Wi11: Inventory Maintenance Strategies for Children’s Series

The Winter Institute 11 education session “Inventory Maintenance and Turns for Children’s Series,” presented by the ABC Group at ABA, looked at the special challenges that booksellers face in managing inventory for young readers’ series in both general interest and children’s bookstores.

The panel was moderated by Tegan Tigani of Queen Anne Book Company in Seattle, Washington, and featured Sarah Hutton of Village Books in Bellingham, Washington; Justin Colussy-Estes of Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, Georgia; and Sara Grochowski of Brilliant Books in Traverse City, Michigan.

When ordering books from a series, booksellers have to decide whether they want to carry the entire series or just part of it. “If we commit to a series, we commit to the entire series,” said Grochowski, who is the frontlist buyer for the children’s section at Brilliant Books.

However, if a customer is seeking out books from a series that the store does not carry, “we have to assess if we’ll just bring it in for them or if we think it will sell more generally,” she added. “Everything on your shelf should be there for a reason. Know who you want to sell that book to and who it’ll appeal to when doing ordering.”

Little Shop of Stories does not commit to carrying complete series, said inventory manager Colussy-Estes, because too many books can take up valuable shelf space. Instead, for longer series such as Rainbow Magic (Scholastic), the store will order the first few titles and then the most recent; for Magic Tree House (Random House Books for Young Readers), which tends to be more popular during summer camp season, orders are increased when staff believes the books will be more in demand.

At Little Shop of Stories, middle grade and young adult book series have a dedicated section because of the volume of space the books require. “The standalones were kind of vanishing within these chunks of series,” said Colussy-Estes.

Some series for emerging readers, such as Elephant & Piggie (Hyperion), are shelved in the series section rather than with picture books or leveled readers, so that “the reader who discovers that and is ready to read it will feel better because it’s over with the bigger books. Some of that is gauging what’s going to make a kid feel excited to find and read that book,” said Colussy-Estes.

At Brilliant Books, young adult and middle grade series are mixed in with standalone titles. If a customer only sees the first book or two of a series on the shelves, a sign posted in the section lets them know that subsequent books can be ordered any time.

The Harry Potter series (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Books), which the store carries in hardcover and paperback and in a variety of covers, has its own shelf. “We believe that’s a staple of our store — customers know it’s going to be there,” said Grochowski.

Publishers’ rapid replenishment programs have changed how Village Books does its ordering, especially for series, said Hutton, who does frontlist and backlist buying for children’s and adult books. As books now arrive in two to three days, it “has minimized the amount of back stock we’ve had to have on hand,” she said.

Village Books keeps middle-grade series shelved with middle-grade standalones, and young adult series with young adult books. In the nonfiction section, series have a dedicated shelf, but additional copies are kept within specific genre sections as well. “It’s a small enough amount that we can carry that slight extra inventory, but it’s enough of a critical mass that there’s representation in multiple places,” said Hutton.

Each bookseller said they used their respective point-of-sale (POS) system to track and analyze inventory and sales. Village Books’ POS system, IBID, “does allow us a fair amount of reporting and turns analysis to see how a given section is performing or underperforming,” said Hutton.

Hutton sees the combination of the store’s POS system and data from Above the Treeline as “camera one and camera two,” she said. “I can’t get the whole story from just one of those things, but in tandem they work much better.”

The children’s specialists at Village Books also provide important information about which series need to be ordered and which need to be pulled from the shelves. “Sometimes I’m not on the floor as much as I’d like to be and getting that feedback is absolutely critical,” said Hutton.

When considering what inventory to pull at Little Shop of Stories, Colussy-Estes knows the series that sell consistently — Harry Potter, Magic Tree House, and Percy Jackson & the Olympians — but to remain on the shelves the rest have to be ones that the booksellers want to hand-sell. If staff is not passionate about a series and it’s taking up valuable real estate, it has to come off the shelves, he said.

At Brilliant Books, Grochowski considers a series’ sales over time, looking at both how it is selling as a whole and how the first and second books are selling, when deciding which series to stop restocking or to pull. “If you’re selling a good number of the first but you’re never selling any of the rest, I think that’s a clue,” she said.

Grochowski also looks for a newer, better series that might fill the niche of a pulled series. “You have those backlist classics that define your store and then you have fresh, new things for kids to discover. You don’t want customers to come in and find the same books,” she said.

While visiting Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver during Winter Institute, Colussy-Estes made a mental note, he said: less is more when it comes to the children’s section. “Pick the ones that you as a staff are passionate about, that you love, that you find interesting, and let the others go,” he said. “And make sure buyers know when you’ve decided to let go of a series.”

Grochowski recommended, “If it’s not selling well and you want to get rid of it, start hand-selling it. You have that power.”

There are multiple venues to research the titles and proper order of books within a series, including Wikipedia, Ingram, and online retailers and book review sites. Following the education session, audience member Heidi Powell of Washington, D.C.’s Politics & Prose suggested using the Mid-Continent Public Library’s “Juvenile Series and Sequels” database, which contains details about 36,000 books from 4,900 series for young readers.