I've inherited a sizeable amount of money and have always wondered about running a bookshop.

I've inherited a sizeable amount of money and have always wondered about running a bookshop. I saw a thread on here a few weeks ago that discussed the viability of doing this. I know running any store is a frickton of work but I haven't really got anything else going right now.

Is it worth trying to open a bookshop, IQfy?

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    nobody reads anymore. you will at best cover rent by selling coffee and pastries. just move to croatia and get a sex slave.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >i have never worked in the industry

      https://i.imgur.com/JY9EPbI.jpg

      I've inherited a sizeable amount of money and have always wondered about running a bookshop. I saw a thread on here a few weeks ago that discussed the viability of doing this. I know running any store is a frickton of work but I haven't really got anything else going right now.

      Is it worth trying to open a bookshop, IQfy?

      you don't want to. running a bookshop is like any other shop the difference being that you sell books instead of whatever, groceries I dunno.
      it really depends where you open up shop, obviously. if you were to open up close to university you're likely to encounter terminally artistic students, soem people deep into their classics, their language, their philosophical studies and others who want to become writers, poets. it takes some time to cultivate these customers, most don't have that much money but are willing to spend it all on books. you need to know the pseuds from the mediocre from the talent to the brilliant. you should also know other bookshop owners in your city and local publishers.

      the important thing is having a speciality, to have a specialtiy however you need to be quite well read. if you don't have a speciality you're no better than Amazon or your local bookstore chain. there are art history, architecture, classics, philosophy, french literature etc. bookshops where I live. you go to a place to discover something new and to talk to the owner, mainly. buying the books from amazon or used (not through ebay, frick that site) is obviously more convenient and cheaper, but after exhausting the literature on a certain subject by yourself you need some recommendations. some people might go to this site, others research and dive deeper into the sources and research literature while some, and those people would be your customers, go to a bookshop and ask the owner.

      you'll be running that place by yourself for it to be economical, especially in the first few years where even with you working there it's unlikely people are going to discover you.
      it's a good idea to either have a café close by, offer coffee and reading spots in your store or host readings (which you should do anyway) and various cultural talks, seminars etc. Essentially rent out the space you have in the bookstore or rent a place close by for events.
      the worst thing you can do is stock up on thousands of books. a good bookstore will be, as said, cloes to a university and you're not a storage for largely useless thesis' and now irrelevant, outdated research works.
      you should have a core theme around which you stock rotating books in small number. drive up demand, keep the people coming to look for new books, what's new this week etc. rummaging through dusted tomes might be aesthetic for instagram but it makes for a bad bookstore, bad customer experience and really makes you a lot of work where you have to keep stock and a catalogue of the books you actually have in store. nothing is worse than asking a clerk or the owner whether they have this or that book and then getting the reply that they do not in fact keep record. I'd say 100-300 unique books max and more some in storage and maybe 1-7 copies of each book.
      with "so few" books you should have plenty space or save on the lease.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        From where I live I used to frequent 5 secondhand bookstores. 2 of them ran out of business in the last 2 years. This anon is right. Excluding one of the remaining ones (it's run by charity), the two surviving bookstores are both well known to university students and professors, have a very good collection of books given by academics and hobbyists, and both manage to keep the books coming and going. I've noticed they are also picky on what book to accept. They don't just buy in any book you throw at them. This helps in keeping the quality up, and cultivating a solid customer base. Both of them have survived for a really long time, while others come and go, but you have to know your customers first.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Is it worth trying to open a bookshop, IQfy?
      nobody reads anymore. you will at best cover rent by selling coffee and pastries. just move to croatia and get a sex slave.

      nobody reads anymore. you will at best cover rent by selling coffee and pastries. just move to croatia and get a sex slave.

      nobody reads anymore. you will at best cover rent by selling coffee and pastries. just move to croatia and get a sex slave.

      >i have never worked in the industry
      [...]
      you don't want to. running a bookshop is like any other shop the difference being that you sell books instead of whatever, groceries I dunno.
      it really depends where you open up shop, obviously. if you were to open up close to university you're likely to encounter terminally artistic students, soem people deep into their classics, their language, their philosophical studies and others who want to become writers, poets. it takes some time to cultivate these customers, most don't have that much money but are willing to spend it all on books. you need to know the pseuds from the mediocre from the talent to the brilliant. you should also know other bookshop owners in your city and local publishers.

      the important thing is having a speciality, to have a specialtiy however you need to be quite well read. if you don't have a speciality you're no better than amazon or your local bookstore chain. there are art history, architecture, classics, philosophy, french literature etc. bookshops where I live. you go to a place to discover something new and to talk to the owner, mainly. buying the books from amazon or used (not through ebay, frick that site) is obviously more convenient and cheaper, but after exhausting the literature on a certain subject by yourself you need some recommendations. some people might go to this site, others research and dive deeper into the sources and research literature while some, and those people would be your customers, go to a bookshop and ask the owner.

      you'll be running that place by yourself for it to be economical, especially in the first few years where even with you working there it's unlikely people are going to discover you.
      it's a good idea to either have a café close by, offer coffee and reading spots in your store or host readings (which you should do anyway) and various cultural talks, seminars etc. Essentially rent out the space you have in the bookstore or rent a place close by for events.
      the worst thing you can do is stock up on thousands of books. a good bookstore will be, as said, cloes to a university and you're not a storage for largely useless thesis' and now irrelevant, outdated research works.
      you should have a core theme around which you stock rotating books in small number. drive up demand, keep the people coming to look for new books, what's new this week etc. rummaging through dusted tomes might be aesthetic for instagram but it makes for a bad bookstore, bad customer experience and really makes you a lot of work where you have to keep stock and a catalogue of the books you actually have in store. nothing is worse than asking a clerk or the owner whether they have this or that book and then getting the reply that they do not in fact keep record. I'd say 100-300 unique books max and more some in storage and maybe 1-7 copies of each book.
      with "so few" books you should have plenty space or save on the lease.

      >selling coffee and pastries
      >offer coffee and reading spots in your store or host readings (which you should do anyway) and various cultural talks, seminars etc

      All these posts are correct. OP, I have worked in retail (online granted, but still) and have a number of friends in hospitality and I can confirm that the recipe for most shops is this. You either have a shop where people come in and leave so you can serve other customers, or you have a shop where you want people in and hanging around. Restaurants are the former, as you want to clear the table for another seating for lunch. A pub is the latter, you want people around for ages sipping a drink with a book or with Scrabble or with mates.

      A bookshop is also in the latter category and a cafe will maximize that. Have the most laidback format ever. I rarely buy in chain stores cos I feel put off reading the whole first chapter. And in the only chain store in my town, there are no seats so they want me in and out. You should do the opposite

      I am part of a philosophy group and we meet in a cosy pub, but if we did day time meetings, then a used book store with a good cafe in it just selling tea and the core coffees at less than the chain stores (not hard at all) and a few cookies or home baked goods would make us move there. You need a wall of books and seating areas for people and encourage them to read the books openly for as long as they want.

      See pic related, it is a pub that sells take home beers near my house. It has taps and a checkout at the back, and lines its walls with the cans you can buy. Do that, but with books on shelves, in genre order and not in pales/lagers/stouts order.

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Is it worth trying to open a bookshop, IQfy?
    nobody reads anymore. you will at best cover rent by selling coffee and pastries. just move to croatia and get a sex slave.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      nobody reads anymore. you will at best cover rent by selling coffee and pastries. just move to croatia and get a sex slave.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    nobody reads anymore. you will at best cover rent by selling coffee and pastries. just move to croatia and get a sex slave.

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I'm guessing it's some sort of passion, but I'd say contact other book store owners first so they can tell you first hand how it's like as a career and how viable it is financally.
    And obviously since this is likely to be a long term endeavor, even if you don't got anything going right now you better be sure there's not anything else you want to do.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Ask anyone you know when was the last time they walked into a bookstore and purchased a book. Most of your sales will be done online through eBay, Amazon, AbeBooks, BookDepository, etc.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    the nicest men and greatest have been bookstore owners, sadly they dont seem that profitable, but they are or were, the greatest 'hubs'.
    Most women run bookstores like a slightly worse library or McDonalds with truecrime paperback coom.
    If you want to make unprofitable memories with people I would do it. Not much of a loss I imagine if you own the place.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      unfortunately very true. i see the lady owning the biggest bookshop in town carting every book she finds in public bookshelves into ther palace of dust for the sake of having them. she surprisingly does keep a meticulous list but only stocks books you wouldn't even find in the university libraries. they're also extremely overpriced.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        that's the main difference, I volunteered at a charity bookstore by a woman and she put up all the paperback shitter romances and just went "I have no idea if this is good" and its just more of the same normie shit. Two bookstores in my town fell, and it was a goldmine of all these interesting texts, even if they were hoarder mode or overpriced.
        Like record stores, real quality ones are going extinct, because people only buy normie pop-sci and YA/truecrime pulp now.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I notice this a lot too
        >go to used bookstore
        >literally thousands and thousands of dusty stacks of old paperback prints interspersed with little knickknacks that are actually just garbage.
        >it is impossible to find more than 1 book on IQfy‘s top 100, let alone anything that ever was desired
        >instead there are infinite books that don’t even have a Google results when you search them up
        >a couple hundred series of YA scifi
        >99% of that inventory will NEVER make it out of the store
        >every book is still $10
        >two geriatric homosexuals upstairs arguing over which one is more liberal

        There’s probably a way to do it to make it work but I haven’t seen it so far and I’ve been to many used bookstores

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >>two geriatric homosexuals upstairs arguing over which one is more liberal
          top kek this is true

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >books that dont have a google result
          this is bookstore kinography though, just like record stores is makes them top tier even if it's printed fanfiction or local magazines its some culture

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Do it and sell guns with the books

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      no

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      no

      >Not giving out a free gun with every $900 copy of the Turner Diaries
      Ngmi

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Please don’t do this. It will probably ruin books for you. Your clientele will likely be 4 or 5 old ladies and a couple of middle aged men who want to talk your ear off for an hour about nothing. Save your time and money and volunteer at the hospice. And I love bookstores.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >but I haven't really got anything else going right now.

    You should travel the world.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I'm not a le travelling troony.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Of all the weird neuroses that /misc/ and IQfy give people, this anti-traveling shit is the weirdest. Traveling is extremely important for your development into a well-rounded and interesting person.

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Two things. Location is huge. Can easily be the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful shop.

    On the other hand, it seems like many bookstores depend on internet sales for additional revenue.

    If you could find a knowledgeable, experienced person and use them as a sounding board for ideas, that would be a big help.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      The best bookstore I ever went into was in charlottesville, VA and they had an online store that they used to sell their rare books. I was very very close to buying a $500 first edition of Outer Dark by McCarthy there, but the curmudgeon owner wouldn’t budge on the price even $50 despite it having a huge significant mark on the first page that bled onto the cover. I bet anything it’s still sitting in that shelf for $500, all these years later.

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Why wouldn't you start with an online, low-cost publishing house?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      this. publishers are just flavour of the month garbage and only one narrow political bent being represented. even if you are not a /misc/yp you will never get that IQfy book with 25% of it being Black person published. we need an anon-run publishing house.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Why wouldn't you start with an online, low-cost publishing house?

        If someone actually pursued this I would be proud to do graphic design / logo design / website design for it

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