“Do you remember What kind of beer was it?
Andy Hunter pauses so long before answering my question that it’s awkward. He is racking his brains. I asked him to tell me about the night he came up with the idea that led to his improbable success. start of book sales, Bookshop.org. As a former magazine editor, you want to get the details right.
Remember the easy stuff: It was 2018. I was traveling for work. At the time, Hunter was running the midsize literary publisher Catapult, a job that required speaking at industry events. The night of her big brainstorm, she was away from her two young daughters and her usual nightly obligations (dishes, bedtime rituals) and she had an exceptional moment to think and drink a beer.
But what kind of beer? “It was, uh, a Dogfish Head IPA,” Hunter finally replies. Well, picture this: there he is, alone in a fancy Airbnb, a pale blue bungalow on a quiet street in Berkeley, California. His brown hair is a bit tousled and he’s drinking a pale beer. He is enjoying the music. (“You can tell she was listening to Silver Jewish,” says Hunter.)
She couldn’t stop thinking about something a board member of the American Booksellers Association, the industry’s largest trade group, had said to her during a recent business dinner. What if e-commerce was a boon for independent bookstores, instead of an existential threat? The Booksellers Association ran IndieBound, a program that gives bloggers and journalists a way to link up with independents instead of Amazon when quoting or reviewing a book. But she hadn’t gained much traction.
That night in Berkeley, the unusual combination of nocturnal solitude and a hint of alcohol triggered something in Hunter’s brain. Or maybe he hit something together. Either way, by morning, he wasn’t hungover and had a proposal for how to grow IndieBound, including simplifying the logistics of buying online and integrating it with social media. Plus: “I wanted it to look better,” she says.
When he returned home to New York, Hunter sent his proposal to Oren Teicher, then executive director of the Booksellers Association. Teicher liked the idea, but he said no. The trade organization wasn’t really interested in expanding IndieBound. But if Hunter was willing to take on the project himself, to create this new and improved version on his own? Well, the group could invest some money.
Although Catapult kept him quite busy, Hunter really believed in his vision of an improved e-commerce platform uniting indies. Small shops deserved to find customers online too, even if they didn’t have the resources to set up their own online stores. Offering them a way to join felt like a fair crusade. Also, Hunter thought it could be a low-effort side gig.
What began as a favor done on a whimsical business trip has since become Hunter’s greatest professional life project. In its first few years of existence, Bookshop defied even its founder’s expectations and demonstrated just how useful its model could be for small businesses. Now, Hunter has a new plot twist in mind: he wants to show business owners how to grow without selling out, without killing the competition.
the problem for independent bookstores is that many of them do not have the bandwidth to run their own online stores. Your inventories and shipping capabilities are limited by your non-Amazon budgets. Also, sometimes they don’t. want to engage in electronic commerce; the romance of stocked shelves and reading nooks and carefully curated staff picks are central to its existence. Eliminating those experiences seems antithetical, though it might be necessary, to the bottom line.
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