What else is important to your business?
We do a lot of school book fairs. [The James Patterson grant of $7,500] is going toward our book-fair work. We’re doing one at Bailey Middle School in Kingston, and are bringing in from $20,000 to $30,000 worth of inventory. We work with the school librarian, and 20 percent of all sales go back to the school. It helps you reach out to a population that wouldn’t necessarily come to Woodstock.
In the past, the store did one a year. Typically it was done by Scholastic and run by a parent. The quality of books was not that great, but now we bring really great books into the school, and the grant will help us buy books. This fall we did seven book fairs. It’s a big investment in time and money, but very good for us.
Running a bookstore is very small-margin business, since you’re dealing with many big vendors all the time and a revolving door of payments and credits. When we’re done with the season, we’ll fold some of our book-fair inventory into our children’s section inventory, and the others we return to the publisher.
What has been the biggest challenge for you since you opened the store?
First thing is we’re open seven days a week. There are just two days a year we’re closed. I have three kids, and that kind of schedule took some getting used to. We have two other full-time employees, one of whom is Gaela Pearson, who’s been with the store since 1980. She’s the children’s books buyer and runs that part of the business. I couldn’t have done it without her. She has a deep knowledge of that business. The other person [who doesn’t want his name printed] has been here for two years and previously worked in a New York City bookstore. We also have two part-time people and some teenagers helping us out.
I have the core part of my day [at the store] during school, and I enjoy the flexibility of having my own business. I’m generally not the person behind the register. I’m doing the accounting, bill-paying and [otherwise running the business].
What’s the size of your inventory, and who is your core audience?
Our store is about 1,000 square feet. I don’t know how many titles we have. The three of us do the buying based on our tastes. We have an interesting audience, being in Woodstock. We’re a general-interest bookstore with a little bit of everything, although music books and fiction are our main areas. We’re also a community for New York City weekenders and people visiting Woodstock from all over the world.
There are so many wildly different writers in the Hudson Valley, which is a great help. Woodstock is a community of working artists. People are interested in reading and arts and ideas, and enjoy the community a bookstore provides. Our location is definitely an important ingredient.
How else do you compete – specifically, with the online stores and e-books?
We have to create business any way we can. We only make 20 percent from selling books at the store. We know the store won’t make what it did in 1995, but we’re making it and increasing our sales as I learn the business and do things more efficiently. As an independent bookstore, we have a partnership with the American Booksellers’ Association [ABA] through which we sell Kobo readers. We sell e-books from our website, which ABA helps us maintain. We make a few pennies off each e-book. People still want books. We’re about physical books and the community related to those books.
So physical books won’t ever be completely replaced by e-books?
People are reading more than ever, and they love their physical books. For some people, being on the computer all day is not the same feeling as holding a book in your hand. Kids are also buying books from us. Children’s books are works of art, which are a perfect marriage between words and pictures. It’s just not the same as a digital book…Green Eggs and Ham digitally is not the same thing as touching the pages.
People really like to touch things. They also like having the physical space for discoverability, the ability to browse that a bookstore gives them. If you have the time to come in and wander around, you’ll see things you didn’t intend to. People really appreciate us for that, and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on our curation.
What’s your strategy in purchasing your inventory? Can you predict accurately what will sell?
It’s a guessing game to know which new book will sell. We have a fairly sophisticated inventory and data analysis overlay that tells us what sells. We like to promote literary fiction, which is always at the front of the store; also books on local history and maps, which people who are visiting want. The new book, History of the Hudson Valley from Wilderness to the Civil War by Vernon Benjamin, I’ll always have on the front shelf. Because we have so many musicians in the area, we have tons of music books. We always feature This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band and books about the Woodstock Festival and Bob Dylan.
I also really love history. A really cool history book that just came out is Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman. I also love graphic novels and comics, so we have a good selection of that (and more than we probably should). It’s a combination of what people respond to and what you can be enthusiastic about. Hand-selling is really important: having that conversation with a customer and being able to guide them to the right books.
The Golden Notebook, Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Friday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Sunday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m., 29 Tinker Street, Woodstock; (845) 679-8000, www.goldennotebook.com.
