Sometimes, the Right Thing Just Takes a Little Longer to Get Done.

Bye bye, Judith Regan.

Just a Little Further North...

Le sigh.

If only a town around here would put out a call like this (from "Shelf Awareness" 12/13/06):

Town Seeks Bookstore, Must Be Independent, Energetic

Haddonfield, N.J., which has 12,000 people and is 15 minutes from Philadelphia, is looking for an independent bookstore "to enhance their downtown business district," the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association reported.

Haddonfield has "outstanding demographics, one of the best school districts in the state, parents who care deeply about education and a growing population of young families. Not to mention the fact that virtually every woman in town over the age of 25 is in some kind of book group!" Lisa Hurd, retail coordinator for the town, wrote to NAIBA. There is a Barnes & Noble 20 minutes away; Haddonfield's Cabbages and Kings bookstore closed some five years ago.

The Partnership for Haddonfield, a business improvement district for which Hurd works, offers "significant financial incentives to targeted stores [which would include a bookstore] that take the form of rent subsidies and fit-out grants."

Chemistry, Luck or Savvy, Probably Need a Little of Each

I'm sitting at my desk, trying desperately to find my list of speed-dial codes for our fax machine so I can show the new girl which buttons to push, when I come across an old print-out. It's five - no, wait, almost six years old, printed on one of the dot matrix printers from back in my customer service days. So old that it has my maiden name on the to: line, and the domain name for my company was actually the name of the publisher, not the parent company who was just about to merge with us.

It's from a friend of mine - "Top Ten Ways to Celebrate Your Birthday" - and suddenly I'm waxing more nostalgic about the bookstore than I have in a long time. Because goddammit, I miss you, Matt.

One of the best things about Booksmith was its crew. Somehow, we always managed to hire people who just clicked together. There was the occasional employee who never quite found a niche, but for the most part, you could look at the schedule any night of the week and think, "that's going to be an excellent shift." Seven years later, and a lot of my favorite people have scattered across the country, in pursuit of other dreams. But when they're in town, I know we can go get a cup of coffee, and suddenly it's just like they've never left. Most of them are people I'd never have met if we hadn't shared those years at Booksmith.

There are very few jobs where your coworkers are also your friends. If Books That Don't Suck gets big enough for employees (aka, people who aren't related to me), I hope I can find that same sort of formula for my own crew.

Call Me Old-Fashioned

If I may go all industry-jargon for a hundred words or so...

I am so very proud of some of my current customers who are already making the conversion to ISBN-13, and not waiting until the last minute to let go of the old ten-digit ISBNs.

But can I just say that after, oh, thirteen years in the book world (hello, coincidence!), it's a bitch getting used to typing those three extra numbers? My fingers just refuse to do it. After a while, you get used to the rhythm of ten-digits. You know when you've keyed one number too few or too many, or when a customer gave you an extra number somewhere.

I know, six months from now, I'll be using ISBN-13 as though it had been here all along. So in five years, at the grand opening of Books That Don't Suck, the great 13-digit crisis of 2007 will seem like nothing.

But ugh, muscle memory is so very hard to retrain.

Shuffling towards progress.

I stood for a half hour this afternoon, staring at a wall o' business books. This other gentleman and I would occasionally do the polite I-step-forward-and-to-the-right/you-step-backwards-and-to-the-left shuffle to switch places, while we both were simultaneously overwhelmed by the sheer volume of books on the shelves.

No, that wasn't an intentional pun.

Okay, maybe a little.

Anyway, I noticed two things:

Thing the first: there are books on opening all kinds of stores - coffee bars, restaurants, florist shops, car washes - but there wasn't a single book on opening a bookstore. I saw books on opening generic retail businesses, which I realize would mostly apply to a bookstore, but others got so specific, I just sort of figured... well.

So, of course, I'm thinking, "What, are you scared, Borders?* Where are the books on opening a bookstore?" (No, I haven't gone searching for one, but I'm sure such a book exists. Although, it's not an easy time to be an independent bookstore, so I doubt there are very many new books out on it.)

In the end, I walked out of there with a general how-to on starting a small business (the one whose table of contents seemed to best apply to me, for now) and another on actually writing a business plan.

Now, of course, that means I have to make use of them, and not let them gather dust on the Shelf of Good Intentions.

Thing the Second (and this one can go in the eventual employee handbook): Borders failed the One-finger Rule. To wit: on a shelf full of books facing spine-out, you should be able to place an index finger on the top of a single book, and slide it out easily. If you can't do that, or two books slide out instead of one, the shelf is packed too full. Employees of Books That Don't Suck who overstuff shelves will lose one finger for every extra book that comes out during the test.


*I know, I know. I'll do my penance for not buying from an indie this weekend. I promise. I just wanted to have some kind of tangible step taken towards 1/2/12.

So you can see what I see

A friend started a thread on a message board we're both on, asking what our dream jobs were. This was my response.

It's that bookstore where you go and browse and find the book you came in looking for, plus books you didn't know you wanted to read. And the person behind the counter knows who you are and what you like, and you shoot the shit with them for a few minutes before you go. You recommend books to them, they tell you about the new This or That Author coming in the fall, and you know there'll be a copy waiting for you when it comes out.

Coffee? Sure, but not anything pretentious. None of this Grande/Venti half-caff mochaccino shit. Coffee. Pure and simple and good. You wanna fancy it up? You're in the wrong place. We sell books here, not java.

Decent-sized floor space or even an attached building/room for events. Local musicians, poetry slams, book groups (for good books, obviously). Author signings - local authors and some of the big guns. I'm not talking Grisham or Patterson. They don't quite follow the store name, do they? I mean Christopher Moore, George RR Martin. And hey, dream store, yeah? Neil Gaiman, Stephen King.

We don't sell Cliff's Notes. Nor do we sell candles, or any distracting sidelines that aren't book related. You want Beanie Babies and kitsch? Go to the Hallmark store.

But, before you go, have you read Inkheart?

I know it's a thankless job. I know in reality, it's really fucking hard to get an indie off the ground and keep it in the black. You work long hours - sometimes ten, twelve, sixteen - for not a lot of pay. You argue with publishers, customers, authors, other bookstores. B&N wants to build across the street and steal your business. The bestsellers are 30% off at Wal-Mart, and Amazon's offering free shipping. All the authors get sent to the Borders two towns over and hey, why does Books-a-Million have the new mass markets a week before I do?

I know all that. I know it.

I still want it.

Words, words, words...

I'm not big on how-to books. Not so much a fan of self-help tomes that all say the same things only with different names in their example stories. I don't even remember the last time I read an advice column looking for anything beyond a giggle. I've read forums for people looking to save money, or lose weight, or achieve any of hundreds of goals, and seen the same posts reworded weekly as newbies ask old, old questions.

Suppose you can't really be exposed to all of that without taking something away from it, though. One thing I actually found useful was this (reworded, of course, by me):

If you're trying to accomplish something, don't keep it a secret.

It's so very, very easy not to tell people you (for example) want to lose twenty pounds by the holidays. If you do it, great! Your friends will notice, and compliment you. But if you don't, the only person you disappoint is yourself. Makes it awfully easy to pretend you didn't really fail. "Oh, well, twenty pounds by January, then." "Valentine's Day." "Easter." "I have plenty of time." Until you're back around to the holidays again.

But if you tell people, if you stop letting it only echo through your head, and start actually saying it out loud and in the presence of others, well. Now you have a goal, and something they're going to ask you about. How's the job search? How's the diet?

How's the bookstore?

It's never been a secret, this aspiration of mine. My friends know. My family knows. Hell, my boss brings it up now and again. But it's always been such a nebulous thing: someday, I will open a bookstore, and I'll call it Books That Don't Suck, and it will be good. It's the "someday" that sets it up to fail. That sets me up to fail.

So, what good does blogging about it do? It puts the idea out there even further, I suppose. Announces it to even more people, should anyone stumble across this little corner of the internet, and like it enough to peek back every now and then. It will make me think about it every day, reminding me that, well, the idea's not going away - what have I done today to make this dream a reality?

And, since part of the reason I want to have my own bookstore so badly is because I miss working in one, some of my rants might actually come in handy for the Books That Don't Suck employee handbook. (Chapter 1: Ten things that will make the boss grit her teeth.)

So. I want to open a bookstore. It will probably not really be called Books That Don't Suck, as most communities would frown on that, but it might be something like "Books That Don't Suck LLC, d/b/a "[Insert Clever Bookstore Name Here]." Oh, and since "someday" is weaselly, let's say...

Books That Don't Suck. Grand Opening January 2, 2012. Guest list sign-ups for the opening bash start...

...now.