Some Thoughts On In-Store Events & Efficiency
I recently got an email from a customer, in response to an announcement I’d sent out about the store’s fifth year anniversary celebration: “Surely events are the best way to celebrate a bookstore.”
“Should they get the polite store response or my own personal response?” I asked a colleague. Though I chose simply to delete, I was vexed.
Prior to the pandemic, we had a robust events calendar of around 2-3 a week. Touring authors, local authors, authors we requested, authors who’d requested us. It ran the gamut. Since fully reopening after shelter-in-place in 2021, we’ve scheduled but three in-store events, and have made no assurances nor noise that a “calendar of events” was in the offing.
It’s been nice “just” being a bookstore. Regular hours with regular tasks come with sufficient irregularities to never quite be monotonous. It’s been nice not playing beauty pageant to impress publicists. It’s been nice not stressing over attendance, introductions, Q&As, order quantities and returns, effects of weather or sporting events, etc. What’s more, it’s been nice that just being a bookstore has also coincided with our best sales ever.
And yet, naturally, people do wonder, “You are going to start doing events again, right?” It’s a natural assumption. Events have been baked into the DNA of many people’s in-store experiences. Independent bookstores, in particular, have cited events as what distinguishes them from Amazon and a rationale for being supported by customers.
None of this is wrong per se. Who am I to argue with people’s experiences? And perhaps, depending on the store, it may not even be incorrect. The thing is, far too often we don’t talk very openly about what we mean by a successful event. (A big exception to what I’m going to say are overtly ideologically-driven spaces, where the primary purpose is activism or overt community-building, and matters of sales and broad marketing are secondary if they exist at all)
It may sound shocking to people who know me or who visit my store, but efficiency is the key to everything we do. Being efficient at the core of our business (namely, in terms of staffing and dividing up responsibilities) is what allows us to be so indulgently inefficient about so much beyond the core. With this in mind, I thought it might be helpful to quantify what an efficient event looks like for us.
Without getting too deep into the weeds or specifics, let’s start with a basic financial premise. Every store has a certain end-of-day average they consider good enough. And let’s not sell our people short; we must make sure that “good enough” is human-centered and reflects an ability to increase wages and benefits, versus just keeping the lights on. For the sake of argument, let’s say that number is $2500-$3000 sales a day. (Obviously, that’s going to be comically low for some stores and optimistically high for others. Scale this up or down as appropriate.)
If a store does business seven days a week, chances are they’re open 60-70 hours p/ week. Let’s go halfway, and say that puts us at $300 (in gross sales) p/hour as getting a store to where it needs to be. Whatever this number is for a store, it seems to me a reasonable baseline to begin thinking about an efficient event. This is especially true if events effectively shut down the rest of a store’s regular business, due to its size or centrality of the events space.
If an average in-store event set-up, the actual happening of the event, and clean-up takes on average about three hours, and you need $300 p/ hour, the gross sales tally says we need to sell about 25-30 hardcovers / 40-50 paperbacks. Remember, I’m talking here about a medium- to small store, whose average attendance for events is likely going to be around 20-30. Already, the paperback events are in a little trouble: attendees are either going to have to buy multiple copies of the event book or buy other stuff they maybe can’t immediately access or see in the store because we’ve had to rearrange everything to make room for the chairs. (Let’s not even get into the weeds of the dreaded sales::attendance ratio.) The point is: it’s already cutting it tight in terms of efficiency.
As anybody who has planned a party knows, though, more time is spent planning (& paying for) an event than actually enjoying it. Talking to in-store event planners around the country, a vast majority agree that an average event takes between 7-10(+) hours. Let’s go conservative, and say eight, which minus the three hours described above us with five hours to fit into our efficiency measurement.
There are a few ways we could approach this. Maybe a store has a dedicated events person, at which point they might responsibly use their salary / hourly wage to measure. If that’s the case, you’re only adding a few extra copies to what you need. But if you’re like my store, and so many others, the person responsible for events is also working the register, or they’re (re)ordering books, or they’re receiving/shelving. Or the untold number of other tasks it takes to operate a store during the day. In which case, I think it makes more sense to divide the hourly sales expectation by the number of people working. If you’re like us and have three people working each day ($300 + 3), that gets us to $100 p/hour. Multiply that by five hours of emailing publicists, making Instagram posts, emailing people cc’d by the publicists, finding somebody to be in conversation with your person, researching the author for a fantastic introduction, creating a webpage, tracking the boxes, troubleshooting when tracking goes awry, assembling for returns … all the stuff that goes into doing right by an author and an event. And this is done for every event, whether for the biggest name or the scrappiest of self-published. The basic napkin math now says we need to sell another 15 or so hardcovers / 25 paperbacks.
All told, an efficient event sales requirement is around 45-50 hardcovers / 65-75 softcovers … again, to an average audience of 25-35, in spaces that get a little crowded at 50 people. Is that possible? Of course. Does it usually happen? Not even close.
And even then, maybe it’s still worth it! On the boring fiscal side, maybe you win a couple of well-heeled customers who would have never heard of you without the event, and they over time make this seemingly inefficient event a slow-burn sort of efficient. But, is it just me, or does that sound like gambling?
More likely, it’s worth it because you or your staff had a great time, and you showed the author and attendees a great time. Good experiences were had, and your store is part of that experience. None of what I’m saying is denying or diminishing that. The question of efficiency I’m posing isn’t directed at any single event, because you’ll always have your favorites for which you can make great cases.
The issue is that of programming. That is, the imposition of a calendar on a space that is maybe not really fit for it. Furthermore, it’s the implication that events are doing stores a big favor by bringing them traffic and business. See above … that’s a definite sometimes. More often than not, there are reasons beyond finances that make for the best events, and in the name of efficiency these occurrences have to be in our eyes pretty special.
Which is to say, to rephrase my apparent customer, sometimes not doing events is the best way to celebrate a bookstore.