The difficulties of being a bookseller

A typical bookshop stocks 70,000 titles (out of almost a couple of million currently in print). Many of them are steady backlist sellers that any customer would expect to find, such as Shakespeare plays, Jane Austen novels and Wordsworth poems. In order to stock new titles a bookseller has to drop old ones. Making decisions like that whilst dealing with customer questions and operating till points and unpacking stock parcels is not easy. How many new titles should the shop take on when there are over 100,000 new books published each year? In order to be able to keep in stock the range of backlist titles that customers expect the choice of new titles is limited to as little as 5,000. So 95% of new books will not be stocked and the bookseller has to reject new titles presented to them every day.

However, it’s not quite the case that 95% of new books are turned down: many books are not intended for sale in high street shops in the first place and the bookshops are never told about them. Specialist text books, for instance, are sold to libraries and through other channels. Some publishers don’t have reps to show the books to the shops. Some of the ‘new’ books are, in fact, new editions of older books and don’t need to be re-sold into the trade.