Stupid Barnes and Noble

[MsFish]

The Barnes and Noble by my house is OUT of Elantris.  I was not amused.  I had to order in a copy for my best friend for Christmas.  Grrr.

[stacer]

No good. We haven't heard sales figures from Ookla for a while. I'm wondering what they've been lately.

[MsFish]

I mean, they had copies a couple weeks ago and now they don't, so that's good.  But annoying, very annoying.  

I was also going to get my dad a copy of Runelords and they were out of that too.  Grr.

[Spriggan]

Should have gotten it at Media Play, they just got another 10 copies in last week.

[stacer]

B&N can be very frustrating on the returns thing. When I worked there, I tried to recommend Diana Wynne Jones to parents/teens, and I could never find the Dalemark Quartet on the shelves, because B&N had returned them, even though they were selling (and I could sell them even if they weren't selling themselves).

[MsFish]

Should have gotten it at Media Play, they just got another 10 copies in last week.

Dang it.  Next time I will.  I usually don't shop there for book, though.  



Do you really think they returned them?  Maybe they're just out.  

[stacer]

Oh, I hope they're just out, but you never know. B&N has a pretty short return policy, which is why I was wondering about sales figures.

[MsFish]

That's lame.  Maybe if people keep ordering it, it'll end up back on the shelves.  

But I work in retail, and I have to say, if B&N is anything like Jo-Ann, special orders don't affect anything.

[Chimera]

Does anybody know how your book gets in Wal-Mart?

I would think that you could sell a lot of books there. I don't know. But that's the reason I picked up Leven Thumps--I'd heard about it and when I saw the beautiful cover as I was waiting in line next to the book section I started drooling and decided I had to buy it. It was discounted, too, of course. I was in line so I couldn't go look, but I didn't see Elantris on the outer shelves. Leven Thumps is from Shadow Mountain, which is an LDS press (possibly and imprint of Deseret? I'm not sure).

As a side note, I think it's funny that the Wal-Mart in Orem has all sorts of LDS books. The whole section I saw was devoted to that (which is why there could still be an Elantris hiding in the section I couldn't see--a mainstream section). But the fact that they have special interest books makes me wonder who decides which books are stocked in a Wal-Mart. Because obviously they aren't carrying The Work and the Glory at the Wal-Mart in my hometown in Southern California. Does Wal-Mart buy from book suppliers the same way B&N or Amazon or Media Play does? Stacer? Anyone?

[stacer]

1--Shadow Mountain is a national secular imprint of Deseret Book. Orson Scott Card often publishes through them.

2--Walmart is a very hard place to get into for books. It's the "mass market" segment, and they don't want to take books unless they know it's a broad sell, nationwide.

The Walmart in Orem has a lot more books than most Walmarts I've seen, and I imagine the LDS content is because they have regional buyers--they might place more LDS content in places that they know LDS people will buy it--across a broad region. Perhaps LDS people are also more likely to look for discount books?

At any rate, the Walmart generally tends to be homogeneous across the country, so maybe that's a regional sales thing, specific to that store, controlled locally? I don't know. But it is definitely hard to get into the mass market retail stores for books, because there's so little shelf space. Very few SF/F books make it there--I usually only see Stephen King, a whole bunch of romance, and the latest John Grisham/John Le Carre/etc.

[MsFish]

Where did I hear this?  I can't remember for the life of me where this came from, so it may or may not be true.  

I remember hearing that Wal-Mart does their shipping direct vendor.  This means that instead of going to some massive Wal-Mart warehouse (that would have to be one big warehouse) like Jo-Ann does, the merchandise gets sent from the vendor to the stores directly.  This means that Wal-Mart in Orem could potentially get things that other Wal-Marts don't.  Most stores I think do their ordering the same way, but they could potentially sell things that other Wal-Marts don't sell (like LDS books).

This is different than Jo-Ann, where we only sell what everybody else sells, because it all comes from the same two warehouses.  So at Jo-Ann in Orem we sell nothing LDS (even though LDS craft stuff would sell like crazy), but lots of things with cocktail drinks on them and things that never, never sell.  

Besides that, where you'd really want to be is in airport bookstores.  You'd sell more books there than at Wal-Mart.

[Spriggan]

Nope, Wal-Mart has their own Warehouses and you're right they're freaking huge.  History Channel showed them a month or two ago, all computer automated.

[MsFish]

Okay.  Maybe it's that they do *some* of their ordering direct vendor.  

That must be a gigantic warehouse.  Jeez.  

[Eric James Stone]

I tried to buy a copy a couple of weeks ago at the Barnes & Noble in orem, and they said they kept selling out of it.

[stacer]

Well, then, that's good news.