John Hugo

Like Emily Powell at Powell's Books in Portland, Ore., and Casey Coonerty Protti at Bookshop Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, Calif., John Hugo is a second-generation bookseller being groomed to take over the family business. “I wouldn't be doing this otherwise,” he says. But unlike them, Hugo has worked in bookselling since he was eight. He hasn't missed a Christmas at Hugo Books—where he's manager of Andover Bookstore—in the past two decades and the only summers he was absent from the store were between the ages of 14 and 18, when he rented his own place on Cape Cod and worked as a tennis pro.

At 28, Hugo is one of very few people his age to have seen the book industry go from no computers, no Amazon and no Borders to today's high-tech, highly competitive marketplace. Although he has become the driving force behind the Web sites, MySpace pages and other new technology for his father's three stores, his earliest bookselling memories date back to carbon-copy special-order cards. “I have an unusual perspective,” acknowledges Hugo, who credits his dad, Bob Hugo, with teaching him on the job about the nitty gritty of bookstore ownership and management. Among the lessons he cites: “The owner should clean the bathrooms. You should buy your building, and you should count back change after each purchase. Otherwise, what do you do when the computer goes down? He always said, 'If you don't computerize, you're out of business.' ”

Hugo senior also taught his son that sales matter. For example, John recently gave up the bookstore blog he started last March, because he couldn't see a direct sales link. “All I hear about from my father,” says Hugo, “is, 'Are we paying our bills on time? Are we getting our books on time?' It's always got to be about selling. That's what I tell people who apply for jobs here. We don't have clerks. You are a bookseller. If you enjoy the product, then the way of keeping score is what's in the register. A lot of people who aren't owners don't understand what the numbers are and how important they are to the business.”

Hugo believes it's becoming harder and harder for a single store to keep those numbers up. “Since the business is flat right now,” he says, “in order to expand you have to grow laterally. A single location, even if you give it 150%, it's still flat if you're mature.” And all of Hugo Books' locations—Spirit of '76 Bookstore and Cardshop in Marblehead, Mass.; the Book Rack in Newburyport, Mass.; and Andover Bookstore in Andover, Mass.—are mature, especially Andover, which is 200 years old, making it one of the oldest bookstores in the country.

During the coming year, Hugo says, he and his father plan to add two more stores to Hugo Books, all within a two-hour drive of the three Massachusetts outlets it currently owns.

“We want to be the neighborhood bookstore on the corner,” says Hugo, who also wants to own the real estate on the corner. He and his dad are working to transform Hugo Books from a loosely connected set of individual stores, operating under their own names, into a tightly woven network that shares back-office functions. The biggest challenges Hugo sees are linking a computer system across all three Hugo Books stores and finding exceptional staff to help run the stores and grow the company.

As for the industry as a whole, he would like to get more young people his age to shop in bookstores. Also, he wants the Emerging Leaders Project, geared for newer booksellers, to become more responsive to the needs of those who are serious about opening a bookstore—or in his case, two or three.