Hello,

As regular visitors may have noticed, we’ve been absent for a few months.  This hasn’t been a conscious decision but rather simply that pressure of work and the associated stress have meant that keeping the blog up-to-date has fallen down the list of priorities.  We have been tweeting though and you can follow us at @EdinBookshop – in some ways, Twitter with its 140 character limit has been easier to keep up with and it has a more immediate effect in terms of reaction and interaction.  But of course 140 characters isn’t enough to convey much beyond the basics so I’ve given myself a talking to and reminded myself that I need to stop neglecting this blog.

There have been some changes round here.  Sadly, Becky has left us for fabulous pastures new and we can’t wait to see what she goes on to achieve – wonderful things I have no doubt.  Andrew’s departed too which is quite positive really as it means that I’m back in the bookshop full-time and that’s good.  I’ve come to the conclusion that Malcolm and I are the best people to run our shop as we know our market and our customers best and also because no-one else is ever going to show the same levels of loyalty and attention to detail and nor is it reasonable to expect them to.

We do however still have our fantastic children’s specialist, Cat and brilliant part-time bookseller Lila and we’re settling down into a routine which means that I get to spend lots of time in the shop whilst also having some time in the office to keep up to date with all the paperwork and to plan things like marketing and events etc – and to maintain the blog.

So, how are things at the bookshop?  Well, the decision to merge the two shops was the right one; not only are our costs lower – massively so given the City of Edinburgh Council’s recent business rates revaluations which saw our combined bill rise by something in the region of 80% – but also it’s easier to cross-sell between the two sectors of children’s books and ‘grown-up books’ whereas before I think a lot of people went to one shop or the other.  We still need to get the word out there though about what we do as we still get people saying that they didn’t know we were here…  that’s one of my priorities for the next few months.

However, we’re not out of the woods yet.  Many bookshops have found that the recession has caught up with us over the last few months and our own data shows that average transaction values are down from a year ago. Volume is up though in the last couple of months which is encouraging as it means that we have more customers spending money.  As people are obviously reducing their spending (and don’t forget that up here, we also have the uncertainty arising from the SNP’s performance in the recent Scottish Parliament elections), our goal is to increase our customer base so that we keep increasing the volume of books sold.  That should also be beneficial when the economy improves… because it will at some point: economies have always been cyclical and this will be no different in that respect.

In the meantime though, do come along and buy a book now and then – if all the people on our mailing list just bought a single paperback from us every two months, it would make the difference between sleeping at night and lying there worrying about the future.

We’ve also started running some price promotions.  I’m not keen on discounting – the margins that independent bookshops get from publishers isn’t as generous as that given to say, supermarkets and therefore we don’t have the scope to cut prices as far.  Also, bookshops do a lot of things that other sellers of books, whether supermarkets or online retailers, don’t do which make our operating costs higher.  When did Sainsbury’s last organise an author event; when did Amazon ever organise a school visit for a children’s author; where’s the customer ordering facility in Asda?

So, we’re discounting in very specific ways.  One of our promotions is to offer 2 books for £12 on a select range of titles that we really like.  Put another way, with most paperbacks having an RRP of £7.99, 2 for £12 equates to Buy One Get One Half Price which is a good deal in anyone’s book.  We rotate the dozen or so titles frequently and try to include some classics along with new releases.  Our current selection includes The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and the new Janet Evanovich, Sizzling Sixteen.  We’ve also experimented with signed copies on publication at a discount – for example, had a limited number of signed copies of the last Alexander McCall Smith novel at £11.99 against an RRP of £16.99.  We’ve been lucky in that publishers have been really supportive of this and it’s working well in terms of turning browsers into purchasers and seems to generating return business as well.  Hopefully, that will continue to happen…

We’ve also tweaked the shop layout a little, reducing stock in sections such as Mind, Body, Spirit (because let’s face it, if you’re going to buy a book about coping with divorce you’re probably going to get it online rather than visit your local bookshop – however discreet we are, this city is like a village!).  This has meant that we can expand some children’s sections such as our range of books for older-but-not-quite-YA readers and display the children’s gift books better.  And we have a shiny new table in the middle of the front part of the shop (there’s a pic up there at the top) which looks great and is proving very successful as retail space for new titles, craft books and some of the more unusual titles such as the beautiful Atlas of Remote Islands.

Events-wise, we’ve run a couple of book swap evenings which have been hugely successful.  We used a lovely space at Henderson’s, the Edinburgh vegetarian restaurant and a local institution, and around 60 customers, both regulars and newcomers, came along to enjoy wine and talk to other booklovers, all bringing with them a book that they wanted to tell other people about.  To give it a structure, we adopted Marie Philips and Scott Pack’s brilliant Firestation Book Swap idea of having a couple of special guests.  During the evening, in between people chatting to each other, we have two 20 minute-ish interludes where I (or someone else if I can persuade them) talk to our guests about their writing or their lives with books.  At the first book swap, Nicola Morgan told me about Write to be Published, the book-of-the-blog that’s just been released and Vivian French and the Scotsman’s Lee Randall talked to each other about their favourite books.  At last week’s event Sara Sheridan talked about the breadth of her writing career and most particularly about her historical novels and Ian Rankin talked about his forthcoming book, The Impossible Dead, and read the opening few pages – a world first for our little book swap as the manuscript had only been sent off to his editor the day before.  And of course, our guests talk about the books they brought with them and see if they can find takers for them.

Of course, however, much fun the book swaps are (and we’d like to make them a regular happening) they need have a commercial justification.  So far, they seem to have – we don’t do booksales at the events, although that may change, but we are seeing a good number of people coming back to the shop following the event to buy books by the authors who’ve been special guests, or to buy books that they heard people talking about.  We’re also seeing new customers coming along who are then making the long trek to south Edinburgh to visit the bookshop.  All going to plan so far…

I was going to talk about where we’re at on the publishing side of things but I’ve gone on for long enough so that can wait a few days.  But, to reassure the people who’ve been emailing to ask if we’re all right, things are ok and life is less stressful and worrying with every day that passes.

Bye for now, Vanessa

The Edinburgh Bookshop has been really busy over the past month (yay!), and we’ve also had a busy year in general; we really appreciate so many people supporting us through Fidra Books, the bookshop and our events.

For those who aren’t so local, we thought you might like to see a few snippets of 2010! (Warning: video has sound.)

Music from Free Music Archive: Rhythme Gitan by Latché Swing

You may have noticed we’ve been pretty lax on the blog front lately, but that’s partly because we are now addicted to Twitter! You can follow us on @edinbookshop, or @fidrabooks, or me, @bookshop_becky (or all, if you’re feeling so inclined….).

Some of you may remember that last year for our birthday we hosted Maisy the mouse and Winnie the Witch, and the year before that, Kipper the dog. Well, this year Elmer the patchwork elephant came to celebrate with us (and only one child asked why he was on two legs rather than four, phew).

Our birthday party is always a lovely day for a number of reasons: firstly because we get to make lots of children happy with balloons and goody bags, secondly because we get to see a lot of our favourite regulars in one day and lastly because we feel we can legitimately start our Christmas shopping season without being one of those irritating shops that forces it on everyone when the leaves are barely falling. (*Cough* ALL supermarkets, *cough*)

…Which segues nicely into our gorgeous Christmas window, an installation by the wonderfully-talented Rachel Hazell. We sent Rachel some booky/Christmasy/wintery words and she incorporated them into her design, like this:

It’s tricky to see from the photos, but each piece of paper is sewn into the installation with book-binding thread. We’ve called it “Snowflakes on Strange Thermals”  because the paper dances when the heat catches it. When it gets dark (at 3.30! Silly Scotland) they look magical, especially from the outside.

Mondays are supposed to be my day off but I did end up working for quite a bit of yesterday. However, in the morning Malcolm and I took Teaga the dog to Yellowcraig beach in East Lothian to run around and have a swim (her, not us – far too cold).

We took the opportunity to have a bit of a chat about work and plans and stuff so in a way it was a working morning for us.  However, we’re very lucky that when we head off to have a meeting we get to have it here… Sadly, Falko in Gullane are shut on Mondays so we were unable to stop on the way home to warm up over coffee and cake.

But I thought you might like to see that we do get some short breaks and that life isn’t all work and stress at the moment.

Around the walls of the children’s section, above the bookshelves, will be a mural of children’s book characters, painted by Andrew who’s a hugely talented artist as well as creating amazing windows for the bookshops.  We decided that ages ago but we only worked out the format yesterday.  The characters are going to be parading around the walls and, as far as we can manage, in proportion to each other.  Obviously the Very Hungry Caterpillar will have to be beefed up a little and we may not be able to include Neal Layton’s marvellous woolly mammoths Oscar and Arabella, but I still think it’s going to be marvellous and I’m so impressed that Andrew can copy these as it’s not his usual style at all and copying someone else’s work is really hard, right down the fact that your hands naturally move in different ways.

Yesterday Andrew began the first painting which is of Augustus the tiger from Catherine Rayner’s marvellous Augustus and his Smile (click on the pic to enlarge), one of our best-selling picture books from the day The Children’s Bookshop first opened.  Obviously, Augustus still needs his stripes but he’s looking rather fabulous don’t you think?  And any other suggestions for characters?

After a very late night on Thursday and an early start from me to get the carpet hoovered and the beanbags in the children’s section plumped, we opened The Edinburgh Bookshop in its new, extended and combined format at 9.30am on Friday 3rd September.

You can see from the pic on the left that it’s looking pretty good.  And we were off to a great start with a wonderfully busy weekend when we sold absolutely masses of books and got to show off the shop to old and new customers.

And it’s the glitzy relaunch party on Thursday evening so there will be lots more pictures to show you, albeit mostly accessorised with glasses of fizz.

Friday is getting closer and we’re looking forward to throwing open the doors at 9.30am to welcome customers to the new, improved, extended, fandabbydozy Edinburgh Bookshop.  If you’re around do drop by so that we’re not throwing open the doors and finding no-one there.  That would be quite depressing.

The top photo shows how the shop looked on Saturday just before Cat, Andrew and Malcolm got busy with the painbrushes and the bottom one shows how it looked this morning just before the carpet fitters arrived.  All coming on rather well as I’m sure you’ll agree.

Poor old Malcolm is fixing bookshelves in place this evening all by himself – although he’s taken the dog so he has some company – and tomorrow the electrician will be putting the last few lights up and we have to run computer cables etc to where we need them.  On Thursday we move the books, the computers, the till, the counter and all the enormous amounts of sundry stuff and I think it will be a late night getting the place looking absolutely perfect for the re-opening (9.30am on Friday – did I mention that?).  But it’s all coming on rather well don’t you think?

Here was the shop at the weekend before Malcolm, Andrew and Cat started painting and again this morning, painted and ready for the carpet-fitters.

This was how the shop looked on Saturday morning.  Removing the stairs and the mezzanine has increased the potential shelf space by about 80-90% and last minute adjustments to the new wall that has been built at the back and changing the door to a sliding one means that we can actually squeeze another drop in which means that we will have almost exactly the same amount of shelf-space that we has across the two shops before the merger so that’s very reassuring.

Our builders have worked at the most amazing speed and the plasterer was due in today to get the new plasterboard that you can see in the picture plastered (as plasterers do).  Tomorrow the electrician’s back to fit plug sockets and the joiners will do the fiddly bits of finishing before starting on moving the hatch into the basement – you can see it in the picture beneath Andrew’s feet.  Bookshelves are planned to go on top of it so we have to make a new one about 5 feet away.

By the middle of the week we can start decorating then all being well the carpet-fitters will be in next Monday and then we can start getting the bookshelves in place and all the books will move on Thursday 2nd September before we re-open on the 3rd.  That’s going to be a late one I think so we’ll be calling on friends with a good command of the alphabet to come and join us or at least bring fish suppers and beer!

But it’s all coming on apace – exciting times.

Well, the builders arrived bang on time and lost no time in cracking on with removing the mezzanine floor in the shop together with the wall that was behind the till, the kitchen units in the back and masses of other stuff we don’t need any more. So far I think we’re on schedule but I’ll be more certain when I’ve talked to head-joiner and the electrician tomorrow morning.  As you can see though, they made a good start in the first day.

Seeing the shop empty on Saturday was really hard and I actually got a bit teary – we’ve worked so hard over the last three years to turn it into a great children’s bookshop and to see it empty and forlorn was – completely irrationally – depressing.  However, by the end of the first day was ok; like seeing new beginnings and possibilities stretching ahead of us.

It’s going to be good.

So, last week was astonishing in many ways. On Wednesday, we hosted legendary actor Simon Callow, who was both interesting and utterly charming. He spoke about his new book, My Life in Pieces, which is partly about his life in the theatre, and partly pieces he has written along his theatrical journey. He was also extremely funny, and I was going to recount a couple of the anecdotes here, but I fear I don’t have the delivery (or the vocabulary: in the first page of the book he uses the word logorrhea, which I had to look up…). Suffice to say, projectile vomit and stage collapse has rarely been so amusing.

Simon Callow and lovely local author Vivian French, who was interviewing him

The next evening we had an event with Robin Ince. I say “an event” because it started out, organisationally speaking, with him going to talk about his new book Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club, about the worst (or perhaps the best?) books ever written. (My favourite was The Secrets of Picking Up Sexy Girls, which features a Chapter One entitled: ‘What is a girl?’) However, the evening ended up…somewhat differently. Robin did talk about the book for a while, but then some of his friends – mostly other comedians – came on to read from a couple of the worst/best books he had written about. Specifically, a series about Giant Killer Crabs. He then had someone doing interpretative dance about crabs, then a tap dancer being the crab, then other instruments. I can’t really explain, so here are a few pictures (click on them to make them bigger):

You'll have to take word for it, but Jo on the left is tap dancing whilst Robin is reading

Comedian Stewart Lee reading. I think this bit was filthy.

Comedians on instruments on the right and interpretative dance on the left

I can genuinely say that I haven’t laughed so much in a long time.