Small business blog / starting a bookstore / self motivation

I think Friday was a fairly successful day. I decided to start sorting books by category. I probably need to go to Half Price Books and see how they do things.

I am already struggling though how to categorize things. One book can be considered fiction, poetry, mythology, historical fiction, classical fiction, Greek literature, etc. The easiest thing to do would be to just put all the fiction together and then later break it down into smaller categories.

I was removing duplicate books so I have more space but now I am thinking if I have six books I can put one in each section (as an example). But I don’t even know that I will have space for all of that. Probably best to just stick to one category and decide at a later time whether to put in multiple categories.

I am also debating whether to put fiction and non-fiction next to each other if they are the same topic. Like there are fiction military books and non fiction military books. Do I put all fiction books together sorted by category or do I put them together by category and sort by fiction / non fiction? I guess this is where looking at a place like HPB would help. I guess as long as they are somewhat organized is the important part. Still there are books that can fit in the military category but also fit in other categories.

Another struggle when sorting is it’s not always labeled whether something is mystery, romance, sci-fi, etc. Maybe once I get them sorted by author it will be easier to tell what’s what.

I am not a fan of my current shelf system. The easy route will be to just get standard bookshelves, 6 feet tall, 9.5 inches wide, six shelves per bookcase. Right now I have 20” and 18” wide shelves, some with just four shelves, things double stacked. But if I buy new bookcases it will be a good waste if I decide to go the custom route. Maybe I will work on my layout yet again. I can probably do things like cut up the stuff I have to make the sizes I need. It might look bad though to have cases made from multiple cases. We will see I guess.