Anyway, I promised to tell you what we’re planning to do.

A month or two ago I was sitting in the office, which is on a mezzanine at the back of The Children’s Bookshop (storage and kitchen space below as not enough headroom to use it for retail space), doing the accounts and noticing (for the umpteenth time) just how many costs were duplicated by having two shop – instead of two phone lines I have four, two lots of business rates, two lots of broadband, two lots of water and electricity standing charges…. you get the picture.  And then there’s the admin time that’s duplicated – dealing with returns, checking invoices, staffing… just, you know, STUFF!

“What we need” I muttered to myself “is a bigger unit where we can combine both shops.”

And then it struck me (yeah, yeah, you saw this ages ago – I can be a bit slow on the uptake at times), that I was actually sitting in a bigger unit.  Or at least I was, assuming we did some building work such as taking the mezzanine out and moving the hatch into the basement.  So we all did measuring and pacing out and then Malcolm did more precise calculations and we counted how many bookcases we have now and how many we could fit in and found that the difference was small and so we fiddled around with the layout and discovered that, with some building work, we can fit the stock of both shops into what is now The Children’s Bookshop.

Opening The Edinburgh Bookshop in its own space was a good idea as it meant that it could establish its own identity, and we could find out whether the south side of Edinburgh (although increasingly it seems that our customers come from a much wider area) could and would support an independent bookshop.  And both shops are doing fine individually but rationalising is a good move and protects us to as great a degree as possible from further problems in the wider economy as well as giving me that precious day off each week – I’m already really looking forward to that!

So, from the beginning of September, Bruntsfield will just have the one bookshop but it will be bigger and brighter and have just as good a range of stock as the two shops do now.  The staff will be the same and as always we’ll be trying to provide the highest standards of customer service, we’ll be hunting out the most interesting books and we’ll still be running really interesting events – it will just all be in one place.

This weekend we start the endless process of emptying one shop, moving stock, trips to the tip, trips to our storage facility, setting up a temporary office at home, organising builders, electricians, carpet fitters and decorators, returning old stock, ordering new titles for the reopening, merging the websites… and of course, with our usual amazing planing, all of this is happening at the same time as Malcolm and I are planning to put our own house up for sale!  It’s a good job that the book festival starts in a week or so – we’ll be able to flop in Charlotte Square with someting fortifying after a long day of organising and hefting boxes.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back with details of timescales etc….

So, if I had a message it would be ’shop local’.  In most cases, your local butcher, baker, fishmonger are just as good value as Tescobury’s.  Okay, so the butcher up the street might not be able to sell you a chicken for £3, but is that poor little ill-treated, unhealthy, water-injected bird really what you want to be eating?

And your local bookshop offers you so much more than Amazon or big chains even if we can’t compete with the cheap-chicken merchants – we can find you the novel that can change your life or the perfect present…  I’ve written about that more here – a blog post which I’m told caused some people to get a bit teary, which was a bit of a surprise.  Okay, I’m not going to be able to flog you Dan Brown or Katie Price’s latest output as cheap as Tesco or Amazon but that’s partly because we don’t bother stocking them – we don’t have room for all the books we love so why bother stocking tripe?

But if you want your high street to have a future that includes businesses other than huge conglomerates, that keeps jobs and investment and profits in your community then that’s in your own hands.  Because voting in the election for the party you think might keep the country afloat is only part of it.  We have another (sadly neglected at the moment) blog where we write about the trade side of bookselling and you can read about the latest shop local campaign being imported from the USA by the Booksellers Association here.

Anyway, this is an interim post – a mere digression – tomorrow I’ll be back with details of our changes and developments.

So, in September 2009, The Edinburgh Bookshop opened just up the road from The Children’s Bookshop and after a slow-but-steady start – well, we did have a builders’ portakabin parked outside it for the first two months and a particularly unsightly team of builders therein – we had a cracking Christmas and we’ve had a steady and growing 2010.  We have three thriving book groups, we were shortlisted for Independent Bookshop of the Year and are building a good reputation with publishers as people who can put a good event together.

However, we’ve had a stressful few months with admin issues at Companies House, Edinburgh City Council jacking up our business rates so that we now spend £8.5k (well someone’s got to pay for the trams) on rates for the two shops (and we pay extra for water and rubbish collection – it isn’t like the council tax), and being a tenant is much more stressful than owning the property (roof falls in?  Our problem.  Basement floods?  Our problem too.  Buildings insurance?  Yep, that’s down to us).  And however much the new government tells us that they want to support small businesses (and my new Lib Dem MP certainly seems like a decent chap), the cuts in public spending etc mean that we suspect that this recession might get worse again before it gets better.

So, what to do to enable us to continue to build a thriving business whilst at the same time protecting us from potential downsides?  And organising ourselves so that Malcolm and I might even get the odd day off (although what do people do with days off?  Will I need to take up a hobby or something?  Or do housework?  Perish the thought!) or have time to work on some of the other projects we have on the go.  Well, it seems the answer was staring us in the face all along…

Pop back tomorrow and all will be revealed about the forthcoming changes at The Children’s Bookshop and The Edinburgh Bookshop…

Well, the time has almost arrived. Lari will be writing in our shop window on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of this week, and we’re very excited! If you are an Edinburgh local, pop in and ask her questions about her books or about being an author (even if you don’t have any children to bring!). She’s also looking for some help with some questions as: can a centaur fit in a tent?  What does a fairy pack for a camping holiday? What do selkies eat at feasts (apart from fish cakes, obviously)? Do selkies breathe underwater?  And what names can she give the two ocean powers whose battles make the storms rise out at sea?

We’re also hoping that when the final book is published, Lari will come back and read the chapter she wrote here in the shop at an event.

Well, wish no more single people of Edinburgh because The Edinburgh Bookshop is riding to the rescue with the city’s – and quite possibly Scotland’s – first literary speed dating evening.  Instead of trying to chat in nightclubs or resorting to on-line dating agencies, why not come along to the incredibly stylish The One Below at The Rutland Hotel and see what happens? We’ve got the whole bar to ourselves for the evening so there’s room for lots of people.

You’ll meet lots of people and have 2 or 3 minutes to talk to each of them about your favourite book or books and at the end of the evening you can tick the names of the people you’d like to know better.  The following day Becky and I will get the lists together and people who ticked each other will be emailed with each other’s contact details.

Why not come along?  Tickets are £5 including a drink on arrival.  At worst you get to spend an evening talking about books (never a hardship) and you might even find everlasting love?

Email love@edinburghbookshop.com for more info.

Our next event is actually this Monday evening when Ian Rankin will be joining us for the first in an occasional series called The Books That Made Me.  We’re all familiar with standard author gigs where they chat to the chairperson for a bit, read part of their new book and then take questions from the audience before busily signing and those are great, but for authors who don’t have a hot-off-the-press new book out or who are local and therefore familiar faces at those sort of events we wanted to try something new and Ian kindly agreed to be our guinea pig privileged inaugural guest.  We’ll be talking about the books he loved as a child, what he read growing up in Fife, how studying literature at university widened his reading further and the authors who’ve influenced his own writing.  Obviously we’ll also be talking about his work now that Rebus has been pensioned off and his latest book The Complaints and he’ll be signing after the event. 

Having told you all about that, the event is sold out, especially since I was on BBC Radio Scotland on Monday talking about our upcoming programme but at least you know the format for the future and hopefully for those of you who are now wishing you’d booked tickets, it will encourage you to head over to The Edinburgh Bookshop’s website and join our mailing list so that you’re one of the first to know about events. And if you’re an author reading this who’d like to come and talk to us about their inspirations do drop me an email.

There are some great events for which tickets are still available.  On 4th February Ruth Thomas, author Things to Make and Mend will be joining us to talk about Super Girl, her new collection of short stories.  We all love this book and Ruth is a witty and interesting speaker so it’s well worth coming along – tickets are available from the bookshop but do hurry as it’s being held in the shop itself and so space is limited.  Tickets are £5 with £5 off the cost of the book.

And event for which we have masses of space is the launch of Alexander McCall Smith’s new Lady Detectives book The Double Comfort Safari Club on 3rd March.  This is being held in Christ Church, the beautiful church opposite The Children’s Bookshop and so we have space for hundreds – given the popularity of the books I imagine we’ll fill it too!  Sandy is charming and amusing and his events are always great fun so do come if it’s at all possible.  Again, tickets available from The Edinburgh Bookshop.  Tickets are £5 and this is refundable in the form of a discount if you buy the book.  If you can’t get to the shop you can always call and book over the phone and we’ll post them out to you – 0131 229 9207. 

There a couple of other author events still to be finalised which we’ll be telling you about soon.  And, once we’ve checked out the venue, we have a very special event for Valentine’s Day to tell you about.  You’ll have to wait until next week to hear the details but it you pop along to the Fidra podcasts page and listen to BBC Scotland’s Book Cafe programme would be able to hear me talking to Stuart Kelly of Scotland on Sunday and poet and novelist John Burnside about our plans for the next couple of months and you’ll be forewarned as to what we’re planning…

To be honest, if you want Jill’s Gymkhana in time for Christmas (and why wouldn’t you?), you’d be best to order it from us and we will send it out as fast as humanly possible.  Sadly though, overseas orders won’t be there in time for Christmas but shortly afterwards.

We’re all delighted with how Jill’s Gymkhana is looking with her gorgeous new cover (thanks to Sally, Emma and Melody not to mention the very talented Robbie who risked life and limb to get that close to those galloping hooves) and I hope that she’ll find fans among a whole new generation of readers as well as reminding those of us who loved the books in our childhoods.  Anyone who has yet to discover Jill can read the first chapter here.

Now that the opening stock order has been finalised (along with odds and ends that we’d forgotten and which we sorted out today), I feel much more relaxed and I’m starting to get excited about the new shop opening.  Now all I need to do is get a good night’s sleep where I don’t wake at stupid o’clock panicking that we’d forgotten a particular title or author, and I’ll be back on top form.

Oh, and before I forget, on Saturday 5th September and Sunday 6th, our opening weekend, we’ll be offering customers 10% discount on all purchase (everything except book tokens).  There may even be cake if you’re prompt!  See you then.