annietupek.com blog

I answered the main line at work. I never answer the phone at the store; there’s always a bookseller minion to do it for me. But the phone rang four times so I answered it in my ‘phone voice.’ (Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about with ‘phone voice’ because most people have them. Mine is rather extreme. Test it out, call the store and ask to talk to me. Seriously, you will laugh your ass off when I say ‘Thanks for holding, this is Annie. How can I help you?’ Actually, please don’t call me at work, you’ll just be interrupting my busy schedule.)

‘Do you sell ebooks?’ the man on the other end of the line asked.

‘Yes!’ I was excited. This was the first customer I spoke with about our new website. He was on the old website, so I directed him to the new one and helped him navigate it to find the information he needed to set up an online account with us. He had a Nook, which is a B&N product (boo hiss) but it’s better than Amazon’s Kindle (if you own a Kindle, Amazon owns you!).

The Google eBooks we sell can be read on a Nook, it’s just a more involved process than reading it on an iPad or other Apple device. (I suggest Apple devices, they’re so versatile & you’re not locked in to getting your ebooks from only one source. I’ve downloaded a couple of ebooks from our site onto my iPhone & it’s so easy. Netgalley has addicted me to ebooks. I have 11 ebooks on my iPhone and another eight on my iPod. The digital format has only increased my bibliophilia.)

I probably gave the customer way too much information, but I was thrilled to finally have the news out in the world. Gulliver’s Books sells Google eBooks! I want to shout it out & advertise the shit out of it. Unfortunately, I have to wait. The staff isn’t trained up on our new ecommerce website yet. Had someone else answered the phone, their answer to my customer would probably have been ‘No.’ or ‘Not yet, but I think we will be soon.’

DH has been wishywashy about the new website and selling ebooks. I really want to prove to him at we cannot ignore the digital pathway books are taking. I think this customer has put me on the right track. We haven’t done any advertising, but the word-of-mouth is out there now.

I printed out a whole bunch of training materials for everyone to review. I just hope sharing this info with my customer doesn’t bite me in the ass. I’m on vacation now and the last thing I need is Maria stressed out from filling online orders while I’m gone. So (to protect my sanity), if you’re going to start ordering & downloading books from the new Gulliver’s webstore, please wait until mid-November. You’ll notice that I was very careful not to mention the webaddress or provide a link to the new store. You’ll just have to check back for a later posting

PNBA Day Two:

It was all about the trade show floor.  It seemed as though every publisher had young adult paranormal and science fiction out.  Not only am I a fan of this genre, but so is my sister and my bff Jenn.  (I’m home and have separated out their books into piles: “Jenn,” “Karyn,” & “Books I have to read before passing them on to Jenn & Karyn.”  I have two weeks to get through the four books in the latter catagory.)

The trade show floor was the beginning of my descent into Book Hell.  Whatever it was that I didn’t want to break in my brain, well, it broke.  I did stick to my general list, I had circled 54 books in the program and came home with 55, but I think it still might be too much.  I just know so many voracious readers.  That’s it!  I can blame you!  Jenn, Karyn, Mom, Dad.  It’s all YOUR fault I had to check two bags and lug around another carry on and strain my shoulders and over-extend my wrists.  (Get a fuckin’ TV whydontcha?)

Out of the fourteen books I kept for myself and nick, I’ve finished one: Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith.  (I also read several other books that I’m passing on.)  I really loved this book.  However, I have a problem.  I seem to always select books that are going to make me tear up on airplane rides.  Seriously, this book was beautiful.  The story of an unrequited love between a librarian and a soldier, paralleled to the protagonist’s memories of growing up in Alaska and moving outside.  It was a gorgeous story.  It comes out in January 2012.

Another of my favorites is a middle-grade read: Stealing Magic: a Sixty-Eight Rooms Adventure by Marianne Malone.  Much of it takes place in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Thorne Rooms, the miniature rooms.  (They’re one of my favorite exhibits.)  Ruthie and her friend Jack get shrunk down and have adventures and solve mysteries inside the rooms, which are gateways to the past.  When I was a kid I used to love the idea of exploring those tiny spaces and Ms. Malone has really captured this childhood dream of mine in a very special way.  I’m giving it to Karyn so that she can read it to Sammy.  It, like Glaciers, comes out in January 2012.

I was Vernor Vinge’s escort and helper for the Author Feast Friday night.  (As he would say: Vinge rhymes with ‘Stingy,’ just in case you were wondering how it’s ‘really’ pronounced.)  I got a personalized copy of Children of the Sky, the sequel to 1992’s Fire Upon the Deep.  I can’t wait to read it, but unfortuantely it is going to have to wait until I get through the books for Karyn and Jenn.

PNBA Day Three:

Truly in Book Hell.  I had to save room in my luggage for the children’s picture books on Saturday.  I can’t go home without some shwag for Sammy, and really, and the majority of the children’s authors were presenting at lunch.  So I got my books and hurried back to my room to rearrange my bags and check out.

Peggy, my MPS rep who is Awesome, gave me a large, messenger-style reusable bag on Saturday morning for all my books.  It didn’t have a closure, so I was going to use it as my carry-on.

It contained three books: Stealing Magic, Glaciers, and How Georgia Became O’Keefe (by Karen Karbo, November 2011, a small-ish book that I didn’t quite finish on the plane).  It also had my laptop and wallet and snaks.

Then there was my large messenger bag, stuffed full of books.  I forgot that it contained my ipod.  I checked it with the airline and forgot that it had my ipod in it.  I had to fly all the way home with no music & no movies.  Tragedy.

My red suitcase was filled to bursting with the rest of the books.  It was over-weight and They made me take out three heavy books and put them in my carry on.

Book Hell is lugging a fifty-eight-pound roller suitcase along with one thirty-pound messenger bag and another fifteen or twenty in a second messenger bag.  I got them home okay.  Only about a quarter of them are for me.  The other ones, currently in Book Pergatory are going back in to the suitcase to be brought to Chicago.  On second thought, lugging them a second time would just be a return to Book Hell.  I think I’ll mail them.

I’m finally getting caught up with all my backlog of articles from my vacation and there was a really interesting article in Publisher’s Weekly about Kindles and other eReaders.  It’s their Soapbox column from the April 11th (Yes, I am so out of date!) edition called Books without Batteries: The Negative Impacts of Technology.

What I found most interesting about it was the amount of natural resources used to make one eReader.  33 pounds of minerals and 79 gallons of water!  That’s astounding.  Especially when a paper book costs us two gallons of water, a small amount of minerals, and recycled paper.  Trees are a renewable resource.  Who knows what might happen in the future when Africa stabilies itself!  (Many of those 33 pounds of minerals come from Africa, by the way.)

So in order for your ereader to be an effective water-saving device, you’re going to have to download forty books onto it…Hey, I’m as guilty as the next person, I have four different devices on which I read ebooks.  I don’t think I’ve got anywhere near enough books on them to alleviate their footprint in the natural resources and I’m still an avid buyer of paper books.  I’m not saying that eReaders should go away (cause until the digital armageddon hits, they’re here to stay), I’m just saying check out this quick article.  It was a real eye opener.

It’s annual mark-down time at Gulliver’s.  Maria goes through all the sections and decides what to keep, what to return, and what to discount.  The goal is to get rid of anything that’s been on the shelves for longer than a year.

We’ve had this dusty box of Sylvan Learning School Success Hooked on Phonics forever and we can’t return it.  There was a nice ridge of labels on the back of the box.   Maria asked me to clean it up and discount it to $.98.

I wiped it down.  It’s amazing how dusty the bookstore gets.  All those miniscule paper particles cling to everything like magnets.  Dusting the place is a constant chore.

I decided to do some label-excavation and tried to pull up all the labels at once.  Any time we move a book to a new section or change the price, we put a new label on it, which has, among other pieces of information, the section code, the price and the date code to tell you when the label was printed.

The bottom label, which was so stuck to the box I had to use a little bit of Goo-Gone to fully remove it, was dated 09/19/08, it was priced at $79.98, and put in the Bargain Annex Reference section.  Ah, now there’s some history.

The Bargain Annex no longer exists.  It used to be in a small store front across the parking lot from the main location.  It hasn’t been there for years.  It was closed when DH decided to build bigger, higher shelves in the main location and stuff everything into them so he could avoid paying two rents.

The next oldest label was from 12/24/08 when the box got moved into Educational Reference in the main store.  It must have been a mistake, or during the Annex’s transition into the main store, because a month later, on 01/23/09, according to the next label, it was moved back into Annex Reference.  That must have been around the time DH closed the Annex.

For the first couple of months after the move, all the Annex books were in what used to be the Alaska Room at the main store.  It’s now the Children’s, Cooking, and Craft Room and three years later we still have people wandering back into it, looking confused, wondering where all the Alaska books have gone.  They’re at the front of the store, if you’re wondering.

The final label, the one at the top of the stack, was dated 12/08/09.  It was then that the Sylvan Hooked on Phonics box was changed into a Bargain Blowout item and marked down to $24.98.  Still no takers.

Time for my label, 02/09/11, marked down to $.98.  It’s Hooked on Phonics, people.  For that price, you almost can’t afford to buy it!  And two days later, on Friday afternoon, some guy brought it to the counter and purchased it.  Finally.  The Sylvan box is gone.  Wonder what the next ‘buyer’s mistake’ will be.

Kimberly is my bookseller heroine of the week.

There was a pink special order slip sitting in the box when I got in to work one day last week.  I dread the pink slips; they always mean more work: Phone calls and emails and google and half the time we can’t get the books because they’re out of print or the publisher has too high of a minimum for us to meet.  This particular pink slip was a real doozy.

No ISBN.  That’s a bad sign.  Title: The White Indian?  Author:?  The customer thought it was a female author from southeast Alaska.  Other Notes: Customer heard a review about it on the radio.  Yikes.

I checked the local radio station’s website and their list of featured books and found nothing listed.  I did my usual research and came up with zip.  Maria is a bottomless well of information about Alaskana books so I asked her when she came in and it didn’t ring any bells with her.

So I called the customer and asked her for more info.  The book clerk who left me the pink special order slip had it wrong.  The customer had seen it on tv, the local PBS station.  She thought the title might have been White Native.  The author’s first name might have been Ernestine and she was either a Tlingit or Yup’ik Native from Sitka or Juneau.

“I saw it on a local PBS station,” she said when I asked her for more information.  “The title might have been White Native.  The people in the audience all seemed to have already read the book, so it must be out.  The author’s first name is Ernestine or Emmaline.  She’s either a Tlingit of Yup’ik Native from Sitka or Juneau.  I wrote down the title somewhere, but I misplaced it.  I’ll take a look for it,” she said.

I told her I would do more searching and let her know what I found.  I switched gears on the web search and went looking on the local PBS site.  The local PBS station has their schedule posted, but not the topic or feature of the show for any particular day and it’s a pain in the ass to navigate through.  Alaska is usually a good decade behind the lower 48 technology-wise and in some places it really shows.

Aarrgh.  I got up from my desk.  Frustrated.

“Do you want another pair of eyes looking for it?” Kimberly asked me.  She was standing at the receiving counter working on entering books into the inventory.

I explained everything to her and wished her luck with a laugh, saying that she’d probably find it.  She got frustrated with the PBS website, too.

I was ready to call the indie bookstore in Juneau because if anyone would know about the book, Katrina at Hearthside would.  Then Kimberly had the brilliant idea to check google again.  She put in White Native Ernestine.  Don’t know why I didn’t think of it, but sometimes you just need a second brain working on the problem.

Blonde Indian by Ernestine Hayes was the third or fourth hit.  OMGNFW.

I called the customer.  As soon as I said who I was she interrupted me and said she still hadn’t found the paper.

“Could it be Blonde Indian?” I asked.

“Yesss!” the customer shrieked, thrilled to pieces we had found it and we had it on hand.

Now that’s customer service.  And that’s why Kimberly is my bookseller heroine of the week.

So this was posted a few weeks ago and I forgot to mention it.  (Yes, things have been that hectic.)  Check out this article about Gulliver’s Books on the Northwest Booklovers website.  There are a couple of recommendations and some little tidbits about the bookstore (and Alaska) that you might not know.  There’s a link to one of my favorite knitting stores and an awesome ice cream shop.

Yesterday marked my five year anniversary at Gulliver’s.  I can’t believe I’ve been in Alaska that long.  Last week I decided I was going to bring brownies to celebrate, but then I clear forgot about it until Maria walked in with a box of goodies from her garden for me.  Among other things, I’ve got a Gadzooks Zuchini, some peppers, tomatoes, and other delicious homegrowns along with a lovely boquet of nasturtiums, parsley, and mint.  I just can’t believe I’ve been there for five years.  I suppose my over-stocked bookshelves are proof enough!