Having looked on the system, Nottingham Bridlesmith have both Waylander and Wolf in Shadow in stock, but they only came in yesterday. Legend is not in stock, but it is on order.
So, they were sold, and then re-ordered as I suspected. Books can take a few days sometimes to make it from the totes they arrive in onto the shelves - what we always encourage people to do is simply ask a member of staff if there's a specific book they're looking for, because we can look up which tote it arrived in and, if it's not yet shelved, go and get the book from the back of store
The main problem for this is that model stock of authors like Gemmell is only one copy, due to the pathetic market share sci-fi and fantasy holds. Something like 5-6%, and in actual stores that figure is closer to 3%, since a lot of SFF is bought from online retailers, more so than other genres.
Where a genre like crime can afford to order vast numbers of fairly obscure books, due to their market share being closer to 15% (We had 80 copies of the new paperback of Three Seconds arrive last week, after having sold 3 copies of the hardback in 6 months). This book has been ordered for us by head office due to being on a special offer, so even if we don't want the books, they still send them to us.
The main problem Waterstone's faces with stock levels is that model stock - books that are always stocked is dictated from head office, not by each individual store. For example, David Eddings is no longer listed as model stock, despite still being quite a good seller. This is a decision handed down from on high, with stores having no input, so I have to now manually order a copy of each of his books when we sell one.
This comes back to the model stock problem - since in SFF I've never seen a book with a model stock level higher than 1 copy (this may be different in bigger stores, but only in exceptional cases), any orders for extras copies are only made by a store if the book is constantly selling well. And for Gemmell this simply doesn't happen - as I said in my earlier post, we haven't sold any for months, and in fact are looking at taking some off the shelves because we need more room in that particular bay for authors like Feist, Gaiman and Peter Hamilton, who are all bigger sellers.
