Why this project?
Open Book arises from my many investments in the health of independent bookselling. As a writer, as an owner and board member of a cooperative bookstore, and—most of all—as a devout reader, I need indie bookstores to persist and flourish. Each month, I sit in board meetings and help analyze the financial data for one heartfelt, struggling indie, and for years now I’ve wished that we could tell the larger story of what it takes to keep going in the face of steep obstacles. If you are more than a casual bookstore customer, I think you will find this story riveting and even urgent.
As I write in the first chapter of Open Book, books are beloved, consumable items and if you like them, you like them a lot—you might even be addicted, and you’ll try to addict your friends and family. So why is indie bookselling so hard? The answers are surprising, interesting, and great for thinking.
I want to use indie bookselling as a laboratory for reflecting on art and commerce. If we value literature, what are we willing to do to sustain the structures for producing it? How can we bend capitalism to our needs as a reading public? What role do locally-owned bookstores play in creating communities in a healthy democracy, and how can we design and fine-tune the industry to amplify that?
What you can expect
I post once a month, occasionally twice. In a culture where talking about money is difficult and keeping data secret benefits those with power and privilege, I draw back the curtain and share the actual figures behind the operation of an independent bookstore. I analyze those numbers against the backdrop of indie bookselling at large. I interview bookstore owners and booksellers from around the country to listen in on a fervent conversation that is happening within the industry but that customers don’t usually get to hear, though it greatly affects them. And of course I recommend books, because how could I not.
This project benefits Buffalo Street Books
Though this newsletter represents only my views, it wholly benefits Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, NY, the bookstore on whose board I serve. Every penny of your subscription (minus Substack’s fees) goes right to the store. In Open Book you’ll read about why bookstores need additional sources of revenue in order to subsidize the selling of new books, and your reading will itself be that revenue, that additional support and vote of confidence for the indie bookstore mission. How fitting is that?
PS: You too can own a bookstore! The bragging rights are legit.
