Bookselling & the Art of the Staff Pick

10:59 AM, 6 September 2018

Bookselling is all about selling books to their ideal readers. Promotion takes many forms, in-store and through media, through catalogues and publishers’ posters and many other items. But perhaps the most powerful form of promotion, for all booksellers, is personal recommendation.

The very act of stocking a book is often akin to a personal recommendation from a bookshop to you, but another form of this, mentioned during the ‘Curating your stock and nourishing your Community through books’ breakout session during the Booksellers NZ conference recently, was staff recommendations. The Read has thoughts to share from Juliet Blyth, Manager of VicBooks, Thomas Koed of VOLUME, Mary Wadsworth from Dorothy Butler Children’s Bookshop, and Marcus Greville from Unity Books in Wellington.

‘An integral way of expressing the personality of the store’
Unity Books Wellington has always had staff picks, throughout its entire 50 year history. Greville says, ‘It’s an integral way of expressing the personality of the store. It’s also exciting for staff members to be able to get in and sell books they’ve loved their whole lives…’

Likewise, VOLUME – a fraction of the size, and run by Stella Chrysostomou and Thomas Koed – began as they mean to go on with personal recommendations. Koed says, ‘Each week we include a personal review from each of us in our newsletter [of the books we’ve been reading], we add these reviews to our website and often post them on Facebook. We overlay our virtual and physical approaches with hand-written shelf talkers.’

VicBooks has always done staff picks, but want to do more, and Blyth says, ‘we started doing it as much for backlist as for new books, it’s such a great way to bring some of your older but no less important books to the fore.’ At Dorothy Butler Children’s Bookshop, Helen Wadsworth brought the idea back from the Winter Institute, where she saw how effective they were.

Booksellers read and recommend
At VicBooks, there is a senior bookseller responsible for haranguing them (in a nice way) to write them. ‘With ARCs we do try and distribute them around readers who we know love a particular genre, sometimes this extends to lending them to special customers as well.’ Greville notes that at Unity Books, ‘maintaining the picks is a group effort – the books are always changing, sometimes leading to a competition for space on the staff picks wall.’

At Dorothy Butler, like at VOLUME, they do staff picks in two ways. Wadsworth explains,

‘We have a website ‘staff picks’ category where any staff member can shift a book into that category and write a paragraph or two about it. In the shop, we have 1-2 sentence reviews on a card placed where the book is displayed.’

All staff at Dorothy Butler are encouraged to write a card review for any book they’ve read and liked. ‘We regularly have comments from customers about how they like having those recommendations.’

The length of staff picks varies widely. At Unity, sometimes it is one word with loud punctuation, sometimes a full shelf-talker card – but they always have the staff member’s initials.

Displaying and promoting staff picks
Do you need to build a wall? No, Trump, you do not. You can put staff picks wherever you wish.

Due to its size, VOLUME is a tightly curated bookshop, and Koed says, ‘Our customers expect every book we stock to have been ‘picked’ by us as deserving of their attention.’ But alongside personal recommendations of books they have been reading as mentioned earlier, they also have themed book lists. Koed says, ‘these have a physical display as well as reviews online, and our Book of the Week is displayed on a plinth in our window and supported online with reviews, links and amusements.’ They find these online and physical displays good ways to start conversations with customers and to increase sales.

The capacious Unity Books does have a pillar of staff picks. ‘We use two sides of a large pillar next to our busiest counter, as well as a children’s staff picks bay we recently made space for next to our kid’s section: both areas chosen because they’re highly visible in a prominent area.’ This is where they send customers looking for ‘something new’. They also use images of the section in their social media, as they change so frequently.

At VicBooks, they put them at their front counter, but don’t have quite enough space to give them their own segment. Blyth went to the Winter Institute in Asheville a few years ago and visited independent bookshop Malaprops. ‘When I went to Malaprops… each staff member has a shelf of staff picks so customers could check in with that staff member and what they were reading each time they came in.’

Each of the stores use their staff picks for promotions on Facebook and/or Instagram:  another store The Read has observed doing this well is Marsden Books.

Happy readers
When Sarah Forster from The Read worked at Whitcoulls Wellington Airport in 2003/4, she wrote a staff recommendation for Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. A month or two later, a man came up to her – the review was named ‘Sarah’ and she had a name tag on – and took her to the staff recommendations row and said ‘are you the Sarah that wrote this?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Thank you so much! I picked it up because of your review, and it was just wonderful. It changed my life!’

Greville from Unity says, ‘We’ve had wonderful feedback from customers, from cards and letters to the occasional phone call. There are several customers who seek out particular staff members’ recommendations as they’ve proven very hand in glove taste-wise. And then there’s a customer who always bases his Christmas presents for his wife on the reading tastes on a particular bookseller.’

At Dorothy Butler, one of their staff members introduced a customer to a now-favourite author. ‘Bernice started a Kate di Camillo craze for one customer who had read her glowing review of The Tale of Despereaux, bought it and then kept coming back for more by the same author.’

So what have you got to lose? Fashion yourselves a shelf-talker – Canva is great for quick design ideas – and start recommending books. You may change somebody’s life.

By Sarah Forster