Goneril has persuaded Consort to lend her §60,000 to buy the Three-in-One Bookshop in Bluewater. (See picture here.) Can you give her any tips to help her to run it at a profit?

Consort would quite like to get his money back with interest, but he's not holding his breath! "Families!?"

Books by themselves don't actually turn a profit, given that you need staff to run a retail business. Also, have your playable be the restocker - for some reason the restock script is broken and restock employees don't restock bookshelves (even with BRY!). So you want to do something like place a ticket machine, or sell some more expensive stuff on the lot to bring in the money. Also, you should get my sellablenovels hack so you can sell your sims' novels that they wrote.

A lot of bookshops also have cafes! If this "espresso bar" or whatever that supposedly comes with University were real, you could use that, but a little coffee and tea ought to do just fine. If the bandatron method seems too cheaty or unrealistic you could always schedule events like book signings or children's reading events and have it out during those.

Don't set it on fire, for one.

My self-Sim ran a bookstore in Hazelton. I didn't have much luck running it on books alone, but throwing in a handful of deco items for sale helped considerably.

I think you need Free Time for sellable novels, so that leaves books from bookcases and stand-alone type books-if your EP's allow for them.

http://modthesims.info/browse/ts2/3...ype=1&tag=books

Then you can earn sneak money by using a pay door or exem chargeable food plates. http://www.simlogical.com/sl/Sims2P...othesChange.htm

or add a ticket machine. My library sells both tickets and books. I am not out for a huge profit though, the owner is an author and makes most of her cash by writing.

I have chess outside as well.

My best piece of advice is to find a way to sell high ticket items. Books are cheap to buy and do not provide enough profit, you will find it easy to go bankrupt in the beginning stages. Don't sell things at cheap, that's giving stuff away. I sell everything mostly at average, with 1 or 2 special books at expensive. Too many expensive items will turn customers away when you first start trading. Use the set for sale tool on any bookcase and individual books will be set for sale. (Don't forget to provide for the owner's needs. A toilet for customers is a bonus, they mostly don't have time to use them)

To counter the profit problem, I sell high priced books. Sophie-David's Opportunity Pack Collectors Edition is an example of this and sell at $300 a time. But I use the whole of Sophie-David's Skilling System which might not suit, as it can seem a bit cheaty. There other expensive books out there, and you can use the more expensive book sets in the Maxis catalogue if you would rather play vanilla.

You could choose to sell sympathetic items like magazines (maxis rack) or posters (maxis deco) but again, these are low priced items with low profit. I do not offer other facilities like coffee or sell alternative expensive items, such as TV's. It's a bookshop, and I want them to buy books.

One mod that is useful for setting proper environment is Mrclopes Read Books Autonomously. The books you set for sale will allow Sims to browse them, but if you use this mod and don't set some for sale, people will actually sit down and start reading. This way you'll get a proper bookshop feeling. Browsing and reading, looking confused and asking for help, and others waiting in line to purchase.

Using Novel's Written By Playable Sims
You can sell Novel's written by your Sim or other playable sims. Get your bookshop owner to make friends with authors and then when you play the author, get them to give the bookshop owner their novel as a present. You can get complicated and ensure that authors and bookshop owners always have social relationships to stimulate a kind of publishing house. (easier method, use SimManipulator/SimBlender to make author selectable and then take novel out of their inventory.)

To Make Novel's Sellable and Cloning More Copies)
Kestrellyn has produced a wonderful Sellable Novels Mod. This will allow you to sell the novel's your playable sims produce in your shop.

To get enough copies to sell, use the "end table clone trick"
1. Place novel on "official maxis" end table
2. Place in inventory
3. click on any other tab (aspiration rewards/career rewards)
4. Take the novel on the end table out (cloning has been set)
5. Place the novel in the inventory (separated)
6, Place the end table in the inventory (separated)
7. click on any other tab (aspiration rewards/career rewards)
8. Click on the inventory tab.
9. You should have one novel, and a clone of the novel on the end table
10. Repeat 4 -8 for further clone copies of the novel
You can make a shipload for free, and everyone in the neighbourhood can now buy a copy of the latest hot novel from their local author.

I've been told that you can also get additional copies if you use Simlogicals Auto-Register, but have never tried it myself.

There are so many wonderful custom contents for books and bookshops. One of the best is the Dahlen Shelving System by Leefish, found in the charming bookshop lot of Peacock Books It includes a link to download FantasyRogue Book Recolours which gives new covers to maxis books (and thus novels) as does PlasticBox's Cinderbooks and Biblofile Recolours

Sorry, in real life I'm crazy for books and have thousands and thousands of them. So naturally, in my sims world, they also like books and demand variation and novelty all the time. Recolouring your playable author's novels will help them to stand out. My favourite lots are books shops and my favourite downloads are posters book recolours and magazines. You can play vanilla or with mods and still have fun. Take the money rewards so you don't go bankrupt.

You need Free Time for the sellable novels mod and Andrew doesn't have that. He only has a few EP's.

Thanks, Jo, didn't realise. Not sure about the "end table bug" cause I'm not sure when that came in.
I remember now, there was a novel writing system but it didn't produce a book you could sell before free time came out. No matter, I put Novels and writing books in a separate section for people who don't have that. I've tried to provide info of more vanilla play and I hope that helped.

This may be irrelevant if he doesn't have Free Time, but just to clarify, you don't need to do the whole cloning novels with the end table thing to get copies of the novel to sell with my hack. They restock like buy mode objects, not like craftables.

Also, I'm not *entirely* sure the hack doesn't work without Free Time, I just suspected it probably didn't. There's actually no harm in trying it out to see if it works.

Andrew, you could be the tester for that. :D

Well, you could write novels before FT, but I don't know if those are sellable in OFB.

In any case, I was going to suggest something similar to Diovanlestat, and advocate selling deco books. I haven't run a bookstore yet, but it is on my to do list and I'm setting up my neighborhood shops so that sims can buy clutter in them. So I'll have shoe stores and books stores and make up stores, etc., and instead of having them only be shells/decorative, or merely sell stuff using Maxis' handful of racks, they'll have the clutter I use in my sims homes and my sims can go out and buy them.

And there are functional books, too, if you want to make sure that the things sims buy have a function. Mutske on TSR has some that use the books from the game's bookcases and allows sims to read from them, as well as some empty bookcases too. I won't link too much from Mutske because I'm not sure what SPs you have AndrewGloria, but this set says only NL is required: http://www.thesimsresource.com/downloads/800707. I use it and like it a lot. Otherwise there's plenty of book and magazine clutter out there.

As for store shop bookshelves, I think Veranka's Roaring Heights conversion is really good (https://verounique.livejournal.com/23911.html), and there's a BG version, too. You can find recolors by Whysim in garden of shadows' blind date 2017: https://gardenofshadows.org.uk/gard...25930#msg725930. I also like this one by PrincessBliss, though I'm not sure if it's BG compatible: https://princessbliss-sim.tumblr.co...of-mine-where-i HugeLunatic slaved it to Buggybooz's Kitchen Basic counter here: https://sims2artists.com/index.php?topic=4814. Picture for HL's version is attached because the preview got borked/deleted.

Nanashi has a nice set too, and it has stackable books for displays, but the site ( http://nanashi.sims2.net ) isn't working for me right now and I've no idea if it's my internet or temporary maintenance or what. It's called Nanashi’s Easy Peasy Bookstore Set if you want to look for it later. Anyway Decat ( http://decatsims2.blogspot.com/2016...ok-add-ons.html ) and Moocha Muses ( https://moocha-muses.tumblr.com/pos...-we-both-really ) have some book stacks in case you want it to look like a display has multiple copies of the same book.

Otherwise, I'd say don't be afraid to get creative with your inventory; some bookstores do sell other things, like calendars and knickknacks and stationary and/or school supplies. And yes, you can do the cafe thing. I've always wanted to make a comic book store internet cafe--I think one was in Kickass? Anyway, Amovitam has a little display set for the comic section: https://amovitamsim.tumblr.com/post...ms-3-university and there are lots of anime/manga recolors of magazine racks out there.

@kestrellyn - All this time I've been copying and cloning tons of books to sell, when I didn't have to with your mod.

@Phantomknight - My disk drive and computer are not pleased with you. :P

Aside from selling smaller items like greeting cards or chocolate, book stores also have reading and signing events. Does Goneril know any writers that might be interested? For a cut of the profits of course. (I'd place a ticket machine for that event only and set it to a reasonable price depending on how well-known that writer is. A local hobby author wouldn't bring in much, but would be cheaper. Maybe some townies could be used as famous authors? The author would just need to be present on the lot and talk to people.)

I was selling self-written books before FT, and the Simlogical 'restocker' mod will restock them without any in a pixel's inventory.

Ooh, yes, comics! There's surely something cloned from the magazine stand that sells comic books, graphic novels, and manga.

This won't help Andrew Gloria, as it's for FreeTime, but might be useful to anyone using Freetime's Literature Hobby Feature, so seems useful to a discussion about Novel's. It's Chris Hatch's Book Club In vanilla play, I suppose I would just use the group feature to gather serious sims together at a bookshop or library and talk about serious things.

Just bumping this thread because Nanashi's set that I was talking about earlier was reuploaded here: https://www.simfileshare.net/download/1919881/ by mrsreval, if anyone was looking for that.