Do book shops only stock bestsellers?

[Stephen Palmer]

I worked for Waterstones for eight years, a lot of which I spent running the SF&F section, in addition to my duties as manager of the stock room. During that time, using my grasp of the genre, I almost doubled the sales of books from that section. Then Waterstones introduced centralised recommendations and buying, and all my expertise was lost. Sales dipped. I was, needless to say, rather disappointed.

 

[Kissmequick]

I think perhaps it's just your local branch, Brian. My local Waterstones has a FAB SFF section, but then several of the staff are massive fans. Not just bestsellers (or I wouldn't be in there!). They also do great displays (Angry Robot one month, great UF the next etc etc)

Next town over, there are two Waterstones (within a few hundred yards of each other too!). One has a much bigger SFF section than the other, because, as they told me, they tend to specialise. So teh bigger shop only has the basics of SFF, but a huge general fiction section, but the smaller one has a really great selection of SFF

In the end, it's always going to come down to the individual staff/manager. If the manager thinks SFF is just for teenage boys into D&D and that lit fiction is where it's at, it's going to reflect in what s/he orders in.

 

[Montero]

Libraries - certainly in our county library, you can make recommendations to them for the next time they buy sff (preferably with a couple of good reasons why/review text from somewhere). I do this by email and they buy at least half of what I recommend. (I'm talking them buying maybe 6 new books I recommended in a year, so not a vast amount, but it helps to showcase authors they haven't already got.)

So - in terms of the quality of SFF sections in bookstores - this one especially to folks who worked in bookstores - is there any mileage in writing (emailing) say a Waterstones and saying "look, how about stocking x, y and z, they are popular books with older sff readers - would be great to see them on the shelf".

Or in other words, if some shops are much better than other ones, is there anything we can do as readers to sort it?