Keys to Mystery Lovers' Success Easy to Deduce: Specialization & Innovation

Sixteen years ago, Mary Alice Gorman and her husband, Richard Goldman, decided to open an independent bookstore because a doctor suggested she find a "low stress" job. For veteran booksellers who deal with small margins and chain retailers on a daily basis, the idea of "independent bookselling" and "low stress" may seem to be a contradiction in terms, but considering Gorman's previous career as executive director for the Allegheny Center for Victims of Violent Crime, everything was relative. Mystery Lovers Bookshop opened its doors in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, in 1990 and on October 31 will celebrate 16 successful years in business.

"We're going to have our traditional Halloween birthday," Goldman said of their upcoming sweet 16. "We'll be open until midnight, there will be free cappuccino and '10-cent books,' a fundraiser for Beginning With Books," a local children's literacy program that operates through libraries. For 10-cent books, the store offers customers the ARCs that it accumulates throughout the year and asks them to make donations that are used to buy children's books for Beginning With Books.

To succeed in the west Pennsylvania area -- where, the couple noted, there are 15 chain bookstores, including a new Borders opening this month, Gorman and Goldman knew they had to specialize. "Many people don't realize you have to make choices out of 150,000 books every year," Gorman explained. "But we wanted to read [the books we sold], and both of us read mysteries."

Gorman pointed out that while she and Goldman had worked in retail before, they had never worked in it at the management level. Both had executive experience, however: She at Allegheny Center, and prior to that, as executive director of the Pittsburgh American Civil Liberties Union, and Goldman at Mellon Bank, where he garnered database experience that would eventually come in very handy at the bookstore.

Gorman said they picked a location for the store within 10 miles of their home and found a perfect spot just off the Pennsylvania turnpike -- "an easy place for a visitor to find." In their store description, the couple notes that, in the past 16 years, "this specialty store has become the third largest in the U.S."

Mystery Lovers Bookshop has differentiated itself from the competition through knowledge, innovation, and as previously noted, specialization. Mystery Lovers includes a gift basket business, mail order business, and special events involving over 50 writers each year from all over the U.S. and U.K. The store regularly hosts book groups, special events, and has an "aggressive public speaking program," which includes student field trips and book club visits, among other events. In 1993, the bookstore expanded to include a bookstore cafe.

One of the bookstore's most innovative features is its website, www.mysterylovers.com, which offers a proprietary database that allows the user to search books by character name or story setting, in addition to the usual search features such as book title or author.

It was Goldman who created the database. "We realized from the opening of our store that a series' characters are very important to mystery readers, so from the very beginning, our book records had series characters and sequence." At first, the information entered into the database was somewhat limited, but eventually the effort was ramped up to include full names and descriptive information, he said.

The proprietary database is a key reason why the store's website is so successful. All told, the Mystery Lovers Bookshop website gets 20,000 hits each day from over 8,000 unique users, she noted. The store has redeveloped its website, and the new site will go up for their 16th anniversary on October 31.

In-store, Goldman puts his database marketing savvy to work by making the most of customer data. "Having [the database marketing background] is a definite advantage, though it does take a lot of my time.... We have a frequent buyer program where a customer can accumulate credits as a percentage of a purchase. We have records going back 14-some years of every book customer's purchase, so we could pull out readers of a particular author and send them a postcard -- we've done it in the past for events."

Gorman noted that for each of their author events they find a special "hook." For instance, when author Peter May, whose series features a detective in Beijing, appeared at the store, the cafe featured a meal catered by a local Chinese restaurant. At the dinner, the author rotated from table to table, where he had the chance to meet and talk with his fans. "The event sold out," she said.

The store has also offered the "Coffee & Crime" breakfast series for the past 14 years. The store usually holds three series a year with three or four authors in each series. --David Grogan