3 fun lessons we’ve learned from this crazy adventure
It’s getting close to the end of summer, the kids are back in school, fake pumpkins are preternaturally popping up in home decor stores, and Juliet Books is stocking fall romance novels so we can add even more spice to your pumpkin spice lattes.
It’s a little sad to see summer end. But what a summer it’s been.
This time last year I never would’ve thought I’d be writing about what it’s been like to open a book store. But now we’ve had several months of stocking shelves and re-stocking shelves and staring at the shelves that we restocked, thinking to ourselves could this really be happening?
Boy, has it happened.
Since it’s fun giving you insight into what it’s like opening and running an independent bookstore, I thought I’d list three (somewhat) surprising things we’ve learned over the past few months:
There’s more math involved than expected.
Here’s the thing: I’m a non-math person trying to calculate how many books are needed to fill our shelves. I thought I had it pretty close until I found myself with an entire cart full of titles that wouldn’t fit and had to be…creatively displayed. Surely my old algebra teachers are out there somewhere, nodding smugly to themselves.
Readers are wildly diverse…and wonderfully unpredictable.
Placing that first book order was tricky, because we didn’t have a lot of data to go on. You basically start with a list of suggested titles from the book supplier, choose the ones you think will work for your store, and hope for the best. But a couple of the titles I thought were riskier picks turned out to be some of the first to sell, and that’s one of the most unexpectedly delightful lessons I’ve learned so far: taking chances pays off.
The joy is unbridled.
It’s easy to romanticize what it’s like to open a bookstore. I definitely did. And yes, some parts of it are hard or unpredictable. But let me tell you what it’s like to walk in for an afternoon shift and see crowds of people scanning the fiction shelves. Or kids proudly handing you their stack of books and stuffed animal they’ve already named (“I’m getting this sloth! His name is Slothy!”). It’s better than we’d asked for, more than we’d hoped for, and we want to get to do it for a long, long time.
