We hold a sale every three months. We take all the boxes of clearance books from the shed and put them on display. They are five bucks each or five for ten dollars. A steal. Between times we funnel good books that won't fit on the shelves into the clearance boxes and move on the less good ones, in preparation for the next sale.

We are getting to the end of the beginning of this bookstore journey. The big physical changes are mostly made. The books are less numerous, better quality, and more orderly. We have run a few events and hired out the space a few times. The space is ready for people. The question is how to get them along.

Happy birthday to us. We bought the store a year ago on 1 August. It seems like both a long time ago and no time at all. So how are we going on saving the bookstore, you might ask.

We post a book of the day on Facebook and on our website every day. We recently switched from posting to Facebook via the website to posting directly to Facebook. This means a little extra work: we have to create each post twice. But it turns out that content that we post directly gets nearly three times as much visibility on Facebook.

In the last post I presented some info on what books we have and what books we sell. In this post I want to talk about what we can learn from those numbers for the types of books we should have.

Is our shelf of Minette Walters going to follow me to my grave? Should we get in more literature or more self-help books? Or are books about dreams or crystals or gardening more likely to be the thing?

I updated the numbers on the point in a previous post on whether removing Paywave has meant a higher proportion of payments by EFTPOS instead of credit card. And it definitely seems like it has.

Our brand promise is Out of this World. One of the ways we deliver on that promise is through our instore environment. Right on Ponsonby Road, but a million miles away in hustle and bustle. Here is the original wonky walkthrough video I sent to Julie a year ago. And another version I shot just now (I walked a bit quicker the second time soz).