Once Upon A Bookshop: The Beginning - Part 4
Pandemics, Partners, and PALs
This is a continuation of Once Upon a Bookshop: The Beginning - Part Three.
Pandemics and Partners
Even though I wanted to open a bookshop for almost as long as I’d been writing, it was, more than anything, the pandemic that pushed me to actually take action. But it wasn’t the threat of death or a global apocalypse that drove me; it was loneliness. As an introvert, you’d think I’d have flourished in the isolation the pandemic provided. However, I didn’t flourish, I withered. Writing is an isolating endeavor, and the SCBWI helped break up those periods of isolation with joyous and sometimes even raucous gatherings of like-minded creators working toward the same goal.
I’d been entrenched in the children’s book community for over a decade, working on my craft while building connections with other creators and publishing professionals. As a socially awkward introvert, it took a long time for me to get comfortable in that community (though I’m sure a great many of my peers would say the same). I’d spent the last decade attending conferences and workshops multiple times a year and a little less than half that time volunteering with the organization in various roles.
Volunteering in an official capacity helped me to interact with more people, not just because I wanted to but because I had to. It also provided a convenient cover, a guise I could use to get to know people without fear of rejection. In those roles, I wasn’t just Carissa, the sometimes socially awkward writer and wannabe illustrator; I was Carissa, the Social Media Coordinator; Carissa, the Faculty Coordinator; and Carissa, the Assistant Regional Advisor. It was in these roles I truly started to build my community. It’s also where I’d met with my future business partner.
Partners and PALs
In 2017, while I was volunteering as Assistant Regional Advisor for the Rocky Mountain Chapter of SCBWI, I worked on a Children’s Book Festival with my future business partner, who was then Co-Regional Advisor. At that point, I didn’t know she would be my future business partner. It was this event, though, that placed the possibility in my mind.
We met with the owner of the now-closed Bookbar in Denver—a beautiful bookstore and wine bar combo—to talk through the details of the festival they were hosting. We were arranging for the chapter’s Published and Listed (PAL) members to be able to appear for book signings and meet-and-greets. In that meeting, I learned that, like me, my future business partner also dreamed of owning a bookstore. I also learned that there was a children’s bookshop just down the street from the one we were visiting. Apparently, there had been some drama between the two bookstores since the children's bookstore was already on the street when Bookbar moved in and (rumor had it) was further scandalized when Bookbar decided to throw a children’s book festival without including them—these were murmurings within the SCBWI community, but I can’t say for certain that any of it was true except that Second Star was not invited to participate in the Children’s Book Festival.
Intrigued, I visited the little house on Tennyson Street, where Second Star to the Right was located at the time (they have moved twice since then and recently changed ownership). From the moment I stepped into the shop, I was in awe. The owners, a husband and wife duo who came from teaching, had built something truly beautiful: a small house converted into a bookshop bursting with children’s books. I loved it, but the shop was an hour away from where I lived. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to visit often. Still, I bought some books and left inspired, comforted by the fact that my dream could become a reality.
My dream looked a bit different from theirs, though. I had already fallen in love with a space, not a house, but a little historic building in a tiny train town five minutes from where I lived. I wasn’t interested in city life. I wanted a small town bookshop, someplace off the beaten path, a destination shop that would attract and welcome not only readers, but also the community of writers and illustrators I had built over the years.
If You Build It…
Fast forward to 2021. While I awaited the realtor’s response to my Letter of Intent for the Niwot Tribune space, I contacted the woman I’d previously volunteered with. I never forgot her interest in opening a bookstore, and since we’d stayed in touch through the chapter, I decided to reach out to see if she would be interested in partnering with me. I think I wanted a partner partly because I missed my community and wanted to ensure that if nobody else showed up, I had at least one of them by my side (though, much like Ray Kinsella in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, I was sure that if I built it, they would come).
However, I was also inspired by a book I’d read the previous year called The Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling by Madge Jenison, which describes one woman’s adventures in bookselling in the early 1900s. The Sunwise Turn was one of the first woman-owned bookstores in the U.S.. It was considered a feminist bookshop—though it sold books of all kinds—simply because all of the initial shareholders were female. Though I didn’t say it out loud, I wanted my bookshop to have that same feminist feeling of solidarity between women.
In the Sunwise Turn, Jenison describes her first inkling of opening a bookshop and who she might want to bring in as partners:
“…I was thinking vaguely between its rusting pages of two women I knew who needed something to do. They needed some way to use all the powers and perceptions which leisure-class women draw upon and make into pleasure, but never into life.”
Like Jenison, I was thinking of one woman who, like me, had spent years entrenched in the children’s book community as both a member and a volunteer, and who, also like me, had yet to be published. How could we, women, writers, and children’s book enthusiasts who had gained so much knowledge and built so many connections, put that knowledge and those connections to use in our daily lives?
Just one day after I toured the space and sent my LOI, I met my future business partner for coffee. I told her I wanted to open a small-town children’s bookstore and asked if she’d like to be my partner. Initially, She was hesitant and rightfully asked what she’d get out of coming in as a partner since we wouldn’t be able to ourselves at first. I had been sincere from the start. “What you get out of it is up to you,” I said. But I’d added that the skills and experience we’d gain along the way would be useful if we decided to pursue other professions in the industry—this, I’m happy to say, turned out to be true as she went on to work in a library, a job she might not have sought nor obtained had she not had the experience of running a bookshop of her own.
It took her two days to say yes, and from that day on, we were full throttle. Because I wanted to make sure she felt included in the decision process, I set another appointment with the realtor to see the space. She loved the little town but had doubts about the size of the store and the fact that there was no space for an office or storage, so I offered to look at different options, but I also knew that there was additional office space for lease in the building which couldn’t be accessed from our store, but was only a few steps away in an attached building owned by the same landlords.
The office space was just as charming as the store, though it had a different feeling, with red brick lining the stairway and beautifully carved wooden banisters. The office itself was small and simple. It had two entrances: one from the back of the building with its own wonky staircase, and one from the inside. It also had two sections, one larger room and one smaller. We determined that we could use the smaller room for our office and the larger room for book storage and writing workshops, which was something I wanted to offer since we were both writers with such a large community of authors and illustrators.
The space was an extra $1500 a month, but we were confident we could use our connections to set up monthly writing workshops that would allow us to make up the difference. But, perhaps we were too confident.
