Am I really such a Bad Person?
I've been having an argument over on rasfc about the merits and the morality of wandering into your lcoal bookstore and, if you find your book shelved spine-out, turning it face-out for a potential buyer to see. As I pointed out somewhere in the thread, in my specific case it was my books shelved spine out next to a veritable avalanche of "
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Hopefully you wish your bookstore to be in business still a decade or, oh, fifteen years from now. Let us assume that in that period of time many of the current "10X" profit names will have stopped writing, or at least stopped writing prolifically enough to still be 10X.
You've constantly and consistenly faced out ONLY the 10X books in those ten or fifteen years of businesss. Those names are all your customer knows.
They will, sooner or later, go away.
What do you do then? You aren't cultivating a customer base predicated on the fact that "people buy books". You are cultivating a customer base on the basis of people only buying books which YOU think they should read.
Waking your custmers up to the fact that there are OTHER writers out tehre whose work they might enjoy is an investment in the future - of the publishing trade, of the up-and-coming writers out there, heck, even of your store. Because a bookstore that sells only the bestsellers *will die when the current crop of bestsellers dries out* - because they have done nothing to pave the way for new bestsellers, relying instead on the instant gratification of 10X profit.
Let's split the odds and assume that if you occasionally face out the faceless ones you will get maybe 2X profit for them, and perhaps 7X profit for the Webers and Kings of this world. You come out much the same way. the Webers and Kings of this world have lost a couple of sales. And the unknown next door whose book you let stay face out for a few hours... might be the next Weber waiting to happen.
If you don't take a chance, you will never know.
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No. Because it's not relevant to the discussion. I *only* brought money into it because you did.
Whether what you do is beneficial to the company or detrimental, the point is IT IS NOT YOUR DECISION TO MAKE.
The difference is the same as you walking over to me when I'm getting ready to eat and substituting low-cal Italian dressing for my Parmesan Peppercorn, versus you already sitting at the table with me and suggesting -- leaving me free to ignore the suggestion -- that I try the low-cal italian. It may be better for me. It may not. I may like it and decide that I'll be using low-cal Italian from now. But if you just walk over and switch the dressings, you're intruding. You don't have the right to do that. Even if you sell salad dressings and I'm a restaurant owner who stands to make money from your dressing versus others.
You have EVERY right to politely address the people in charge and make them aware of your presence and of how it would be very nice to face out your books, or those of your friends and family. In fact, I strongly encourage you to do so, and I encourage all my Minions to do the same. But NOT to just go and rearrange the shelves to suit.
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