Building a Better Bookstore

~ Cheryl

I am almost caught up with all of the backlog that built up over June and July, so I should soon be able to start thinking about how to improve the Wizard’s Tower bookstore. Top of my list is to add automatic downloads to Kindle and Ibis, because convenience seems to trump just about everything else where customers are concerned, but there must be other things I can do as well.

Gary and Jonathan were talking about one of the problems in the latest Coode Street podcast. If you go to Amazon and ask for SF&F books there are apparently more than 72,000 to choose from. Many of those are going to be spam books. Those that Amazon promotes will be promoted because their publisher has paid to have them promoted. So how do you know what to buy?

Today Foyles posted the results of a Twitter survey on what people want from a bricks and mortar bookstore. Smell is going to be a bit difficult to reproduce, but what about some of the other things? Could they be done online?

So, over too you lot. What would you like to see me do with the store?

13 thoughts on “Building a Better Bookstore”

  1. Can you do magazine subscriptions? I’d like to subscribe to some of the fiction magazines but I don’t particularly want to do it through Amazon, so if I could sign up for (say) a year of Clarkesworld via Wizard’s Tower I’d do it that way instead. Getting it sent straight to Kindle would be great, but just getting an email with a download link would be fine. It’s the reminder that there is a new issue and I should go grab it that I want, and the convenience of just doing one transaction.

    1. Subscriptions is definitely on my list of things to look at. I’ll need to talk to people like Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace to see how they want such things to work, because the magazine publishers need to be happy with whatever I implement.

  2. OOOh – what Liz said – I’d LOVE to subscribe to a year of Clarkesworld through your store! I’d want more choices than Kindle tho, as I don’t have a reader at present – an email w/ d/l is how I’d prefer it.

    A couple of other things come to mind:
    I suspect adding US currency would improve ease of use for US customers – at present, I see only UK prices and have to translate in my head.

    Perhaps changing the links in the left nav into buttons (I’m thinking a look and feel thing, not a change in mechanics) – text isn’t as obvious to the avg. buyer as something that looks like a button. Wouldn’t have to move, just be more “buttony” – alternately, you could put some buttons just above the featured products graphic line (books, mags, donations).

    I LOVE the drop down menus at the top and the featured products.

    1. See my reply to Liz re subscriptions.

      US currency is on the list, as is Euro. Unfortunately I’ve not found any existing store software that supports multi-currency. The only way to do it is to create separate stores for each currency. That’s not too hard if I can automate the updates, but a real pain if I have to update three stores rather than one each time there’s a new book to add. It also means three times the hosting costs.

      Look and feel is entirely up in the air. The store software I’m using right now doesn’t allow for much customization beyond page structure, so I’ll need to switch the software I’m using.

        1. Looking at their website, I suspect they will be at least an order of magnitude more expensive that the software I have now.

  3. I don’t know if I’m just not seeing it, but is there a way to sort the titles in your bookstore by author? I’d like to do that.

    If a book is part of a series, it should be clearly visible on the individual book’s product page. It’d also be helpful to have links to the other books in the series on the page. (I’m looking at Gemma Files’s books and the information is not readily available)

    Automatic downloads to Kindle would be nice. It’d also be nice to be able to see the prices in €, but I understand how that might be impossible.

    One thing physical books have over ebooks is that the lenght is visible. I’m much more likely to buy a modest 300 page volume than a 1000 page doorstopper. When I buy an ebook, I still want to know how long the book is. There’s only so many hours in a day and I don’t want to commit to reading something that’s going to take me weeks to finish. Not sure how to make this possible in an online bookstore that only deals with ebooks, but I wanted to mention it anyway in the hopes that someone smarter than me has an idea.

    I like how you’ve split the catalogue into novels, collections etc. I don’t read short stories so it’s really helpful for me to be able to see only novels.

    Oops, that became loger than I thought it would. I’ll stop now.

  4. The store software I am using has recently issued an update that may allow me to implement search by author, and if so I shall add it, but certainly better searching and sorting are on my to do list.

    The trouble with showing prices in € is that I don’t know what exchange rate PayPal will use. If there is some means of querying them it might be possible, but I’d rather not show a price than show the wrong price and have people complaining. Ideally I want to be able to price in $ and € as well as in £, but as I noted above that’s hard.

    Page length data is rather complicated, because with an ebook the number of “pages” depends on the size of the screen you are using to view of the book. File size isn’t helpful either, as the book may contain illustrations, which can be very large. Would quoting the number of pages in the paper edition help?

    And do please keep coming up with ideas.

    2. Fictionwise’s way is an option, but for old geezers like me, the paperback or hardback edition page number would be fabu!

      Also – small thing – but the software asks me to put things in my “basket” when picking, but has a “cart” sitting on the top of the page – consistent wording might make a diff to some folk.

    3. Word count would be great; I’ve never understood page count for something without pages, though. 😉

      Sorry, no bright ideas here (well, none that weren’t already mentioned).

  5. Hmm – another thing that comes to mind – instead of a paragraph of Who We Are on the Home page, consider putting that under that “About” link and give us a subtitle that does some of the same job:

    Wizard’s Tower Bookstore: Worldwide provider of Ebooks & Emags

    (or something like that :>)

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