Don't Repeat Your Victories: Strategies for...

Don’t Repeat Your Victories

Strategies for Independent Bookstores

Don’t fall into a pattern

Part 4 of the 36-part “Book Wars” series of articles

by David A. Rozansky, Publisher, Flying Pen Press

April 22, 2009

(Note: This is the 4th article in the “Book Wars” series of articles, a series of articles where the author interprets the strategies taught in The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene, and applies them to the business of the independent bookseller, in the arena of the difficult book trade. The first article in this series can be read at http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977657920.)

This series of articles discusses how war strategies can be applied to the book trade for the benefit of the independent bookseller. So far, I have discussed the Warrior Spirit and the strategy of Defining Your Enemy. Now I will discuss how important it is to keep from forming patterns. It’s a tougher objective than one might think. Robert Green states in his book, The 33 Strategies of War, that this strategy of avoiding patterns requires waging war on your own mind, because the mind strives to create patterns out of everything.

It is only natural that in any competition, whether it is war or bookselling, all competitors will strategize to get the upper hand. This begins by studying the competition, to see how they operate. If the competition closes each day at 5 p.m., we can gain more business by staying open until 6 p.m.

But while we study the enemy, the enemy is studying us. They are making plans based on our patterns, just as we plan our strategies based on their patterns.

The enemy has a difficult time of it, though, when you have no patterns. There is no way to know what you will do next if you do something different all the time.

This can be especially insidious when the enemy is looking for a pattern in your random actions. The mind forces a person to find a pattern, whether or not a pattern is there…it is one of the first things our minds do after we are born. Forcing the opponent to create strategies on the perceived patterns in random noise is sure to lead that opponent off track.

However, creating random strategies is not easy. As small business owners, we want to find the secret formula to success. In all things, this makes it easier. For most of our operations, we want procedures that we can teach our staff and follow every day for maximum efficiency and profit. We don’t want to have to think. But when it comes to actually competing in the marketplace, if our big sale hurts the competition, the competition will immediately find a way to counter such a tactic the very next time. The worse the competition is hurt, the more energy he will pour into finding a counterstrategy, and when you try the same sale, it will not have the same success it had before.

The answer, then, is to keep trying new things. If you find something that was successful, realize that it can’t work a second time, either because it will be countered, or because everyone who has seen your success will imitate it, or both.

Here is an example. Many long years ago, there was a time when the chain stores were cramped spaces in the malls, while independent bookstores were often cramped stores in strip malls or off-avenue boutiques. The Tattered Cover Bookstore here in Denver brought forth something new. They moved into the building left behind by a failed department store, a four-story monster of a building. They filled it head to toe with one of the largest selections of books ever seen at that point, and had a very liberal check-acceptance policy. They did something that was unheard of to most in the book trade—the store put in large wing chairs for customers to sit and to read the books, without first having to buy them.

The Tattered Cover’s sales took off, and it became a local icon. The trade publications noticed, and pretty soon, Tattered Cover was seen as one of the premiere independent bookstores in the country.

The chain stores caught on fast. They began renting larger spaces, until they no longer rented a few hundred square feet in a mall, but rather tens of thousands of square feet in stand-alone buildings and anchor storefronts. They filled the room with books of all kinds, they put in comfortable chairs, they added coffee shops, and they eased up on their return and purchase terms. And because they had the purchasing power of a national chain, they could beat the prices of stores like Tattered Cover.

Pretty soon, Tattered Cover found itself losing ground. It had to change its ways. The owner pulled the Tattered Cover out of its legendary home in the department-store building and moved to a urban renewal project, a closed down theater on the infamous Colfax Avenue. Claiming that the store wanted to help with the important project of making Colfax a better place (and knowing the people who work there, I believe it’s a sincere claim), the store found its renaissance. It moved into a neighborhood that cannot support a large chain store because of how the neighborhood is laid out and the demographics that are unappealing to chain-store executives, yet that neighborhood is very much a book-loving marketplace with a bohemian atmosphere.

As a result, Tattered Cover has regained its presence as Denver’s leading bookstore. It is a lesson that has not been lost on other independent stores in the area.

Strategizing is a creative process. There is no magic formula that results in business success. Innovation, inspiration and intuition are the tools needed to win in the book wars. Customers want something different, and competitors hate it when you do anything different. So be different. Don’t fight the same battles over and over again. Fight new battles, win new markets, engage new marketing campaigns. Drive the competition crazy trying to figure you out

So, Book Warriors, do you have any examples of how success cannot be repeated through the same means?

This is just one article in David A. Rozansky’s column, Readers, Writers & Royalties, a blog column about the book trade, from writing and publishing, to selling and reading. This series of articles—“Book Wars”—is an interpretation of the strategies listed in Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War, as they apply to the independent bookseller. His next article examines the importance of keeping one’s mind in the game, called Presence of Mind.

Readers may find archived articles or subscribe to Readers, Writers & Royalties at www.ReadWriteRoyalty.Gather.com. Subscribe to all of Mr. Rozansky’s articles at www.FlyingPenPress.Gather.com.

David A. Rozansky is the publisher of Flying Pen Press. He has been in publishing since 1987, and has more than one million published words under his byline. Flying Pen Press is at http://www.FlyingPenPress.com. He is available for speaking on the subject of writing magazine articles, public relations, marketing and book-length material.

The book mentioned in this article is The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene (Penguin Books, 2007, ISBN 978-0-14-311278-5, trade ppb, $18.00).