Steven Pate

Steven Pate

Bookseller who builds things

Digital strategy, data, and technology for independent bookstores.

I help bookstores turn the systems, data, and expertise they already have into better buying decisions, better customer experiences, and a stronger presence online.

Start with a 20-minute conversation

Most bookstores already have what they need.

Years of sales data. Deep staff expertise. Loyal customers. Systems they’ve learned to live with. My work is about getting more value from what’s already there — making the data useful, the expertise discoverable, and the technology work together.

Three problems I work on

Make your data useful.

Your POS holds years of sales history nobody has time to read. Sections drift. Reorders run on instinct, memory, and whoever happens to be working that morning. The information to fix this already exists; it’s trapped in a system built for ringing up sales, not for making decisions.

I turn store data into buying decisions: velocity scoring, section reviews, reorder systems, and reports your staff will actually use.

  • See it done: One Section, Read Properly
  • Start here: Inventory Intelligence Review — one section, your data, worksheets your buyer can act on

Make your expertise discoverable.

Your staff’s knowledge lives in their heads, on shelf-talkers if you’re lucky, and in a newsletter that’s realistically gone from inboxes by Friday. Meanwhile customers are asking Google and ChatGPT what to read, and they’re browsing long after that email is gone. Durable, structured editorial gives your expertise somewhere to keep working. A store that leaves its window empty is wasting the window. The same is now true online.

I turn bookseller expertise into infrastructure that lasts: review archives, subject guides, metadata, and editorial systems that make your curation visible where people actually browse.

Make your technology work together.

POS, e-commerce, newsletter platform, spreadsheets: each one fine on its own, and hours lost every week in the gaps between them. Most stores don’t need more software. They need the systems they have to cooperate.

I plan migrations, build integrations, and automate the handoffs between the systems you already run. When the missing piece doesn’t exist, I build it.

One section, read properly

An independent bookstore on the Olympic Peninsula had one of the best naturalist sections in the Northwest and no way to see it. Nobody could say which titles sold, which backlist standards had gone missing, or what had been sitting spine-out for two years.

I built a map of about 1,500 titles the section should hold, organized across thirteen themes and tiered by sales velocity, critical history, and fit with the store. Then I matched it against the store’s own inventory and gave every title a velocity score combining recency, current sales, and lifetime history.

The buyer got eighteen workbooks, one per theme plus the science shelves, each with a keep / reorder / cull / add column. The first pass surfaced more than 400 backlist titles the plan called for and the shelf didn’t have, nearly fifty of them must-stock. Dead stock came off. And the same curation became printed buying guides customers take home.

Birds Workbook 1 of 18 · sample rows
Title On hand On order Sold YTD Lifetime Last sold Velocity Action
The Sibley Guide to Birds, 2nd ed. David Allen Sibley Tier 1 · must stock 1 2 9 64 Oct 2 91 Q1 Keep
Birds of the Pacific Northwest John Shewey & Tim Blount Tier 1 · must stock 3 0 7 41 Sep 28 84 Q1 Keep
What the Robin Knows Jon Young Tier 1 · must stock 0 0 2 18 Jun 3 58 Q2 Reorder Priority A
The Bird Way Jennifer Ackerman Tier 2 · strong 0 0 4 23 Aug 14 71 Q2 Reorder Priority B
Sibley Birds West David Allen Sibley Tier 1 · must stock — — — — never stocked — Add
The Sibley Guide to Birds, 1st ed. David Allen Sibley Superseded 2 0 0 31 Mar 2024 7 Q5 Cull Returnable
Velocity is recency, this year’s sales, and lifetime sales in one number, ranked Q1–Q5 Refreshed from the POS export each week
One of the eighteen workbooks. The titles are real; every count, score, and date is invented for illustration.

Read the case study →

How working together works

  1. A 20-minute conversation. We find out whether there’s a problem worth investigating. No pitch, no obligation.
  2. A discovery engagement. A real project with real deliverables: assessment, data review, concrete recommendations.
  3. Implementation. If there’s something worth building or fixing, I turn the recommendations into a defined project.
  4. Ongoing support. Stores can keep me involved as the systems evolve. Never required.
Steven Pate sitting on a gravel bar beside a clear forest river, next to a toddler playing with stones

I’ve spent twenty years in bookselling, ecommerce, and literary nonprofits: buying books, working the floor, running the systems, and writing the software, usually all in the same week. I’m a bookseller at Port Book and News on the Olympic Peninsula, where I get to test these ideas against an actual bookstore every week. I know the margins, I know the systems, and I know the answer usually isn’t another app.

More about me →