Ask independent booksellers to name the guiding principles of the trade, and chances are that one of the first words out of all their mouths will be community. But building it takes time and money, and in a business with typically razor-thin margins, owners of even the most established bookstores can find it difficult to know where to begin.
Will Ames is aiming to change that. A former high school English teacher, Ames is now portfolio director for philanthropy at Emerson Collective, the LLC founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, where his focus is on indie bookstores, libraries, and literary arts organizations. And like many booksellers themselves, he sees bookselling as a public service as much as a business.
Booksellers, Ames explained, “are curators,” and as such excel at planning and executing “mission-related work” including on-site author events, children’s storytimes, educational podcasts, and literacy programs, giving back to their communities in similar ways to their librarian counterparts. But unlike libraries, bookstores are largely for-profit businesses—meaning they receive no government funding to support their programming, even though it is typically free to attend. In an era of ever-rising costs, that model has become less and less tenable.
Ames’s goal is to educate bookstore owners on how to explore not-for-profit and hybrid business models that could help them “supercharge” their programming and “free up working capital” for their stores along the way. To date, he’s partnered with 26 shops, with a focus on businesses in underserved markets and run by people of underrepresented or historically marginalized identities. He hopes to bring another 14 stores on board by the end of 2025.
Partner stores are offered resources that include accounting and legal support, education on inventory management, direct funding, and what Ames calls the group’s “playbooks”: step-by-step guides to incorporating nonprofit elements into for-profit stores and for establishing and operating such businesses.
“The amount of money we spend sending authors around to schools with our staff and events coordinators—not to mention 400 community events a year!” said Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla., a partner in the initiative. “We may sell some books, but the sales themselves don’t necessarily keep the events going.” Ames and Emerson, he added, “believe that independent bookstores help us to become more democratic as a nation. Smartly, and with such a sophisticated view, they see that helping to sustain independent bookstores can be part of their mission as well.”
The bulk of Ames’s outreach has been directly to partners, whom the organization convenes annually to discuss the challenges unique to not-for-profit models at bookstores and strategies for overcoming them. The second “convening,” as the group calls them, was held in Washington, D.C., last September, where bookstore partners including Kaplan, Calvin Crosby of the King’s English in Salt Lake City, and Claudia Vega of Whose Books in Dallas ran workshops and participated in panel discussions.
Emerson is hoping to ramp up awareness of its target model. At this year’s Winter Institute, Ames will offer “step-by-step directions, checkpoints, and goals” for bookstore owners to begin the process of spinning off a nonprofit arm at a February 26 panel, where he’ll be joined by Kaplan; Courtney Ulrich Smith of Underbrush Books in Rogers, Ark.; and Annastasia Williams of the Bottom in Knoxville, Tenn. And he encourages bookstore owners who are interested in learning more about the model to reach out to the American Booksellers Association and their regional trade associations, with which Emerson has built close ties.
The collective launched its bookstore partnership program during the pandemic, after researching challenges facing U.S. civic institutions and determining that the bookstore might prove a sturdy loom upon which to reweave the country’s fraying civic fabric. Ames stresses the bipartisan nature of the project, and the need for institutions to come together across the aisle to give bookstores a chance to help their communities grow.
“I want every small town that needs a bookstore to have one that is really thriving,” Ames said. “That will take more philanthropic partners, and maybe there’s a role for government. Books are ‘controversial’ right now, and it’s been interesting for me to hear booksellers talk about the Freedom to Read statement, which the American Library Association crafted in 1953 and which explicitly calls on booksellers to not curate only according to their own political, moral, or aesthetic values. I think the idea of building spaces that make a wide range of ideas available is something that everyone can come together around.”
