Book Crusaders: Strategies for Independent Bookstores

Bookstore Crusaders

Strategies for Independent Bookstores

Pump up the Morale in Your Store

Part 9 of the 36-part “Book Wars” series of articles

by David A. Rozansky, Publisher, Flying Pen Press

Readers, Writers & Royalties columnist

May 8, 2009

Copyright 2009 David A. Rozansky

(Note: This is the 9th 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. In previous articles, I have discussed the first set of strategies from Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War. That set of strategies was focused on organizational and internal strategies. In this article, we look at the last of the internal strategies in Greene’s book, that of building strong morale among your staff and customers.

When it comes to fighting wars, there are two big challenges any general must face. The first is to create such strong morale in the troops that they will lay down their lives for the good of the army as a whole. The other is to win the hearts and minds of the populace; either the people being defended, or the people being conquered. These are no easy tasks.

In the world of commercial competition, it’s not so bloody, but morale is still an vital issue. Employees should want to make great sacrifices of their time and labor to help your store dominate the market, and your customers have to lay down their hard-earned money. It is not enough to pay reasonable wages or offer lower prices. These people must give of their hearts and minds.

This is yet another arena where the advantage goes to the independent bookseller. Large corporations, especially Amazon, spend considerable time and money collecting data on their customers: where do they shop, what do they buy, when do they spend money, and how much do they spend. With this blizzard of data, they generate long title lists, develop extensive ad campaigns, and target customers with email and reward programs. The independent bookseller’s “database” may not be as extensive, but goes much deeper.

The independent bookseller learns her customers’ names, learns about their habits and their lifestyles, learns how their families and businesses are doing, learns how they fit into the community. In essence, they become their customers’ friends. The database of the independent bookseller is not based so much on statistics and demographics, but on what is in each customer’s heart and mind.

The relationship with the staff is different, too. At the big box store or the large chain book-retailers, employees are programmed with policies and procedures. Their needs are left to a human relations department, which tries to fit the needs of all employees with generic, wide-ranging solutions. The independent shopkeeper, however, knows all the employees by name and hopefully treats them like family.

Greene gives us a list of eight ways that a leader can create high morale among her followers. Note that not all of these are warm and fuzzy. It is just as important that the staff be fearful of making egregious mistakes (for instance, calling a customer a bad name to his face) as they are excited to be recognized for a job well done.

Here is the list, with my interpretations for the book trade:

1. Unite your troops around a cause. Make them fight for an idea. In the third article of this series, I discussed Polarization, that is declaring war on the competition. In that article I stressed the importance of stating a moral reason for going to war, other than survival. Why is it important that your store survive and succeed in the face of the terrible and evil competition? Now it is time to make the staff and customers understand this reason, and make it seem as though they have a personal stake in the fight. If you lose in the competitive market, they stand to lose something of great value, as well. Perhaps they lose tax revenue for their community, or the sense of community that holds your neighborhood together. It could be their privacy or freedom of press that is at stake, Whatever it is, it has to be personal and meet their own selfishness and sense of righteousness.

2. Keep their bellies full. While ideals are grand, they do not put food on the table. Your employees won’t want to stick around if their pay is insufficient to pay their rent, and if your prices are too high, no manner of aggrandizement will pull your customers away from the big box stores and Amazon. Be aware of what your supporters need to be safe and happy, and be sure they get it. You don’t have to pay more than the competitor, or charge less than they do, but you have to be reasonable.

3. Lead from the front. Leaders lead. Followers will only follow leaders who lead. Leading means to be in front, not planning from the back office. Be there on the cash registers when the lines are long. Shelve books alongside your staff. Say hello to everyone, and be ready to clean toilets, dust shelves, and any other dirty job that comes along. When your people see you working hard, they will be compelled to work just as hard. This also works with the customers. Be a community leader, and the community will follow you and do business with you. And when they do come into your store, let them see you working hard at basic tasks that they can understand. They will always appreciate the extra mile you go for them. But if you run your business from the back room or a distant office, your staff will become resentful, and your customers will be apathetic.

4. Concentrate their ch’i. Ch’i is a Chinese concept of energy that flows through all of us. To translate this into American: Idle hands are the devil’s playground. Keep your people busy, even when there is nothing to do. There are always books to be shelved, books to be ordered, books to be dusted, books to be stripped. If nothing else, have them go through the catalogs of the smaller presses. Ch’i is also important in customer morale. When customers are in the store, keep them busy with things to browse, posters to read, book groups to talk to, video booktrailers to watch. If you have a store that features a coffeeshop or meeting space where they are encouraged to lounge, keep reading material and other pastime items nearby (oh, the power of free Wi-Fi). Even when the customers are not in the store, keep them busy. Community projects like read-a-thons, book groups and free workshops can go a long way towards keeping your name on your customers’ lips, even when they are nowhere nearby.

5. Play to their emotions. Every successful salesperson knows this. But be careful. Making a sudden appeal to their emotions is seen as pandering, and people will resist this. Lower their defenses by offering a humorous story or by opening with a harmless conversation. Once they are listening to you intently, hit them with the emotional appeal. Make them angry at the competition, make them love you. Use your best showmanship.

6. Mix Harshness and Kindness. If you hand out too many rewards to your staff, and too many sweet deals to your customers, they begin to take you for granted. Hand out too many reprimands to your staff, too many high prices for your customers, and their morale will be destroyed. Instead, make kindness rare, so that any praise has tremendous power to inspire, any discount motivates a purchase. Likewise, you should be just as stingy with your harshness, so that you need only a simple reprimand to motivate someone to work harder. Most of your harshness should be in the form of setting high standards that only a few can reach. Make your staff compete to please you, and make your customers compete to get your best deal.

7. Build the Group Myth. Here, Greene is talking about camaraderie. Camaraderie is the sense that you are part of an elite group, and that each person in the group can and must rely on all the others. This feeling of camaraderie comes about only when the group has gone through a tough time together. There are no other exercises that build this level of teamwork. So Greene recommends taking the group into difficult campaigns as often as possible. Have your staff take on tough projects that exact a little bit of stress, and see to it that they succeed at it as a team. When one employee stumbles, the entire staff needs to be there to pick her up. This also works for customers, but cannot be easily engineered. Rather, it is a matter of response. Whenever a customer is having a hard time, or disaster strikes the community, be there shoulder-to-shoulder with your customers, meeting the crisis. Comaraderie transcends even the greatest price war, and many a bookstore in financial trouble has been saved by customers who felt camaraderie with the storekeepers when the news of the store’s pending bankruptcy hit the newspapers..

8. Be Ruthless with Grumblers. Sooner or later, you will hire a disenchanted employee, and you will certainly have more than one unhappy customer. Disaffection spreads like wildfire, and must be cut off as soon as possible. Staff who lack motivation or enthusiasm have to be terminated, and quickly. Those who are highly motivated and enthusiastic should be rewarded. This is not to say that you should fire anyone who disagrees with you—it takes bravery to share a dissenting opinion with one’s boss, and such bravery should be cultivated—but anyone that speaks ill of the business will only stir up discordance. With customers, it is the same, but the ruthlessness is not to be directed at the customer, but rather at yourself. Everyone knows that in retail, the customer is always right. When the customer is unhappy, do anything and everything to make it right, and do it quickly, firing whoever you need to in the process. But there are customers that can never be satisfied, and it is best to cut that customer loose from your company. Think of it this way…if the customer is never happy, and her discontent is contagious, make her do business with your competitor.

Once you have established morale among your staff and customers, they will resist the advances of the competition with tremendous resolve. Use as many of these morale boosters as you can, and your store will become strong and victorious in the marketplace.

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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. As this series continues, Mr. Rozansky begins discussing defensive strategies, starting with the strategy of choosing battles carefully.

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).