I Don’t Understand How Bookstores Work

This past weekend (the last Saturday of April) was Indie Bookstore Day. My usual indie bookstore was actually closed, however, their day dedicated to working the Texas Teen Book Festival. They moved their celebrations, instead, to Sunday. So, instead, I took to two stores that I had never been to before. One was newly opened, and the other, while also new, was simply out of my usual stomping grounds. It is on the way back and forth from one of the studios where I do work, however, so…I might be stopping in more often. I also got the necessary information to join their local author’s shelf.
Overall a fun day where I also came home with garlic infused olive and oil and some local honey off of Main Street Grapevine, TX.
What I also came away with, however, I the realization I have no idea how I would ever run a bookshop successfully when it comes to deciding on stock.
In my perfect, ideal world, I’d run a science fiction and fantasy shop, going deep instead of broad. Exploring all the facets and bringing in the weird stuff as best I can. I know these genre specific shops exist, but the fact that there aren’t more suggests there must be some deeply difficult elements to keep them going. At the same time, I’ve been to a number of feminist bookstores, queer bookstores, and black bookstores that have been kicking around for literal decades. So who am I to say that specialized bookstores don’t have a place? I literally don’t know. This is not my area of expertise. I genuinely don’t understand how business works.
But as I’m browsing these bookstores and seeing what they have the thought that prevails is “my god, how on Earth do these people make these stocking decisions?” What metrics are they using? Are they successful? Are they making their money back? I couldn’t possibly begin to understand.
The first bookstore I visited, their Christian section was the largest among all of them, and they other stock was too small to divide between fiction genres. The large Christian section isn’t something I’m surprised to find in the middle of the Bible belt, particularly in this particular part of town. I think it says a lot about this owner and the kind of clientele that they certainly want to attract, even if that doesn’t 1:1 match what stock ends up moving.
The second bookstore was a little bit bigger, right on Main Street, and had more standard divisions in the way it separated books with equal attention paid to the various fiction and non-fiction genres. What I did notice, however, in the SF/F section was how much shelf-space they still had to dedicate to “SF/F standards.” Things like Dune and ACOTAR and the Cosmere books. And it made me wonder if that’s a necessity to be able to compete with larger stores, even though these are technically back catalog items.
Then, of course, creates the spiral that I found myself in. Could a small bookstore survive on new releases alone? If so, which ones do they pick? If they need back catalog, how do you pick those?
I can sit here and complain about how about marketing and bad genre labels and reader habits and how they affect me as a writer. But balancing all that when you have a whole store of books to manage? How do you make purchasing decisions in this kind of wishy washy environment? I think I would roll over and die, honestly, it seems so overwhelming.
But they do it.
And for that we should really be focusing our financial and emotional support on the little guys.