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a sales presentation (selling apples), and an English class at WMU where she presented on Emily Dickinson and learned how to speak in front of people. She speaks in public frequently now — at book clubs, store events, and even national conferences for the American Booksellers Association. Her message evolves, she says, even as she stands up to talk. She has trained herself to read rooms full of people, something she learned on her first day as a bookseller. Before the Book Exchange opened during Labor Day weekend in 1988, she had spent the summer stocking her shelves with 5,000
romance titles, because she assumed women were the main book buyers and that they would want mostly romance novels. But the first customer who entered was a man who requested a mystery title. She didn’t have anything to offer him. “It was the first change I made to the business,” she says. Instead of assuming she knows what will sell, she now responds to what her customers want every day. She likes helping customers, like the ones who call while driving down the road holding their phones up so she can hear NPR and saying, “Gloria, can you order this for me?” “We got it,” she tells them, and she has the book available within a day or two. Maybe that kind of service is why Tiller says her sales haven’t been affected by online giants like Amazon. And, with more than 47,000 books in her inventory, she owns more books than some chain stores. Referencing a bookstore opening in Rochester Hills that will reportedly carry 32,000 books, she says, “I can safely say I have more books than Barnes & Noble,” and laughs. The 47,000-plus figure doesn’t even include books ordered directly for customers, since they never enter her inventory, or the 3,000 books she recently acquired at an estate sale that still need to go into the system. “I’ve never had it so good,” Tiller says. “But I am excessively busy. You have to learn how to say no to some things, and I haven’t quite accomplished that yet.”
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