10 Useful Skills For Working as a Bookseller
I’ve recently fulfilled my years-long dream of becoming a bookseller — I now work at East City Bookshop in Washington D.C., a lovely woman-owned bookshop on Capitol Hill, which is a picturesque neighbourhood of engaged, passionate readers and thinkers. So far, I love it — my colleagues are great, the customers are friendly, and I feel like Rory Gilmore every time I walk into work.
There’s a lot more to bookselling than I ever knew, though. I’ve used skills I never knew I had, stretched some that don’t come so naturally to me, and watched my colleagues deploy others while I can only watch in awe. Skills like…
Recommending Books
Obviously, that’s the best one, the one I enjoy most, am naturally good at, and want to get better at. It’s 90% of the reason I wanted to work in a bookshop to start with. There’s nothing like the feeling of handing someone a book you’ve loved, knowing it matches up with what they’re looking for, and then waiting in anticipation to see if they will actually take it to the till and buy it. I could swear my heartbeat increases and I get an adrenaline rush at such moments. (The first book I handsold was The Secret History by Donna Tartt, to someone who’d just finished and loved The Goldfinch.)
