Goodbye Retail, Hello Real Life



Coolest thing ever!


That's right ladies and gentlemen, I am no longer a slave to retail! It's been almost two weeks since I worked my last shift at the bookstore and I've been meaning to write a sort of goodbye post since then but I've been super busy. I took advantage of my first official weekend off and went on a road trip to visit Waterloo. Amazing time, but that's not the point of this post. Instead, I will write a bit about what I'll actually miss about working with books.

But first, check out the site that this wicked awesome picture came from! Gotta love other Harry Potter obsessed people.
Righto, to the point!

As much as I may have complained about my job at the bookstore (and trust me, it was a lot...ask any of my friends), it was actually a decent job to have during school. I got to work with books all the time, see what was popular and selling, and get great recommendations from customers. The discount didn't hurt either. :)
I gave it quite a bit of thought and I think my favourite thing about the job was being able to recommend books to people and get them excited and interested in something new. It was always great to spend some time with a customer and finally find just the right book for them to read. The customers that valued my time and opinion were the best. They knew I knew what I was talking about and took my recommendations seriously. The people who drove me nuts were the ones who wanted something to read but rejected every single book I pulled off the shelf. Or, the ones who thought I was a brainless idiot because I worked retail. But, I'm not going to think of them.

I really liked being able to get people reading something that I absolutely loved too. I think I've mentioned before that Sarah Dessen is my favourite author so I would always try to tell teen girls about her books when they came in looking for something. I found it more difficult in the last few years though with the popularity of all the vampire/supernatural books that girls have become obsessed with. On the other hand, a lot of the people who I used to work with knew how much I love Dessen so they would recommend her books to customers too. Next, I will work on taking over the world. :) (speaking of Sarah Dessen, sooo pumped for her new book coming out May 10th!!!)

One of the other cool things was when someone would come in looking for something but they couldn't remember the title, or author, or sometimes even what it was about. They would have one little bit of information and were hoping that by some slim chance we would know what they were talking about. I found that the longer I worked at the store, the better I was at figuring out what they wanted. My favourite incident was when a woman came in and was looking for a novel that was about a woman who time traveled. Yes, I knew exactly what she was talking about - gold star for me! (the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, in case you were wondering)

The long and short of it is that I will kind of miss the job at the bookstore, but I'm also super stoked to be working a real "grown up" job. I'll miss knowing what books are coming out all the time, and hearing what my coworkers and customers think about particular books. I guess now I'll have to settle for reading many, many book blogs and wandering through the store all the time to keep up. I'll survive :)

One last thing...I apologize if this post is disconnected. I started watching The Kids Are All Right but really wanted to get this posted. Thanks for reading, and let me know whenever you have good recommendations or tidbits to pass along. Have a good night everyone!

Sharing the Love

Sorry for the delay in posts, but here's another novel sized one for your reading pleasure :)

I absolutely love being able to get someone hooked on one of my favourite authors or books. One of the two jobs I have is at a bookstore and this allows me to recommend what I like to customers, which is probably my favourite part of the job.

I've been recommending books to people for years. I worked at my town's public library all through high school and that led to me becoming the unofficial book loaner/recommender among my friends. It hasn't stopped, and I love it. I suppose it's not really surprising that this happened - since I was working with books all the time, I was always learning what was new and being exposed to books that my friends and I may never have found.

Just the other week I had a conversation with a friend about how we happened upon one of our favourite authors - Sarah Dessen. We've been reading her for the longest time and still get excited when she writes a new books (May 2011! Can't wait!) After thinking about it for awhile, my friend realized that I had just found one of her books (Someone Like You, I'm pretty sure) at the library one day and decided to give it a shot. Boy, am I happy I did. I now own all but three of her books (store discounts are a wonderful thing) and have lent them to several of my friends. Just this past summer I got a coworker hooked on them too, which was great. She devoured the six books I have in about two weeks. (We booksellers are speedy readers!) By the way, if you don't know who Sarah Dessen is, maybe you remember the movie Mandy Moore and Trent Ford starred in a few years back, How to Deal. That movie is actually based on both Someone Like You and That Summer, Dessen's first two novels. By the way, Sarah Dessen has her own blog, which is a great read, but maybe just for those who are totally obsessed with her books :)

The same friend who got hooked on Dessen with me was also the one who was refusing to read Twilight a few summers ago. Now, I am one of the first ones to say that it is not the best writing and yes, Edward is quite stalkerish and creepy, but...the story itself is pretty addictive. I must also point out that I read all the books before the first movie came out and made teenage girls crazy. Ok, crazier. I had had a lot of girls coming into the store telling me how great the series was, so as soon as I was done school for the summer I decided to check them out of the library (yes, I work in a bookstore but I still love my library). Twilight sat on the table for two weeks before I got around to reading it, and once I did, that was it. I read the next two in quick succession and only had to wait about a month for the fourth. Sometime during this summer, I brought up the series with my friend who immediately said that she really didn't think that she'd like them. Knowing her taste in books, I insisted that she would. Her cousin and other best friend had told her that she would like them, but since I was her own personal librarian, she trusted my judgement and gave them a try. Yes, she now loves them too.

My final sharing story involves another fantasy series, Percy Jackson. This was another case of having customers (young kids and parents alike) rave about the books. I started to really notice it right before the movie came out, so once again I vowed to read them as soon as school was finished. I borrowed them from a coworker and was instantly hooked. No matter that these books are really targeted to ten year old boys. I am a twenty three year old female and I absolutely love them. I encouraged parents to buy them for their kids and had in depth conversations with eight year olds about Percy's world. (Check them out if you've never heard of them.) I had talked about them so much at work with the other people who had read them, that one girl gave me the first three as a going away present. Which I immediately lent to my mom's boyfriend so he could read them too. He's a huge fan of Harry Potter so I knew he would love these too...score another point for me, because he did. I also lent them to my sister's boyfriend at the time because he was about to go away to school for classics. I knew he'd love them because of the Greek myths (which is one of the coolest parts to this series) and he liked them so much that we actually got all five for him for Christmas.

I think part of the reason I'm pretty good at my job (if I do say so myself) is that I love to talk about books and what I like and try and figure out what other people might like too. It's like a puzzle, as long as the customer wants to play along and isn't looking for a book for their grandmother but they have no idea what she reads. Argh. Sorry. Fellow booksellers will know that frustration well. Anyways, getting people hooked on books is a lot of fun for me and I'm glad that my friends give me the chance to do that. They let me ramble on about books and trust me to buy/find ones that they'll love. A big thank you to them. And a thank you to you, whoever is reading this and made it through the whole post!

That's all for now...check back soon for another post :)