In Print and other categories

In Print, and other less happy categories Part 1

Since sartorias and yhlee continue to talk about the intricacies of process and questions that arise from struggling with it day to day, I'll go back to rambling a bit about things that are less fun, but not, in the continuum that sees writing merge with business, less relevant, I hope <wry g>.

Every shipment of books that arrives in the store will, in theory, come with an invoice. Unless it's the new Simon & Schuster Canadian distribution, in which case it will come with a packing list, no discount listed, and some of the prices wrong. But I'm not bitter. No wait, I'm digressing.

The invoice will list the books in a variety of ways, usually by title. The books that come in, we price and shelve. The books that don't come in usually have a code associated with them to tell us why they're not there. ( Read more... )

Reorders, and how things have changed

When I first started working in a bookstore, we ordered from the frontlist, and we kept a chunk of what didn't sell for the backlist, because as a specialty store, backlist was important. This was before the rise of the big box stores, and our entire inventory was on cards; we had one card per book, and the sales history of each book was written on that card; they were filed in the order in which they were shelved.
( Read more... )