Another Day, Another Offsite

Dateline: Tuesday, July 14th.

Greetings from the “City of Milwaukee Emerging Business Sustainability Conference.” I got here at 7 PM to set up. I’m the only vendor that has widgets to sell; everyone else is selling services. That left most other folks to leave their spaces and participate in the workshops, leaving me behind to read Richard Powers’ Generosity. Did you know Powers doesn’t sign books? For a second, I thought that meant he might still do readings, as long as he didn’t sign, but he doesn’t do that either, at least for me. He lives in Illinois so I thought we had a shot. We didn’t.

Maybe one day Powers’ cousin will stop by and say, “Did FSG say Rick doesn’t do events? He’s coming to my wedding next May and he’d do anything once I told him this was my favorite bookstore.” There’s a lot of fantasy involved in that statement. I feel like I’m writing fan fiction.

Hey, that's sort of what happened with David Rhodes, author of the wonderful and popular (at least in Milwaukee) Driftless. We were told he wouldn't be touring for the hardcover (it seemed like a shot because he lives in Wisconsin), but he's appearing at Boswell Book Company for the paperback, on Sunday, October 11th, at 2 PM. Go figure. I'm thrilled.

I brought some startup books of the entrepreneurial sort, some basic management stuff, some sales, some sustainability titles, and some business narratives. I played, “How many books have I read on the table” with Marc, the Associated Bank guy who led me to this gig. I read 12; he read more. I’ve got about 60 titles altogether, in ones, twos and threes. There’s no speaker. My rule of thumb is “No speaker, no offsite,” but I broke the rule almost immediately.

So far, the two titles most talked about are Good To Great and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. These are titles that appeal to companies and nonprofits alike. Everybody’s got a crappy coworker, I guess. Oh, and several folks have commented on Jeffrey Gitomer’s The Little Red Book of Selling. I wasn’t quite sure how far an emerging business would be, which is why I brought three copies of How to Write a Business Plan. I looked at a number of books on the subject when I was starting my business and I thought this was the best. (I sold one to a fledgling construction company owner, with just this endorsement).

So anyway, I think I’m supposed to be here all day. I got up at 4 this morning. I’m not sure I’ll make it.

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In the end, I sold five books, two of which I threw in the kit at the last minute. I talked to some nice folks, several of whom were trying to sell me their services. And I finally got to go in the new Manpower Headquarters. They have a very neat display case with historical artifacts from the company.

I made it to about 2 PM.

A Stray Bookseller Comment Leads Us to Redo the Business and Finance Cases

We knew we wanted our foreign language books closer to travel. This led to flipping about four cases. Then Sarah realized the general business books didn't progress naturally from case to case. Then I noticed that the subsections in business didn't work well together. I wanted retirement and real estate books (well, while we still have the section) with personal finance, and the general business books near leadership and corporate stories.

I re-subdivided the sections back at Schwartz, with the help of Todd Sattersten at 800-CEO-READ. It was really to try to jump-start business sales at ou Brookfield store, only blocks from Milwaukee's largest Edge City. The problem was that it didn't matter in the end what we did; if there was no place to get food, the business types weren't going to stop and browse with us. When the Cousins sub shop closed nearby, our last hope was gone.

When we looked closer, we realized that a good number of books were shelved incorrectly. For some reason, a number of second-hand business titles had not been integrated. And the price points on some of the second-hand titles were too high; they were bought when the potential was there for these books to go head-to-head against new copies, but they had aged, the titles did not not become better known, and their prices needed to dropped accordingly. Regarding the errors, maybe some of my booksellers are afraid of the section, or are too overwhelmed with work. In any case, we needed to fix the problem.

So we have these sections, and we're selling a bit. We've done a bit of research to make sure we have some of the correct titles. The browsing is still spotty and I'd like to pull out some more subsections. We're currently pulling a section out on nonprofit resources, after realizing that so many folks we were talking to were in this field, and a bit inspired by Tracy Gary's recent visit, and the recent decision by my coworker Nancy to jump into the world of nonprofit consulting (a helpful response to all you folks who asked at Book Expo what Nancy was doing now).

But in the end, it may be that what we really need is a Cousins, or a Cousins equivalent nearby.

I also had an interesting comment from a customer who came in to thank us for reopening the bookstore, and then proceeded to tell me why he wouldn't buy a business book from me (he wound up buying nothing and leaving, content that his "go get 'em" inspirational comments were what we needed to keep the store going.) And if the business isn't there because that's the prevailing attitude, the section breadth will follow.