The Independent Bookstore
A couple weekends ago, I visited San Luis Obispo, a small college town in the Central Coast of California. They have a quaint little downtown area. One of the highlights the city boasts is an alleyway between two buildings that's about fifty feet long, and on both sides, eight feet high, the walls are completely covered in people's chewing gum. (Translation: they turned one annoying type of litter into a tourist attraction...an interesting concept.)
During my visit, I went into a very small independent bookstore. It was no larger than 500 square feet, and the shelves were not the high, so the selection was extremely limited. But most of the major sections were there: fiction, philosophy, history, politics, social science, and so on.
And what amazed me was how generalized the selection of books was for being such a small store. If you went to a larger bookstore and took a cross section of the most popular titles from every genre, you'd end up with what this guy had in stock.
That was the gist of the selection: the most popular of the most popular. The problem with this particular shop is that if you leave and walk one block down the street, you arrive at a Barnes & Noble. In that case, acting like a tiny, tiny version of Barnes & Noble doesn't make any sense at all. People who want to browse "everything" will go where the selection is more complete.
It's nice and PC to stock a little of everything, but who does that appeal to? If I owned a small shop and was going to run a small bookstore, I would draw a line in the sand. Pick a niche, and serve that particular niche as well as you possibly can.
If you're going to stock fiction, pick one particular genre, like, for example, horror, and focus on that. You could even set up an area of your store with chairs and a TV showing Stephen King movies. Offer free popcorn. (Popcorn is cheap.)
Cal Poly State University (the local college) has a pretty good business school. Why not become the go-to place for students to come and browse new ideas about business and tech?
If you've got a political bent and you're conservative, why not stock the shelves with Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly?
Sure, these bookstores wouldn't appeal to everyone (and I don't think that last idea would fly in Southern Californa), but the handful of people that did like them would be great customers. Serve them right, and they'd become regulars, and they'd tell any friends that shared that interest.
During my visit, I went into a very small independent bookstore. It was no larger than 500 square feet, and the shelves were not the high, so the selection was extremely limited. But most of the major sections were there: fiction, philosophy, history, politics, social science, and so on.
And what amazed me was how generalized the selection of books was for being such a small store. If you went to a larger bookstore and took a cross section of the most popular titles from every genre, you'd end up with what this guy had in stock.
That was the gist of the selection: the most popular of the most popular. The problem with this particular shop is that if you leave and walk one block down the street, you arrive at a Barnes & Noble. In that case, acting like a tiny, tiny version of Barnes & Noble doesn't make any sense at all. People who want to browse "everything" will go where the selection is more complete.
It's nice and PC to stock a little of everything, but who does that appeal to? If I owned a small shop and was going to run a small bookstore, I would draw a line in the sand. Pick a niche, and serve that particular niche as well as you possibly can.
If you're going to stock fiction, pick one particular genre, like, for example, horror, and focus on that. You could even set up an area of your store with chairs and a TV showing Stephen King movies. Offer free popcorn. (Popcorn is cheap.)
Cal Poly State University (the local college) has a pretty good business school. Why not become the go-to place for students to come and browse new ideas about business and tech?
If you've got a political bent and you're conservative, why not stock the shelves with Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly?
Sure, these bookstores wouldn't appeal to everyone (and I don't think that last idea would fly in Southern Californa), but the handful of people that did like them would be great customers. Serve them right, and they'd become regulars, and they'd tell any friends that shared that interest.