Once Upon a Bookshop: The Middle - Part 2

The Benefits of Cultivating Communities

This is a continuation of Once Upon a Bookshop: The Middle - Part 1.

The Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators

When it comes to the bookselling business, community is key. Luckily, my business partner and I came into it with a readymade community of prolific children’s book creators who were ecstatic to learn of our new business venture. I’d decided to open a children’s specific bookshop not only because I loved and wanted to create books for kids but because I loved my kidlit community and wanted to create a space where we could congregate and celebrate their work.

Both my business partner and I had been members of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) for over a decade by the time we opened The Wandering Jellyfish and had served in various volunteer roles with the Rocky Mountain Chapter (RMC) of SCBWI over the years. In these positions, we not only met a lot of creators and other industry professionals, we also learned a lot about the industry as a whole. That knowledge and those connections not only helped us curate our selections, it helped us keep our events calendar packed.

It’s pretty unusual for bookstore owners to have such a strong connection to the creative community from the start, unless, of course, the bookstore owners are authors themselves, which, as you may know, is becoming a more common occurrence (Books Are Magic and Parnasssus Books being good examples of this phenomena). After so many years volunteering with SCBWI, we were thrilled to bring our community together in a whole new way, and our community was not only supportive of us in return, they were grateful to us for shining a light on their work.

They showed up whenever they could — for our grand opening, book launches, signings, and write-ins. They hosted story times and led writing workshops. They engaged with us on social media, sharing our news and events. And in turn, we showed up for them. We always kept their books in stock and showcased their work. We always recommended their books and celebrated their book launches, signings, and other events, even when they weren’t at our shop.

While the Wandering Jellyfish wasn’t the official bookstore of the RMC chapter of SCBWI, we were the go-to for many creators. We always gave them 100%, no matter their platform or following. We not only knew how hard they worked to learn their craft and get published, we knew how lonely the journey could be, and we wanted to let them know they were not alone. We would always be there with them to help celebrate their accomplishments and spread the word.

In the two and a half years we were open, we’d hosted 28 author and illustrator story times and 16 book launch parties…not bad for having only been open 27 months. We ordered books for school visits and signings and arranged events with schools and libraries. In the first five months alone, we’d hosted 20 events, which included 12 author and illustrator storytimes and signings, 1 author salon, 2 book launches, and 5 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) write-ins with author hosts.

In addition to spreading the word about their books and accomplishments to customers, we gathered information from our creative friends to offer the largest list of published authors and illustrators available for school visits in Colorado online. This list, which was comprised of cards that included the author’s name, photo, and school visit preference, also, when clicked, included a short bio, school visit topics, and activities, as well as the book covers of their books. This list was available on our website for anyone to access. We didn’t expect or demand that schools and authors use us for visits — some authors had other hometown bookstores they wanted to support, so we weren’t always guaranteed to be the bookstore that would sell books at their events, which was more than fine with us. We just wanted to make sure schools and communities knew about and had access to the wealth of creatives in Colorado.

In ‘22 and ‘23, RMC honored us by asking us to be the bookstore at their annual Letters & Lines conference, which my business partner and I had been attending and volunteering at for years. We were more than happy to oblige since not only would we be selling our friend’s books, we wouldn’t have to miss the conference. It was truly a dream come true and a boon for our business. This time was especially beautiful and exhausting. Preparing for the conference was a whirlwind, and working the conference was a blast, though, as with everything, there were certainly moments of frustration — like when we’d sold an author’s book (the only book of his we’d sold all conference) only to have it returned to us because after seeing that someone had bought his book, he decided to give them a copy instead. But we were happy to be there, supporting our community and knowing they supported us.

I had registered for the conference the first year we asked to be the conference bookstore, but when I realized I wouldn’t have the time or the mental capacity to attend, I donated my registration as a scholarship. Thus, The Wandering Jellyfish Grant for Children's Book Creators was born. I have donated this scholarship every year since ‘22, and even though The Wandering Jellyfish is closed, I plan to continue doing so for as long as finances allow because RMC will always be my most cherished community of creatives. They were there with me at the beginning of my kidlit journey, and they will be there in my heart until the very end.

The Wandering Jellyfish Team

In the beginning, I was working sixty-hour weeks with nary a day off, trying to keep up with the every day needs of the bookshop and events. We opened at the end of July ‘21, and by September, we realized we couldn’t do it alone. We needed help. As luck would have it, a customer mentioned that her children’s nanny would love to work in our bookshop. A nanny! We’d said. How perfect! We told her to send her nanny into the shop sometime, and that was how we found our second employee (our first employee was a friend of mine we’d hired as our office manager).

Not long after, we hired The Nanny, a journalist who’d written about us in the local paper stopped into the shop to ask if we were hiring. Not only was she a writer, she was also bilingual, and she was incredibly sweet and hardworking (at that point, she’d had three jobs, we’d be her fourth). She was also embedded in the Niwot community. She was perfect for our shop. So we hired her as well.

All three employees were very part-time, with The Office Manager working a couple of hours a few times a week and The Nanny and The Journalist mostly working weekends to help with story times, author and illustrator events, and social media (while I ran our Instagram account, I didn't have the time to keep up with Facebook and TikTok). We hadn’t budgeted for hiring anyone until year three, so I had to revamp our financials and prepare for the possibility of contributing more capital, but I felt it was worth it. I’d never imagined we’d find such perfect people for our bookshop. I’d felt like fate had sent us each employee, and who was I to turn away fate? So our little internal bookshop community was born: Me, my Business Partner, our Office Manager, The Nanny, and The Journalist.

For a while, it was just the five of us until The Office Manager stepped away in the summer of ‘22. We became, as The Journalist would dub us, The Core Four until we brought on two new employees in March of ‘23, one to help us coordinate school and community book fairs and the other to help The Nanny, who’d since become our Store Manager, in the shop. These women were my most valued companions as I spent almost every day interacting with them in some way or other — less so with the newer employees, though, as I’d already moved out of state shortly after they were hired. We shared our hopes and dreams, our fears and frustrations, but most of all, we shared a love of the bookshop and the communities we’d cultivated. We were team TWJ… until we weren’t.

Bookstore Brothers & Besties

One of my goals as a bookstore was to work with and uplift other bookstores. I felt that there was room for everyone at the table because every one of our shops had something different to offer. This, I think, is the strength and value of small bookshops. Most small shops focus on a specific niche, and because not one of them are the same, all are able to provide a unique experience to their customers and communities.

When we opened in Niwot, there was already a bookstore there called Inkberry Books. Before we opened, I visited the shop to make sure we wouldn’t be stepping on any toes. Inkberry is a small shop offering an eclectic array of mostly used adult books, self-published titles, and books published by their own small press. They had a relatively tiny section of children’s books, none of which we would carry in our shop, so we didn’t feel as though our presence would hinder their business. The owners were a lovely couple who loved books as much as we did. We referred to them as our Brother Bookshop, and when we opened, we made sure to promote their shop and partner with them whenever we could. When we closed, I gave them some office equipment and our cash wrap hoping that our Brother Bookshop would need them for much longer than we had.

We’d connected with Second Star to the Right early on, not only because they were the only other children’s specific store in Colorado, but because we’d met the store manager at a bookselling conference and were instantly smitten. She reminded us of our own employee, The Nanny. So we connected the two so that we could work together on various projects like Independent Bookstore Day, an event where, all across the country, indie bookstores celebrate with sales, raffles, games, and events. We helped Second Star develop a deeper connection with our creative community. Up to then, they’d hosted the Book Bash Parties for SCBWI, but while they also hosted some author story times and book launches, they only offered a handful of local authors for school visits on their website. They seemed to lack the connections they needed to create a truly beneficial relationship with the creative community until we came along to show them how it was done.

I loved sharing knowledge and resources with other bookstores. Whenever we didn’t have a book in stock, I’d call around to other local bookshops, Inkberry first, then Barbed Wire Bookstore in Longmont, or The Bookworm and Boulder Bookstore, to see if they had that specific book in stock before we’d offer to special order it, which I’m not ashamed to say I learned from the movie Miracle on 34th Street. In the movie, customers were not only happy that the business would go the extra mile to find something they needed, even if it meant losing their business, but they were more loyal to the business because of it. I found this to be true. Whenever I called around to find books for a customer, they usually bought a different book from us before they went to the other shop to get what they were looking for. Those customers always returned to our shop because they knew we would go that extra mile to find what they wanted.

Unfortunately, not everyone on team TWJ understood my logic, and because of this, they rarely called around to find books in other shops when I wasn’t there. Though I wasn’t thrilled about this, I can’t say I blame them. While I was happy to call around to find books at other shops for our customers, we rarely received calls from those shops in return. But for me, it wasn’t about the return (not entirely anyway); it was also about helping our communities: our customers and other bookstores. I wish more bookstores would work together in this way.

Our Reading Communities

Early on, we’d established ourselves as experts within the reading community, not only because of our connections to creatives but because, as we were told time and time again, our curation was exquisite. For a small shop, we offered an incredible array of titles in board books, picture books, early readers, middle-grade, young adult, and later, adult titles (not that kind of adult title, though). We offered story times and crafts with staff and creators, writing workshops for teens and tweens, and created a thriving youth advisory board — tweens and teens who came in anywhere from once a week to once a month to pick up an advanced reader copy of a new book to read and review.

When we began to bring in more adult titles, The Office Manager and The Nanny suggested we start an adult book club. They called it the 2nd Ave Book Club (we’d tried this with teens and tweens but, for whatever reason, were never able to get it off the ground). Because we couldn’t afford to close the shop for the book club, our employees offered to host it after hours as long as we promoted it and offered our shop for them to meet. We agreed to sponsor the book club in this way, and when my business partner suggested the book club read The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, I offered to reach out to the author to see if he’d be willing to appear at the meeting via Zoom for a Q&A. My business partner and I met the author, Jamie Ford, at a bookselling conference, and he was so wonderful that I was confident he’d at least respond to my request. He said yes and from then on we always tried to have the authors speak at the meetings. Our adult reading community was thrilled to “meet” those authors.

The Niwot Business Association

Not to minimize the importance of big-city bookshops, but there is something special about a small-town bookshop. I’ve never been a city girl myself, though I’ve also never truly lived in a big city or a small town and certainly not a town with less than four thousand residents. But I loved Niwot. I loved the little historic street where our little bookshop lived. I loved the community and events. I loved feeling like I was in an episode of Gilmore Girls every single day.

When you are a small town anything, especially a business, it’s important to stay engaged with your community. So, before we even opened, we decided to join and volunteer our time with the Niwot Business Association (NBA). They’d had an opening for an Education Outreach Coordinator, and thinking we could split the responsibilities of the position, my business partner and I took on that role. We thought it was the perfect position for us since we were hoping to build relationships with schools anyway. But in our first meeting, we learned the role hadn’t previously existed. We would be the first, so we would need to completely define the role. Yikes!

In addition to volunteering as the Education Outreach Coordinators, we also attended the monthly NBA meetings where we’d get updates about the Town and learn about new events and how we could participate and prepare. They held events constantly in an attempt to drive tourism to the Town, and for the most part, it worked. Some events, like the summer Rock-n-Rails concert series, brought people from all around. Other events, like the summer art markets, weren’t quite as successful. Still, we always participated, volunteering our time as greeters at Rock-n-Rails and donating goods from our shop for the Town drives and raffles. The Town’s official slogan was Small Town, Big Heart. So when there was any kind of disaster, we’d usually hold a drive to raise funds.

I loved how active our town was and that we had a role in it. But as time went on, we found ourselves having to step back. It was all too much. The events, the donations, the expectations about hours and staffing. We ended up resigning from our role as Education Outreach Coordinators in July of ‘22. And though we loved attending the NBA meetings, which were held every month in various locations around town and which were as always entertaining (imagine the Gilmore Girls town meetings), we started skipping some of those meetings because we were just too exhausted to attend.

Teachers, Schools & Libraries

One of our main goals was to work with schools and libraries, hence our willingness to volunteer as Education Outreach coordinators for the NBA. We had decided early on that we’d always give teachers a 30% discount in our shop, and we even extended this discount to librarians and gave a 10% discount to other non-teacher educators and library professionals. Sometimes, schools reached out directly to set up events; sometimes, authors directed them to us to provide books for school visits and signings.

The first school book fair we worked was at Lyon’s Middle Senior. Apparently, the scholastic book fair wouldn’t visit their school because it was too small or some such nonsense, and so we were happy to bring them a TWJ book fair. At this point, it was just me and my Business Partner working on book fairs. So, we ordered books and transported them to the school ourselves, then set it all up with some help from the librarian. We trained the volunteers on our system and hoped for the best. To be honest, it wasn’t great saleswise, especially since we gave 20% back to the school, but it was a valuable learning experience for us. Book fairs were hard work, and there was no guarantee they would be profitable. Still, we felt this was a worthwhile endeavor, so we took everything we learned from the first fair and tried to streamline the process.

We only did one other school book fair with Niwot Elementary in ‘23. It was a ton of work with ordering, setting up, working the book fair (we’d decided we would be the best people to sell the books), tearing down, and returns. While the school book fairs provided great visibility and engagement, the adult book fairs benefitting specific schools were much more popular (and profitable), though these were also a lot of work. We’d ended up doing three adult book fairs at various venues, mostly restaurants and bars. But we were always trying to figure out how to bring book fairs to schools without breaking the bank, and our backs, in the process.

The Longmont Public Library was one of our best partners. We helped set up a several author visits and events at the library, where we’d sell books at the event. The librarians were wonderful to work with, and grateful to have access to our network of creatives. These events were usually hit or miss financially, but they were always fun. We loved bringing our creatives to new audiences and meeting new people in the process, people who might not have been able to make it over to our shop or who had no idea we even existed.

Some think libraries and bookstores are antithetical, but I believe they go hand in hand. Librarians and booksellers love books and want to spread that love within their communities. Working together can create a more robust and, dare I say, diverse community of readers.

Speaking of diversity…

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, or DEI, has been deemed an “immoral discrimination” by our current administration, which is ironic to say the least. I’m proud that The Wandering Jellyfish was dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We believed that EVERYONE deserved to be seen and heard, and we were adamant about making sure that was the case in our shop. We had a wonderfully diverse and inclusive collection of books. We wanted any child, any person, who walked into our shop to feel instantly at ease because no matter who they were, they could see themselves reflected, at least physically, on the covers of our books.

We had an incredibly strong LGBTQIA community because of our efforts to always carry those books that would not only help them understand themselves and the world but also books that featured their stories, and those stories, whether realistic or fantastical, that included people like them. We were lucky to be located in a community that supported this mission. We were proud to be considered a safe space for those who needed it. That was especially important to me: creating a safe space for everyone in our community. So, when we decided to host a Drag Queen Storytime and that safety was threatened, I was both heartened and relieved when our community came together to protect that space we’d created, but more on that later…

Stay tuned for the next installment of Once Upon a Bookshop: The Middle Part 3 - The Cost of Cultivating Communities, which I plan to post in mid-July.

Thanks for reading!