Changing the Picture Book Shelves

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From Publishers Weekly:

We’ve been struggling with our picture book section at the shop for some time now, and by “struggling” I mean that while the category is selling well once we locate the suggested title, often the finding of that exact book has been a bit of a challenge for frontline booksellers in a hurry. The last two years have seen big growth in nonfiction sales, and while some of these fit nicely in that “Who Was….” spinner from Penguin, there’s a LOT happening outside those charming little biographies. We have seen an uptick in interest in nonfiction all over the store, from coding books to germ science, sports to baking. Feminist girl power books, yoga how-to’s (I’m still waiting for someone to do “Can Your Mama Asana?”) and lots of history are getting picture book treatment; our increased sales show that these subjects are definitely in our customers’ bedtime story rotation.

Currently, we have nonfiction sections scattered around the store: Biography, History, Science (which is actually several bookshelves, including anatomy, weather and natural disasters, physical sciences and then project type books), Space (which gets its own shelf), Vehicles and Transportation (there is nothing as powerful as a digger in a children’s bookstore), Dinosaurs, Spy, Magic (this is the how-to section, versus the magical fiction category), Cooking, Animals (arranged alphabetically by species, not author) and then general parenting and bibliotherapy: Potty Training, New Baby, and Big Sibling – the holy trinity of the preschool parents.

. . . .

Specific childhood issues from sleeping to school issues are grouped by age, and there’s a good-sized section of books about puberty, sexuality and personal health.  All of those sections are ideally next to non-book displays that cross-sell well with those titles, (like the volcano kits near Natural Disasters, although I could make a case for those to be placed by potty training, too, I suppose)

. . . .

Most of these nonfiction sections are a mixture of early readers, small paperbacks, and larger hardcovers, relying more on their subject similarity for grouping than reading level. This is a particularly “kid lit land” kind of problem – in a general bookstore, all the animal books are grouped together, regardless of text difficulty. In kids’ stores, we have whole sections devoted just to a particular reading level and/or format – so, does Bears Are Curious go in the animal section, or on the early reader spinner (top two tiers for Level One) and if a second grader who is working on a report about grizzlies comes in, where do we direct him first?

Picture books, however, have always had their own long wall, and while they are the #3 selling category by quantity for us, they are the biggest seller in dollars.

. . . .

Late last Friday afternoon (where all good inspiration lives, between gift wrapping birthday presents for the weekend and debating the staff pizza order) we decided that we would just pull all the nonfiction titles out of picture books that were not already classified and give them their own section. We’d not only pull them, but we’d create a “nonfiction picture book” category in the POS system for these titles that allowed staffers to find them easily, and change all the shelf location fields in their description.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG very rarely visits physical bookstores these days, but back in the time when he did visit bookstores, he had a mindmap of the location of sections he would consult for new reading materials. Perhaps he’s an outlier, but he would not have appreciated his preferred books being scattered around the store.

OTOH, it’s been a long time since PG has been a kid, so he might enjoy running all over a bookstore to find things.