5 Ways to Support Your Local Independent Bookstore
Josh Niesse
For those who may not have been following the book industry news over the last few years, there has been a delightful and surprising resurgence of independent bookstores. According to the American Booksellers Association “there has been a 35 percent increase in the number of independent bookstore locations since 2009, existing locations are opening new locations, and established stores are being successfully sold to new owners, often younger owners as a new generation of booksellers enters the industry.” And this happened after nearly a decade of declining numbers as the industry struggled to adapt to the onslaught of Amazon and e-commerce. Even with this good news showing the impressive resilience of indie booksellers, we are facing a tough climate. Amazon’s share of the print book market expanded from 37% in 2015 to over 50% for the first time in 2019. All this is to say: if you are a lover of independent bookstores, please don’t get complacent at the news of our revival, we still have a lot of work to do. It is part of our personal mission to be part of a national movement to revive the independent neighborhood bookstore. To that end, here are some ways you can support your local independent bookstore that you may not have thought about.
Get Your Audiobooks From Libro.fm
Are you an audiobook fan? Have you heard of Libro.fm? If not, you need to know about it. It’s a simple to use smart-phone app and is the same price as Amazon-owned Audible ($14.99/mo) but you get to pick a local independent bookstore that your purchases support. Use the coupon code “switch” (as in, you’ll promise to switch from Audible to Libro) to get an extra free book when you sign up, and be sure to pick our Carrollton store location Underground Books as your bookstore to benefit from your purchases. I didn’t think I’d like audiobooks, but I am now a passionate convert. I constantly hear the phrase “I don’t have time to read” from customers in the store (usually the friends or spouses of customers, actually), and audiobooks are the perfect remedy for this problem. Listen during your commute to work, while you’re doing the dishes, working out, walking the dog, etc. and voila – you’ve made time to read! Libro also recently launched a bulk buying option for corporate/business groups (we recommend listening to Simon Sinek books with your work team!).
2. Purchase Gift Cards or Open a House Account
Most bookstores offer gift cards (both Hills & Hamlets Bookshop and Underground Books do), and buying gift cards to give to friends, family, or co-workers is an amazing way to show your support. If you work for a company that gives holiday gifts to employees, consider including gift cards from your local bookstore! We also offer a “house account” option at Hills & Hamlets Bookshop currently, where you can pre-purchase large blocks of store credit at a discount (the bigger the house account deposit you make, the better the deal). This is an especially good option for the serious reader, book-loving family, or the discount-sensitive book buyer. If you are an Underground Books customer and are interested in this option, let us know and we can discuss it!
3. Create a Home Library
The #1 reason people standing in our stores give us for why they aren’t making a purchase is that they don’t have room or have too many books they haven’t read already. If this is you we would like to refer you to this excellent article on author Umberto Eco’s famous home library and his philosophy toward book collecting. For those of us that may not have the room or budget to build a 30,000 volume home library like good ole Umberto, we would still say the problem is more likely that you don’t have enough bookshelves in your home than it is that you don’t have enough room. We draw great inspiration from our local friend and book collector Gilbert Huey, who converted his garage attic into an exceptional home library. We featured Huey’s library on the Underground Books blog a couple years ago, and you can see pictures and read about it HERE.
We can’t speak for everyone, but we would definitely rather have a home library than a man-cave or a she-shed. For locals to Underground Books, we’d like to recommend Adam & Sons on the square, which has a wonderful selection of beautiful bookshelves.
4. Bring Friends and Out-of-Town Visitors to the Bookstore
We learned early on at Underground Books how our community’s pride in the bookstore and sense of shared ownership became an important part of our recipe for success. When, in 2013 we successfully executed a crowdfunding campaign to raise almost $10,000 from over 120 people in our community for the down payment to purchase our building, we noticed how those supporters became our biggest champions. They had helped us overcome a huge hurdle to our long-term viability, and they were proud of it! And then they wanted to do more, so these core supporters started to do something amazing – they constantly brought new people to the store, local friends who had never been in before, or out of town guests they were hosting. And guess what? Many of those new customers buy books and become regular supporters. When we opened Hills & Hamlets Bookshop in 2016 we were able to get about 25 families in the neighborhood to pre-purchase big blocks of store credit before we opened in order to help us finance the build-out. Those families to this day form an incredible bedrock of support, and nearly all of them bring in new customers and guests to visit the store.
5. Foster an “Indies First” Mindset; Special Orders and Pre-Orders
“Indies First” is what independent booksellers call Small Business Saturday (it’s kind of a token effort to take the branding of the day back from American Express). It is usually a huge day for local bookstores, like it is for many small and independent retailers. What we really like about the name is that it reflects what we think is a good mindset to advocate for. We don’t ever try to tell people they shouldn’t shop for books online, as we believe it is for most people, not a realistic goal. While we would love for all of our local customers to ONLY get their books from us instead of amazon, we try to be realistic. What we ask is that you simply consider your local indie first before shopping for something online. If we don’t have what you want on hand, we can almost always order it. If you know there is a hot release coming out soon that you want to have, instead of pre-ordering it on Amazon, consider pre-ordering it from your local bookstore. You can email us at undergroundbooksllc@gmail.com or at hillsandhamlets@gmail.com with any special order requests. While we don’t have our websites set up for special orders, we have several thousand rare, vintage, or antiquarian books listed for sale at UndergroundBooks.Net and we have selections of signed books for sale at HillsAndHamlets.com, all of which are available for purchase through their respective websites.
As communities increasingly recognize the cultural value of having independent bookstores in their neighborhoods, but struggle to keep them financially viable, we are seeing an outpouring of creativity among indie bookstores as we all explore new and unique ways to thrive in an age of frictionless one-click e-commerce. Keep an eye out for a new and exciting development launching in early 2020 called Bookshop.org, which will be a similar model to Libro.fm but for print books and will offer a way to enjoy the convenience of online shopping while still supporting your local bookstore.