ABOUT THIS EPISODE
It is a truth universally acknowledged that all cities, towns, and even neighborhoods are in need of an independent bookstore. And yet, there is no one single way to accomplish this. But, there are some universal truths about opening an independent bookstore, in America at least, that each new bookstore owner should acknowledge. And that is where this podcast episode comes in. Welcome to The Business of Bookselling: The First Five Things to do when starting to consider opening an independent bookstore.
- Create an email address specifically for your bookstore dream.
This may sound like an odd one to start with, but here’s why: you’re about to embark on one of the most exciting journeys of your life. Perhaps this is something that’s been percolating in the back of your mind for years, or maybe you’re exploring an opportunity that recently fell into your lap – if that’s the case, I would totally read that book and watch the movie about this happening – but either way, you’re about to dive deep into a research and logistics process that will, at one point or another, become completely overwhelming to you. Don’t be scared, this is a natural part of life. Have you ever started a hobby or been interested in taking a vacation somewhere, and suddenly you find yourself with 300 skeins of yarn and 500 knitting needles, or more long-distance road biking equipment and gear than you’ll ever use in a season, or receiving notifications and emails from the 50 travel-to-Italy Facebook groups, gap year abroad blogs, and budget travel websites you’ve joined for that trip to Iceland or Italy? This is like that. At some point, you’re going to want to step away for a minute. And it’s much MUCH easier to not check one email account for a little while than to avoid the email you use for everything else, from emailing recipes with your sister to paying your bills. By the way, on a personal note, I highly recommend getting a different email account that you use just for your bills. Anyway, in addition to one email address being easier to step away from, it’s also the easiest way to find something you thought you remembered from that one piece of research you did – or in other words, it’s MUCH easier to organize. So do yourself this favor and create a new IHeartMyBookstoreDream-at-freeemailwebsite-dot-com email address to go down this path of exploration. - Now that you’ve opened a new email address, start your research.
First and foremost, research bookstores in your area. Do you have one or more? If one doesn’t exist within an hour drive radius of you, can you find out why not? If one does exist nearby, what else can you find out about it? Is it a corporate store or an independently-owned one? Does it have a café or additional business as part of the store model? Does the store sell new or used books or both? What else does it sell – cards, gifts, toys? Does it have a niche focus in some way? Collecting all of this information will help you identify gaps in the market where your book business could thrive. This is an incredible opportunity to start narrowing in on your exact business model and product – or multiple products – you want to focus on for your own store. - As part of that research you’re doing – and this is item #3 on the list – sign up for industry newsletters and bookselling Facebook groups – if you’re a Facebook user – to start learning more about the book industry and what books you’d like to bring in for store stock.
Some recommendations for Facebook groups to join as someone new to the industry include Indie Booksellers; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Bookselling; the Pop-Up, Bookmobiles, and Other Nontraditional Bookstores group that I moderate, BXsellers run by Publishers Weekly; The Romance of Bookselling, for booksellers specifically interested in romance; and a lot of others that are niche specific, like Children’s Booksellers, Mysterious Indie Bookselling, Indie Bookseller Sidelines for learning about non-book products to sell, etc. I’m part of the mod team for several of these, so don’t be surprised if you join and see me popping in to post. Industry newsletters you should sign up for include but are not limited to Shelf Awareness – they have two, one that’s industry-focused and one for readers; I recommend signing up for both; Publishers Weekly – if you join that BXsellers Facebook group, you can receive free newsletters by clicking the pinned links with that offer in the group; a newsletter called The Independent Bookseller, which provides a round-up of indie-specific reminders and opportunities; and the We Need Diverse Books newsletter, which highlights titles by diverse creators and featuring diverse characters, but which also includes different industry opportunities to be a part of. Another type of industry newsletter are those that other independent bookstores put out. You just did all that research on bookstores in your area – sign up for their newsletters! Find other bookstores in the industry that inspire you with what they’re doing; sign up for those as well, and then keep a folder in your email of great ideas you’d love to replicate in your own way some day. If you’re really into organization like me, you may also want to start some spreadsheets of titles, perhaps organized by genre or section or age of reader, listed out with title, ISBN, author, illustrator, and publisher name. If you’re wondering where you find all of that information, I want to introduce you to an industry website called Edelweiss plus. Literally, the website is E-D-E-L-W-E-I-S-S.plus. It’s free to create an account, and it is a wealth of industry information. You can join communities as a reader, becoming involved in conversations and giving and receiving book recommendations, but perhaps more importantly as a bookstore, you can look through season after season of publisher catalogs. They often offer catalogs or collections of titles for specific identity holidays, seasonal titles, groupings along a particular theme, etc. Edelweiss offers a lot of tutorials, as it can appear a little overwhelming at first, but it also provides so much wonderful information - The fourth thing I would recommend doing is spending a little bit of money to join your regional bookseller association and the American Booksellers Association (ABA) as a provisional member. These are trade associations geared towards independent booksellers who sell primarily new books. There are other associations, like the Antiquarian Booksellers Association or ASTRA, the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association, that booksellers selling other types of products may also want to join, but as this podcast is primarily focused on independent bookselling, the regionals and the ABA are the ones that offer education, services, information, and networking opportunities that will help you at every step along your journey. The ABA website – bookweb.org – does have the other regional associations listed at the bottom of their page, but here’s some love for them by name – CALIBA recently united the entire state of California into one regional association, whereas PNBA serves the rest of the west coast and a few other western states and even includes some Canadian booksellers; GLIBA is for the Great Lakes region, while MIBA is for the Midwest-based stores – some stores belong to both regional associations, and these two have historically come together to offer the Heartland Fall Forum which unites the booksellers in both associations for one week long conference; MPIBA serves the Mountains & Plains region north to south, and NEIBA (New England), NAIBA (New Atlantic), and SIBA (Southern) serve the entire east coast with various individual and overlapping programs throughout the course of the year.
- The fifth and final recommendation I have for anyone looking to start an independent bookstore is to pick your store name–and once you have that, purchase the domain name and grab your store’s social media handles. Domain name is the URL for the online home of your business. RiverDogBookCo as an example. Social media – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat (if that’s still a thing when you’re listening to this). Storygraph. Discord account. LinkedIn page for your business. Basically any online medium you think you’ll use when you open your business. Don’t have to use them all; put up a placeholder post for now and possibly even in the future, directing people to the one channel you choose to use the most. But grab all the handles now so that if you want to use them later, you can. Also, if you know what you want your store to be called before doing the rest of this, then combine number one and number five – make your bookstore research email your store’s email. It can be StoreName-at-freeEmailAccount-dot-com – by the way, that’s a placeholder website so it doesn’t sound like I’m sponsored by any particular free email account organization, just FYI – or you can go ahead and purchase your domain name and then hook that up to something like a paid Gmail account that will use your domain name for your email address, so you can create something generic like hello-at-riverdogbookco-dot-com. Whether you choose to do that or not, use the email address you created for all of your bookstore research to sign up for all of these social media channels so you can, once again, have everything organized in one place.
So now that you know the first five things to do once you’ve had the idea to open an independent bookstore, can you guess the most frequently asked question I get asked from people with this idea? “What books should I carry?”
My answer is going to give you a little bit of bonus information for things to explore and start doing.
Start with the books you yourself love to read, because that is what you know the best and you can use those books to practice what’s called handselling – placing a book in someone’s hand, excitedly telling them about it, so that they want to purchase this book that they didn’t know about before you told them about it. That’s essentially what being a bookseller is – putting the right book in the right hands for the right reader. Over and over and over again until the end of time. If that doesn’t sound exciting to you, you might want to start thinking about exactly why you want to open an independent bookstore. I’ll dive into that a little deeper in another episode, but in the meantime, if you begin with the books you love to read – in my case, much of my first season of pop-ups had inventory that I pulled off my own shelves at home, and I know I’m not alone in that – and then read through these industry newsletters and pay attention to things like the independent bookselling and national bestseller lists (each regional association does send out their own weekly bestseller list, and you can Google things like the New York Times, USA Today, etc. bestseller lists), national book awards, like the American Library Association (ALA) awards, the actual National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and others, and then keep an eye out for other books that are being talked about in the general zeitgeist – various celebrity book clubs, for instance, or movies and TV shows that are based on books, things like that – you’ll be able to pick and choose the titles that you want to carry that best fit your bookstores’s niche and the needs of your community.
Now, all of that said, here’s a very important piece of advice I want to leave you with: don’t let anyone – myself or any of the other wonderful, knowledgeable, and experienced booksellers you may talk to or who are featured on this podcast, or anyone else you go to for advice, or people you didn’t go to for advice but will still give it to you – tell you how to run your store. That’s what makes this industry so beautiful. Whatever distinctive ideas, partnerships, book clubs, decor, events, etc. you have or want to do in the future to make your store unique? That’s the whole point of independent bookselling. It’s YOUR bookstore, and you can do with it what you want to. Welcome to the community.
Website: https://businessofbookselling.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizofbkselling
Links mentioned in the episode:
Bookselling Facebook Groups to Join (search by the group name in Facebook, if the link isn’t working):
- Pop-Ups, Bookmobiles, & Other Non-Traditional Bookstores – this is the group I started and admin for; at last count, we had almost 2,500 members
- Indie Booksellers – this is the most popular independent bookselling group on Facebook and definitely the OG of the bunch, along with being one of the most active; has about 3,200 members
- Bookseller Mentors – a group run by other independent booksellers and geared toward helping newbies; about 2,800 members
- BXsellers – this group was created by the industry publication Publishers Weekly; I am currently one of the moderators; it’s a place where you may get quoted in an article if you answer a question by a Publishers Weekly staff member (they openly state this about their questions); has about 1,500 members
- Booksellers- 1 Person Indies – a group for indie bookstores run by one person; I’m also an admin for this group; it’s less active but is a good place to ask questions specific to one-person stores; has about 330 members
- Children’s Booksellers – a group for…children’s booksellers….; about 180 members
- Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion in Bookselling – this group used to be run by the American Booksellers Association’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, but then everyone on that committee decided to leave Facebook, and so in order to not lose the historic record, I became one of the admins; a few other folks admin as well; I wish this group was more active but it’s a good place to go for specific resources such as creating a land acknowledgement (resources are pinned to the top of the group); currently about 460 members
- The Romance of Bookselling – a group for booksellers who love romance; some publishers are also in this group; it’s run by Billie Bloebaum, the bookseller who started Bookstore Romance Day in 2018; has about 530 members
- Mysterious Indie Bookselling – a group for booksellers who love, you guessed it, mysterious! Not very active, but still a fun place to go for recommendations; about 110 members
- Indie Bookseller Sidelines – a group run by other independent booksellers who all offer more than books in their stores; specifically talking about what gift items make great merchandise to also sell at indie bookstores; about 2,200 members
- Indie Bookstore School Book Fairs – a group for bookstores with questions about how to run school bookfairs; about 430 members
- Used Bookstores/Booksellers – I think you get the point of this group; about 515 members
Bookselling Facebook Groups to Join that are Region-Specific:
- California Independent Booksellers Alliance – CALIBA Bookseller Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592082324677450
- Midwest Independent Booksellers: https://www.facebook.com/groups/midwestbooksellers/
- MPIBA Booksellers: https://www.facebook.com/groups/680019409173304/
- NW Indie Bookselling: https://www.facebook.com/groups/889418684443009/
- Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/205172186875708
Bookselling Facebook Groups to Join That Are Point-of-Sale System-Specific:
- Booksellers on Bookshop.org US (managed by Bookshop.org team): https://www.facebook.com/groups/1550729631964952/
- Basil Bookseller Software Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BasilBooksellerSoftware/
- Bookmanager North American Bookstores: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1282053901967553/
- Bookstores Using Square: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1097407303731307/
- Booksellers Using IndieCommerce: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2531600896999738/
