WHAT GOES ON IN THE BOOKSHOP?
Similar tasks are performed in all bookshops, however large or small they are. The central activity, of course, is buying books at one price from a publisher or wholesaler, and selling them at a higher price to the customer in the shop. Everything else that goes on in the bookshop is intended to snake that central activity work as smoothly and profitably as possible. These are some of the main tasks that bookshop staff perform:

Dealing with Customers
This is the most public part of a bookseller's work, and arguably the most crucial. As far as customers are concerned, even the newest and most junior member of staff is the bookshop, and when people say they particularly like a certain bookshop, they are probably thinking as much of the informed and pleasant helpfulness of the sales staff as of the shop's stock range and general appearance. Creating the right impression, however, is not just a matter of smiling sweetly and taking the customers' money.

Most bookshop customers like to be left alone to browse along the shelves, and most bookshops encourage their customers to do so because experience shows that this increases the number of books sold. But there are times when customers need help or advice, and the skilled bookseller recognizes when to remain in the background and when to come forward with a polite and friendly offer of assistance.

Quite apart from a detailed knowledge of the shop's stock and a wider knowledge of books generally, the sales assistant also needs to know how to operate the till, accept payments by cheque or credit card, deal with Book Tokens, take special customer orders, handle telephone orders or enquiries, and possibly correspondence and mail orders too.

And then there are those awkward customers who have to be dealt with calmly and diplomatically: customers looking for a specific title but able to provide only the vaguest description of it; customers complaining about the books, the shop or even yourself; customers who treat sales assistants as if they were an inferior breed of humanity; 'customers' whom you suspect of being shop lifters looking for an opportunity to steal. These and others will try your patience and test your skills, not just as a bookseller but as a human being.

Bibliographical Work
Customers often want titles beyond those stocked on a bookshop's shelves, and booksellers need to know how to find out such things as who publishes a particular title, what it costs, how many pages it has, whether it's a hardback or a paperback, what other books are available on the same subject, and so on.

Information of this kind is to be found in a variety of trade bibliographies and catalogues, some published annually, some monthly, some weekly. Some are issued in a conventionally printed form, others are on microfiche, others again are supplied on compact discs which can only be used with special computer equipment.

The confident and efficient use of this trade bibliographical material is an essential bookselling skill, and you will have to learn it very early in your career.

Buying
Buying means selecting titles for stock. With well over 400,000 different titles in print, and even a fairly large bookshop typically stocking no more than 20,000 - 30,000 of them, the business of stock selection demands a high level of skill and knowledge. The buyer aims to stock the sort of books that the shop's customers will want to buy; if he or she gets it wrong and the books remain unsold on the shelves, the shop will quickly get into financial trouble.

Buying is usually left to the manager or other senior staff. In some shops there may even be one or more staff for whom buying is a full-time job - seeing reps, studying catalogues, evaluating new titles, and so on. At the other extreme, some shops allow quite junior staff to be involved in buying, perhaps making a sales assistant personally responsible for a small subject section of the stock, not only keeping it dusted and tidy, and being specially knowledgeable about it, but also reordering as necessary and making decisions about which new titles to take into the shop. Having at least a say in the buying makes you feel more personally committed to the whole bookshop operation. In some bookselling chains, buying is done centrally, buyers at head office selecting stock for all the shops in the group. Branch managers are then either allocated stock from the central warehouse or make their own selections from it. Either way, local managers are not quite as free to determine the general character of their own stock range as they would be if they were able to buy direct from publishers or wholesalers.

The way a bookshop's buying is done, and by whom, has an important bearing on the general character of the shop, and what it is like to be a customer in that shop or a member of its staff.

Stock Control
Bookshops have far more different items in stock than other retailers of comparable size. Somehow booksellers have to keep track of what's happening to each of their thousands of titles -often stocked only in ones or twos - so that they know what is selling well and needs to be reordered, and what is selling badly and should perhaps be dropped.

The routines for monitoring the stock and ensuring that the right quantities of the right titles are always on the shelves are collectively known as stock control. Some shops use card systems for stock control, keeping a record card for each separate title in stock, or, in some cases, for each separate book. Checking the shelf stock and updating the cards takes a great deal of staff time. Increasingly, shops are moving away from card systems to electronic stock control. Title - by - title information is held on a computer, sometimes automatically updated as sales are rung up on the till. The latter is known as an electronic point-of-sale system, or EPOS for short.

Order Processing
A continuous stream of orders goes from booksellers to publishers, wholesalers and, in the case of
branch bookshops, to the groups' central warehouses. These orders may be written or typed for mailing, or telephoned through, or entered on a special keyboard for electronic transmission.

Book deliveries have to be unpacked and checked against invoices and orders. Stock control records have to be updated. Special orders have to be identified and put aside for the customers who ordered them. Stock titles have to be shelved.

Unless accounts are dealt with by a department at head office, suppliers' bills have to be settled regularly. This may involve collating invoices with statements, writing cheques, addressing envelopes and so on. All in all, there's a continuous buzz of behind-the-scenes activity that staff are engaged in to keep the shelves full and to meet customers' special requirements.

General Housekeeping
The shop, its fixtures and fittings must be kept clean and tidy: books have to be dusted and floors vacuumed. Shelves that are starting to look bare because books have been sold have to be replenished, if possible, or rearranged if not - perhaps turning one or more books face outwards to fill the extra space. Window displays need special attention. Cash has to be banked. Security and safety regulations affecting both customers and staff must be strictly observed. A lot of this general housekeeping is routine and rather dull: it is, however, all part of the job.

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