About two years ago I expanded the children’s book section
in my bookshop from seven bookcases to ten which is about 10% of the overall
bookshop of about 100 bookcases, last year children’s books accounted for 6% of
book sales in the shop in money.
This may sound like some sort of accountant’s gibberish to
most people but the town centre bookshops I have opened over the years (Welwyn
bookshop in Welwyn Garden City, Hitchin Bookshop in Hitchin and now Michaels
bookshop in Ramsgate) have always been weighted towards children’s books.
By this I mean more space in the bookshop than an accountant
would advise based on the value of children’s books.
Back in the 1980s when independent bookshops in the UK
started to close, partly because of the ending of The Net Book Agreement and
partly because of the expansion of retail book chains in the UK, I had a bit of
a rethink about children’s books.
For the most part now you have three types of children’s
book sections in bookshops. You have the ones in the big chain bookshops
(mainly Waterstones) these are very good, but the snag is that the children who
would most benefit from them can’t usually afford the books. You have the ones
where it is fairly obvious that the price and marketing for a cheap present are
at the forefront, these are not so good. You have the ones in the better
secondhand bookshops which are collectable children’s books and one again
children can’t afford the books.
What I set out to do was by a mixture of sourcing
secondhand, from bankruptcies and remainder lists to have a fairly good
children’s book section where the children and in the case of the less well off
their parents could afford to buy the books in the children’s book section.
A factor in this meant that the children’s books would have
to be cheaper, I aim for an average price of about £1, but certainly I think
the books in the children’s book section are averagely less than half the price
of the books in the rest of the bookshop.
Of course this means that in terms of the number of books
sold from the bookcases in the children’s book section of my bookshop, it is
now doing as well as the rest of the bookshop.
This is a first for any of the bookshops that I have been
involved with and I think a considerable achievement, the best we ever managed
in the past was Stevenage Bookshop before it closed in the early 1990s where
the children’s section took up about 10% of the bookshop and generated about 3%
of the sales.
Many thanks to my younger customers and their parents for the support during last year. The pictures are of the ten bookcases in the children’s section the photos were taken today and the sections are in a bit of a mess as it’s a school holiday this week.
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.