As of May 2023, the American Booksellers Association’s membership included 2,185 companies with 2,599 locations; of those, 693 have opened their doors since January 2021. Many of these new booksellers see bookselling both as a career and as a means to advance personal priorities. They’re stocking shelves with books from BIPOC, LGBTQ, and global perspectives, seeking out local and underrepresented authors, and creating spaces for historically marginalized customers. We spoke with several up-and-comers about why they got into bookselling, how they’d like their businesses to evolve, and what the industry can do to support rising generations.

For some young entrepreneurs, bookselling is a business and a way to live according to ideals. “When people visit my store, they often think I got into bookselling because I read all the time,” says Halley Vincent, 15, owner of Seven Stories in Shawnee, Kans. “I do enjoy reading, but the real reason was my love for my community, interaction, and sales.” She likes handselling because people “come back to talk about the title. I love that our store creates an environment that welcomes conversation.”

Starting around age 12, Vincent gave books away, delivered titles from a riding-lawn-mower bookmobile, and sold books from her mother’s studio. Last November, she opened Seven Stories in a former barbershop. While she’s at school, her mother minds the store. Vincent emphasizes BIPOC titles—“forty percent of my area is brown and Black families,” she says—and carries bilingual books in Spanish and Chinese, as her dad came to the U.S. from Taiwan, and “half my family speaks Chinese.” Bilingual books spark emotion for customers: “They’ll stand there at the shelf, and they’ll be happy, but sometimes they’ll also cry.”

Seven Stories is Shawnee’s only indie bookstore, and Vincent says she feels a responsibility “not only to carry diverse titles but to invite local authors,” including self-published teenage novelist S.B. Sheets. Vincent also strives to set up accounts with publishers and reps, though her store is tiny. Wholesale ordering is “quick and easy,” she says, but “there’s no personality to it.”

Vincent is an uncommonly young proprietor, but booksellers in their 20s recall similar aspirations.

Owning a bookstore “has been a lifelong dream,” says Keeley Shay Malone of Ink Drinkers Anonymous in Muncie, Ind. “A couple of years ago, my mom was like, ‘If this is what you want to do, do it.’ That’s literally all it took.”

Within a week, Malone had her business license. In 2023 she opened in a tiny storefront, and in January she moved into a larger location.

Making the industry more inclusive

Malone says she makes it her mission to stock books with BIPOC perspectives, “especially for young readers and teenagers.” She uses NetGalley’s “OwnVoices” search to find books by authors of color and does “deep dives on TikTok, and I get tons of diverse authors on my For You page.”

In nearby Indianapolis, YA author Leah Johnson started Loudmouth Books as an online shop to combat censorship and established a storefront location in 2023. She stocks banned books and work “for, by, or about marginalized people,” she says.

Voicing sentiments common to young booksellers, Johnson says she views “literature as a means of social change.” She appreciates her mentors at Semicolon Books in Chicago; the Novel Neighbor in St. Louis, Mo.; and Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin, Ind., whose advice has helped Loudmouth get louder. For her, bookselling is “all about collaboration, and not ‘how can we edge out the competition,’ which is antithetical to what capitalism would have us believe.”

To build goodwill, Johnson encourages staffers to attend local events and greet community members. “This is going to sound so woo-woo, but what are the vibes? What’s the energy in here?” Johnson asks. She wants store visitors “to feel like they’re being invited” into a friendly space.

Aysia Brown, co-owner of Protagonist Black in Pomona, Calif., says she and her husband, Kevin Brown, launched a mobile bookstore last year because the nearest bookstores were 30–40 minutes away. “As a parent, reader, and educator, I was disturbed by the implications of that lack of access,” Brown says. The store recently moved into a shared retail space maintained by an African-American nonprofit organization.

Brown sees bookselling becoming more “experiential and social,” and has constructed a business model with that in mind: the store pairs cocktails and mocktails with select titles, and its Friends of the Shop program encourages local BIPOC authors to sell their own books. “They interact directly with our customers,” Brown says of the program, which thus far has attracted self-published authors. “This helps us support indie authors while balancing our inventory budget.”

For Brown, being an indie bookseller means making books accessible to those from underrepresented communities. But inclusion must be sustainable and intentional: “Identify your growth points and create a plan for how you will measure your success,” she says, emphasizing “honesty and accountability” in business practices. “It does not serve anyone to bring a diverse group of folks into a toxic environment that’s not prepared for that level of engagement. No one will thrive.”

Kaitlyn Mahoney of Under the Umbrella Bookstore in Salt Lake City agrees. “Booksellers should be aware of the privileges they have and actively work to advocate for and stock BIPOC authors, disabled authors, fat authors, neurodivergent authors, etc.,” Mahoney says. “We have a lot of power to amplify the stories that can make the industry more inclusive as a whole.”

Mahoney opened her store in 2021 “in direct response to the lack of safe, sober, and accessible queer spaces” in S.L.C. and to “help readers gravitate towards a more diverse baseline.” The store spotlights LGBTQ authors and books with LGBTQ characters and themes, and emphasizes BIPOC authors.

Mission over profits

Walking their progressive talk is essential to the young booksellers PW interviewed, including Eleanor’s Norfolk, in Norfolk, Va. Described by its owners as a “radical neighborhood bookstore and bottle shop” with an inventory that “uplifts and highlights traditionally silenced voices and ideas,” Eleanor’s Norfolk was launched in 2021 by Erin Dougherty in response to the BLM movement. It recently transitioned into a worker-owned cooperative, with two 20-something co-owners alongside Dougherty, who is in her early 40s.

Co-owner Anitra Howard has worked at Eleanor’s for two years. She says she became a worker-owner because the business model and inventory reflect her values as an advocate for social justice and storytelling.

“Indies have the really cool ability to cater to what their own community wants and needs,” Howard says. “We’re able to coordinate what we have in our store to our mission and what we want to promote in the world through intersectional feminism, through abolitionism, through those kinds of progressive tenets.”

As community hubs, indies should do more than sell books, Howard believes. To that end, Eleanor’s partners with local organizations to offer a free “personal hygiene and period pantry” on its front porch and cofounded two community-building nonprofit organizations for people to share expertise and resources: the Hampton Roads Mutual Aid Network and the People’s Free School Norfolk.

Progressive stores, conservative areas

Many of the young booksellers contacted for this piece have opened stores in places where community connections have frayed and diversity has been regarded with skepticism. In 2021, Lyn Ciurro, along with Rachel Ciurro and Nicole Menzel, opened Bound to Happen Books in Stevens Point, Wis., a liberal college town in a conservative rural area. Ciurro says Bound to Happen “emphasizes stories, authors, and experiences not represented in mainstream literature and central Wisconsin” and fulfills a “political necessity.” They believe “bookstores should proudly take up the role of a community civic center,” and therefore founded Bound to Happen with a grassroots, cooperative business model.

Ciurro believes bookselling can change the entire industry for the better, especially if indie booksellers organize. They say store owners benefit from union drives just as much as employees do. “If unions can fight for fair wages for workers, they can fight for other issues that booksellers deal with: rushed production that leads to poor quality printing and higher book prices.”

Diana Dominguez founded the intersectional, feminist bookstore Más Libritos in Springdale, Ark., out of her own feeling of political necessity. Visitors are often “surprised a bookstore like this exists” in an Arkansas town with a population of 8,000, Dominguez says. “I think I surprised myself!”

She started Más Libritos as a pop-up in January 2023 and moved into a shared space with another Latina-owned business that summer. “It was a steep learning curve,” Dominguez recalls, yet “people have been pretty receptive.” Fellow booksellers “have been supportive and kind, but it’s been a lonely journey, to be honest,” she continues, because she cannot yet afford full-time or even part-time employees.

To counteract the isolation, she attended the ABA’s Winter Institute 2024 in Cincinnati—“I was like, I’m going to gather my people,” she says—and she is in the inaugural cohort of the Book Industry Charitable Foundation’s new BIPOC business incubator, BincTank.

“
We’re able to coordinate what we have in our store to our mission.
”

“The need is there for more BIPOC bookstore owners and booksellers, yet the infrastructure needs to be created for us,” Dominguez says. “Not everybody has the same starting line—even more barriers exist for people of color.”

Dominguez is keen to stock original Spanish-language titles, as well as translations mindful of national and regional argots, and considers Más Libritos part of a growing bookselling movement. “I want to disrupt the literary canon,” she says.

To read more from our Independents Issue, click here.