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The Book of The Man
Lesson #3: The Bookstore is a Machine
Like a watch. That's the kind of machine a bookstore is. A shiny, beautiful, ticking watch.
Watches are full of tiny little cogs and wheels and springs. Those are you. You, bookstore employee, are a cog, a wheel, a spring. What do we know about these little parts of a watch?
Ok, I guess they're important. But what else are they?
Small, yes. Very true. But what else?
They're hidden! No one sees the cogs and wheels and springs. No one! No, all they see is the nice, perfect hands, ticking away past the beautiful numbers.
Only the watchmaker may see the springs. Him and the guy that replaces the battery. But no one else. Unless...
Unless the watch is dropped and broken and shattered all over the ground where the shards of glass and little bits of cog and wheel are scattered everywhere to be stepped on and cut someone's foot and make it bleed and get infected and make the foot get amputated so they have to get a fake wooden one and walk with a cane and never be normal again.
The parts of the watch (that's you: the little, tiny parts) must never be seen, except by the watchmaker. Thus! the customers shall never see you working. You must hide your work, squirrel it away beneath counters and behind doors. Never shall a customer know that we need notes to keep things straight, they shall never see the machines and notebooks, or hear of the special secret systems that churn in the watchmaker's den. Never!
They shall only hear the ticking* and the see pretty numbers**.
That is all.
*The beep of the barcode scanner.
**On the credit cards and bills they give to us.
Sometimes you get bored. Sometimes you get tired. When you get both, shit like this happens...
The Modern Victorian Erotica series, written by Charles Dickers
- Great Expectations in Bed
- Our Mutual Girlfriend
- A Tale of Two Naked Bodies
- A XXXmas Carol
- Freak House
- David Cop-a-Feel
- Hard Times
The Book of The Man
Lesson #2: Sales Technique
Stores are scary places, and customers are both weak and stupid. By turning their weakness into your strength and their stupidity into your superiority, the "scary" place will soon become a "rich-as-shit temple of the gods". This list, though incomplete, includes many patented, sure-fire sales techniques.
1. The customer should never be alone. Anything that's scary is 8 times scarier when you're by yourself. Be as close to each customer as possible at all times. From the moment they walk in to the moment they're handing you their credit card/check/cash/bank account number, you need to be by their side, comforting and reassuring them.
2. Only sell books touted by the publisher. There are, after all, a lot of books out there. And who knows those books better than the people that are publishing them? Publishers have to have manuscripts read, email copies to the printers, hire someone to do the proofreading, and lots of other things. Thus, they are very familiar with every book they print. And publishers, as a service industry, have no reason to steer you wrong. It's not like people would pay them money for shitty books, right? So publishers will always make sure you know which of their books are the best (a.k.a. least shitty) and you can pass that expertise and quality onto your customers, who are incapable of knowing what's good and bad without your vital assistance.
3. Never - never - allow customers to aimlessly browse sections of backlist titles. Display tables exist for a reason: to display the books people should buy. Anyone who is allowed to meander away from the tables is in danger of becoming lost amongst the riffraff of backlist titles your store carries to fill out the shelves. Letting a customer into the section shelves is like letting a puppy loose in a mindfield: they'll sniff a lot of things and find exciting smells, but will always get blown up in the end. Because customers have an inate lack of judgment (see #2), they will never be able to suss out a good read on their own. Proust? Evanovich? Chabon? Backlist shelves are filled with lots of names and pretty pictures that can (and will) easily overwhelm your ignorant customers (being all of them). If you're appropriately following #1, lead your customer back to the display tables and start following #2.
As you can see, The Man's patented sales technique work in unison to create a comforting atmosphere without a lot of difficult analyzing or leaving things to chance. Presumably, you got into book selling for one reason: tons of profit. Only by understanding your customers like The Man does can you achieve your wildest money-related dreams. Your customers are your customers, and your the salesman, dammit, so they have to listen to you.
*Image courtesy despair.com
