• Challenge,  Misc

    What Would I Do…

    If I Started A Bookstore Today? I got asked that question today and honestly I know exactly how to make a used bookstore very profitable in today’s world. I would not start a new store. Too expensive, too small of profit margins, too much risk, and honestly no real need with online bookstores working the way they are working for more and more people. But I know how to start a very profitable used bookstore. And keep in mind, I have owned and run two used bookstores in my lifetime, but I would NEVER start a new used bookstore the way I did the two I used to own. It…

  • Challenge,  publishing

    A Trip to the Past

    All We Did Was Walk Into a Store… As we climbed out of the car this evening, Kris asked me, “Are you ready for a trip to the 1990s?” And wow was she right. The Barnes&Noble bookstore was in a late 1990’s strip mall. Modern, but still dated in architecture. And when we walked through the door, we really did step back in time. Decorations, layout, everything. 1990s. And even more frightening, the authors on the front fiction display table were the same authors that would have been there in the late 1990s. So we roamed around for a time and honestly it was fun to explore in shelves of…

  • Challenge,  News

    Working at the Bookstore

    Well, At Least Hanging Around… Dan has all the construction and moving plans under control and over the next five days we will be moving a ton of books and shelves. This is part of what the North by Northwest Bookstore Kickstarter paid for. Movers will be coming in to do the heavy lifting for a time. And we are taking a ton of shelves out of Kris and my house here on the coast that we are getting rid of. We still need to build more. The new area is huge, if you haven’t gotten that idea. Here is what it looks like at the moment from the edge…

  • Challenge,  Fun Stuff

    Nifty Stuff In the Bookstore

    Most Of You Don’t Know This… Our bookstore, North By Northwest Books and Antiques has one of the largest pharmaceutical collections in the world. All for sale. Sheldon McArthur, the former owner, loved collecting the stuff and he even found old drugstores that had gone out of business in the 1940s but nothing had been touched for fifty years. He would go there and clean them out. I bought it all when I bought the bookstore. Well, our store and strange collection was discovered by a YouTube program called Finding Goodies where these guys go around and look for nifty stuff and do videos about it. Dan (who does an…

  • Challenge,  workshops

    One Day Left

    To Sign Up for the First Two Weekender Workshops… ONE DAY AND COUNTING!!! Exactly at midnight Thursday morning, (basically late Wednesday night) the first day’s videos in the weekended Pop-up workshops will appear. Four days of videos, three different assignments. I will leave the workshops open to sign up until around 1 p.m. on Thursday. Here is all the basic information. POP-UP WEEKENDER WORKSHOPS The Structure of the Weekender Workshops Starting on Thursday morning right at 12:01 a.m. US West Coast Time (Pacific Time), six or seven videos will appear on the first session Teachable.com page for the workshop. An assignment will be with the videos that is due by…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    How to Run a Bookstore in 2017

    Some Top of My Head Tips… On ThePassiveVoice.com (a fantastic resource for all us indie writers) bookstores get slammed a bunch. I finally got sort of tired of the slamming of bookstores in general and decided to make a point that it is the bad management of bookstores that kills them, not bookstores in general. There was even a comment that bookstores are like a boat, a place to throw money. Well, if you run them wrong for 2017, yes, that is correct. If you run them correctly, with an open mind, no. So I got asked by two people in email what it took to run a modern bookstore…