The Edinburgh Bookshop will be opening on Saturday 5th September with a glittering launch (aren’t all launches ‘glittering’?  And we do love an excuse for a party) on the 3rd.  Consequently, we need a manager for the new shop and although we’ll probably be advertising in the usual places I thought I’d flag it up here first in case any of our readers or people they know are interested.

We think it’s a pretty good opportunity for someone to be in at the beginning of a new bookshop and to really shape its development.  We don’t have set ways of doing things and we’re always open to new ideas so we’ll happily listen - if you’ve been getting fed up with missives from on high and feeling as though you’re a cog in a corporate machine then our shop might be the one for you.

Here’s the formal version of what we came up with:

The Job:

The Children’s Bookshop in Edinburgh is expanding and opening a new bookshop for grown-up fiction and non-fiction. The manager will need to develop core stock, as well as undertake daily stock replenishment and new stock ordering. She or he will also be responsible for event organisation, cashing up, maintaining the customer mailing list, customer orders and managing any additional staff. The manager will contribute to overall business development. Work days will be Tuesday-Saturday.

The person:

The candidate will have a proven track record in bookselling as well as experience of managing staff and budgets. Good IT skills and excellent interpersonal skills are a must. She or he must be self-motivated, but also work well in a team with other staff and with The Children’s Bookshop. Reliability is vital.

Obviously, on a more informal note, we need a manager who is versatile and can turn their hand to most things (because the hoovering and dusting will be down to you) and can put up with my occasional (honest!) bouts of control freakery (which I’m sure will be fewer once I’m confident that the new manager is doing ok).  You need to be good at organising events and have good marketing ideas (agreeing with us that ‘bookaholism’ is a lousy idea for a marketing strategy is probably A Good Thing).  You also need to be well-read and to be a strong fiction buyer as we think that will be the major part of our market.  Salary is negotiable depending on experience etc and you’ll be working for 37.5 hours per week, plus overtime if necessary to be taken as time in lieu.

If you think this might be the job for you then please send your CV and a covering email explaining why you’re the person for us, please drop us an email. Obvious as it sounds, do make sure that you write a decent covering letter as last time we advertised for a part-time staff member masses of people didn’t and we gave up reading their CVs in the end as we thought that someone who couldn’t follow basic instructions probably wasn’t going to be an asset to the company.  Mind you, quite a lot of applicants didn’t put the apostrophe in The Children’s Bookshop which didn’t do them any favours either.

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