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Novel Model Bookstores
Intro: What is handselling? How much do I sell a book for? Should I open a brick-and-mortar, a bookmobile, or a pop-up shop? How do I host author events? And most importantly, how can I turn my passion for books and reading into a profitable and sustainable, independently-owned, small business?
Welcome to The Business of Bookselling, a live-workshop and interview-style podcast about business and book culture. This podcast uses a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens, combined with triple-bottom line sustainability business principles, to offer actionable advice, bookselling basics, and deep dives into the book ecosystem.
Learn from bookstore, business, and book industry experts about how to turn your book-loving dreams into a profitable and sustainable book-selling business.
Transcript:
I want you to close your eyes. Not if you’re driving, obviously, or doing something else that needs your eyes to be open to be safe, but if you’re able, close your eyes. And even if you’re not able to do that, you can do this next part – imagine your dream bookstore. Imagine your favorite bookstore or the bookstore where you’ve spent the most time throughout your life. I’m going to guess that this bookstore you’re imagining is what’s known in the retail industry as a brick-and-mortar space. That means there’s a physical location with four walls and a roof and a bunch of nearly floor-to-ceiling bookshelves all around it; in other words, a pretty traditional bookstore space. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having that vision! And you can open your eyes at this point, if you haven’t already.
But sometimes, some times, people with dreams of opening an independent bookstore of their own don’t have access to a traditional brick-and-mortar space. Sometimes the right physical space isn’t available in the general location you want to open, or sometimes you don’t have access to the financial capital you need to invest in starting up a bookstore business that is the size of a 1,200 square foot or larger physical space, or sometimes you want to test your consumer market before committing to a full space, or sometimes your community would be best served by not having a brick-and-mortar physical space, but instead a mobile space that would travel to serve different areas of your community rather than requiring the community to come to the one physical space, or sometimes a traditional brick-and-mortar space has unique qualities or characteristics about it that requires some outside-the-four-white-walls-retail-box-space thinking. Those unique alternatives, whether born of dreams or necessity, those nontraditional bookstores, are a type of business that’s recently been termed “Novel Models” by Candice Huber, owner of Tubby & Coo’s Traveling Bookshop, one of those very novel modes. Yes, the term “novel models” is a pun, but it’s so much more than that – it’s a bookstore business that fits your current set of circumstances.
Let’s be honest here – novel models are usually born out of necessity, and that necessity is most often a lack of access to traditional funding due to systemic injustices that have made generational wealth, educational opportunities, amassing capital, and access to financial resources harder to attain and obtain. If you had access to capital for your business, if you didn’t need to draw a salary from day one as a single person to support your entire family (however many people that may be), if you didn’t have a significant debt load due to higher education costs, if you weren’t the kind of person who, as an adult, has created community, lived in community, and shared resources with your community, you would probably open up that 3,000 square foot bookstore, cat cafe, and yarn store tomorrow. But in reality, novel models are most often owned and operated by people from traditionally underrepresented, marginalized, and historically excluded groups, such as people of color, members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, immigrants, neurodivergent people, differently abled and disabled folks, and people who are from historically and generationally impoverished communities, who often don’t have access to capital, who don’t have generational wealth, who do carry a significant debt load, and who are often taking care of friends, family, and community with the limited resources they do have, instead of hoarding them. This is why novel models are SO important, this is why novel models are legitimate bookstore business models, and whether you’re considering a novel model as a stepping-stone or as your final end game, there is absolutely no shame and only celebration attached to you creating a bookstore business that fits the life you are currently and aspire to be living.
To help support you on that bookstore dream journey, in this podcast episode, I’m going to try to describe some of the different types of novel models that exist so that as you consider what type of bookstore reality best fits your bookstore owning dream, even if you haven’t experienced one of these in person, hopefully hearing about them will provide some additional suggestions for how to turn that dream into a reality.
Here we go:
Bookmobiles
Whether you’re riding a bike, driving a van, bringing a bus, or have outfitted a truck or trailer, if your shop is on wheels, you’ve got a bookmobile! A lot of libraries have these, even today, and sometimes you purchase decommissioned ones online. Businesses on wheels really exploded with the food truck revolution, and while you can certainly retrofit a space for yourself, you can also pay a ton of money (it’s most likely worth it) to have an expert build one out for you. You’ll see this as a theme of most of these types of novel models – they can be done on a shoestring budget that shouldn’t stress your personal finances too much to get started, OR you can choose to spend a lot of money investing in the various accoutrement for that specific type of store model. Up to you, but just beware that if you are choosing a specific store model due to budget, it is easy to quickly blow past that if you’re not careful.
Boutique Locations
This is having a shop within another shop, but is different from popping up in that this space is permanent/semi-permanent. So you may have a boutique location inside a coffee shop, for instance, or a grocery store, where you have carved out a specific retail merchandising space for your own products, in addition to whatever type of business the leaseholder of the space is running. Most of the time, your product is run through the larger store till, and then you’re paid a percentage of the retail price for your product. You may pay rent on the space, or you may pay a percentage of your product sales to the leaseholder. Some boutiques have their own register and staff that share the space. Some bookstores have multiple boutique locations! For instance, at one point through River Dog Book Co., I had a used book boutique location inside a consignment shop, a selection of new releases at a coffee shop, books on crafting at a craft store, books on essential oils and organic lifestyles at the CBD shop, and I still did pop-ups around town.
Co-ops
In short, co-ops, or co-operatively owned businesses, are member-owned. It’s a little like having stakeholders and selling shares only less “corporate America” feeling. Every co-op member gets a voice (if they choose to use it) in how the business is run, but the business can still create a day-to-day management hierarchy and have membership meetings on large decisions instead of having 200 members mill about looking for something to do every day. I used to belong to a grocery co-op, for instance, and got a little monthly newsletter, a discount on my groceries purchased there, could attend a quarterly membership meeting, and occasionally got paid a small slice of profits from the business earnings. Co-ops, while having a board and running similarly to non-profits, are not, in fact, 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations.
Employee-owned
Like a lot of things in the bookselling and business worlds, this is a catch-all term for a broad concept that can look like many different things. At its core, an employee-owned business is a business in which the employees own shares of the business. These are sometimes called ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans), so if you’re looking to learn more about the various types of employee-owned businesses out there, search for that term. Project Equity (https://project-equity.org/) is a great resource for finding out more about how to structure a business of this type.
Events-only
What’s fun about this one is that some bookstores choose not to do events because they don’t work in their community, while other bookstores choose to be events-only businesses, because that’s what they love to do best and they’re in a community that supports this model. This type of bookstore will both put together their own author events – often festivals or large panel events or even book clubs and school/adult bookfairs – at which they sell books, and they can also be the book provider for authors who tour or have events of various types (such as school author events or again, festivals, or even events the authors have put together themselves maybe at a library or a private home or for an organization) in the store’s service area. These bookstores may want to consider having non-returnable accounts with publishers, as they receive a larger discount this way; any books leftover from the event, they can make sure the author signs, put them into their store stock housed somewhere (usually these types of stores do not have a physical presence of any kind), and sell those autographed copies online. They can also offer the autographed copies up to other stores for them to sell; if they choose to do that, it’s customary to sell them to other stores at cost + shipping, the original store isn’t making a profit of their bookselling colleagues, but they are recouping losses and not losing money on the shipping.
Microspaces
I love this concept and wish more communities would create these types of opportunities for locally-owned businesses! Microspaces are exactly what they sound like – a very small space in which a bookseller can test out their idea, get started as a business, slowly grow their presence in the community, and not have such drastic overhead costs from a physical space before they can afford them. The size of the space can be everything from a few shelves to a few hundred square feet, but they all have one thing in common: they’re extremely curated spaces that offer only a select range of books in the physical stock. This could mean the store is focusing on a niche (more on that in the next section) or simply that they’re testing the concept of a store in that market area. Portkey Books in Coral Gables, FL is a great example of a microspace: they have about 180 square feet of bookstore space, but regularly participate in city-wide events, host book clubs, organize 300+ people midnight release parties, etc., as well as having a great website and vibrant social media presence. Small can be very mighty!
Multi-concept Store
A multi-concept store is a bookstore that is also a _______ store (you fill in the blank). This could be a bookstore-slash-yarn shop, -plant store, -cat cafe, etc. There are many bookstore cafes/coffee shops, bookstore wine bars, etc. already out there; the novel model angle comes in when making this concept more your own with your unique interest as the second (or third!) business concept that is part of your shop. This might feel like splitting hairs because a lot of bookstores regularly sell sidelines. So the concept of a book-and-toy store has been around forever and a lot of general interest “bookstores” (with no other “official” concept) sell everything from puzzles to stationary to chocolate to tote bags–how would a multi-concept store be different from this? It’s the intentionality of the store. If half the store is dedicated to fiber arts with cubbies for yarn and shelves of various types of hooks and needles and other fiber art supplies, and you as the owner want to call your shop Knit Two, Read One (or whatever, I made that up, feel free to use it if you like it or judge it as the worst name in existence), then your store is a bookstore-slash-fiber arts/yarn shop, and that’s a multi-concept store.
Niche Store
As promised in the previous definition, here is more information about a niche store. The definition of “niche” in this context (thanks to Dictionary.com) is, “a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.” In this case, that product is, of course, books, and niche would refer to a romance-only bookstore, children’s only bookstore, LGBTQIA2S+-only bookstore, etc. etc. etc. Basically if the focus of the bookstore is more concentrated than “general bookstore,” that’s a niche bookstore. That niche can be as inclusive (genre-only) or narrow (cookbook-only) as you the owner would like it to be. Sometimes niche stores develop out of market demand – a general bookstore could find that they have a readership that leans more towards a specific genre, and decide to reduce or remove sections that are not earning their keep so to speak (having poor sales figures) – or you could choose to launch a store that celebrates that one genre you specifically love and, like a siren, draw all the other specific-genre-loving-readers to your bookstore’s physical or metaphorical door.
Nonprofits
Some bookstores operate as nonprofit entities. Some for-profit bookstores choose to have affiliated nonprofit organizations they start to support their events program or their community activism or their school visits, etc. Opening any business is not for the faint-hearted, and a nonprofit does have a few additional bells and whistles that will need to be considered before officially launching one, such as deciding which type of nonprofit your organization is going to be (there are more options than the standard 501(c)3, and a different 501(c)# could be better for what you’re try to accomplish) and putting together a board. Of course, there are also some potential perks, such as grants – but those are tricky to apply for, not guaranteed, and come with a lot of reporting rules as well. The National Council of Nonprofits is a great way to find out more–and it should be noted that federal legislations around nonprofit entities often change with each new president, so what may sound like a good idea under one president may not always have the same federal support and benefits under another. Of course, the same could be said for small, independently-owned businesses.
Online/Virtual-only
This model is the one that usually gets the most pushback from traditionalists, when considering the concept of an independent bookstore. People will throw around words like “third space” (you can read more about that here, if that’s a new term for you) and say that an online/virtual-only bookstore can’t possible be creating the same type of community as a bookstore with a physical presence. But as the pandemic showed us – and I personally believed this was true long before the COVID pandemic began in 2020 – community can be created anywhere and everywhere, and online is certainly no different. That all sounds very altruistic, however, and the truth is, if you sell books online, even if it’s on eBay or on “the platform that shall not be named”*, you’re a bookseller, and it’s your choice how much or how little community around books you want to build or even be a part of. Some stores that are online/virtual only do everything from having Discord and other server groups, online book clubs, virtual events, etc., while others are truly focused on solely selling/reselling titles, and neither of those are wrong, and both are still independent bookstores. I’ll continue to state this until you’re tired of reading it – no one else can decide if your bookstore is a bookstore other than you. THAT SAID, the American Booksellers Association (ABA) does differentiate between their “Online Bookstore Members” and their “Bookstore Members (Core)” (among others, such as “Used Bookstore Members” and “Provisional Members”), so that’s something to keep in mind when deciding if you want to join the ABA and make use of their resources (find out more here: https://bookweb.org/membership).
Pop-Ups
A pop-up bookstore is one that does not have a permanent physical space, but “pops up” at various opportunities, such as fairs and markets, within other businesses (such as coffee shops or any other business with a storefront willing to let you bring boxes of books and set up a table or other display) for a few hours or a few days, or, if in a physical space, is a temporary location with a clear end date (some business incubators offer spaces like these, some malls do this for empty storefronts over the holiday season, etc.). River Dog Book Co. has popped up in a women’s consignment boutique, a crafting store, an organic health-focused CBD store, at the Chamber of Commerce building for 3-day-long pop-ups where I outfitted the Chamber rentable room as a full-service bookshop for that length of time, at a Christmas market (no, it was not a “holiday” market, it was a full-on CHRISTMAS MARKET, and yes, I did bring generic winter books, Chanukah titles, etc.), and I’ve got my eye on a booth space at the local garden expo. Make no bones about it – these are a TON of work and while they can begin with nothing more than a foldable table, a selection of used books pulled of your own shelves, and a sheet from Walmart in one of your logo colors (ahem, personal experience talking here), they can also be a rather large investment in foldable/rollable shelving and/or additional fixtures, a tent that withstands various weather conditions (if you’re doing outside markets), crates or totes for moving books and merchandise around safely and securely, a vehicle that can fit everything you’re bringing, additional decor items such as rugs and chairs, signage, etc. Pop-ups are a great way to test a market, see what demand there is for what types of books/merchandise, and dip a toe into the bookselling water; it can also be extremely lucrative if you focus on doing hundreds of markets a year and make this your entire business model. Basically, it’s a great place to get started and feel out where you want to go next with your bookselling journey, if a brick-and-mortar, for whatever reason, is out of your reach at the moment.
Traditional brick-and-mortar with novel aspects
Can a traditional brick-and-mortar space be a novel model? Absolutely it can! In the first place, some of the above types of stores exist as brick-and-mortars (such as microspaces, boutique spaces, niche stores, micro-concepts, etc.). If your bookstore is general interest in books but has any kind of additional novel model aspect to it, you’re more than welcome to consider yourself a novel model because, why? Say it with me! Only YOU get to choose what type of bookstore you are!
Clearly there is no one set definition for what a novel model bookstore is, so if you’d like to consider your personal bookstore dream a novel model, you are welcome to!
Website: https://businessofbookselling.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizofbkselling
Links + resources mentioned in the episode:
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By BrocheAroe Fabian
5
66 ratings
Intro: What is handselling? How much do I sell a book for? Should I open a brick-and-mortar, a bookmobile, or a pop-up shop? How do I host author events? And most importantly, how can I turn my passion for books and reading into a profitable and sustainable, independently-owned, small business?
Welcome to The Business of Bookselling, a live-workshop and interview-style podcast about business and book culture. This podcast uses a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens, combined with triple-bottom line sustainability business principles, to offer actionable advice, bookselling basics, and deep dives into the book ecosystem.
Learn from bookstore, business, and book industry experts about how to turn your book-loving dreams into a profitable and sustainable book-selling business.
Transcript:
I want you to close your eyes. Not if you’re driving, obviously, or doing something else that needs your eyes to be open to be safe, but if you’re able, close your eyes. And even if you’re not able to do that, you can do this next part – imagine your dream bookstore. Imagine your favorite bookstore or the bookstore where you’ve spent the most time throughout your life. I’m going to guess that this bookstore you’re imagining is what’s known in the retail industry as a brick-and-mortar space. That means there’s a physical location with four walls and a roof and a bunch of nearly floor-to-ceiling bookshelves all around it; in other words, a pretty traditional bookstore space. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having that vision! And you can open your eyes at this point, if you haven’t already.
But sometimes, some times, people with dreams of opening an independent bookstore of their own don’t have access to a traditional brick-and-mortar space. Sometimes the right physical space isn’t available in the general location you want to open, or sometimes you don’t have access to the financial capital you need to invest in starting up a bookstore business that is the size of a 1,200 square foot or larger physical space, or sometimes you want to test your consumer market before committing to a full space, or sometimes your community would be best served by not having a brick-and-mortar physical space, but instead a mobile space that would travel to serve different areas of your community rather than requiring the community to come to the one physical space, or sometimes a traditional brick-and-mortar space has unique qualities or characteristics about it that requires some outside-the-four-white-walls-retail-box-space thinking. Those unique alternatives, whether born of dreams or necessity, those nontraditional bookstores, are a type of business that’s recently been termed “Novel Models” by Candice Huber, owner of Tubby & Coo’s Traveling Bookshop, one of those very novel modes. Yes, the term “novel models” is a pun, but it’s so much more than that – it’s a bookstore business that fits your current set of circumstances.
Let’s be honest here – novel models are usually born out of necessity, and that necessity is most often a lack of access to traditional funding due to systemic injustices that have made generational wealth, educational opportunities, amassing capital, and access to financial resources harder to attain and obtain. If you had access to capital for your business, if you didn’t need to draw a salary from day one as a single person to support your entire family (however many people that may be), if you didn’t have a significant debt load due to higher education costs, if you weren’t the kind of person who, as an adult, has created community, lived in community, and shared resources with your community, you would probably open up that 3,000 square foot bookstore, cat cafe, and yarn store tomorrow. But in reality, novel models are most often owned and operated by people from traditionally underrepresented, marginalized, and historically excluded groups, such as people of color, members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, immigrants, neurodivergent people, differently abled and disabled folks, and people who are from historically and generationally impoverished communities, who often don’t have access to capital, who don’t have generational wealth, who do carry a significant debt load, and who are often taking care of friends, family, and community with the limited resources they do have, instead of hoarding them. This is why novel models are SO important, this is why novel models are legitimate bookstore business models, and whether you’re considering a novel model as a stepping-stone or as your final end game, there is absolutely no shame and only celebration attached to you creating a bookstore business that fits the life you are currently and aspire to be living.
To help support you on that bookstore dream journey, in this podcast episode, I’m going to try to describe some of the different types of novel models that exist so that as you consider what type of bookstore reality best fits your bookstore owning dream, even if you haven’t experienced one of these in person, hopefully hearing about them will provide some additional suggestions for how to turn that dream into a reality.
Here we go:
Bookmobiles
Whether you’re riding a bike, driving a van, bringing a bus, or have outfitted a truck or trailer, if your shop is on wheels, you’ve got a bookmobile! A lot of libraries have these, even today, and sometimes you purchase decommissioned ones online. Businesses on wheels really exploded with the food truck revolution, and while you can certainly retrofit a space for yourself, you can also pay a ton of money (it’s most likely worth it) to have an expert build one out for you. You’ll see this as a theme of most of these types of novel models – they can be done on a shoestring budget that shouldn’t stress your personal finances too much to get started, OR you can choose to spend a lot of money investing in the various accoutrement for that specific type of store model. Up to you, but just beware that if you are choosing a specific store model due to budget, it is easy to quickly blow past that if you’re not careful.
Boutique Locations
This is having a shop within another shop, but is different from popping up in that this space is permanent/semi-permanent. So you may have a boutique location inside a coffee shop, for instance, or a grocery store, where you have carved out a specific retail merchandising space for your own products, in addition to whatever type of business the leaseholder of the space is running. Most of the time, your product is run through the larger store till, and then you’re paid a percentage of the retail price for your product. You may pay rent on the space, or you may pay a percentage of your product sales to the leaseholder. Some boutiques have their own register and staff that share the space. Some bookstores have multiple boutique locations! For instance, at one point through River Dog Book Co., I had a used book boutique location inside a consignment shop, a selection of new releases at a coffee shop, books on crafting at a craft store, books on essential oils and organic lifestyles at the CBD shop, and I still did pop-ups around town.
Co-ops
In short, co-ops, or co-operatively owned businesses, are member-owned. It’s a little like having stakeholders and selling shares only less “corporate America” feeling. Every co-op member gets a voice (if they choose to use it) in how the business is run, but the business can still create a day-to-day management hierarchy and have membership meetings on large decisions instead of having 200 members mill about looking for something to do every day. I used to belong to a grocery co-op, for instance, and got a little monthly newsletter, a discount on my groceries purchased there, could attend a quarterly membership meeting, and occasionally got paid a small slice of profits from the business earnings. Co-ops, while having a board and running similarly to non-profits, are not, in fact, 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations.
Employee-owned
Like a lot of things in the bookselling and business worlds, this is a catch-all term for a broad concept that can look like many different things. At its core, an employee-owned business is a business in which the employees own shares of the business. These are sometimes called ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans), so if you’re looking to learn more about the various types of employee-owned businesses out there, search for that term. Project Equity (https://project-equity.org/) is a great resource for finding out more about how to structure a business of this type.
Events-only
What’s fun about this one is that some bookstores choose not to do events because they don’t work in their community, while other bookstores choose to be events-only businesses, because that’s what they love to do best and they’re in a community that supports this model. This type of bookstore will both put together their own author events – often festivals or large panel events or even book clubs and school/adult bookfairs – at which they sell books, and they can also be the book provider for authors who tour or have events of various types (such as school author events or again, festivals, or even events the authors have put together themselves maybe at a library or a private home or for an organization) in the store’s service area. These bookstores may want to consider having non-returnable accounts with publishers, as they receive a larger discount this way; any books leftover from the event, they can make sure the author signs, put them into their store stock housed somewhere (usually these types of stores do not have a physical presence of any kind), and sell those autographed copies online. They can also offer the autographed copies up to other stores for them to sell; if they choose to do that, it’s customary to sell them to other stores at cost + shipping, the original store isn’t making a profit of their bookselling colleagues, but they are recouping losses and not losing money on the shipping.
Microspaces
I love this concept and wish more communities would create these types of opportunities for locally-owned businesses! Microspaces are exactly what they sound like – a very small space in which a bookseller can test out their idea, get started as a business, slowly grow their presence in the community, and not have such drastic overhead costs from a physical space before they can afford them. The size of the space can be everything from a few shelves to a few hundred square feet, but they all have one thing in common: they’re extremely curated spaces that offer only a select range of books in the physical stock. This could mean the store is focusing on a niche (more on that in the next section) or simply that they’re testing the concept of a store in that market area. Portkey Books in Coral Gables, FL is a great example of a microspace: they have about 180 square feet of bookstore space, but regularly participate in city-wide events, host book clubs, organize 300+ people midnight release parties, etc., as well as having a great website and vibrant social media presence. Small can be very mighty!
Multi-concept Store
A multi-concept store is a bookstore that is also a _______ store (you fill in the blank). This could be a bookstore-slash-yarn shop, -plant store, -cat cafe, etc. There are many bookstore cafes/coffee shops, bookstore wine bars, etc. already out there; the novel model angle comes in when making this concept more your own with your unique interest as the second (or third!) business concept that is part of your shop. This might feel like splitting hairs because a lot of bookstores regularly sell sidelines. So the concept of a book-and-toy store has been around forever and a lot of general interest “bookstores” (with no other “official” concept) sell everything from puzzles to stationary to chocolate to tote bags–how would a multi-concept store be different from this? It’s the intentionality of the store. If half the store is dedicated to fiber arts with cubbies for yarn and shelves of various types of hooks and needles and other fiber art supplies, and you as the owner want to call your shop Knit Two, Read One (or whatever, I made that up, feel free to use it if you like it or judge it as the worst name in existence), then your store is a bookstore-slash-fiber arts/yarn shop, and that’s a multi-concept store.
Niche Store
As promised in the previous definition, here is more information about a niche store. The definition of “niche” in this context (thanks to Dictionary.com) is, “a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.” In this case, that product is, of course, books, and niche would refer to a romance-only bookstore, children’s only bookstore, LGBTQIA2S+-only bookstore, etc. etc. etc. Basically if the focus of the bookstore is more concentrated than “general bookstore,” that’s a niche bookstore. That niche can be as inclusive (genre-only) or narrow (cookbook-only) as you the owner would like it to be. Sometimes niche stores develop out of market demand – a general bookstore could find that they have a readership that leans more towards a specific genre, and decide to reduce or remove sections that are not earning their keep so to speak (having poor sales figures) – or you could choose to launch a store that celebrates that one genre you specifically love and, like a siren, draw all the other specific-genre-loving-readers to your bookstore’s physical or metaphorical door.
Nonprofits
Some bookstores operate as nonprofit entities. Some for-profit bookstores choose to have affiliated nonprofit organizations they start to support their events program or their community activism or their school visits, etc. Opening any business is not for the faint-hearted, and a nonprofit does have a few additional bells and whistles that will need to be considered before officially launching one, such as deciding which type of nonprofit your organization is going to be (there are more options than the standard 501(c)3, and a different 501(c)# could be better for what you’re try to accomplish) and putting together a board. Of course, there are also some potential perks, such as grants – but those are tricky to apply for, not guaranteed, and come with a lot of reporting rules as well. The National Council of Nonprofits is a great way to find out more–and it should be noted that federal legislations around nonprofit entities often change with each new president, so what may sound like a good idea under one president may not always have the same federal support and benefits under another. Of course, the same could be said for small, independently-owned businesses.
Online/Virtual-only
This model is the one that usually gets the most pushback from traditionalists, when considering the concept of an independent bookstore. People will throw around words like “third space” (you can read more about that here, if that’s a new term for you) and say that an online/virtual-only bookstore can’t possible be creating the same type of community as a bookstore with a physical presence. But as the pandemic showed us – and I personally believed this was true long before the COVID pandemic began in 2020 – community can be created anywhere and everywhere, and online is certainly no different. That all sounds very altruistic, however, and the truth is, if you sell books online, even if it’s on eBay or on “the platform that shall not be named”*, you’re a bookseller, and it’s your choice how much or how little community around books you want to build or even be a part of. Some stores that are online/virtual only do everything from having Discord and other server groups, online book clubs, virtual events, etc., while others are truly focused on solely selling/reselling titles, and neither of those are wrong, and both are still independent bookstores. I’ll continue to state this until you’re tired of reading it – no one else can decide if your bookstore is a bookstore other than you. THAT SAID, the American Booksellers Association (ABA) does differentiate between their “Online Bookstore Members” and their “Bookstore Members (Core)” (among others, such as “Used Bookstore Members” and “Provisional Members”), so that’s something to keep in mind when deciding if you want to join the ABA and make use of their resources (find out more here: https://bookweb.org/membership).
Pop-Ups
A pop-up bookstore is one that does not have a permanent physical space, but “pops up” at various opportunities, such as fairs and markets, within other businesses (such as coffee shops or any other business with a storefront willing to let you bring boxes of books and set up a table or other display) for a few hours or a few days, or, if in a physical space, is a temporary location with a clear end date (some business incubators offer spaces like these, some malls do this for empty storefronts over the holiday season, etc.). River Dog Book Co. has popped up in a women’s consignment boutique, a crafting store, an organic health-focused CBD store, at the Chamber of Commerce building for 3-day-long pop-ups where I outfitted the Chamber rentable room as a full-service bookshop for that length of time, at a Christmas market (no, it was not a “holiday” market, it was a full-on CHRISTMAS MARKET, and yes, I did bring generic winter books, Chanukah titles, etc.), and I’ve got my eye on a booth space at the local garden expo. Make no bones about it – these are a TON of work and while they can begin with nothing more than a foldable table, a selection of used books pulled of your own shelves, and a sheet from Walmart in one of your logo colors (ahem, personal experience talking here), they can also be a rather large investment in foldable/rollable shelving and/or additional fixtures, a tent that withstands various weather conditions (if you’re doing outside markets), crates or totes for moving books and merchandise around safely and securely, a vehicle that can fit everything you’re bringing, additional decor items such as rugs and chairs, signage, etc. Pop-ups are a great way to test a market, see what demand there is for what types of books/merchandise, and dip a toe into the bookselling water; it can also be extremely lucrative if you focus on doing hundreds of markets a year and make this your entire business model. Basically, it’s a great place to get started and feel out where you want to go next with your bookselling journey, if a brick-and-mortar, for whatever reason, is out of your reach at the moment.
Traditional brick-and-mortar with novel aspects
Can a traditional brick-and-mortar space be a novel model? Absolutely it can! In the first place, some of the above types of stores exist as brick-and-mortars (such as microspaces, boutique spaces, niche stores, micro-concepts, etc.). If your bookstore is general interest in books but has any kind of additional novel model aspect to it, you’re more than welcome to consider yourself a novel model because, why? Say it with me! Only YOU get to choose what type of bookstore you are!
Clearly there is no one set definition for what a novel model bookstore is, so if you’d like to consider your personal bookstore dream a novel model, you are welcome to!
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Links + resources mentioned in the episode: