Greenlight at BEA

Rebecca and I will be making the rounds this weekend at Book Expo America, the U.S. book industry's largest trade show. We're looking forward to seeing old friends and talking to new vendors. We've got some big news in the cooker that we'll be officially announcing very soon, but in the meantime we'll be spreading the word one-on-one to friends and colleagues. You can also follow us on Twitter to see what we're up to: @booknerdnyc and @arrbecca. Hope to see you at the show!

Fort Greene Open Book

It's a new project (something we tend to sympathize with): Open Book TV.

Here's the official description:

"Open Book is a new half-hour weekly television program about books and writers focusing on the contemporary and historical literary production in a different spot on the planet each week."

But the really important thing about Open Book?

The first show focuses on that most literary of all spots: Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Not only does the show spotlight the neighborhood's literary history with readings of Walt Whitman, Richard Wright, and Henry Miller, but it features the current resident literary and creative lights: Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Wright, Carl Hancock Rux, Moustafa Bayoumi, Ishmael Beah, Bill Lee, Darryl Blaine, and Suheir Hammad.

Also featured: Madiba (best South African restaurant I know), M & H deli(Halal), the Walt Whitman Houses, the Navy Yards, Spike Lee's dad's house, and what I'm pretty sure is the inside of the Methodist church on Hanson Place.

Authors I was looking forward to: Egan and Rux (and they didn't disappoint).

Authors whose descriptions and evocations of Brooklyn and Fort Greene unexpectedly choked me up: Bayoumi on a rich and open-eyed multiculturalism, Hammad on a particularly local youth and pride, Wright on an almost mystical but humorous continuity across the centuries.

All of them made me love this neighborhood even more.

Oh come on, just watch it, and relish the literary joy available in our local "spot on the planet"!

Greenlight in the NYT Local Blog!

It's nice to be one of the (unpaid) guest bloggers on the New York Times' Local blog for Fort Greene -- especially because Greenlight Bookstore is local news. Today's post "Lit Life: A Bookstore Becoming" fills in the blog readers about our new space and our community lender program.

Looking forward to the reader feedback, and to expanding our community!

Community Lender Update

I've spent this morning working on getting in touch with everyone who has expressed interest in becoming a community lender for Greenlight Bookstore. (If you're interested and I've somehow missed you, email me here or here and I'll happily send you the documents and details.) Here's what I told them:

After conferring with our lawyer and accountant, Rebecca and I have finalized the new terms of the loan and promissory note for community lenders. Basically, we're giving lenders the option of choosing their own interest rate, between 2.5% (just above the minimum required by the IRS) and 4% (just above the prime rate). The loans of $1000 or more will be paid back by Greenlight Bookstore with quarterly payments over five years, beginning one year from the opening date of the bookstore (this gives us a grace period during the traditionally difficult first year of business). Interest begins to accrue on June 1, 2009, and will be compounded annually.

In addition to getting your loan back with interest, community lenders get the employee discount of 30% off all purchases at Greenlight until the loan is paid in full. And they'll get special "community lender privileges" like advance notice of author appearances, sales and other store functions throughout the life of the bookstore.

Additionally, lenders at the $10K+ level will be included in meetings (probably quarterly) of the bookstore's Advisory Council, to get in-depth updates on the store's progress. We're also working out details of an optional "lender internship" for high-level investors, in which they'd have the chance to experience the various parts of the store's operations, such as buying, receiving, hosting events, etc.


Thanks again to all our community lenders. We're so delighted and honored by your support, and we think it will prove to be extremely worthwhile.

Who We've Been Talking To and What We've Been Doing

(or, If Rebecca and Jessica Have Seemed Scarce Lately, Here Are Some Reasons Why.)

Who: a financial adviser with Pace University Small Business Development
What: putting together a massive binder-full of loan application materials, with much good advice given and high hopes of securing significant funding.

Who: a Brooklyn-based architectural firm
What: negotiating a contract to oversee the buildout, and talking about our needs and ideas for creating a beautiful bookstore out of a former office space.

Who: the Fort Greene landlords
What: talking about the lease terms, with which they've been consistently reasonable and generous -- but it's a long process.

Who: community lenders
What: talking about loan amounts and interest rates (your generosity amazes us!)

Who: the ABA, our accountant, our lawyer
What: getting advice on the items above.

Who: artistically-minded friends and colleagues
What: soliciting logo ideas and talking through their creations.

Who: our friends, coworkers, and random acquaintances
What: responding to their kind curiosity about the bookstore process, while trying not to bore them silly with too many of the details that currently obsess us!


The result of all of this talking and doing: things are coming together. We're still in the middle of it, but we're moving in the direction we want to be going. Thanks to all of you who are helping and listening to us and bearing with our busy-ness -- as always, we'll keep you posted.

New Lit Life in the NYT

My profile on Emily Takoudes, a lovely member of the Fort Greene literati, went up on the New York Times' Local blog yesterday. Check it out!

I met Emily back at our bookstore party in September, and it was great to reconnect. I'm grateful to her for connecting me with lots of the other bookish folks in the neighborhood -- and for her enthusiasm about books, food, and Brooklyn.

If you're a Facebooker, you can also check out the group Emily created for Fort Greene / Clinton Hill Publishing. And don't forget to become a fan of Greenlight Bookstore on our page while you're there!

News from Greenlight Bookstore

Hello! Spring is in the air and things, they are a-happening...

______________________


A few months back, we announced that it was a "yellow light for Greenlight" (thanks to our fellow bookseller and friend Kelly for the imagery). We were uncertain whether the state of the economy would allow us to open on the timeline we had hoped, and we weren't finding a retail space that suited our needs, so we put things on hold and laid low for a while.

In the meantime, we were still keeping our minds (and hearts) open to finding the perfect space, and at last it looks like we may have found it. We are currently in lease negotiations for a wonderful space right in the heart of Fort Greene! (We'd love to tell you more - give us a week or two so that we can ensure things are going forward before we reveal our location.) If all goes as we hope, we're looking at a lease beginning in the next month or two, a few months for buildout, and a tentative opening in late summer or early fall.

Of course, this great news means that a lot of other things have to come together VERY quickly: most notably, the money stuff. In order to build, outfit and stock the bookstore right, we still have to raise a certain amount of additional capital. While we don't need to have cash in hand immediately, in order to commit to this venture now, we do need to know that we can count on it coming in (eventually.)

We are working on traditional financing options (SBA loans, small business grants, etc.), but we would like as much of our funding to come from our community as possible. With this in mind, we thought it would be a good time to come back to you, our supporters, about the option of community loans. Some of you (you know who you are) have already committed to loaning money to Greenlight under our Community Lender promissory note terms (detailed below.) We thank you! Acting as a lender to Greenlight Bookstore is an investment in your community, and in the book culture of New York City. Now we're putting out the call to those of you we haven't heard from yet: we can use your help as well.

We know economic times are tough, and that's one of the reasons why we feel putting your money into a community venture like Greenlight Bookstore is one of the best investments you can make. As the loan terms below dictate, this is a transaction a lot like putting your money into a CD: you get it back, with interest, after a certain amount of time. There is a certain risk involved - but given the support for the bookstore project we've already seen in Fort Greene, and our 25 years of experience in the book industry, we feel it's a risk worth taking. We'd love it if we could pay back our loans right into the community (that is, the neighborhood AND our friends and colleagues) that has already supported us in so many other ways.

If you're interested in becoming a community lender, we ask that you reply to us with an expression of interest, any questions you may have, and the approximate amount you're interested in investing. You're naturally not legally obligated until you sign the promissory note, but we ask that you be as certain as possible of your commitment level, so we can estimate the amount of community loans we can factor into our startup capital. It may take us a little time to get back to you as we work to pull all our applications together, but we WILL be in touch, and will work out details and paperwork with you based on your interest.

Thanks again to those of you who have already become Community Lenders to Greenlight Bookstore, and thanks in advance to those of you who can search your hearts (and your pockets) to support this project. Investing in an independent bookstore, and investing in your community, means earning a return on your investment that is more than just financial.

We'll definitely keep you posted on how things are going!

Best,

Jessica and Rebecca
Greenlight Bookstore
__________________

Community Lender Terms

Community Lenders will commit amounts from $1,000 to $10,000 in the form of a loan. (Anything above $10,000 we can discuss both terms and interest rates separately.) Loans will be repaid by Greenlight Bookstore in quarterly installments over a period of five years, beginning one year from the opening date of the bookstore.* Loans will be repaid at an interest rate between 0% and 4%, determined by the lender.** Interest will be compounded annually, and loans will be administered by promissory note. Community Lenders will also earn status as Founding Members of Greenlight Bookstore, with ongoing privileges throughout the life of the store.

* This one-year grace period allows the store to get on its feet during the more challenging first year, and ensures that payments will follow regularly afterward.

* * We offer an adjustable interest rate so that lenders can decide what return rate makes the most sense for both the bookstore and for the sake of their loan.

Author Nelson George on his own Fort Greene

Nelson George, author of the forthcoming memoir City Kid: A Writer’s Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success, has an interesting meditation in today's New York Times on the changing face of Fort Greene.

George moved to the neighborhood in 1985 and views the area as a "crucial black artistic enclave." Like many New Yorkers, he's regretful to see his neighborhood change from the way it was when he first encountered it, and wonders about the changing race and class dynamics of the neighborhood. It's a valuable piece for the portrait of one writer's history in Brooklyn, and as a starting point for thinking about Fort Greene's identity. A conversation about the article and related issues is already underway on Brownstoner; feel free to wade in with your opinions.

I'm following this discussion closely, hoping for additional insights into what I've observed and learned about the neighborhood. To me, Fort Greene seems like a wonderful example of racial co-habitation and community -- it's one of the reasons I love it. But it always hurts when things change around you, and I know that racial tension is probably always a presence in Brooklyn to some degree. I'm curious what Fort Greene's current crop of writers, readers, and artists think.

New Roots

"Put a bookstore in a neighborhood, and you really feel the roots of a community growing," said Lois Harvey, owner of West Side Books.

That's from a Saturday article in the Denver Post about the community bookstores in that great bookish town.

I thought it was a perfect expression of not only why Rebecca and I want to start our bookstore in Fort Greene, but why the neighborhood wants one.

A bookstore isn't just a place to get books; there are lots of those. It's a place to spend your leisure time, to meet your neighbors, to talk to folks with shared interests, to hear new authors read, to learn about issues or what's coming up. It's what's often called a Third Place, like a pub or a social club: not home, not work, but the place in between, where the life of the neighborhood really is. It's where our shared history gets made.

Fort Greene has strong roots already, and it's also got lots of newer residents who have been attracted to that history and identity. When the Fort Greene Association's Retail Survey revealed that residents of all backgrounds and races were hoping for a bookstore, that revealed something: that the neighborhood wants to strengthen and grow those roots.

We hope Greenlight Bookstore is going to be a place that together the different threads of the neighborhood, where all our roots can grow together.

Fort Greene Friday!

Without getting ahead of ourselves, and without tipping our hand (or teasing you too much with the lack of true dish in this post), Jessica and I ask that you keep us in your thoughts on Friday, as we've got some interesting irons on the fire.

Possibly more to come...

Bergen Street Comics & Retailer Optimism

In my Friday ramblings around Fort Greene and Park Slope, I found myself walking home past the Pintchick Oracle on Bergen and Flatbush. Along with the usual weather report, this time it had information about the independent shops on Bergen Street between Flatbush and 5th Avenue. Some great new ones have opened up on the block in the last year or two, from a used-and-new bookstore to a girl-friendly sex shop to clothing stores of both the hip hop and maternity persuasions. I was surprised, though, to see the Oracle announce "Bergen Street Comics - Opens Friday, March 6." Um, today? I thought, a little Scott Pilgrim-like in my glee.

Today indeed, as it turns out. I went down the block and turned in at the Bergen Street Comics Sign. "Did you just open today?" I asked. "Just a few hours ago, actually," said the young man behind the counter. His name is Tom, and he's the owner. We started talking shop immediately, and he told me that he had long wanted to open his own comics shop, and worked at Midtown Comics for the last few years to learn the trade. He clearly learned his inventory there, but the aesthetic at Bergen Street is a lot more "high end", as a customer coming in after me noted: exposed brick walls, dark wood cases, none of the florescent lighting and cheap wire-mesh fixtures associated with boys-only comics stores.

I browsed happily, noting classic favorites (including an entire bookcase devoted to Watchmen -- smart move), and new finds, including a Vietnam comic called Guerillas and the collected Freakangels by Warren Ellis, which I'd read parts of online.

I ended up buying 40 dollars worth of comics (Alan Moore's DC Universe, since I just read Watchmen, and the Freakangels collection), which I can't really afford and could probably get cheaper through my day job. But it was too exciting to be buying something from a brand new store on its first day -- and I was hoping to help it be a good one. And he was giving out good customer service: when I brought up Freakangels in hardcover, he pointed out that "while he didn't want to turn down money", it was also available in paperback, which I did actually prefer. "I'm not a collector, just a reader," I said. "That's the audience we're hoping to serve," he replied. Good market research, I think.

Of course I had told Tom about my own ambitions to open a bookstore in Fort Greene within the first five minutes, and he was very encouraging. "If your experience is like mine," he said, "a lot of people are going to say to you 'Are you crazy? Have you noticed what we're in right now?'" -- i.e., a recession. But he said he'd also gotten lots of good advice and support from people in his industry, particularly a comic store owner in the Bay area. That comics retailer told him he'd opened his store in the midst of the Dot Com Bust, which was followed immediately by 9/11 -- and yet his sales had continued to grow every year. Tom and I agreed that it took some luck, and some business know-how, but -- well, you know. It's worth doing, and it's totally possible to make it work.

I left wishing Tom and Bergen Street Comics the best of luck. I kicked myself later for not taking pictures of the place on its first day, but I did save my receipt, so I have proof I was really there at the inception.

Bergen Street Comics doesn't have a website yet -- they're still putting books on the shelves, give them a break! -- but I look forward to following their progress, and welcoming another bookish institution to the neighborhood. We can all use more of Tom's kind of crazy.

Tidying Up

It feels like things getting kinda real lately, and it's high time to tidy up around here a bit. I've changed the name of our blog from A Bookstore In Brooklyn to Greenlight Bookstore Blog - this is the redirect for greenlightbookstore.com, which will eventually be our bookstore website, so I thought it made sense to make that clear. I've added an "About Us" to summarize our project up top. I changed the color scheme, as you might have noticed. And I updated all the press coverage we've gotten over the past year and a half, from the PowerUp competition to the Fort Greene Association relationship to the wonderful party in September. Click through there if you'd like to see some of the things journalists and bloggers have said about us.

And let me know if you have ideas for other stuff we should be including here or on our Facebook page. Rebecca and I think of these tools as the beginning of what we'll want to do once the store is open: ways of connecting to readers and customers. Hope you enjoy!

Breaking News: Landlord meeting!

Rebecca and I have an appointment this morning with the owner of a VERY interesting retail space in Fort Greene. It remains to be seen whether this will be a good fit for us in terms of financials, timing, etc. etc., but we're rather excited -- this is the first really good prospect that has come along in awhile. Send good vibes our way -- we'll keep you posted!

Greenlight on Facebook!

Rebecca and I have both discovered the joys of Facebook in the last months, and though we're still in the process of looking for space for Greenlight Bookstore, we thought it's definitely not too early to get Greenlight on Facebook. Join the Greenlight Bookstore group for updates on our progress, and you can say you knew us when!

Trends, Counter-Trends, and Re-Evaluations

At the PowerUp! ceremony last night, I mentioned the headline of the (otherwise lovely) New York Times article on my bookstore party, which read "A Woman Dreams of Opening a Bookstore, and Defying the Trends." I asserted that the existence of the 75 stellar business plans in this year's competition suggest that my efforts to open an indie bookstore actually embody any number of trends: toward localism, toward idealistic entrepreneurship, toward communities taking charge of their own sustainability, toward valuing books, toward the growth of vibrant, savvy independent businesses.

Thus, it was rather gratifying to read in book industry newsletter Shelf Awareness today that two major papers have been revisiting the common perception of the trends.

The Wall Street Journal article "Folks Are Flocking to the Library, a Cozy Place to Look for a Job" begins

"A few years ago, public libraries were being written off as goners. The Internet had made them irrelevant, the argument went. But libraries across the country are reporting jumps in attendance of as much as 65% over the past year..."

Business librarian Maud Andrews and I discussed this issue at the reception last night: that bookstores and libraries have certainly had to revamp their business model, to become gathering places for the sharing of information rather than warehouses of information on paper. But it's working, for both of us.


The San Francisco Chronicle's piece "Bay Area indie bookstores beat the odds" (deja vu to the Times article) begins thusly:

"As everyone knows, independent bookstores are dead. Or at least dying. Next to opening an indie video rental store, it is hard to imagine a less promising investment opportunity.....

Defying conventional wisdom, and despite what you hear every time a landmark bookstore closes - Stacey's on Market Street is the latest example - independent bookstores are thriving in San Francisco."

The article details the passion and smarts of Preveen Madan and Christin Evans, who bought the small indie store Booksmith and are succeeding in their goal to "push the boundaries of a bookstore for the 21st century," along with Pete Mulvihill, one of the three partners that runs Green Apple Books, who talks about indie bookstores curatorial role.


It feels serendipitous to hear these stories that question the negative "trends" by really observing the successes and changes that are occurring in the world of books, after going out on a limb to assert that the trends are not as they are often assumed to be. Given the wonderful plans I saw last night, and the passion and energy evident in the entrepreneurs, the future is not so bleak as it might have appeared.


(cross-posted on The Written Nerd)