Books (my publishing company).

 

Splinters



It's something that I am very very proud of and hopefully it's introduced some new readers to Joseph's extraordinary prose.
In the meantime two more of Joseph's books were published (SnakeEyes and Blood Fugue).

And now, here we are. The launch of Black Feathers.

Black Feathers is a beautiful combination of folklore, fairytale and dark apocalyptic fiction. Set over two very different time periods, one modern day, the other generations into the future, it follows the journeys of Gordon and Megan. Although there are hundred of years separating them, both are searching for the elusive Crowman. Some say he will bring destruction to the world, others say he is the planet's saviour, but all Gordon and Megan know is that they must find him.

It is surely the most accomplished of Joseph's novels to date (and I've read them all). If you haven't read his stuff before, this would be a wonderful introduction.

I'd be so pleased if you could come along tonight to help us celebrate with Joseph. He has been one of our biggest supporters and he deserves huge huge success.

There'll be wine and an exclusive short film too. And, of course, there'll be Joseph. One of my favourite authors of all time.