Branding: its all in the logo?

The other day we finally got to move our Religion section (and by we I mean another girl and I due to some well timed exits by the rest of my coworkers), a cause for much celebration. Previously the section had resulted had caused contention between all of us due not to differing religious beliefs, but because it was packed so tight that none of us could move the books. Even those of us with small fingers were powerless against the towering wall of spines. We tried sending books back, only to have them return in larger quantities (“Hey, it’s Easter,” the company thought, “You need these books.”). We tried creating a separate backstock for the titles, but staring at if for long periods a time had the ability to induce tears. Shelving at all became a battle where we would pull two books to make room for one, never mind that all the titles had been stocked down the absolute minimum out of necessity.

It was no way to run a section, and we knew that, but at the time we had no alternatives. With the move, however, the section expanded from a three foot to a four foot gondola and gained a second gondola specifically for Christian fiction. Suddenly where there had once been backstock, there was now empty space thanks to the added room. Sure, we didn’t need to put out all ten copies of C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain—one could ask why our store needed that many copies to begin with—but we had the room, so why not! There were face-outs even, despite the Da Vinci Code tie-in madness that resulted in even more religious titles than before.

Oh Happiness. Oh Glorious Day! We could shelve without losing fingers. We could actually alphabetize the section rather than just shoving the books in and running.

(Insert allusion to Holy Light or great weight lifted here)

Of course now that we had a Christian fiction section we had to weed the appropriate books out of regular fiction. It was due to overwhelming customer request that it had been created at all, and we couldn’t have it looking bare and neglected. There was no way to pull up a comprehensive list of the books in our store due to an inventory glitch, so I just had to go on my own knowledge.

In the end I found myself relying on the imprint symbol on the spine of the book more than my passing familiarity with the authors.

Never before had I been so aware of the branding that symbol represents. In general I don’t tend to find house branding that important on the bookstore level. I don’t shelve Random House books together or give Penguin its own bay. There only to publishers in the whole store (Ellora’s and Silhouette/Harlequin series romance) that get that treatment by company mandate, and these are probably the only publishers that my coworkers could easily group by simply looking at the covers. With all the major publishers and imprints running around, it’s easy for a person to develop book blindness, and our customers (for the most part) are even more unaware of imprint signifance.

Does this represent a failure to “brand” on the publisher’s part or simply a failure on our own end to create awareness within our customer base? Do publishers want to brand at all? And as a reader, does this make any difference to you at all, or are you sitting there asking yourself, “What the hell is she talking about?”