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This issue we're going to break from the norm to profile the Siegels whose study about the used bookselling market has recently been released. A look at the study's findings is in this issue, but I'm going to introduce you to this wonderful pair of people who have had a tremendous impact on our industry during the past ten years.
I met Susan and David one Sunday afternoon right after Dan and I opened our first shop. We were closed on Sundays but we'd taken some time to clean the store and stock shelves. Since we were there, we opened the door to the personable pair who knocked, and they quickly introduced themselves and explained that they, too, had embarked on a new enterprise. They were going to create a guide to New England bookstores.
One guide led to another and today, the Siegel's Bookhunter Press inventory contains guides to various regions of the U.S. and all of Canada. Many are in repeat printings and updates can be found on their Web site.
In a telephone interview, Susan explained that David was a retired school superintendent from Westchester Co. in New York and had collected books about the golden age of radio among other things. The couple happily spent weekends browsing shops for books, David shopping while Susan read or studied facts and statistics that contributed to her own successful business marketing and promotions for real estate developers. When David retired the couple planned a trip to England and armed themselves with a copy of Dris's guide to English bookshops.
"A light bulb went off," Susan explains. "Why don't we try this?"
Up until then, when the couple traveled from one bookshop in the U.S. to the next, they relied on small state guide booklets or word of mouth.
"We had no way of knowing where this would lead us," Susan said. Before they began, the couple asked the advice of several bookstore owners that they knew and received little encouragement, but they proceeded nonetheless, and the New England Guide was an instant success. "We agonized over how many copies to print and we sold out in six months and we had to decide how many to reprint and that second printing sold out."
The New England Guide was the easiest to compile because most shops were within a day's drive for the couple. The next projects were broken into six-week travel forays to find the shops and report on them and one or two new guides were produced each year. There are seven now, six for the different regions of the U.S. and one dedicated to Canada. Some of the books are reprinted and supplements had been provided to keep each guide up to date. Bookhunterpress.com's Web site now manages the updates.
The success of the guide is attributed to what Susan describes as a "marriage of skills." She loves research; David loves books and bookstores. Since her schedule was flexible, she says, "It was a good challenge for me." Anyone who has met Susan more than once also knows that her memory is another important attribute that contributed to her success. I've known her for more than 10 years and only see her now and again, with very long lapses in between. Yet, despite the thousands of people in the industry that she has met, she remembers everything about our shop, our history and about us personally. She has what can be termed, "a mind like a steel trap." I say this in the most reverential way, we should all be so blessed.
A great resource Susan depended upon was Dr. Marc Wienstein whose statistical background proved a great help. She also attributes the help she received from a small upstate New York publisher. After reading about this woman's business in the New York Times, Susan telephoned the publisher and explained what she planned to do. "She was so helpful to me," Susan said. The publisher provided valuable advice about printing, selecting paper and organizing the guides. It was the same kind of collegiality Susan always found within the used book industry, a trait she valued.
Their first study compiled in 1999 grew out of the statistics Susan kept while compiling the guides. "I decided to pull the statistics together," she said. Up until then the industry relied on statistics compiled by sources that did not understand the industry or by selling venues that had a commercial stake in the numbers. Both were unreliable. Susan decided to give it a try by sending out questionnaires to booksellers, requesting that they send their information anonymously. "Some people were very helpful and some just wouldn't participate." Susan persisted because she knew the information was of value to dealers and to the public.
She kept the questionnaires to a length that did not impose too greatly on the dealers' time and so, she laments, some information she would have loved to have included had to be shelved.
Of the responses that surprised her, the fact that the number of open bookshops is increasing was the most significant. Most people within the industry made the assumption that the loss of shops was directly due to the Internet, working from home with a lower overhead being a tremendous enticement. But when the data came in, Susan learned that most of the closings were naturally occurring, through death or retirement. The Internet, she believes, has spurred greater interest in bookselling, and more people are seeing the value of an open shop.
"Eighty percent of the total sales of books came from brick and mortar stores," she explains, adding that most shops aggressively pursued the Internet sales as a component to their shop.
Another surprise came from the sizes of inventory held by online dealers. Three-quarters of them host inventories under 10,000 volumes.
Her experience of having met with so many bookstore owners helped her understand some of the data sent through the survey. Inexperience contributed to the demise of some bookshops, owners having a glamorous idea of what owning a bookstore means and not being capable of managing a business that needs to make a profit. Of the newcomers to the bookshop fold, those owners that network within the community (contacting lawyers for house call referrals, etc.) were the most successful. "They also need the capital to buy," Susan said and so these successful owners are also careful managers of their businesses.
The final message she wanted to convey through her study was that no one could generalize when it came to explaining the used-book industry. It's a mixed bag of participants, whether you are a seller or collector. It's important to remember, she added, "That just because something happens in your community doesn't mean it's nationwide."
If you love to travel to find books, if you have a bookshop you want listed, contact Susan and David at Bookhunterpress.com.
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