Brooklyn-Based Bookstore!

This morning I'm featured in a story called "Business Plan" in the fabulous thrice weekly newsletter/website Brooklyn Based, which highlights the best and most interesting stuff in our beloved borough. Aside from a typically squinty-looking picture of me (and a nice one of our home bookshelf, here), it's a cool little piece by Nina Pearlman that lets me talk about the process of getting to this point in the bookstore development process, offer some tips for fellow budding entrepreneurs, and give a shout to some of my favorite Brooklyn bookstores!

If you're finding this site through Brooklyn Based, welcome! If you're interested in knowing more, sign up for our email list at the top right. Rebecca and I are going to announce that long-awaited secret bookstore name to our mailing list in a matter of days. And if you're interested in finding out more about being one of our community lenders (honestly, it's one of the best investments you can make these days), you can email us directly here.

Bookstores in Bad Times

Note: At last weekend's meeting of the board of NAIBA (the regional booksellers's assocation of which I am an executive board member), secretary Eileen Dengler "comissioned" a piece for the upcoming NAIBA newsletter. This is something I've had on my mind lately, so it was a great motivation to write out my thoughts, and Eileen graciously agreed to let me cross-post it here. Your comments are most welcome.

Bookstores in Bad Times

At this particular moment, it’s a challenge to be an idealist and an optimist: two labels I’ve embraced as I’ve found my calling as an independent bookseller. Newspaper headlines, daily sales totals, and our own tightening belts tell us that things are tough, and getting tougher. As we head into the holiday season, where most of us make 40% of our yearly sales, it can seem logical to throw up our hands and wait for the apocalypse.

But booksellers are tough, and relish a challenge. And somehow I keep finding reasons to be optimistic.

For example: if our memories are long enough, we can remember that at least through August, US Census numbers (as reported in Shelf Awareness) showed that bookstore sales continued to rise month by month over last year’s numbers, even as retail sales overall were stagnant. That seems to suggest that bookstores may be more resilient than some other segments of the economy.

And economic hard times can actually be pretty good for purveyors of books. Sara Nelson of Publishers Weekly quoted Random House founder Bennett Cerf in her October 6 column: in his 1977 memoir, he asserted “The publishing business has always been rather stable. It doesn't soar when things are going crazy and people with a lot of money are spending it. . . By the same token, when everything goes to hell, books become one of the cheapest forms of pleasure.”

You’ve probably already heard the formulation “Books and Booze”: the two commodities that continue to sell when folks have little money to spend. The 15 or 25 dollars someone spends on a good book represents an investment in pleasure, entertainment, and escape that lasts a lot longer than a movie, and costs a lot less than an iPhone or a Blu-Ray player. (And if you’re selling wine or beer in your bookstore, you’re doubly insured.)

And we have the advantage of being on Main Street, not Wall Street. We’re not answerable to jittery stockholders who demand impossible quarterly growth; we are the ones we have invested in, and we’re in it for the long haul. I think more consumers are starting to understand the benefits of that. Now is the moment when the message of shopping locally to support your local economy is more resonant than ever. We have the marketing tools of IndieBound, as well as our own local first organizations and publicity efforts and personal relationships, to get that message across, and people are listening.

If we are heading into another depression – well, we’ve been here before. The publisher returns system was implemented during the Great Depression of the 1930s – so in a way, our industry has a safety valve built for just such an economic environment. As CEO Avin Domnitz of the American Booksellers Association reminded us in his open letter, now is the time to take advantage of that system, and make sure our inventory is serving us well.

Avin is a pragmatist, as are most booksellers, and I’m grateful to them for reminding me when it’s time to face hard facts. But to quote Avin himself, “Now is the time to look at your business carefully, to first identify trends, and, then, to find ways to enhance those that are positive and to soften those that are negative.”

To me, looking with all honesty at the reasons to be optimistic is one of the ways to enhance positive trends. While we work on controlling our inventory, payroll, and cash flow, we booksellers would all do well to remember the good stuff. It’s never a bad time to get inspired, to be hopeful, to remember what we have to offer, and what we have to rely on, even in tough times.

One of my fellow NAIBA board members passed along an article describing the economic downturn as an approaching storm. It’s scary, and it could get ugly.

But independent bookstores are a port in the storm. We sell a product that people can feel proud – and smart – to spend their money on. We create spaces that offer a welcome third place (and that doesn’t have a two-drink minimum). We offer human connection, and free conversation. We have “one of the cheapest forms of pleasure”, and one of the richest sources of community. We are what people are looking for.

So I’m still an optimist. And like all of us, I’m an idealist. We can and should be savvy business people (so we can keep doing what we’re doing), but we’re never going to make a massive fortune as independent booksellers, no matter how good or bad the economy gets. That's not why we do it. We do it because being an independent bookseller is one of the great good things one can do in the world. And our stores are islands of hope and perspective in scary times. We’ll be fine, because what we have to give is just what is needed now: Community. Ideas. Stories. Shelter from the storm.

Making appointments, making choices

For Rebecca and I, that's what being bookstore proprietors (or partners or LLC managers or principals or what have you) is all about these days.

Appointments with lawyers. Appointments with bankers. Appointments with potential investors. Appointments with building owners or development corporations or real estate agents.

And then the choices. Choosing whether this space is worth pursuing or too far off the beaten path. Choosing the language of a promissory note that will give the best benefits to both our community lenders and the business. Choosing the many, many details of the LLC operating agreement (from what we'll use for the address, to how we'll split equity, to who gets our shares if we die, to what kinds of decisions will be made individually or jointly, and on and on).

And before all that, choosing a name.

Those of you who know me know that I've struggled with choosing a bookstore name since I first conceived of the venture. I have lists of dozens, maybe hundreds of potential names and parts of names, and I've fallen in love with one or the other at various times. But I wasn't sure enough to put any of them on legal stationary -- I thought maybe I needed to wait until I saw the space the bookstore would be in, or some other moment of clarity.

When Rebecca and I started talking about partnership, I passed along my lists of names, but she wasn't in love with any of them either. We tossed around some ideas for coming up with a name: something based on a book we both love, or some combination of our names; something alluding to the neighborhood, or something more universal. Nothing quite clicked.

Then, rather unexpectedly as it often does, a name presented itself. A friend might have mentioned it, then we heard the word again, then we started talking about why it might work.

Then it was time to put down a name for the LLC. And we realized we had already chosen.

No, I'm not gonna tell you what it is just yet. We're saving that fun announcement for our first big email blast (sign up for the mailing list at the top right if you don't want to miss it!) Rebecca and I have joked that finding out we had the bookstore name is kind of like finding out that you're going to have a baby: you want to wait to be sure before you make it public.

Like all of our other choices, choosing a name seemed daunting until it came down to it. I think it arose organically from our partnership, and from our vision for the store -- as have all our decisions about corporate structure, spaces, finances. It takes some concentration to sit down and make the choice, but the tools and the seeds are there in our shared philosophy of the kind of bookstore we want to create.

Now we've just got to sit down in those appointments and put our choices on paper.

The Hunt Is On!

Now that the furious excitement surrounding the party and our partnership announcement is winding down, Priority Number One for the future bookstore of Fort Greene is finding the right space.

As we've told lots of people, we're going to be very picky. We need the right size (1500-2000 square feet or more), the right aesthetic, good walking traffic, sufficient time for buildout, a good layout and general vibe, and of course, an affordable rent. But we're willing to look at almost anything in the neighborhood that's available -- everything we see gives us a better perspective and a sense of context for what's out there.

Rebecca and I are currently following up on every real estate lead available. As with finding an apartment, commercial real estate in New York is all about word of mouth and relationships, and we're grateful to those who have given us leads or are doing research on our behalf.

And it's great to have a partner to share the site-seeing responsibility with! Sometimes we'll look together, sometimes separately, and debriefings are frequent. It's really good to have a second opinion and another skilled bookseller's eye to look at these things -- yet another reason I'm thrilled about our partnership.

At the same time, we're also on the hunt for those who will leap into action once we do find a space: the architects, the designers, the general contractors, etc. We've got some wonderful leads on that as well.

So hey, if you've got any information, feel free to send it our way! You can send email to our new address, fortgreenebookstore@gmail.com.

We'll keep you posted on the hunt!