Re: [AGA-mcm] Advertising in TFH and selling a book

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, Cheryl Rogers wrote:

> However, to my knowledge, no one in AGA-land is actively seeking new gems to 
> offer. I am not volunteering for this. Repeat, I am not volunteering for 
> this. :-)  But it would be nice if someone were on the look-out for those 
> hard-to-find, as yet undiscovered books.

That is the trick, of course.  FYI, Diana has actually NEVER gone out and 
found a new book to sell -- I beleive all her leads were generated by Neil 
or Gomberg.  Her own book was suggested by the board.  The last new one 
was Aquarium Plants Handbook, which was really an update to the Oriental 
catalog, and they approached us with the idea.  It works because it's not 
really a book, per se, and nobody else cares to carry it.  Cool.  But how 
many books that are any good fall into that category?  Not much, anymore. 
Used to be the case, pre-Amazon and pre-micro-businesses like AB or 
Florida Driftwood.

But anyway, yeah, I think Diana isn't really interested in researching new 
ideas, just selling them.  I did find it interesting, though, that she 
recently offered to take care of shipping "some copies of the DVDs and 
archive CD" as some folks had been ordering them with books (I politely 
declined -- I have a system!).

If there's anything we're going to carry in the future, I suspect it will 
have to be either "enhancements" like Diana's autographed book, "one-shot 
imports" like Amano's book if not available domestically (which might not 
be a bad thing to carry a few of if the Senskes don't already), or in 
those rare cases, "exclusives" like with Oriental.

The other thing to consider, is just not worrying about the bookstore, and 
instead concentrate our efforts on the other areas.  Diana does a good job 
at what she does, but it's not the major focus of the AGA to me.  This is 
why I have sunk all my effort into AGA-produced material that we can offer 
exclusively.

  - Erik

--
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
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