Some Hard Lessons I Learned from Owning a Bookstore

I am a cautionary tale

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I had to take my stepdad to the doctor a few days ago, which allowed me to make a side trip to the closest bookstore to me that sells new books, the hated Barnes & Noble roughly 30 miles away (for the reason they are hated, see this story). While roaming the aisles and (reluctantly) picking up a few books I plan to review at some point, I found myself pondering my own bookstore and its sad demise around seven years ago. Bookshops are great places for pondering times when life went off the rails.

I wrote an ode to that bookstore in my first month on this site back in 2021, so I’ll not rehash all of that here. Rather, I want to share a few of the ways I totally failed that contributed to the end of the dream I’d had since I was six years old. Hopefully, this will help any of you considering a similar jump into bookselling while also serving as a reminder to me when I finally take the plunge again (if I don’t write it down, I’ll never remember it).

Let me start by saying that there are some things that worked against me that would have been true when starting any new business: insufficient cash reserves, a location that was far too large (and thus too expensive) and had too little foot traffic, and the inescapable competition from both Amazon and Big Box retailers like…