How to know what customers want: Book buying decisionmaking

How does a bookstore make decisions about which books to bring in? That’s a question that a lot of people were wondering after we talked about where bookstores get their books (NOT from Amazon!). Stacy Whitman dives into a few of the key ways we decide what books we bring in--and you'll get a little glimpse of the bookstore along the way! 

Join us in Winsted, CT for a live podcast taping with Sarah Beth Durst! https://curiouscatbookshop.com/event/2025-09-27/sarah-beth-durst-live-podcast-taping-little-red-barn-brewers 

Transcript

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but sometimes even if a book is doing well nationally it might be on the New York Times sometimes it just doesn't sell for us and that's disappointing but as I said a couple of weeks ago in my interview with Wesley Chu we cannot carry every bestseller or we wouldn't be bringing in all the quirky books that might be your serendipitous find as you walk through our unique bookstore you can get a bestseller anywhere but do we carry the book that speaks to you as our customer that is the question that I'm also always asking hello and welcome to the Curious Cat Bookshop Podcast I'm Stacy Whitman and I'm the owner of the Curious Cat Bookshop I'm also the founder and former publisher of Tu Books which is now an imprint of Lee and Low that publishes middle grade and YA fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels so I'm in the bookstore today if you're watching on video you can see our front desk and our fiction section behind me with our art that by Sheila Smallwood up above on the walls of cats wearing glasses reading books which is something that I intend to eventually have line the walls above our bookshelves I'm in the bookstore today because when I posted a couple weeks ago about where bookstores get their books not from Amazon someone asked well how do you make the decisions on what books to bring into the store and that is a pretty complicated question and I thought I would bring you into the store to show you a few examples of how and why we make decisions to bring in what we bring in we've been in business for almost two years and in fact if you're local make sure to come to Winsted, Connecticut on the last Saturday in September 2025 because we are celebrating our second anniversary of being here in our brick and mortar store and we're gonna have Sarah Beth Durst, who's an amazing author here in the early afternoon for an author reception and then later that afternoon she's going to be taping a an episode of the podcast over at the Little Bread Barn with me and we're gonna ask her all the questions about the spell shop and the Enchanted Greenhouse

so that is September 27th here in the store at 1: 2:23

30 over at Little Red Barn in Winsted at 3:00 tickets are $15 for the podcast taping and you can go to curiouscatbookshop.com/events for more information or just click the link below we're so excited about having been in business here in this full brick and mortar for the last two years and we'd love for you to celebrate with us we'll have a prize wheel it's the day of our town's Fall Foliage Festival so there will be food trucks and live music and all sorts of stuff and we like to think that our celebration being part of the whole town's celebration on the same day will be a lot of fun so come by and see us because we'll all be celebrating on that day like I said we've been in business for two years more than that because we started as a pop-up in February of 2023 right down the street at Live.AtHome we we did a few events and then we rented the room in the back of Jackie's store, Live.AtHome in Winsted for about three or four months before we found the lease here and were able to open up the full bookstore when I first started I was only doing pop-ups and I had a very small number of books that I was ordering and I wasn't really honestly sure what to order I had the books that I love but I had to come to figure out who the people were in town and what their tastes were before I really felt confident in buying books for the store I think Valentine's Day was our first event over at Live so I brought in a bunch of romance and the romance did okay and sometimes the men were like well what do you have for men so I expanded a little bit more I was buying some children's books I was buying some nonfiction to try and flesh out our pop-up inventory little by little as I went on as I was in the the back room there and it was OK we were doing OK on the weekends when I was there and Jackie would check people out if they were interested in browsing the the bookshelves when I was working my full time job now, when we came over here to this brick and mortar space we had 1500 square feet and really only about half of this front area was filled I brought in this table which I refinished myself for our new books we had, I think, three and three of these tall IKEA shelves and little by little I was refinishing shelves that I got from another bookstore when it closed I was adding more shelves and so little by little I was paying attention to what people were buying in subject matter and buying more of that the really important thing to note is that when we first came over here I also got a POS system called Basil I still used square on the front end when customers come in what they interact with is the square system but on the back end Basil made all the difference because it is a book centric POS system which I've talked about before and what that means that's one cool thing about books in a bookstore is that you can return them to the publisher you just try to be very careful about doing returns because obviously you return too much and that is a cost because you're paying for shipping back to the publisher so if you didn't sell that book and you paid let's say you paid 60% for that book or you paid 55% of cover price for that book and then you're paying for the book to be sent back you're not getting a full 55% or 60 60% back of what you originally paid you're getting that amount minus what you paid in shipping so it doesn't equal out and so you try and sell through you try to have enough turns in your inventory that's the term that you're looking for turns in your inventory so that you feel like there's a healthy number of books coming through the store that people want and that you're not overstocking this is an art that I have yet to perfect, and I'm still working on it, but that is the goal the most important thing that I've found over time is that paying attention to customer requests will help me to know what to stock in the store that will help us so for example our locals really love anything local we've got a lot of books about Connecticut in the store and they're anything from hyper local this book

Son of a Slave: 7:36

A Black Man's Journey in White America by Daniel R Smith Sr. is by a local man he was born here in Winsted and eventually he had an amazing life he served in Korea he worked in DC in a variety of departments in government and in his later life he served as the chief usher in the National Cathedral so that is hyper local here's someone from our town who went on to do some pretty amazing things we also carry things like jerks in Connecticut history speaking ill of the dead series and other travel books like around every corner of Connecticut 100 towns to explore every season this is signed copy because Sarah Cody is a local journalist who came to the bookstore last year actually it might have been late 2023 but Sarah Cody came to the bookstore and gave a presentation on various towns and their attractions in the state and a lot of people came because they love to explore locally so we've got anything from books about hiking locally books about exploring local towns books about where to hike so that you hit the best breweries and I think we're out of stock but we even have books about murder in New England one of the most popular books of the last couple of years in this section has been a book called The Devil's Rooming House which is the true history of the woman who ran the boarding house who was Connecticut's first serial killer in Windsor and that boarding house and that woman was the inspiration for the play and later the Cary Grant movie Arsenic and Old Lace kind of creepy in the real life but obviously customers aren't only interested in local interest they want to have access to the most interesting new books as well and this is our new books table and how I find these interesting new books is I work with sales reps from every publisher and I look at lists of upcoming new books to monitor what is looking the most popular who's ordering more of the next Stephen Graham Jones book for example and should I be stocking up a little bit more on it so I will meet with our reps from each publisher that we work with directly and sometimes I meet with them and sometimes they just send me a catalog but either way whatever system that they're using they're flagging the new books that they think will work for me because they have now seen two years of my ordering history and they have access to my sales history so they know what succeeds for us and so it's a relationship that we have with those reps that helps us to get a better sense of should we be ordering that how should we be ordering more of that do you think that will fly off the shelves most books that we have here in the bookstore even if they are expected to be national bestsellers generally we sell one or two copies but sometimes there's those books like Rebecca Yarros suddenly everybody got into romantasy and we had a whole party and sold 20 copies and so, when you're talking about 10 or 20 times the normal average sale for a particular book it's something we pay attention to but sometimes even if a book is doing well nationally it might be on the New York Times sometimes it just doesn't sell for us and that's disappointing but as I said a couple of weeks ago in my interview with Wesley Chu we cannot carry every bestseller or we wouldn't be bringing in all the quirky books that might be your serendipitous find as you walk through our unique bookstore you can get a best seller anywhere but do we carry the book that speaks to you as our customer that is the question that I'm also always asking and that's why I like working with a lot of small presses whether I'm ordering them through Ingram Publishing Services or directly through a small press I really love being able to bring in books that you might not know that you want now this is a book published by Bloomsbury which is a medium sized press and they are distributed by Macmillan which is a big five so this is not necessarily the best example but it is a wonderful book set in Korea that is a book in translation called welcome to the Hyunamdong Bookshop and there is a whole range of books in translation that a lot of people don't know that they would enjoy but these have been flying off the shelves for us and other indies we've got books from Korea we've got books from Japan often they're about bookshops and or cats sometimes they're murder mysteries but that is far from the romantasy bestsellers that we see everywhere with the sprayed edges these are very simple cute everyday books about interesting characters that if you're looking for a comforting read we want to make sure that we have in stock for you, as well another way we decide whether to bring in a book or not is my day job is in publishing or it was um and will be up until September 30th I've been laid off and I have a long history of knowing a lot of authors so there are authors that I know from where I've lived elsewhere like Seattle, Chicago, New York or who I've worked with on a professional basis who I want to make sure and bring into the store or authors who are favorites of our booksellers because we know that if our booksellers love that book they're gonna talk up that book to the customer they're gonna tell them about how much they love that book and the customer may or may not have a similar taste but if they trust our bookseller's taste if they trust my taste in authors and they have a similar interest well people are gonna be more likely to pick that up which is of course why we have our bookseller recommendations, our current reads staff picks etcetera we want you to know what we've loved so that you can look at it and go oh I love that kind too what else do you have to recommend me in the same vein we also have a local authors section we're always on the lookout for local authors we love working with our local authors no matter whether they're self published or not we we have local authors who write picture books for children, YA, romantasy, this is a cozy fantasy this is more YA several middle grade authors you can't see it but down there we've got the Fright Watch series by local author Lorien Lawrence, which is a perfect Halloweeny read if you're looking for something like that we've got local authors who do graphic novels nonfiction, memoir pretty much every topic they might not be writing about local topics they might be but they live here locally and we like to have them here in the store for author events book club chats that kind of thing now one thing that's really interesting is that we don't really I'll browse the national book seller lists from time to time and pick things that I think that our customers might be interested in but I don't just go down the New York Times list and order everything on the list I do however take a look at our regional best seller list and that helps me to narrow down on what is popular right now in New England and again I have to use my judgment of whether our local community is going to be interested in the same books that people in Hartford or Boston are interested in because we are a rural community and we have different interests and different lives sometimes so they might not be looking for exactly the same kind of thing but it helps me to take a look at those because it's a little bit closer to home and to make sure that I'm not missing anything that might be taking off elsewhere of course you have to make sure that you're buying for seasonal needs as well fall is starting there's a chill in the air so of course we need to make sure that we have a copy of The Leaf Thief by Alice Hemming and Nicola Slater because this was so popular last year it's about this cute squirrel who's realizing that someone is stealing all the leaves from the trees so squirrel has to get to the bottom of it seasonal buying also means making sure that we have those cozy reads for fall like this Savvy Summers and the Sweet Potato Crimes book by Sandra Jackson Opoku and of course, seasonal buying means looking a few months ahead because it's not Thanksgiving yet but people want those books to be on the shelf so that they can find them in time before the holiday begins so that's why we already have calendars in stock for 2026 and of course you cannot run a bookstore without paying attention to your sales by category

so romantasy: 16:47

a big ol' deal right now and there's a crossover with Halloween and seasonal because romantasy might also mean picking up horror this is Love and Other Conspiracies by Mallory Marlow, for example which is about cryptid hunters who fall in love and then outright horror like Bad Cree by Jessica Jones seasonally, horror is a big deal in the fall people love it year round in fact romantasy is so hot right now that we have decided to create a little nook back here in this otherwise unused space at the back of the store and this will be our romance and romantasy section so that we clear up space up at the front for other things and have more space for romance and romantasy back here this is a work in progress we will post when it's ready it should be ready in time for the Fall Foliage Festival because we want people to really see us spiffed up I also want to put up some twinkle lights on the walls but I haven't had a tall enough ladder to do so so that has been a challenge if you're local and you have a really big ladder and from the top of our walls has been hard I am I'm a little bit scared of going up it's like fourteen and a/2 15 feet tall ceilings demographics is another thing that I pay attention to when I'm buying books because we have a robust children's book section but most children's books are bought by an adult in the child's life not by the child themselves and so we pay attention to what the demographics in town are doing because there might be more babies being born we get a lot of people coming in asking for baby shower gifts one of our most popular sections here in the store as far as children's books go is the board book section because people are buying either for new babies and they want to get a classic for them for the baby shower like this, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See by Eric Carle or they know very well that somebody else has already given them that book so they're looking for cute books like Hank Goes Peck by Maudie Powell-Tuck and Duncan Beedle and the fun thing about board books is that a baby can chew on them very safely and they're cute and fun to read with parents sadly demographics can also affect us in negative ways this is my favorite part of the bookstore this is the young adult section there are so many amazing books in this section that everybody is sleeping on but so many of the adults who used to read YA have now moved into romance and romantasy perfectly fine, that's a great place for them to be they're great stories a lot of the same kind of pacing and character development that you'll see in YA but one thing I love about the YA section is all the experimentation that happens some amazing graphic novels happening in the YA section right now this is Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook illustrated by Ko Hyung Ju and Ryan Estrada or Ko Hyun Ju might be one of the authors as well but this is a biographical fictionalized biographical story about Kim Hyun Sook's time in the 1980s [in Korea] as a freshman in college trying to access books that have been banned under the military dictatorship there's a lot of amazing fantasy a classic like the Abhorsen trilogy Sabriel is down there on my staff picks so I'm showing the second book in the series this is Garth Nix's Lirael a lot of mystery is really great in the YA section right now One of Us Is Lying-- you might be familiar with that TV series-- that was a book first by Karen M. McManus and you should read it if you haven't read it yet it's a really twisty mystery and of course as an editor and former publisher I have to stock my books these are just a few of the books that I have edited at two books which I said earlier is the middle grade and YA imprint of Lee & Low Books I love working with Guadalupe Garcia McCall every book that she has written is a masterpiece this is Echoes of Grace if you are looking for fall vibes in the like creepy horror kind of way Echoes of Grace is the book for you this fall everything by Yamile Saied Méndez is beautiful this is her On These Magic Shores and this is The Reel Wish which just came out in April or May and has gotten four starred reviews and this is what I meant by genre bending Twin Flames is by Olivia Abtahi and it is not only a sister story it is a story about djinn, it's a family story there's a family secret there's all sorts of fun stuff happening in this story that you need to pick up if you wanna know about this country's history of mass deportation events, All the Stars Denied by Guadalupe García McCall is the book for you to be reading I also edited this it is actually a stand alone sequel to *[Shame the Stars] which is set 15 years before in the same area of Texas about the Matanza in Texas All the Stars Denied is about a young girl who is a US citizen who is deported to Mexico and how she and her family survive and *[Shame the Stars] is a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet in 1915 Texas so full of adventure*[Shame the Stars] also has interstitial poetry between the chapters read them all you want to talk about Chicago read Safe Passage by G. Neri and illustrated by David Braam this is about the Safe Passage program in Chicago and it's also a sibling and friendship story about surviving mean streets so that's just a little bit of a look at the decision making process that I go through to bring everything together into this cohesive retail bookstore one last thing I'll mention though is that preorders really help your bookseller to know what to bring in and that's why on our wall here we have all sorts of books that we recommend that you might want to take a look at and make sure that you order because we know that either Dogman is so popular or Brandon Sanderson is so popular or people might want the illustrated Catching Fire we know what our customers love already and we're gonna let them know about the big bestsellers that they might wanna reserve their copy of or like I said the indie stuff the publishers who might not be on your radar who have what we in the publishing industry call "quiet books" that might be right up your alley so that's The Curious Cat Bookshop and a little bit of a window into how we decide what books we bring in if you have any questions let us know in the comments and as always go to curiouscatbookshop.com for more information is that I can track sales by category and by week and month and I can see what books have sold the best I can see books that we've had on hand that have sold 17 copies and books that we have had on hand that have sat for more than a year and never sold at all and that is a really bad thing for a bookstore to have a book sit for a year and I should have returned those sooner we're trying to get on top of returns because that's a