The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (7 page)

The dogs Zora and Bert, the cats Val-Kyttie and Beulah, and Jack himself waited to greet the readers we just knew were out there. We had Christmas presents they could buy! Pity they didn’t know we were in here. The few who came mostly had credit from before we opened. They used their swap slips immediately, on pretty much the same principle as not buying green bananas after your eightieth birthday. (Why invest in what you might not benefit from?) Without saying anything to us, pretty much everyone in town was assuming we’d close within the year.

Jack and I had figured, based on how much people knew about our church hunt and our opening plans, that everybody showing so much interest in the new kids on the block meant that they’d shop with us, and bring their friends. That, plus the preopening swap buzz, the Opening Day crowd returning with others, good word of mouth from our regulars, and of course the single ad we’d taken out in the local paper, would be enough.

It wasn’t.

New customers did appear, saying “James sent me,” or “Bill’s my uncle,” but they came in dribbles rather than droves. It’s a wonder we didn’t scare them away, since by now we were chasing newcomers out the shop door with our flyers, begging them to put these up at their places of work and to talk about us to their friends.

Meanwhile, everywhere we went—the grocery store, church, out for a walk along the Greenbelt in the blustery wind—people stopped us to ask, “How’s the bookstore doing?”

“Great!” we’d smile, teeth gritted. “You should come by and see for yourself!”

They’d give us knowing looks. “Sure, after Christmas. Can’t give used books for Christmas, can you? Y’all have a merry one, and we’ll come see you in the New Year.” Off they’d saunter, the unspoken subtext hanging in the air:
if you’re still open.

After three or four similar encounters, Jack turned to me. “Think they know something we don’t?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, “but don’t you suspect that someone has set up a betting pool on how long we’ll last? Let’s find them and bet against ourselves.”

When Fiona’s four-and-a-half-year-old grandson walked up to me at church one day, pulled my trouser leg, and said, “So, how’s the bookstore doing?” I went straight to Fiona and demanded to know what people were saying. Softhearted Fiona hemmed and hawed, but finally she admitted that, yes, people were talking about us, all right. Community consensus to bookshop owners: You won’t last six months, but bless your hearts for trying, you dear sweet fools.

I confronted Teddy, a woman whose intuitions and insights I trusted. “Why is everybody assuming we’re not gonna make it? It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy; they won’t shop here because they think we won’t be here in a year, and we won’t be if they don’t shop here.”

Teddy smiled but deflected the question. “Why do you think that’s what they think?”

I pondered a moment, then began to lay out points. “One, a lot of people probably don’t know we’re here because we’ve only advertised in the local paper, and that only circulates in Big Stone. Two, avid readers will be used to buying their books online, so why should they support some new store run by people they don’t know? Because as near as I can tell, you’re not a Big Stoner unless your grandfather was born here. Three, there’s this sort of weirdness in the region; people disparage it even if they’re from here. Everyone keeps telling us there aren’t enough people who can read to support a bookstore, and that something like half the population graduates from high school. Is that even true?”

Teddy’s mouth made a little
moue
. “More like 60 percent. Graduating, that is. Go on.”

“Four, even if everybody in town who likes to read did shop with us, that’s still a maximum of five thousand people, and not everybody buys a book every day. So if we get half the customers for books in Big Stone, that’s just not that many people. And five, if you’re not from Big Stone, people seem to think you’ve come here to do some unspecified evil rather than just, oh, say, open a bookshop? How am I doing so far?”

She smiled. “I think you’ve hit the low points.”

“Okay, so in essence we’ve got locals who won’t shop with us because we’re not locals, and we’ve got the rest who won’t shop with us because they think shopping local is beneath them. Now how do we get past any of that?” I asked her, counting on her years of accumulated wisdom in the nation’s capital.

Teddy’s smile lingered as she leaned across the table and drummed her perfectly manicured fingernails lightly in front of me. “You know what, honey? Most people make a business plan
before
they start.”

She had a point.

Teddy was too diplomatic to add that most people also didn’t waltz into an area known for being insular and just assume everybody would love and trust them from day one. The shop did have a handful of regular customers, plus a slowly growing list of people discovering us for the first time. Once people found us, they tended to return, and their telling others had been what we’d counted on to grow our customer pool. It wasn’t so much that people weren’t talking us up, just that this buzz hadn’t generated enough volume to keep up with our grocery bill. We needed more customers, faster than public opinion was dragging them in. Well, that, or we needed to eat a lot less. Our word-of-mouth advertising “plan”—more wishful thinking, really—had half succeeded (Jack’s take) and half failed (mine; I’m not certain optimist/pessimist couples should be granted marriage licenses).

Of course, among those that did hear about us from local buzz, some would see no reason to change their current routine—which could have been anything from not reading to ordering their books online to driving to Kingsport (a town about forty-five minutes away) to the Books-A-Million. The natural suspicion of a new store before it catches on is somewhat enhanced in a small town, where the “are you from here?” factor adds to reticence. How could we entice readers away from online or out-of-town shopping, and also let interested customers know we were here?

Firing up the computer, I googled “publicize with no money, how to” and soon found a site offering advice to small retailers. What I read chilled my blood. To this day, I am grateful that Jack had no idea that a rule-of-thumb formula existed to compute retail success by population and geography. Had that magic calculation been known that cork-popping day in Little Mexico, we might have drifted downstream a little longer.

My hubby was in the bathroom when I knocked on its heavy wooden door with the news: a bookstore in its inaugural year should expect in dollars about one-fifth the number of the population in its advertising region. A pause followed, and then Jack’s voice came, taut as a fiddle string. “Big Stone Gap is a town of five thousand people.”

“So the expert opinion is that we’ll make a thousand dollars this year, unless we can advertise more widely than town.”

Running water muffled his response, but it sounded like “eff the effing experts” and a suggestion of “spit for brains.” The door flew open. “Start thinking,” Jack ordered.

It’s part of our couplehood mojo that I’m the eccentric thinker who creates harebrained schemes, Jack the sensible partner who evaluates their workability. I sat down at the table, stared at “$1,000” written across the top of my notepad, and thought hard.

Although the town housed five thousand, the within-sensible-driving-distance-of-the-store population reached sixty-five thousand across three conjoining counties. They had never heard of us out there and, short of a bullhorn from the car window on some back roads, they weren’t likely to. We couldn’t afford to drive through every county looking for the Laundromat and clinics that had corkboards to pin up flyers, even if they let us. I had learned the hard way—namely, someone chasing me down, yelling, “You can’t post that here!”—that Wise County businesses couldn’t post flyers on Lee County bulletin boards. I think it has something to do with the rivalry between high school football teams.

We’d bought one ad in the
Post,
the weekly newspaper covering Big Stone Gap, before opening. And after we opened, one of our most common conversations with people discovering the shop—usually by seeing Jack’s sign in our yard or hearing about us from a friend—was:

Them: We had no idea you were here!

Us: Did you see the ad in the paper?

Them: The
Times
? No.

A major newspaper in the region published in nearby Kingsport and covered the rural counties of Southwest Virginia. But we learned this after we had drained our advertising budget with the
Post
ad. Teri and Gary’s credit-for-copies swap remained all we could afford for a while.

It is far too tempting for a new business to count on overachieving. Jack and I had done just that, opening on a bloody whim with no idea how little we would make or how long it takes to build clientele. Advice centers around the country warn that 75 percent of small businesses fail in their first three years. All this data swarmed through my head like the horrid beasties from Pandora’s mythical box.

But Hope lived in that box, too. And although the story never mentioned her, I’m certain that Hope’s little sister, Tenacity, also hung around. She sat on my shoulder that day and together we started on that long-overdue plan to actually run a bookstore.

What did we have to work with? Unlimited photocopies, the qualified good wishes of a small but growing clientele—even if they were taking bets on whether we’d last—a reliable car, and our energetic selves. What did we need? People. People with at least a little bit of discretionary income, who liked to read. Lots of them.

A cunning idea formed. When Jack heard it, he put his head in his hands and sighed.

“Don’t you think it could work?” I asked, voice brittle with anxiety.

“Aye, it
will
work. That’s what’s so bloody annoying; there’s no way for me to get out of doing it. I’ll fetch my coat.”

My devoted spouse spent the slushy gray Saturdays of December standing at the front doors of the Super Walmart two towns over. Serving the three-county population, the big box store shepherded a hefty number of people through its portals each weekend. Two aisles of books bedecked its front central lobe. Anyone buying printed matter in our area did so at Walmart, and those nice readers just needed to know we were here.

We printed bookmarks, five to the page, on Teri’s copier, giving hours, location, and trade policy. They were small for two reasons: cost-effectiveness and being able to pocket them if anyone reported Jack’s activity. I gambled that people would be curious enough about a bookstore not to turn him in to the Wal-guards. It was probably illegal and Jack nearly froze to death, but a thousand bookmarks went out each weekend, and our sales tripled. The phone started ringing with calls like this one:

“Good afternoon. This is the bookstore.”

“Hi, that the new bookstore?”

“It is. What can I help you with?”

“I’ve got like a zillion textbooks from my college days. I was an engineering major. I hate to just chuck them out, but my parents need the space. Would you take them?”

“Sure! What’s your name so I can start a credit slip?”

“No, I don’t want credit. I live in New Jersey. I’m just down for a funeral; my grandma died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. She’d been sick for years and hated everybody. So I’ll bring these boxes by? My mom’s so happy to be clearing out my old room.”

That afternoon Tim, a man in his late forties, dumped four boxes of books on the porch, shook our hands, and wished us well. (Tim became one of what Jack calls our “semiannual regulars,” people who don’t live in town but who always drop in on us when they visit relatives.) Through Tim, we entered the wonderful world of textbook appraisal, a plane of existence akin to the Twilight Zone. What holds value, and why, is a long hard slog of study interspersed with idiosyncrasies, but here’s the cheat sheet version if you’re interested: history books outdate the day after they’re written; math and chemistry hold their value the longest; sociology is a mixed bag; and it doesn’t matter what date is on the English anthology, because nobody wants it except the lady with all the cats who lives at the edge of town. That’s the skinny on textbooks.

But the gentleman discarding college baggage wasn’t the only caller. One snowy January day I answered the phone and a lady said without preamble, “I met a man at Walmart, I guess he was your husband? He’s from Ireland.”

“Scotland, yes. He—”

“Now listen, he gave me a slip of paper that says there’s a bookstore in Big Stone Gap. Is that right?”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ve just been open a few months. We’re—”

“Well, whoda thunk it? Big Stone! Listen, do you have any Danielle Steels?”

“Loads.” (Short answers seemed prudent.)

“Well, I’ll be right down.”

Lulu, the owner of that preemptive voice, slammed through our front door twenty minutes later. A salt-of-the-earth character who rarely lets anyone around her finish a sentence, Lulu would become a fixture in our lives, appearing every few weeks with a friend in tow. She must have introduced twenty people to our shop in the first year alone.

In short, the Walmart caper worked. “Effing experts,” said Jack later, reviewing the month’s sales figures with satisfaction as he sipped a hot toddy.

So we broke the rules and got away with it, not just via Operation Walmart but by opening a business without capital to keep it going. We got lucky. A couple of years ago, a family started a coffee shop in Wise, a college town near that infamous Walmart. On a main street and near the county courthouse, it looked like a shoo-in, so the family didn’t let heavy rents deter them. Throwing wide the doors with enough operating capital for a month, they scraped by happy as clams with their small but steadily increasing profits—prophetic of the stability to come, we all thought, cheering them on as they hit the three-month mark.

And then a winter storm shut down the region. Power stayed off four long days as people huddled in their homes. The family lost everything in the freshly stocked freezer. Unable to cobble together enough money to buy new supplies, they couldn’t make their rent and had to give up. Good people, sensible people who might have made it with enough money for another month’s inventory, or if the storm hadn’t ruined their existing stock.