Twittering on and book buying....

Too busy selling books and sorting out storage and clearing out stock to make way for new stock to be bothered much with blogging at the moment. Anyway I've discovered Twitter.com! The great thing about that is it's always short and sweet, as you have to say what you want to say within 140 characters max, unlike here where I could just ramble on for pages and in any case how many people are actually reading it, judging by the comments not that many and I can't actually work out the number of page views since TonbridgeBlog converted to Google blogger; I know it was around 2,000 hits a day on the old site, but was that the same person visiting 2,000 pages or was it 2,000 people visiting only one page each; probably somewhere in the middle, but where in the middle? Who knows! I did say that you can ramble on for pages and that you should try twitter didn't I. Anyway what I would like to know is what brings people out book buying. I've been a book seller now for 5 years and I still haven't worked that out. If it's raining they stay in or go to Bluewater, if it's sunny they take a trip to the coast or do some gardening. Maybe what I need is a dull, but not too cold day, with no hint of rain or wind, when Bluewater is closed and there are no other sales on and the internet happens to have crashed that day! Also what are John Adams playing at? Are they trying to keep the good folk of Tonbridge guessing as to are they closing or aren't they. First they advertise "Closing Down Sale" and tell everyone that they're closing at the end of March. Then they take the signs down and tell people they can now order new books but they're not restocking. The good thing for Mr. Books is that they are driving people to my shop to order new books as well as top quality secondhand books where, incidentally, they will find friendly service all year round! I have it on fairly good authority (I spoke to the owner, who curiously is no longer John Adams, but a London bookseller called Doug) that they are open for another six months while they flog off the old stock and then it'll be bye bye Tonbridge. So I find myself in the quite nice position of being the only independent bookseller in the town. All I need now are customers to stop buying their books on the internet and for WH. Smiths to follow Woollies and go bust and perhaps a bigger shop!...