Greenlight Bookstore Tells a Different Story

\f0\fs26 \cf0 I feel like every time there\'92s a story about independent bookstores its like, \'91Oh, isn\'92t it sad, the independent books stores are dying. No more of them, just Amazon and chains.\'92 And I\'92m like, \'91That\'92s not the whole story!\'92\ \ My partner Rebecca and I, we were both committed to the idea that you have to run a bookstore as a business. It\'92s not just this sort of hobby that you do because you like books. That doesn\'92t\'97I mean maybe that was possible in the 70s, before there were chains and the internet, but at this point you have to be very aware of the financial side and make sure that you are going to be able to make ends meet\'97and make a profit. But at the same time, that didn\'92t conflict philosophically for us with the idea that we\'92re creating a community space, that we\'92re making a neighborhood institution, somewhere that people gather and meet each other and encounter literature and encounter new ideas. Those all seem to go together. \ \ Fall of 2008, there\'92s like this dive in the national economy, and everybody got scared. And we\'92re like, maybe this takes another ten years before this happens. And it was heartbreaking. But there was nothing I\'92d ever wanted to do this much, you know? There was no other life I could imagine. So we were just going to keep trying for as long as it took. I figured somehow we would make it happen. It sounds totally crazy at this point, and yet, it worked.\ \ It is kind of traditional with a small business to get small loans from family and friends. But we didn\'92t really have that many family and friends who had that much money. So we\'92re like, can we extend this to people in the community who\'92d be willing to loan us a thousand dollars at a time? The response was overwhelming\'97and we raised about $70,000 through community loans. It was worth it not only because it helped us get the capital together, but because there are all these people who feel so invested in this store. Literally, they own a piece of it. \ \ The decisions that we feel good about, also tend to be good business decisions. We have this big table of local Brooklyn authors and New York authors, and we\'92re emphasizing that a lot in the events that we host. It\'92s not like it\'92s a purely philanthropic decision, I feel like everything we do is like, we\'92re creating this environment that people want to spend time in. You can buy a book anywhere, what we can offer is an experience, a place that you can come in and connect with other people, and find out about your neighborhood.\ \ Part of why we\'92re doing well is this community that we\'92ve kind of lucked into, and how strong a need there was for a bookstore here, how many books people can afford to buy here; and this sort of literary center that already existed that we just made ourselves a part of\'97and people have been completely embracing us. People said that they wanted a bookstore, and they were telling the truth. \ \ I feel like there\'92s an increasing sense among people who love books that there\'92s a value to an independent bookstore, that there\'92s something you can get there that you can\'92t get from clicking on a button on the internet\'97and that\'92s great for us. But the story is not that independent bookstores are dying. Independent bookstores are evolving and are still a piece of the picture.}