Shiny Object Syndrome

Keeping books vs. bookkeeping

In a post at the end of last year, I compared my business finances to those of the antiquarian bookseller / YouTuber Tom Ayling. He’s back with a video where an accountant, Rachel Harris, reviews his finances. Most booksellers would benefit from watching it.¹ Book collectors interested in the reality of the rare book trade will also find it illuminating.

My favorite part is when the accountant tells Tom, “your business model is dopamine-fueled Shiny Object Syndrome that lets you buy books before you’ve paid yourself” (at 11:18).

Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS) is the best description I’ve heard for the magpie sensibility of most booksellers. The accumulation of pretty things is essential for our businesses, and most of us struggle to rein it in. Many of my colleagues have long ago given up trying to keep book acquisition in check.

Some booksellers excuse their unrestrained purchasing because they plan to retire on their inventory. It’s not impossible. Ben and Lou Weinstein, of Heritage Book Shop in Los Angeles, successfully convinced the Bloomsbury auction house to overpay for Heritage’s closing inventory. If you don’t recognize the Bloomsbury name, that’s because they went out of business shortly thereafter. That the Weinsteins pulled off such an impressive exit is not surprising—they were two of the most successful booksellers of their generation.

Most booksellers, including this one, are not in the Weinsteins’ league. The expectation that our stale stock will produce riches at auction is not realistic. Usually, booksellers buy less as we age. With fewer new acquisitions, aging booksellers get along by selling off their better old inventory. At last, all that’s left are the books they overpaid for, books with condition issues, and books that used to be popular. Those are the books that go to auction. Is it any wonder that prices usually disappoint?

At the end of Ayling’s video, Ms. Harris tells Tom that he needs to pay himself three times his current salary.

Years ago, when I worked for a downtown association, we often consulted with business owners looking to sell their shops as they approached retirement age. When selling a business, one of the key questions is how profitable is it? Part of answering that is figuring out how much it would cost to hire an employee to replace the owner. What’s left over is the true profit of the business. Most business owners—booksellers included—typically say you can’t hire an employee to do what they do.

Nonsense. Think of all the publicly traded companies. Apple, for example, makes billions of dollars each year staffed entirely by employees, not founders or owners.

So it’s not impossible for a bookseller to replace themselves with an employee. It’s just expensive. It might mean hiring the head of the rare books department of an auction house or luring a highly paid expert from one of the top firms. In short, employees with six-figure salaries.

If a bookseller isn’t paying themselves as much as it would cost to hire a comparable employee, then the business owner, of which Tom is a good example, is subsidizing their business with free labor.

Predictably, the comments on Tom and Ms. Harris’s video, from customers and booksellers alike, suggested that working with books was its own reward.

“There is a lot of value in having a job you love to do everyday rather than just focusing on the bottom line.”

and

“[Ms. Harris] failed to mention the love and satisfaction [Tom] gets from buying and owning these books, if even for a brief time. This is a legitimate value and satisfaction that should be taken into consideration.”

On their face, I can’t disagree with those sentiments. I think working with books is great, that’s why it has been my full-time job for 25 years. There are engineers at Apple who think that being on the iPhone team is also a dream come true. I’m pretty sure they don’t go to their managers and say, You know, I love my job so much, please pay me less. Why should booksellers be expected to underpay themselves?

One of the main benefits of working for yourself is that you can do things that don’t make good business sense. I frame these as luxuries I buy myself—they are part of my compensation. The best example is that I hate exhibiting at book fairs and always have. Once I no longer needed to go to shows to make a living, I stopped going. I would make more money if I did. I would have a higher profile in the book trade if I did. I would have better relationships with special collections librarians if I did.

I deliberately make less money in order to not exhibit at fairs. One colleague put it this way: “If we see you at a fair, we’ll know to set up a GoFundMe campaign because you’ll need the money.” That’s about right.

But I want to reframe the idea that booksellers can’t pay themselves adequately.

When a bookseller’s pay is less than their replacement cost, they are subsidizing not just their business but their customers.

Most booksellers sell to private customers who make more money and have more wealth than they do. The librarians who buy from booksellers often have higher salaries than the bookseller, with top-of-the-line benefits and retirement packages added to their monetary compensation.

The libraries that buy books are part of entities (universities) with budgets in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

Those are the people and organizations benefiting from the underpaid work of booksellers. If a bookseller wants to support a library, they should make a donation, not undercharge for their work.

Ms. Harris told Tom Ayling (I’m paraphrasing) that what he’s really selling isn’t books, it’s the knowledge of what his customers want and the experience required to fulfill those desires. Good booksellers sell knowledge. The book is just the medium of exchange. For that reason, Ms. Harris said, Ayling needs to raise his prices.

In my previous post comparing Ayling to Downtown Brown Books, I suggested he needed to improve his margins. That can be done by raising prices. Another option is acquiring books at lower prices.

Ms. Harris also suggested that Tom curb Shiny Object Syndrome by paying himself first. That was the best lesson I learned from co-owning Fine Books & Collections magazine with Webb Howell. Webb told me that if you pay yourself first, you’ll be motivated to figure out how to pay all your other bills, mostly by selling more. I’ve found that to be true.

I also found it was easier to pay myself first if I pay myself often. Currently, I pay myself three times a week. Paying out frequent smaller amounts is a bit ridiculous, but it’s also easier on my psyche, so that’s how I do it. I also always give myself a raise in the fall. That’s necessary to at least keep my compensation in line with inflation.

Before I make myself out to be a better bookseller than Tom Ayling, I should make clear that I am not. In just two years of being in business, his annual sales already exceed mine after decades. I am good at cataloguing and research. I have also internalized the habit of paying myself better than many of my colleagues. I lack, however, the natural instinct about what and how to sell. When I am selling, I always feel like I’m speaking a foreign language. I know the vocabulary but I can conjugate the verbs on the fly.

Paying myself first helps keep my own case of Shiny Object Syndrome in check. The money to buy shiny objects is swept out of my account every other day. I can only spend what is left over. There is never any shortage of books to buy; what’s truly scarce is the willpower to buy only the best.

Yours in books,

Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books

1. If you aren’t British, you might be puzzled when Ms. Harris describes her review as an MOT (em-oh-tee). I googled MOT and the Internet said it stands for Ministry of Transport, which seemed wrong. But it wasn’t. In the UK, MOT is shorthand for the required annual inspection of British cars. From there, the term came into general use for any annual review. Sort of like if “smog check” had become a phrase meaning inspection.