WEBVTT
00:00:00.000 --> 00:11:31.033
hello and welcome to the Curious Cat Bookshop Podcast I'm Stacy Whitman I'm your host and I'm the owner of the Curious Cat Bookshop and today we're going to be talking about a number of things it's the end of August I've been MIA here on the podcast for a while and we'll get to that later as we talk about the state of the store and what I've been working on this year but first I wanted to talk about something really important I have a lot on my plate all the time as a business owner but especially this year again we'll talk about the details of that in a moment but what that means is often times I'm so behind on getting displays up and it occurred to me two weeks after watching the Odyssey the movie that maybe I should make an Odyssey display you know like this Emily Wilson translation and her translation of the Iliad that everyone is talking about but also books that are inspired by the Odyssey and the Iliad Circe is a great example of that I've got a few others that I'm waiting on coming into the store and one of my most favorites and not just because I edited the book is Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe García McCall this is a beautiful book about five sisters it is a retelling of The Odyssey from the point of view of the eldest of five Mexican American sisters who find a body in their swimming hole right in the Rio Grande and their dad has left the family they see this guy's family photo in his wallet and they decide you know what we can't make dad come home but we can bring this guy home to his family in Mexico so off they go on an adventure magical adventure assisted by Tonantzín who is kind of the Virgin of Guadalupe there's a lot of syncretism going on in the story Virgen de Guadalupe probably is closer to the right pronunciation but anyway La Llorona is involved right there on the river and it is a beautiful beautiful story of sisterhood and mothers loving their children and sacrificing everything for them in the midst of great struggle and just a romping story because it is a retelling of the Odyssey so these girls have a pretty easy journey to take the man back to his family in Mexico but then when they try to come home they meet Cecilia who is a witch they meet a nagual who is a warlock who shapeshifts and tries to put them in a pot of soup they meet lechuzas which are wicked owl witches who attack them in a barn that they're trying to stay in at night and they meet a one eyed chupacabras and other creatures and those are the creatures and magical beings from Mexican folklore that have parallels in this story to the Odyssey Guadalupe was a sixth grade teacher when she wrote this book she was mostly writing poetry at the time her first her first book that was published was a beautiful novel in verse called Under the Mesquite which is a novel in verse about a sixteen year old girl who loses her mother to cancer and then this came across her editor's desk at Lee and Low where I used to work and her editor was like I edit poetry I don't edit fantasy and I had just started working at Lee & Low I had just started acquiring for my imprint Tu Books and this was the perfect book this is the book that I had been looking for so we released this in 2012 and now there are more than a million copies in print well I'm actually not sure last time I looked which was right before I was laid off almost a year ago we had been approaching a million so I'm assuming that there are now more than a million copies in print it's never made it onto the New York Times list if you talk to somebody who isn't involved with the school system they would not know this book probably but if you know someone who is a teacher or who is a librarian or who has taken The Odyssey in some class where um they're also reading retellings along the way to help kids understand it Summer of the Mariposas is in curriculum all over the country and it is such a beautiful book to hand to a sixth grader who might not understand the language even if it's a plainer translation even if it's in language that is more understandable to a modern reader this is going to be more relatable than something that was handed down by oral tradition more than 2,000 years ago so anyway my point is that retellings can really help us understand the classics help us to see a new perspective help us to understand new cultures that we might not have had experience with before or as happened in Guadalupe's actual sixth grade class when she was teaching them the Odyssey to kids from the border in Texas her sixth grade girls walked out of class and said, "Miss, we need our OWN Odyssey," and she said, yes yes you do because they were struggling so hard to understand I'm not dissing classics I'm just saying kids need a doorway sometimes into those classics that they can understand and Summer of the Mariposas does that why am I telling you all this well the same day that I'm finally putting together this display of books that relate to the Odyssey three weeks after it comes out haha and I'm still waiting on a few to come in because the book about Penelope that I was going to pull from the shelves actually sold before I could put it in the display so I'm waiting for a new copy to come in for it not the penelopiad it's not about Penelope it's about somebody else one of the Helen's sister whose name I'm blanking on the same day I'm putting this display together Guadalupe sends a link to me and says have you seen this and that's when I found out that in the Peoria (AZ) Unified School District a committee voted to remove three books from sixth through eighth grade curriculum because the works are not considered age appropriate this was written by a sixth grade teacher for sixth graders in Texas I defy anyone to go through this book and find a curse word to find the kind of racial violence they're claiming is in here or anything of the sort that would apply to the policies that they're claiming that it violates there is there is not a single thing in here that I would not hand to an 11 or 12 year old I would hand it to a nine or ten year old there's no romance there's nothing in this that I would not hand to somebody it discusses from the point of view of five Mexican American girls that somebody crossed the border illegally and died in the river that's it and it doesn't discuss it in any other way than saying he is a father and we want to return him to his family that's it they are US citizens and when they return at the end of the book to the US they have help from a goddess because they don't have their birth certificates that's it now that says to me they cannot handle discussing the point of view of Mexican American kids now if they had just decided to phase it out because they decided to go a different direction in their curriculum that's one thing but when they're claiming that they're doing it for policy reasons including the banning of DEI they're claiming that this book is offensive for sixth graders so anyway I had to I had to cover that because that is just absolute nonsense to me and if your state is dealing with these book bans I can only ask you to please get involved and make sure that your voice is heard they're also banning The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and a Raisin in the Sun as inappropriate for this age group and they're saying that The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Raisin in the Sun will still remain in the library but they're banning this from the library as well if this were just a curricular direction they wouldn't be banning it from the library if you don't have a freedom to read law in your state the way we do here in Connecticut Massachusetts just passed one I think New York has either passed one or is working on one multiple states have been working on this and there is a raft of book banning bills making their way through Congress nationally as well I ask that you get involved go to your local school board meetings and watch these discussions where they're talking about in age inappropriate books get involved and ask why they think it's inappropriate to discuss the facts of history or the facts of someone's existence as you can guess I'm probably I'm having a hard time number one I'm having a hard time speaking because my my cheek is still numb and I keep biting it as I talk but I am so furious about this and this is only one banning there are so many books that just address the existence of trans people that just address the existence of LGBTQ people for children out there that have been banned in multiple states look at the book bans in Utah for example if a book gets banned by a school district three times by like three different school districts I think the law is it's banned in the whole state which means that if conservative rural Utah decides that Salt Lake shouldn't be allowed to read something like Summer of the Mariposas somehow they have the right to tell other school districts what their kids can read as you can imagine I'm furious about this I could probably just ramble on about this for a while but instead what I'm going to do is move on to the state of the store as I've mentioned here before back in January I had to let a couple of our employees go simply because sales were down everybody is dealing with it it's not just us as a store it's this whole area so many people not just myself who have been laid off in the last six months to a year in our area just tariffs and economic policies and just all of the things that are happening and being talked about on a national basis that we have no control over like defunding libraries denying national grants approved by Congress to blue states denying funding to universities all sorts of pulling of funds from museums and the arts all of these things that we think don't necessarily affect us on a daily basis are absolutely affecting our local economies all across the nation as people lose jobs add to that all the AI fervor and people I I I just talked to a candidate for state representative who said that she herself lost her job because she was replaced by AI how do we survive all of this and come out on the other side thriving?
00:11:31.033 --> 00:19:36.200
it's a giant question that I don't have the answer to but for my store I'm trying to find our answer part of that is doing things like hosting Democracy Reads book club with our local Indivisible chapter we're talking about all the ways that we can get involved civic involvement locally all politics are local thinking about gerrymandering thinking about how our schools work and are funded how our roads are taken care of how our states run their budgets these are all things that we can have a say in more than for example on a national or even worldwide level so that's something that we are talking about in our Democracy Reads book club so if you are local we'd love to have you join us this month we are talking about Chris Murphy's new book and we will be having a special guest well I just realized that our special guest is not on the calendar the way that she should be and I'm blanking on her name so I need to go back into there and make sure that her her coming here as a candidate for a local state office is on the calendar so that people know she's coming and she's going to discuss Crisis of the Common Good with us Chris Murphy's newest book and that's what we're talking about is what is the common good on a local level, on a county or here in Connecticut, town-wide level our counties do exist but the medium sized unit of government here in Connecticut is not a county it's a town kind of like a township where I come from in Illinois it's a little bit confusing to anyone outside of Connecticut took me a while to wrap my my brain around I think it might be similar in Rhode Island and Massachusetts like being in New England thing but I'm not 100% sure but we're going to be talking about that and the point that I'm making is we're working on what we can do to become more involved locally in civic engagement I'm not talking necessarily about politics but about policy and about advocating for the common good for example my friend Carrie um I don't I I think I I posted a short about this but I I don't think I have um talked about it on the podcast yet she owned the Railway Cafe down the street and back in June she was murdered her husband murdered her he has been arrested for murder and and the legal process is moving forward but she had a court order against him she had a restraining order or whatever that's called it's a full court order where she went through and she proved his abusiveness and yet he still murdered her he had no ankle monitoring he had they're she had no way of knowing that he was going to enter her home that night and right now people in town have been very affected by it if you come to the store you'll see that we have purple hearts and purple lights in the window and that's for the color for domestic abuse uh awareness and there are people in town who are advocating for what we call Carrie's Law in honor of Carrie Stetson they're talking about simple reforms that could protect the next person so that they wouldn't have to go through what Carrie (went) through simple things like if they have a court order to stay away then they have to be ankle monitored and maybe alarms go off if they violate that order they're working on what that policy would look like it's going through the process with our legislators here in the state and we're getting periodic updates for it from the organizers who are working on it who are relatives and friends of Carrie's so that's something that we can do that we have the power to do and we are a third space for our communities that's something that we can do locally so anyway that's one thing that we've been working on this year the other thing that I've been working on this year and I will link you to the-- I I still haven't quite figured out how to like put an actual video in the middle of my videos but if I do it right it'll be right here about how I'm implementing a CRM system and that's something I've been working on since last fall and I've finally gotten to a place where I actually have a dashboard where I can see all this data of what my sales looked like this year so far versus last year versus 2024 I'm still working on 2023 which was our first year in business getting my bills from publishers and sideline vendors into that whole system so that I can budget appropriately and forecast all of this is in preparation I feel like I'm finally at a point where I can go and take that information and go to a bank or perhaps one of our community lenders and I've been working with the Connecticut Women's Business Development Center Council anyway I've been working with them to get to a point where I am ready to try to get full capitalization and what that means is that we would not be bootstrapping it anymore I started the business with my bonus back in 2023 for the year so and plus a a grant that I got and then the next year I put whatever I could save into it like I had from my full time job I was working my full time job and paying for my mortgage and everything and whatever I could I was pouring into building the business and I wasn't paying myself I was just whatever we were making I was plowing it back into the business and even so cash flow has just been such a challenge and what I really need to figure out the biggest challenge this year and why I've been working so hard is that without employees to take on tasks that I it is not humanly possible for me to do everything that a bookstore needs if I am working on something like the CRM I'm neglecting the podcast if I am working on the podcast I'm neglecting social media or our email list so recently I did just hire Roxy is our new senior bookseller you might see her on our social media from time to time and she has the experience and the know how to be taking over marketing duties and to grow in that side of the business and what I'd really love to do is to be fully funded enough to have not just one or two people that I can delegate to but a staff that I can delegate to so that I can manage the business and that I don't have to do everything myself because it is not humanly possible to do literally everything myself I have been trying to do that this year except I did keep Sara on because she was running the book clubs trying to be in the store every day we're open and working on the bookkeeping side of things and building the CRM system and doing social media and planning events you'll notice we haven't had that many author events this year because I just I can't I can't do it all myself so if I can get our numbers together that I can show them hey I am taking on editorial work I'm starting to do writing workshops this fall FYI some of them will be online we'll start with announcing the ones here in store and then we're gonna be doing some online as well once we are fully capitalized I can start paying myself for a reasonable number of hours and not stay up till 2 or 3 every night exhausted trying to just push a little bit harder
00:19:36.200 --> 00:27:43.299
00am and and try and get to the store on time and be peppy and on and do everything myself because it's not physically possible so that is the state of the store i am taking on some editorial work in fact, speaking of Summer of the Mariposas, Fall of the Fireflies is set in that same world it stars the twins who are the middle girls of the five sisters and it's a completely new story you don't have to have read Summer of the Mariposas to pick up Fall of the Fireflies it's just a fun adventure two twins dealing with twin gods they become monster hunters and it's very loosely a reimagining of Antigone, the play this is a standalone and 10 years later more than 10 years later because this came out last fall we came out with the first in a trilogy that stars the other sisters and I am actually as a freelancer currently editing, almost done, Spring of the Cicadas, which so this stars Odilia, the eldest sister Fall of the Fireflies stars Velia and Delia, who are the middle twins Spring of the Cicadas stars Juanita who is the second eldest and in the future Winter of the Witch Moth is coming out a year later and that will star Pita who is the youngest of the five sisters so I am taking on some editorial work but again I don't have room for this work until I am fully capitalized enough to be able to hire people to work in the business so I can work on the business and that is always a challenge when you're a small business owner trying to figure out how to fund your business I mean in in the last three years I've done everything from taking out a home equity loan on my home which I'm very lucky to be able to do to this year living off of my 401k which I have now drained I have no retirement left because getting laid off there was a time when I could be on unemployment but now I'm just living on what would have been my retirement in hopes of getting to a point where I can be paying myself on a regular basis from the bookstore I would like to not lose my house so making sure that the business itself pays for itself and can pay me is my top priority this year and that means hiring people who can be competent at making sure that we hit our goals as a business and that needs numbers analytics that they can look at and we can say okay we are here right now this is where we wanna go we need to make what they call smart goals I forget what smart stands for except for measurable and that's the most important thing here is that we can measure our success and our growth and reasonable is one of them as well so reasonable goals that we can measure and aim for to make sure that our business is growing and so that our employees are growing with it I'm not looking to get rich here but I am hoping to actually be able to pay myself regularly and not just rob Peter to pay Paul so that has been the state of the bookstore the realistic thing about running a bookstore even three years in is that we're not yet profitable and I am not making a living off this bookstore I am a single woman I don't have any other form of income other than maybe taking on some editorial work which does make me wonder why am I putting all my energy into this bookstore that can't pay me when I could probably just be freelancing from home and have a much simpler and more robust financial life that might even let me take a day off here and there and even a vacation every now and then and be able to afford my healthcare and dental work thankfully currently I'm on COBRA but that's super expensive as well all of these things to say that's the reality of being three, almost four years into a business like this sometimes you have to ask yourself the hard questions and really dig into the numbers and say are these numbers working right now they're not working I am hoping that with a small business loan having enough cash flow that we have a runway to profitability and having a good plan toward profitability with events that we're planning with perhaps moving to a larger space being able to offer more things maybe we might bring in people to to do art classes maybe we might expand our book clubs most importantly one thing that we want to do is to have big events with great authors at least two to three times a month and that means bringing in more than the 28 people that we can fit in the store here in this location so I'm actively looking for other alternatives but everything that I've looked at so far has either had terrible parking is actually smaller than the space that we're in or are so much bigger and have such higher rent than what we're paying right now that I have to figure out how we'd have the funding to justify it so there are a lot of factors that go into figuring out the future of your business what's realistic, what kind of funding do you have, what kind of funding do you need how do you get access to that funding there is a grant that I've talked about here before called the ignite grant I was applying for that grant last spring and I didn't get it and right now as I consider whether we might move or stay here I don't think I'm going to be applying for it this month I think the deadline is early September I don't think I'm going to be applying for it this month, either unless we suddenly find the perfect space to move into because we need a project to propose that is going to help us to grow the business and right now I don't have a good project in mind that would make that happen so instead I'm focusing on either an SBA loan or a similar community lending kind of loan that will help us to have breathing space so that I'm not constantly wondering how I'm going to be able to pay the publishers for the books that I've ordered and then ending up taking out a loan from Quickbooks or square for like 30% interest rate which of course we're not profitable if we're having to take these you know short term loans that have obscene rates when an SBA loan might be closer to like 10% I think is the current rate some of the rates for the state of Connecticut are as low as 4% because they've created a program specifically to help businesses like us all I need to do is to have the application ready to apply so that is what I'm working on that's what I'm working toward and if you're in Connecticut and need information about getting funding like this the Connecticut WBDC has all sorts of great resources including recorded classes and live classes where you can get this kind of information really really helpful and and they do have free counseling so that if you're a woman owned business they can look at your books they can look at your application and say oh consider phrasing it this way or hey you're missing this bit of information you're really going to need that on your application that is the state of the bookstore and that is the state of my mind when it comes to book bans in the United States right now read Summer of the Mariposas read Fall of the Fireflies read banned books pick them up and hand them to a child in your life make sure that those kids have access to the books that people want to keep from them how can we have any kind of empathy for each other and a care for the common good if we are telling kids that some people's lives don't matter so that's it thanks for listening to the Curious Cat Bookshop Podcast you can always order from us online link is below I'll have links for these books down below bye
00:00:00.000 --> 00:11:31.033
hello and welcome to the Curious Cat Bookshop Podcast I'm Stacy Whitman I'm your host and I'm the owner of the Curious Cat Bookshop and today we're going to be talking about a number of things it's the end of August I've been MIA here on the podcast for a while and we'll get to that later as we talk about the state of the store and what I've been working on this year but first I wanted to talk about something really important I have a lot on my plate all the time as a business owner but especially this year again we'll talk about the details of that in a moment but what that means is often times I'm so behind on getting displays up and it occurred to me two weeks after watching the Odyssey the movie that maybe I should make an Odyssey display you know like this Emily Wilson translation and her translation of the Iliad that everyone is talking about but also books that are inspired by the Odyssey and the Iliad Circe is a great example of that I've got a few others that I'm waiting on coming into the store and one of my most favorites and not just because I edited the book is Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe García McCall this is a beautiful book about five sisters it is a retelling of The Odyssey from the point of view of the eldest of five Mexican American sisters who find a body in their swimming hole right in the Rio Grande and their dad has left the family they see this guy's family photo in his wallet and they decide you know what we can't make dad come home but we can bring this guy home to his family in Mexico so off they go on an adventure magical adventure assisted by Tonantzín who is kind of the Virgin of Guadalupe there's a lot of syncretism going on in the story Virgen de Guadalupe probably is closer to the right pronunciation but anyway La Llorona is involved right there on the river and it is a beautiful beautiful story of sisterhood and mothers loving their children and sacrificing everything for them in the midst of great struggle and just a romping story because it is a retelling of the Odyssey so these girls have a pretty easy journey to take the man back to his family in Mexico but then when they try to come home they meet Cecilia who is a witch they meet a nagual who is a warlock who shapeshifts and tries to put them in a pot of soup they meet lechuzas which are wicked owl witches who attack them in a barn that they're trying to stay in at night and they meet a one eyed chupacabras and other creatures and those are the creatures and magical beings from Mexican folklore that have parallels in this story to the Odyssey Guadalupe was a sixth grade teacher when she wrote this book she was mostly writing poetry at the time her first her first book that was published was a beautiful novel in verse called Under the Mesquite which is a novel in verse about a sixteen year old girl who loses her mother to cancer and then this came across her editor's desk at Lee and Low where I used to work and her editor was like I edit poetry I don't edit fantasy and I had just started working at Lee & Low I had just started acquiring for my imprint Tu Books and this was the perfect book this is the book that I had been looking for so we released this in 2012 and now there are more than a million copies in print well I'm actually not sure last time I looked which was right before I was laid off almost a year ago we had been approaching a million so I'm assuming that there are now more than a million copies in print it's never made it onto the New York Times list if you talk to somebody who isn't involved with the school system they would not know this book probably but if you know someone who is a teacher or who is a librarian or who has taken The Odyssey in some class where um they're also reading retellings along the way to help kids understand it Summer of the Mariposas is in curriculum all over the country and it is such a beautiful book to hand to a sixth grader who might not understand the language even if it's a plainer translation even if it's in language that is more understandable to a modern reader this is going to be more relatable than something that was handed down by oral tradition more than 2,000 years ago so anyway my point is that retellings can really help us understand the classics help us to see a new perspective help us to understand new cultures that we might not have had experience with before or as happened in Guadalupe's actual sixth grade class when she was teaching them the Odyssey to kids from the border in Texas her sixth grade girls walked out of class and said, "Miss, we need our OWN Odyssey," and she said, yes yes you do because they were struggling so hard to understand I'm not dissing classics I'm just saying kids need a doorway sometimes into those classics that they can understand and Summer of the Mariposas does that why am I telling you all this well the same day that I'm finally putting together this display of books that relate to the Odyssey three weeks after it comes out haha and I'm still waiting on a few to come in because the book about Penelope that I was going to pull from the shelves actually sold before I could put it in the display so I'm waiting for a new copy to come in for it not the penelopiad it's not about Penelope it's about somebody else one of the Helen's sister whose name I'm blanking on the same day I'm putting this display together Guadalupe sends a link to me and says have you seen this and that's when I found out that in the Peoria (AZ) Unified School District a committee voted to remove three books from sixth through eighth grade curriculum because the works are not considered age appropriate this was written by a sixth grade teacher for sixth graders in Texas I defy anyone to go through this book and find a curse word to find the kind of racial violence they're claiming is in here or anything of the sort that would apply to the policies that they're claiming that it violates there is there is not a single thing in here that I would not hand to an 11 or 12 year old I would hand it to a nine or ten year old there's no romance there's nothing in this that I would not hand to somebody it discusses from the point of view of five Mexican American girls that somebody crossed the border illegally and died in the river that's it and it doesn't discuss it in any other way than saying he is a father and we want to return him to his family that's it they are US citizens and when they return at the end of the book to the US they have help from a goddess because they don't have their birth certificates that's it now that says to me they cannot handle discussing the point of view of Mexican American kids now if they had just decided to phase it out because they decided to go a different direction in their curriculum that's one thing but when they're claiming that they're doing it for policy reasons including the banning of DEI they're claiming that this book is offensive for sixth graders so anyway I had to I had to cover that because that is just absolute nonsense to me and if your state is dealing with these book bans I can only ask you to please get involved and make sure that your voice is heard they're also banning The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and a Raisin in the Sun as inappropriate for this age group and they're saying that The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Raisin in the Sun will still remain in the library but they're banning this from the library as well if this were just a curricular direction they wouldn't be banning it from the library if you don't have a freedom to read law in your state the way we do here in Connecticut Massachusetts just passed one I think New York has either passed one or is working on one multiple states have been working on this and there is a raft of book banning bills making their way through Congress nationally as well I ask that you get involved go to your local school board meetings and watch these discussions where they're talking about in age inappropriate books get involved and ask why they think it's inappropriate to discuss the facts of history or the facts of someone's existence as you can guess I'm probably I'm having a hard time number one I'm having a hard time speaking because my my cheek is still numb and I keep biting it as I talk but I am so furious about this and this is only one banning there are so many books that just address the existence of trans people that just address the existence of LGBTQ people for children out there that have been banned in multiple states look at the book bans in Utah for example if a book gets banned by a school district three times by like three different school districts I think the law is it's banned in the whole state which means that if conservative rural Utah decides that Salt Lake shouldn't be allowed to read something like Summer of the Mariposas somehow they have the right to tell other school districts what their kids can read as you can imagine I'm furious about this I could probably just ramble on about this for a while but instead what I'm going to do is move on to the state of the store as I've mentioned here before back in January I had to let a couple of our employees go simply because sales were down everybody is dealing with it it's not just us as a store it's this whole area so many people not just myself who have been laid off in the last six months to a year in our area just tariffs and economic policies and just all of the things that are happening and being talked about on a national basis that we have no control over like defunding libraries denying national grants approved by Congress to blue states denying funding to universities all sorts of pulling of funds from museums and the arts all of these things that we think don't necessarily affect us on a daily basis are absolutely affecting our local economies all across the nation as people lose jobs add to that all the AI fervor and people I I I just talked to a candidate for state representative who said that she herself lost her job because she was replaced by AI how do we survive all of this and come out on the other side thriving?
00:11:31.033 --> 00:19:36.200
it's a giant question that I don't have the answer to but for my store I'm trying to find our answer part of that is doing things like hosting Democracy Reads book club with our local Indivisible chapter we're talking about all the ways that we can get involved civic involvement locally all politics are local thinking about gerrymandering thinking about how our schools work and are funded how our roads are taken care of how our states run their budgets these are all things that we can have a say in more than for example on a national or even worldwide level so that's something that we are talking about in our Democracy Reads book club so if you are local we'd love to have you join us this month we are talking about Chris Murphy's new book and we will be having a special guest well I just realized that our special guest is not on the calendar the way that she should be and I'm blanking on her name so I need to go back into there and make sure that her her coming here as a candidate for a local state office is on the calendar so that people know she's coming and she's going to discuss Crisis of the Common Good with us Chris Murphy's newest book and that's what we're talking about is what is the common good on a local level, on a county or here in Connecticut, town-wide level our counties do exist but the medium sized unit of government here in Connecticut is not a county it's a town kind of like a township where I come from in Illinois it's a little bit confusing to anyone outside of Connecticut took me a while to wrap my my brain around I think it might be similar in Rhode Island and Massachusetts like being in New England thing but I'm not 100% sure but we're going to be talking about that and the point that I'm making is we're working on what we can do to become more involved locally in civic engagement I'm not talking necessarily about politics but about policy and about advocating for the common good for example my friend Carrie um I don't I I think I I posted a short about this but I I don't think I have um talked about it on the podcast yet she owned the Railway Cafe down the street and back in June she was murdered her husband murdered her he has been arrested for murder and and the legal process is moving forward but she had a court order against him she had a restraining order or whatever that's called it's a full court order where she went through and she proved his abusiveness and yet he still murdered her he had no ankle monitoring he had they're she had no way of knowing that he was going to enter her home that night and right now people in town have been very affected by it if you come to the store you'll see that we have purple hearts and purple lights in the window and that's for the color for domestic abuse uh awareness and there are people in town who are advocating for what we call Carrie's Law in honor of Carrie Stetson they're talking about simple reforms that could protect the next person so that they wouldn't have to go through what Carrie (went) through simple things like if they have a court order to stay away then they have to be ankle monitored and maybe alarms go off if they violate that order they're working on what that policy would look like it's going through the process with our legislators here in the state and we're getting periodic updates for it from the organizers who are working on it who are relatives and friends of Carrie's so that's something that we can do that we have the power to do and we are a third space for our communities that's something that we can do locally so anyway that's one thing that we've been working on this year the other thing that I've been working on this year and I will link you to the-- I I still haven't quite figured out how to like put an actual video in the middle of my videos but if I do it right it'll be right here about how I'm implementing a CRM system and that's something I've been working on since last fall and I've finally gotten to a place where I actually have a dashboard where I can see all this data of what my sales looked like this year so far versus last year versus 2024 I'm still working on 2023 which was our first year in business getting my bills from publishers and sideline vendors into that whole system so that I can budget appropriately and forecast all of this is in preparation I feel like I'm finally at a point where I can go and take that information and go to a bank or perhaps one of our community lenders and I've been working with the Connecticut Women's Business Development Center Council anyway I've been working with them to get to a point where I am ready to try to get full capitalization and what that means is that we would not be bootstrapping it anymore I started the business with my bonus back in 2023 for the year so and plus a a grant that I got and then the next year I put whatever I could save into it like I had from my full time job I was working my full time job and paying for my mortgage and everything and whatever I could I was pouring into building the business and I wasn't paying myself I was just whatever we were making I was plowing it back into the business and even so cash flow has just been such a challenge and what I really need to figure out the biggest challenge this year and why I've been working so hard is that without employees to take on tasks that I it is not humanly possible for me to do everything that a bookstore needs if I am working on something like the CRM I'm neglecting the podcast if I am working on the podcast I'm neglecting social media or our email list so recently I did just hire Roxy is our new senior bookseller you might see her on our social media from time to time and she has the experience and the know how to be taking over marketing duties and to grow in that side of the business and what I'd really love to do is to be fully funded enough to have not just one or two people that I can delegate to but a staff that I can delegate to so that I can manage the business and that I don't have to do everything myself because it is not humanly possible to do literally everything myself I have been trying to do that this year except I did keep Sara on because she was running the book clubs trying to be in the store every day we're open and working on the bookkeeping side of things and building the CRM system and doing social media and planning events you'll notice we haven't had that many author events this year because I just I can't I can't do it all myself so if I can get our numbers together that I can show them hey I am taking on editorial work I'm starting to do writing workshops this fall FYI some of them will be online we'll start with announcing the ones here in store and then we're gonna be doing some online as well once we are fully capitalized I can start paying myself for a reasonable number of hours and not stay up till 2 or 3 every night exhausted trying to just push a little bit harder
00:19:36.200 --> 00:27:43.299
00am and and try and get to the store on time and be peppy and on and do everything myself because it's not physically possible so that is the state of the store i am taking on some editorial work in fact, speaking of Summer of the Mariposas, Fall of the Fireflies is set in that same world it stars the twins who are the middle girls of the five sisters and it's a completely new story you don't have to have read Summer of the Mariposas to pick up Fall of the Fireflies it's just a fun adventure two twins dealing with twin gods they become monster hunters and it's very loosely a reimagining of Antigone, the play this is a standalone and 10 years later more than 10 years later because this came out last fall we came out with the first in a trilogy that stars the other sisters and I am actually as a freelancer currently editing, almost done, Spring of the Cicadas, which so this stars Odilia, the eldest sister Fall of the Fireflies stars Velia and Delia, who are the middle twins Spring of the Cicadas stars Juanita who is the second eldest and in the future Winter of the Witch Moth is coming out a year later and that will star Pita who is the youngest of the five sisters so I am taking on some editorial work but again I don't have room for this work until I am fully capitalized enough to be able to hire people to work in the business so I can work on the business and that is always a challenge when you're a small business owner trying to figure out how to fund your business I mean in in the last three years I've done everything from taking out a home equity loan on my home which I'm very lucky to be able to do to this year living off of my 401k which I have now drained I have no retirement left because getting laid off there was a time when I could be on unemployment but now I'm just living on what would have been my retirement in hopes of getting to a point where I can be paying myself on a regular basis from the bookstore I would like to not lose my house so making sure that the business itself pays for itself and can pay me is my top priority this year and that means hiring people who can be competent at making sure that we hit our goals as a business and that needs numbers analytics that they can look at and we can say okay we are here right now this is where we wanna go we need to make what they call smart goals I forget what smart stands for except for measurable and that's the most important thing here is that we can measure our success and our growth and reasonable is one of them as well so reasonable goals that we can measure and aim for to make sure that our business is growing and so that our employees are growing with it I'm not looking to get rich here but I am hoping to actually be able to pay myself regularly and not just rob Peter to pay Paul so that has been the state of the bookstore the realistic thing about running a bookstore even three years in is that we're not yet profitable and I am not making a living off this bookstore I am a single woman I don't have any other form of income other than maybe taking on some editorial work which does make me wonder why am I putting all my energy into this bookstore that can't pay me when I could probably just be freelancing from home and have a much simpler and more robust financial life that might even let me take a day off here and there and even a vacation every now and then and be able to afford my healthcare and dental work thankfully currently I'm on COBRA but that's super expensive as well all of these things to say that's the reality of being three, almost four years into a business like this sometimes you have to ask yourself the hard questions and really dig into the numbers and say are these numbers working right now they're not working I am hoping that with a small business loan having enough cash flow that we have a runway to profitability and having a good plan toward profitability with events that we're planning with perhaps moving to a larger space being able to offer more things maybe we might bring in people to to do art classes maybe we might expand our book clubs most importantly one thing that we want to do is to have big events with great authors at least two to three times a month and that means bringing in more than the 28 people that we can fit in the store here in this location so I'm actively looking for other alternatives but everything that I've looked at so far has either had terrible parking is actually smaller than the space that we're in or are so much bigger and have such higher rent than what we're paying right now that I have to figure out how we'd have the funding to justify it so there are a lot of factors that go into figuring out the future of your business what's realistic, what kind of funding do you have, what kind of funding do you need how do you get access to that funding there is a grant that I've talked about here before called the ignite grant I was applying for that grant last spring and I didn't get it and right now as I consider whether we might move or stay here I don't think I'm going to be applying for it this month I think the deadline is early September I don't think I'm going to be applying for it this month, either unless we suddenly find the perfect space to move into because we need a project to propose that is going to help us to grow the business and right now I don't have a good project in mind that would make that happen so instead I'm focusing on either an SBA loan or a similar community lending kind of loan that will help us to have breathing space so that I'm not constantly wondering how I'm going to be able to pay the publishers for the books that I've ordered and then ending up taking out a loan from Quickbooks or square for like 30% interest rate which of course we're not profitable if we're having to take these you know short term loans that have obscene rates when an SBA loan might be closer to like 10% I think is the current rate some of the rates for the state of Connecticut are as low as 4% because they've created a program specifically to help businesses like us all I need to do is to have the application ready to apply so that is what I'm working on that's what I'm working toward and if you're in Connecticut and need information about getting funding like this the Connecticut WBDC has all sorts of great resources including recorded classes and live classes where you can get this kind of information really really helpful and and they do have free counseling so that if you're a woman owned business they can look at your books they can look at your application and say oh consider phrasing it this way or hey you're missing this bit of information you're really going to need that on your application that is the state of the bookstore and that is the state of my mind when it comes to book bans in the United States right now read Summer of the Mariposas read Fall of the Fireflies read banned books pick them up and hand them to a child in your life make sure that those kids have access to the books that people want to keep from them how can we have any kind of empathy for each other and a care for the common good if we are telling kids that some people's lives don't matter so that's it thanks for listening to the Curious Cat Bookshop Podcast you can always order from us online link is below I'll have links for these books down below bye
