Chapter 12: On ownership and membership
…and a drag queen sashays in
Note to my generous and discerning subscribers: this month is the one-year anniversary for Open Book, which means those of you who signed up for an Annual or Founding subscription will be asked to renew. This summer I will be rotating off the executive board of BSB after six years and two terms, and this fall I will be publishing my second book. That means that I cannot promise a full year of posts and will likely need to bring this newsletter to a close in the summer. Please consider renewing with a monthly subscription so that you are only paying for the posts that I will write, though I heartily thank anyone who does renew with an annual subscription. As always, every cent goes directly to Buffalo Street Books. This newsletter has raised over $2000, and I am so grateful to everyone who is reading this. Onward!
It has been a rough few months here at Buffalo Street Books, and that has gotten us thinking. Picture our fingers flying over calculators and sparks flying out of our heads.
The Rough Patch
January sales, which are always very low, were down 28% over last year. February sales rebounded, if by “rebound” you mean “didn’t suck quite as badly”—that month was down 8% over 2023. This dried up the bookstore’s cash trickle and left us wondering how to cover payroll, rent, and suppliers until April and May, when we can expect the fortunes of the store to rev up as springtime literary events bring people to our shelves.
We put out the call to our owners and customers, asking for people to come shop at the store and support us however they could, including donating, joining the coop as an owner, or buying a gift card for themselves (as a kind of book CSA) or others. And people responded! We gained nine new owners, several thousand dollars in donations, and a noticeable bump in sales, about 17% for the weekend after our appeal. This support worked. We have limped through the month of March and are looking ahead to flusher days. Once again, our community showed they value their cooperative indie bookstore.
I can’t overstate how much this support means. We weren’t sure if people would be receptive to our message. Would you be tired of us asking for money, given that just last year we fundraised for the reading room renovation? Would you think that we’re just really bad at business? Neither.
The Thinking
As we wrote, “No bookstore can survive on book sales alone. All bookstores require outside funds.” Most bookstores have access to private capital from owners who invest in their own businesses or work without a salary. Our bookstore has 970+ owners who know enough about the book world to understand the problems and possibilities, and who care enough about sustaining our store to put their wallets where their hearts are. The thing is, we’re tired of coming to our owners when things get dire. Can we restructure this relationship, we are wondering, so that the support is steady and predictable?
We’re tossing around the idea of a membership program. Can we rejigger ownership in the cooperative to require a lower annual fee to stay active? Or set up a membership program alongside the more expensive ownership structure? How can we invite our customers to support us on an annual basis, perhaps with incentives for renewing that support in the first quarter of each year when sales are slow? Do incentives play a role in a cooperative, where equality is a fundamental value? How can we tie our customers’ fortunes to our own without giving away our miniscule profits (in the form of discounts) before they’ve even been earned? What does investment mean in a cooperative?
The stakes of these questions will remain high even as we emerge from the slowest quarter, because the Tompkins County Living Wage has just made its highest-ever increase to $18.45 an hour. Investment most certainly means making good jobs for our staff.
Many other bookstores have membership programs, entirely distinct from owner shares or other untraditional legal structures. I’ve mentioned Kepler’s in Menlo Park, CA, in past newsletters, but we could also take inspiration from Politics and Prose in Washington DC or Brilliant Books in Traverse City, MI, or Loyalty Books in DC and MD, or RJ Julia in Madison, CT, or…the list goes on and on. We aren’t inventing the wheel here.
Et Tu, RuPaul
In fact, just this month, RuPaul started their own membership-based online bookstore, Allstora. Membership costs just $5 a month and entitles you to 50% off your first 3 books and then 30% off the rest of your purchases. Not only that, but authors who enroll on the site get a 10% cut of any of their books sold on the site. The site highlights books by LGBTQ+ authors, women, and writers of color, but all the books ship directly from the distributor Ingrams, and Allstora will sell you any traditionally published book.
It sounds a bit too good to be true, honestly. Allstora maintains no inventory and has no storefront—though it does have a Rainbow Book Bus—just a website. So while it poses an alternative to Amazon, it also directly undercuts every single brick-and-mortar store, plus Bookshop.org, which is a B-Corp structured both as an Amazon alternative and a funnel to indie bookstores. My point: where you get your books matters and how bookstores are structured matters, just as much as the books themselves—their content and their authors and their representation—matter in this time of book bans and decreased reading in favor of screens.
If you have thoughts on memberships and belonging and what you’d like from a cooperative bookstore, I’m all ears.
Book Recommendation
I’m in the middle of a doorstopper novel so I haven’t been reading as many books lately as usual. Sometimes that’s so relaxing, a break from the need continually to decide what to read. Here’s one recommendation from last month’s reading: Come and Get It by Kiley Reid. This one had me laughing aloud at the superb dialogue. The protagonist is an academic doing field work at a southern university, eavesdropping on college women’s conversations and uncovering the deep structures of their attitudes toward men, money, and femininity. I read it, but I bet the audio performance is even better, so consider the Libro.fm version.