Saturday, September 01, 2007

26 stores and counting


I am feeling a lot better today, as no doubt, everyone will be relieved to hear, not least of all my long suffering partner Coran. He has been very good these past few weeks, and an absolute tower of strength and I do not give him the acknowledgement that he deserves. I will say it now though, I could not have done any of this without his love and support, and my life is so much richer for the fact that he is in it.

I had a look at the Gardners website yesterday then and tapped in my ISBN and found that they had 38 copies in stock. Waterstones in Dorchester then ordered 2 copies and the figure dropped down to 36. Then this morning I noticed that the figure was down again to 34. Where have those 2 little copies gone to? Have they gone to my local independent, or perhaps to Waterstones in Cheltenham, who emailed me today to say that they had received the information that I sent? No doubt all will be revealed in due course.

I do wish that when book stores placed orders they would let me know so that I could keep an up to date inventory of who has copies, as it erally would be very useful to know this. It would also help them as I would be able to target media approaches to those areas where the books are particularly well represented and doing well. I did try to explain this to the Manager of one of the branches I spoke to, but he insisted that I did not need to know. I do find this very strange indeed, as you would have thought they would welcome the chance to work with someone like myself who wants to target their approach accordingly. It seems not though.

Still, if Gardners have ordered 115 copies to date, and I have 34 now in stock, then that means that they have sold 81 copies so far - not bad for slightly less than 3 weeks. And these do not include copies sold early on in the month before the sor announcement was made, the figure for which I happen to know was another 11 copies. Then there are the library copies sold to Bertrams, and this is another moot point also, that libraries do not bother to let me know when they have ordered copies. Perhaps I will log on to the Public Lending Rights website and see if they have any information, as short of becoming a member of every public library in the UK, I will not know who has them and where the orders have come from !

So far then, there are 26 book stores that I definately know of who have copies, these are all listed on my new and improved website, but for those of you who are too lazy to click your mouse, I will list them here as well:

Borders - Whiteleys (Bayswater), Fleet Street (London), Lakeside, Wimbledon, Kingston-upon-Thames, Newbury, Uxbridge.

Waterstones - Aviemore, Barnstaple, Barnet, Belfast, Blackpool, Bluewater, Brentwood, Brighton, Chesham, Covent Garden, Coventry (Lower Precinct), Derby, Dorchester, Dorking, Epsom, Godalming, Kingston-upon-Thames (Bentalls Centre), Redhill, Staines.

Lets hope that these copies then start to sell, as the relevant Head Offices do keep on eye on such happenings and once this starts to happen, then the books do stand a very good chance of being shipped out to all stores countrywide. Now that would be worth writing about and may even get me into the Bookseller !

No comments: