Really have trouble finding Kates books in Canada

[Rahl Windsong]

I know I can buy them at amazon.ca but it seems 90% of bookstores in Canada do not carry a single title by Kate Elliott and that is a real shame. I have been to Chapters, The Book Company, Coles, and a few other independants in the Vancouver, BC area and zero books of Kate's found.


Rahl

[Alia]

Rahl, Im sorry about your problems finding her books. Have you tried ebay? I know I've bought a few from there.

[Teresa Edgerton]

I wonder what DAW's distribution situation is like in Canada -- the books do have a Canadian as well as a US price on them, and if they could make it as far as California they should certainly be able to make it to Vancouver, but the ways of the large distributors can be inscrutable.

However, it's also true that independent bookstores are sometimes more directly influenced by their customers than the chains are -- so you may be helping to fix the situation just by asking for the books, Rahl.

Not that that's likely to be much comfort when you want the book now, instead of some hypothetical future date ... but still, if you are asking as well as looking you are doing a very good thing.

I, personally, hate to go into any kind of store and ask a sales person for anything (intellectually, I know that the worst that is likely to happen is a blank stare, but emotionally I'm always expecting the glance of withering scorn), so I admire very much people who have the courage to do it.

[Rahl Windsong]

Well I ran my own business for 20 years so going into a store and asking is not something the bothers me in the least. There are many other Daw book on these same store shelves so it just seemed really odd to me that none of Kate's could be found.Perhaps she is just so popular that they were sold out?

As for someone thinking I am some fool for wanting to read a book, any book, the way I see it they are in the business of selling books so they had best not do that. If they did, I would then ask to see the manager straight away and find out why they had this person working there. And if they were the manager I'd then say something like "Well I guess you sell so many books that you can scorn your customers when they come to buy?" Then I would tell about them the other stores that I would be buying books at from now on.

Rahl

[Teresa Edgerton]

My retail experience was different -- I worked in a craft store that was part of a large chain, and most of what I ordered came from the warehouse, and even when I ordered directly from the sales rep there were restrictions on what I could and couldn't buy. So there was a lot of frustration, because these decisions were made by some corporate person who knew nothing about our store or our customers. People would say, can't you special order it for me, and wouldn't understand why I had to say no.

When I'm the customer asking for something, all that comes back to me, and I just hate to do it.

[Rahl Windsong]

Ok well I can see why then, thanks for that Kelpie I can now see how it may not be the fault of the employee. In retail I was never the employee I was always the employer so everything I did was related to how the business was run. Customer service was always the thing I stressed most to my employees and if they could not serve the customer I wanted them to come to me to get the answer they needed so that they could provide the proper service.

Rahl

[Teresa Edgerton]

Yes, it must be nice when the owner of the business is only one person away from direct contact with the customers.

When I go into a bookstore and I don't find a copy of my own book, I never know whether it's good news or bad news -- did they not order it, did all the copies get sold, or did it sit there so long that they sent it back? But if it is there, does that mean that it's not selling, or that they keep reordering?

With a writer as popular as Kate Elliott, though, it does seem strange if the books were never there at all, unless the store carries a fairly limited selection of SF/Fantasy.

[GOLLUM]

Perhaps Erikson and Bakker are crowding out the market...