Independent booksellers continued to expand in 2023, with more than 200 new stores opening

NEW YORK — Three years ago, Erin Decker was a middle school librarian in Kissimmee , Florida , increasingly frustrated by the state's“We just put our heads together and decided a bookstore would help make sure students could get to books that were being pulled from shelves,” says Decker, whose White Rose Books & More opened last fall in Kissimmee .

Most of the new businesses are traditional “brick and mortar” retailers. But a “bookstore” can also mean a “pop-up” business like Loc'd & Lit, which has a mission to bring “the joy of reading to the Bronx,” the New York City borough that had been viewed by the industry as a “desert” for its scarcity of bookstores. Other new stores are online only, among them the Be More Literature Children's Bookshop and the used books seller Liberation Is Lit.

Just opening a store requires initiative and a willingness to take risks. Decker says that she and Galiñanes had to use retirement money because lenders wouldn't provide credit until they were actually in business. The owner of Octavia's Bookshelf, Nikki High, is a former communications director for Trader Joe's who relied on crowdfunding and her own savings to get her store started.

“I would read a book and think it's the best thing ever and order a bunch of copies, and everybody else is like, ‘No, I don’t want that book,'" she explains. “And when we started, I wanted to be everything for everybody. We had a ton of different categories. But I found out that short stories and poetry almost never sell for us. People want general fiction, bestsellers, children's books.

Source: Education Headlines (educationheadlines.net)

Erin Decker Allison Hill Middle School Librarian Tania Galiñanes Kissimmee Florida Leah Johnson Jonathan Evison Book Association Black Science Fiction Independent Bookstores John Green

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