Friday 16 January 2009

Poetry, retail and the recession

Since Christmas I have noticed increased poetry sales in the bookshop and wonder if this is anything to do with the recession and all the gloomy news of job cuts.

Poetry is not a large section in the shop and frankly it doesn’t need to be as sales are for the most part anthologies of poetry written by the traditional well-known poets, modern poetry that one needs special training to understand like visual art’s equivalent, hardly sells at all.

Despite the general level of retail gloom sales in the bookshop are keeping up fairly well and I think there are a number of factors contributing to this.

The first being that with the museum closures and all three branches of Albion bookshops closing (although not the secondhand one in the old chapel in Broadstairs) I have lost pretty much all of my outlets for the local books I publish, meaning that those people in Thanet that want them have to come here or buy them from us online.

The second being that the majority of our stock in modern high quality stock that competes with the new full price bookshops more than other secondhand bookshops, as two on these have closed in the Thanet towns we are seeing increased sales.

The third being that people are being much more careful with their money so are coming to us first in the hope that they will find the book they want secondhand.

The fourth being the large numbers of bankruptcies at the moment means we have more than the usual amount of new books at secondhand prices.

Sorry the pictures of the poetry books didn’t come out very well click here to look at them.

A further bright note is that several of the empty shops in Ramsgate now have “let” signs on them and I notice a cycle shop is opening over the road from us here in King Street.

2 comments:

  1. Michael, in my role as 'resident philistine' to the Council, I have to say, apart from 'A childs anthology of verses' Poetry leaves me colder than a crab on the sands at Minnis Bay. So , unless you have a copy of the afore-mentioned tome, I will not be boosting your sales anytime soon

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry to say Ken that according to the British Library catalogue no title 'A childs anthology of verses' exists or has ever existed, I will however feature our gardening section some time which is probably more up your street.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.