Rook's Comics and Games

Rook's has a lot to look forward to in 2010. We just concluded a very good year and we wish to continue our successes. There are many changes we are considering but the main thing that we are going to focus on is taking care of our existing customers. In 2009 we tried being very friendly to walk in traffic. After looking at the numbers, I feel like our efforts towards walk in customers didn’t pay off. That is to say that we didn't garner as much sales as I would have liked compared to the cost of extra products necessary for this pursuit. So in 2010 we plan on focusing more on our regulars.

We have already done some things to the store to that effect. We are expanding our play space and changing the arrangement of the tables to hopefully give more room for games. We are cutting back on some products to do this but mostly we are just being more efficient with our retail space. In relation to this, in 2010 we are going to be focusing more on the product we do carry and a little less on trying to get new products in all the time. We will be stocking a little deeper and a little less broad. This is very difficult however. We defiantly don't want our store to become stale. New products and new customers are needed for growth and we still need to grow. This is going to be an ongoing process for 2010.

The new year will also bring a renewed focus on graphic novels. Last week I talked about sales trends for comics and graphic novels and we are going to be giving this a push. We are going to sell or give away ALL of our back issues during the week of Free Comic Book Day. We are then going to use the back issue display for graphic novels or maybe more regular novels. Along with the push for graphic novels we are going to develop actual policies for our comic subscription service and for our customers who have credit with us. For the most part these things have not been a problem but we are going to spell out exactly what can and can't happen with accounts. For the most part this shouldn't change how we interact with our customers.

We are also going back to Catapalooza this year. Catapalooza was a great opportunity for us last year and I am really looking forward to this. I would like to identify some more opportunities along the same line for 2010. If you have a good ideas about large events or festivals please let me know. We are also going to try some more guerrilla marketing for 2010. I want to start sponsoring a night with the Procrastinator Theatre at MSU. We will look into more things like this within the Bozeman community.