Sunday, August 28, 2011

Pages

That's the name of our hypothetical used bookstore. Simple, yet I think it definitely screams "bookstore". I just submitted a proposal to an awesome site called Kickstarter. It's mostly a place for people who are doing artsy type projects and they don't allow you to fund business expenses, but I explained that our fund would be for collecting books to get started, so we'll see.

A lot of people I've talked to are behind this idea. Which makes me feel good. We can't seem to get a hold of any companies who have businesses for rent downtown, but it's been race weekend in Bristol, so I guess they're busy. The biggest/scariest unknown right now is rent cost. We want it to be downtown so there's lots of walk-through traffic. Downtown Bristol is easy for people to get to and there are a lot of cool small businesses going in. Our ideal spot is next door to a really popular bakery that's been there for a little over a year, but the store that's next to it has been empty for years and doesn't have a sign in the window for who to call about rent/lease information.

Basically, our store would be a consignment bookstore. Mostly used books, but Bristol's got a lot of history, so I figured we could offer new books that talk about our area. We have several festivals throughout the year, the biggest one being Rhythm and Roots, so we would get out of towners with money to burn.

There are a lot of library sales coming up, too. Most of them are about two hours away, but we figure if they have a lot of books for the right price, we better go and see what we can get. We'll still sell them on eBay and Amazon for now, since we figure the soonest we'd be able to hang a shingle would be next fall. We've been reading a very cool blog called The Bookshop Blog, which has a lot of do's and don'ts and handy tips.

Fingers crossed!

2 comments:

  1. I think your idea is great. I'm enjoying hearing how your ideas are coming together. I keep wanting to leave comments for you, but Blogger doesn't play very nice (most days for me). If you can change your comment settings to include Name/URL setting, then I can comment more often.

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  2. Kim, I love your blog! I told my husband "Mom's Paycheck commented on my stuff!" I think I fixed it to where anyone can comment. Hopefully it's easier now. Thanks!

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