Six things I'd do differently

What would Stacy Whitman, owner of The Curious Cat Bookshop, do differently today if she were starting her bookstore from scratch? She's got a few ideas, mostly about preparation and community. Are you thinking of starting a bookstore or would like some advice on writing, publishing, or the book business? Let us know in the comments. Also, at least 5 cats make appearances in this video, with varying levels of interruption.

Stacy is the founder, former publisher, and now editor-at-large of Tu Books, the imprint of Lee & Low Books that publishes diverse middle grade and young adult novels and graphic novels. She is also the owner of The Curious Cat Bookshop in Winsted, CT, including the Curious Cat Bookshop Podcast. She holds a master’s degree in children’s literature from Simmons University. In 2013, Stacy founded the New Visions Award, which honors a new unpublished writer of color. Authors and illustrators she has worked with include Guadalupe García McCall, Yamile Saied Méndez, David Bowles, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Tony Medina, Kimm Topping, Anshika Khullar, Raúl the Third, A.M. Dassu, Olivia Abtahi, Axie Oh, G. Neri, Aamna Qureshi, Supriya Kelkar, and more.

Prior to launching Tu Books, she was an editor for Mirrorstone, the children’s and young adult fantasy/science fiction imprint of Wizards of the Coast. She has edited elementary school textbooks at Houghton Mifflin, interned at the Horn Book Magazine and Guide, and was a children’s bookseller at Barnes & Noble (not to mention editing phone books and transcribing overland trails journals in college, typesetting college textbooks and the publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in LaTeX at various points in time, freelance editing and copyediting; and writing, editing, and photography for Electrical Apparatus, the trade magazine for the industrial electrical motors aftermarket—as well as a small local paper in Stark County, Illinois). In her eclectic career, she has worked with a wide variety of writers, artists, and publishing professionals who taught her the gamut of the publishing industry, and she applies that every day no matter what part of the book industry she’s focusing on that day.

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welcome to The Curious Cat Bookshop Podcast the podcast of the independent bookstore of Winsted, Connecticut creating a literary community in Northwest Connecticut bringing our local authors to the world and the world to our community in Northwest Connecticut are you gonna let me sit down I know well Tabitha may or may not come back this is Pyewacket, and I am Stacy Whitman and I am the owner of The Curious Cat Bookshop in Winsted, Connecticut today I thought I'd expand upon my video from February about starting a bookstore what I did to start a bookstore and the resources that I used and today I thought that I would talk a little bit about some of the things that I wish that I had done now that I'm nearly two years into it well technically I'm three years into it almost but I started my business in October of 2022 but I didn't start doing anything with it officially like having any events or anything like that until February of 23 and that was as a pop up and in late September we'll be celebrating our two-year anniversary in our brick and mortar space so as I'm approaching our two year anniversary of running as a full brick and mortar bookstore I thought I'd talk to you about five of the things that I think that there's a little kitty fight going on behind me I just thought I'd talk to you about five things that I would have done differently if I could go and do it all over again stop hissing at babies you're fine Ow! don't chomp me Ow! you're fine yeah okay so that's over anyway the first thing that I think that I ought to have done differently was to start my email list a lot sooner like from day one or even day negative sixty I didn't start my email list until I was pretty much opening the bookstore itself I didn't even start my email list before we did our Kickstarter campaign well it was a was it a gofundme we ran a crowdfunding campaign the summer of 2023 and just to give you a little bit of context with that my dad passed in June of 2023 and I had already had the campaign scheduled for the end of 2023 so in June of 23 I drove home to Illinois from Connecticut while our campaign was beginning and in August of 23 I drove home again for my dad's funeral because we had a whole bunch of extended family that was coming into town anyway in August and so they decided to schedule his celebration of life in August and there there is so little that you can plan for when a family member passes and I was under the gun for some timing because I had received a grant to open on Main Street and one big thing that I would have done differently was to pause and let me have more time because even though the circumstances were such that I really honestly couldn't control the how things unfolded that summer the pottery place on Main Street decided to move that summer and the space and the rent were a perfect size and price for us and I felt very strongly that I needed to jump on the opportunity and I'm I don't necessarily regret having done it but given that all those decisions were made in the midst of some pretty significant grief it was a rough time and I wouldn't necessarily if I had to do it all over again I might have allowed myself a year to pause I might have just continued to work on my day job and save up a little bit longer and that actually gets me to number two because I would have gotten out of debt 100% if possible before fully starting my bookstore if I had this all to do over again because as I discussed in my video about starting a bookstore running a bookstore is a very low profit business I wasn't doing this to make a whole bunch of money nobody enters the book business to make a whole bunch of money if you do happen to make a lot of money there are authors that make quite a bit of money once they're into their careers or they have a sudden hit but if you're an editor if you're a bookstore owner if you're working in the publishing industry or the book industry in general none of us go into it expecting to make millions of dollars if we can make a solid middle class living awesome and you have to understand I grew up in poverty on a farm so for me my idea of a solid middle class life was being able to afford to go to the dentist on a regular basis being able to afford to go to the doctor when I needed to that kind of thing so like I already had achieved that in publishing and I was hoping for that as I start my bookstore now that's a years-long plan I'm not expecting that even now in year two but it's something that I hope that this bookstore will eventually help me to achieve at least partially I don't even expect it to make my entire living so backing up I would get out of debt completely I would pay off all my credit cards before I actually started the bookstore if I had this to do all over again because then you wouldn't have that hanging over you as you're trying to struggle to pay the rent and the payroll and all that stuff out of the bookstore and I still don't pay myself mind you so that's why it's so important that I keep my day job and related to that getting out of debt and making sure that I had a solid savings to be able to really boot it off successfully I have been boot bootstrapping this from the beginning Jiji! I've been bootstrapping my bookstore from the beginning because of the circumstances there was a grant available and it was on a timeline that was faster than I would have preferred but it was a 10,000 dollar grant for opening up on Main Street so if I wanted that grant if I wanted to be able to have that grant help me on Main Street I needed to be able to make my business work on that timeline the thing that I'm learning this year because there was another grant opportunity for me to apply for with the WBDC--the Women's Business Development Council-- earlier this year is that more grants will come along I really really tried to hit the-- I believe it was April--deadline for the Ignite Grant for the WBDC and I just couldn't do it this year I couldn't do it and then I got to talking to my advisors at the WBDC and they said oh another one opens in August you should apply for that one instead and then take your time to figure out what you'll apply for for this grant so that's what I'm in the process of doing now and it really helped me to take that stress level down just a little bit to understand that I didn't have to do everything all at once I could take my time and really plan and the next one will come along and so connected to that take your time and really plan and save up as much as possible because it will be more expensive than you think I'm a single person I don't have anybody else's income to fall back on so if I fail at my business it's all me I don't have if I'm not making money in my business I don't eat; I don't pay the rent if I'm not somehow having an income come in so it's really important to plan ahead and I sometimes look back and I know that I got ahead of myself sometimes on finances I had a nice chunk that I started with and I had that grant, but if I had had double that I feel like in year two we would probably be more well I don't know because right now I feel like looking at our numbers we are on the way to breakeven and that's important in year two because most small businesses don't really start making a profit until year five or they fail you know that's that's how small businesses work but I feel like we're on a good path toward profitability we're just not there yet and a big part of profitability for a small business owner is being able to pay themselves and having that actual sustainability of a foundation and so the way that I've been surviving has been having a day job to pay my bills and then all the money that's in the business keeps getting plowed back into the business and had I had $50,000 or $100,000 in savings two years ago or had I waited to have that much money in the bank I would have had a more solid foundation and be able to more deliberately make the kinds of decisions that you have to make as a business owner I would also have hired differently at the beginning and I don't mean that I would have hired different people necessarily I am very happy with the booksellers that we've had they're very strong and what their skills are but I might have taken the time to look at what we needed to do and how to accomplish that with various skill sets and so right now the hiring that I've recently done in the last month I've just hired two people and I'm working on hiring one more and I might be hiring a manager in the fall if you've seen me post the manager position I've actually pulled that because I need to rethink that a little bit as well rather than just a part-time bookseller in the store and then hiring somebody else to do another task on top of it and another I want all of my employees to be booksellers in the store at least part time so that if they have a specialized skill set like social media or marketing or events planning or stuff like that that they know our community and they know and buy into our goals as a company and that we are all aiming in the same place and so that is it's not on my list so let's call that four and a half because all of what I'm talking about is even though I was deliberate about my planning I had to bootstrap this and I wouldn't say I've been cutting corners so much as I've had to deal with a lot of circumstances because of lack of money that if I had enough in the bank as savings we could ride out those harder times a little bit more easily and I wouldn't have had to rely on for example loans from our payment processor which come at a very high rate I could apply for a small business loan and be approved rather than consistently denied if I had worked on those things more solidly and I was working on them very much I got my credit score up 100 points in the year that I started my bookstore even while my dad dealing with my dad passing but had I even given myself six months more or a year more to work on it even more I feel like we would have been in a stronger financial position so that I didn't have to bootstrap so hard and feel like I'm approaching burnout if that makes sense and then so number five that was not number 4 or 4 1/2 that was number 3 so number 4 is I would have taking the time before I fully started to connect even more with local community leaders and members the Economic Development Committee the Chamber of Commerce I did some of that as I was trying to figure out where I would put the store because I was choosing between Torrington which is where my house is or Winsted because they had the the grant program and I ended up going with Winsted but I feel like there was more networking that I could have done I could have joined the Chamber of Commerce a little earlier it was always questions of price because the Chamber of Commerce I think it's like $300 a year and that's a lot when you're just trying to start a business and you're not really quite sure where the priorities should be and so let's back up because when I say that these are things that I would do differently now because I am two years in and I have this hindsight to look at the thing about hindsight is that you don't know what you don't know you don't know what you're missing until you realize hey I could have done that better had I known this thing that I've just gone through to learn so number 5 is I would have taken-- started taking classes from the Women's Business Development Council it's ctwbdc.org is their website I would have started taking classes from them sooner and really plotted out a little bit more I had a a mentor through the Small Business-- SBDC or SBA? SBA I had a counselor who walked me through my business plan early on that I was meeting with her all throughout 2022 just trying to figure out how do I do this how do I do that how do I plan and she was a really good mentor but had I taken those classes from WBDC at the same time which I didn't discover WBDC until I was well into the process with her I feel like I could have really supplemented what we were talking about now, I'm saying this as somebody who has started a business before. Tu Books, which is the imprint of Lee and Low that I currently work for that is the the imprint that I was the publisher of until last October and we can talk about what it is to be an editor in another video if you guys are interested let me know in the comments but like I started that as a small business as well with the SBA helping me along and so for the last 15 years I've been running the basically a startup business within a business and what's been nice about that is that I've had the resources of Lee and Low to teach me all the things that I didn't know enough about so what I'm saying is I've done this process before of starting a business and so I thought I knew what I was doing and two years into this business running it myself I'm realizing all the the gaps that I've had and especially because this is a different part of the book business and so there are things that I only knew from the outside or I only knew as a bookseller for a semester when I was in graduate school getting a masters in children's literature so like there there are things that I knew about but I hadn't experienced fully until I had been fully in the business so taking those classes earlier as a supplement to my learning with my SBA advisor would have helped me to really dive deeper and get a little bit more realistic and what it boils down to is that you don't know what you don't know you have to learn it and sometimes you can learn it from other people you can learn from their experience you can talk to other people who have been through it but even if they've been through it I talked to say hi to Juju I talked to multiple other bookstore owners as I was starting out and they told me you need to know this this this and this and I would take 2 out of 5 to heart because I didn't understand like a friend told me oh you need to look into this point of sale system I didn't know what a point of sale system was and I didn't realize why it was so important to have a book specific point of sale system until I was into it with square because square was cheaper and realizing that I had no way to easily track whether I had double ordered anything I had no way to easily track whether I had already ordered something and so I might double order it if it sold out I did have access to POs but it didn't connect to the system that publishers use and so there was no easy way to talk to my rep and I did pull in adelvice and started using Edelweiss because a lot of publishers' catalogs get posted on Edelweiss, which is a website run by a company called under the treeline or something to that effect anyway, Edelweiss is a really great way to look through the catalogues when you're doing seasonal ordering but they're really hard... I-- it was it was hard it was hard so like I would sometimes I would put my orders through to my reps-- No, Juju!--on Edelweiss, and then I would export it to Square but they didn't talk to each other well and so being able to pick up on the backside Basil, so that it would automatically track all that I've ordered and send it to the publisher and all of that made my life so much easier but it took going through the experience and understanding what the drawbacks were of using a point of sale system that is not book specific to understand why I needed that thing so you don't know what you don't know but I would definitely start my email list if you're even thinking about starting a business start your email list now and do it legally if you're in the US and the thing that I want to say about all the stuff that I'm talking about is this is very US centric so if you're in another country I hope this is useful to you and I hope that you can basically take what is useful and throw out the rest because I know that a lot of you who have watched the previous one were in other countries than the US so hopefully this is useful to you in some way but anyway starting an email list I feel like that's a pretty universal one getting out of debt and saving money before you truly dive in I feel like those are fairly universal no matter what country you're in connecting with local community leaders and figuring out and this is where demographic studies come in and I did a lot of like research on the demographics of the area and compared it to other places that had bookstores that were successful that were in similar demographic areas I feel like that is something that you can adapt to wherever you are in the world for me it's the Chamber of Commerce or a local economic development committee or the mayor or the local community leaders in Winstead there's actually a town manager in addition to a mayor so there are all sorts of people that you can connect with in your local community to make sure that they are on board and support your new business, as well the main takeaway that may not be as easy for you to be able to take as advice is starting those classes from the Connecticut WBDC so if you're in Connecticut and you're a woman in particular you need to pay attention to the WBDC here in Connecticut because they have a wonderful grant program I've talked about it before and if you're in the US but in another state definitely take a look at what your state has to offer as far as the Small Business Administration and you might have a WBDC there is one in every state as far as I know but some of them are more robust than others they are I thought they were part of the SBA but apparently they are a independent nonprofit that is funded by funds from the federal government and they've had a lot of their funding stripped lately so take a look at what your local can do and if you happen to be in a position to help them out to get better funding connecting them with corporate sponsorship for example that's always a good idea anyway, those are the five things that I would do if I were starting out now and if I were to be doing this business from the beginning if I had the chance to go back in time but the reality of starting any business is that you deal with the hand that is dealt to you I don't think that's quite the metaphor but hopefully you understand what I mean that you do the best you can at the time with the resources that you have and the knowledge that you have and as you go through the process of running your business you're gonna find out that you've made mistakes you're gonna figure out oh I could have been doing this more easily all along there are things that you're gonna learn through the process that you just couldn't learn in other ways because you just didn't have the bandwidth or the resources or the knowledge at the time when you were going through it so this is not in any way telling you never start a business unless you have $150,000 in savings and have wiped out all your debt and have gone to get a business masters or something like that this is just saying these are things that I do wish that I had had the ability to do things differently and if you have the chance to do things a little differently hopefully this will help you and with that that's the end of our podcast but what I'd love is if you would go below and follow and like this post and if you like what we're doing please buy your books from us we are an independent bookstore in Winsted, Connecticut and we can ship all over the US afraid that we're not able to do international shipping at this time I don't think you'd want that anyway because international shipping is so expensive but if you're not in the US please support the local independent bookstores wherever you are and we'll get through this hard time together as we support each other in our local small businesses as much as possible in our communities making community, creating third spaces so that we can all gather together in our bookstores or whatever third spaces that we're creating so that we can connect with our each other and with each other across the world so let me know what you think in the comments what-- if you've started a business and there are things that you would do differently let us know in the comments, or if you've got questions, ask them in the comments thank you! bye!