The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
Some variation of the quote, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” has been attributed to everyone from Mark Twain to Marc Anthony. While there is certainly a kernel of truth to it, I think most people view the concept as somewhere between wishful thinking and deliberate self-deceit. My experience has been that one of its less-discussed corollaries, “Monetize what you love, and you will come to despise it,” rings far more accurate.
Many years ago, I operated a consulting firm that provided business and market development services for small businesses and nonprofit organizations. I have always been an avid reader, writer and lover of books, so I was delighted when a small used book store hired me to help them market their business. A big part of my “neighborhood marketing” strategy was developing the client’s “story.” My preferred way of doing this was to spend a couple of days in the business, acquiring an understanding of the culture, the customers and how the operation worked.
I arranged to spend four days over two weeks working beside the owners. This was just a few years after “You’ve Got Mail” was a hit movie, and I was always a little bothered by the ease with which Kathleen Kelly (played by Meg Ryan, above) had given in to the mega-bookstore down the street in that film. I thought that with the proper marketing, she could have remained viable as a boutique children’s bookstore. As it happened, a brand new Barnes & Noble had opened less than a quarter-mile from the used book store, and I saw it as an opportunity to prove that idea correct.
The owners of the bookstore were an older couple who had loved books all their lives and bought the store as their “retirement plan.” At first, they came off as a nice, if slightly eccentric, pair with a tenuous grasp of business and profitability. After spending a few hours with them, though, a different picture emerged. They hated the store and felt trapped in it. Therefore, my job wasn’t to set them back on the road to profitability and fight the challenge from Barnes & Noble; it was to dab fresh makeup on a rotting corpse in the hopes they could unload it on some naive buyer.
Needless to say, I was somewhat less enthusiastic about that. Still, I dutifully helped them craft a narrative, designed a slick brochure, built a website on the then-newfangled internet, and worked out some cross-promotion arrangements with complementary local businesses.
The store was located in a suburban strip center anchored by a Food Lion, and including a dry cleaners, a hair salon and a couple of restaurants, so there was ample foot traffic. It was immediately adjacent to a Subway, which meant that the smell of baking bread continuously inundated the store. For the first few hours, by the way, that’s great. Then it gets strangely nauseating.
One of my neighborhood marketing strategies was to promote the business by writing a column for the local newspaper. It was early November, so I wrote a piece on Nathaniel Philbrick’s recently released book “Mayflower.” I sent that article to the publisher of the local weekly newspaper, for whom I had written a few things over the years. He called me and said, “I like this article John, but I can’t publish it.”
“Why not?”
“Well, that bookstore owes me about five hundred dollars for advertising they placed but never paid for.”
When confronted with this, the owners said the ads “didn’t work,” so they refused to pay for them. I explained that’s not how advertising works, but they were unconvinced.
Meanwhile, the time I spent in the store exposed me to a few operational issues. There was no inventory system, so customer inquiries about the availability of any particular book required a trip to the stacks, arranged sort of by genre and alphabetically by author, but not definitively so. By far, though, the most significant business issue was that the number of customers who wanted to sell books far outstripped the number who wanted to buy them. The owners had some safeguards in place in this regard. They posted a list of books that they already had too many copies of and would not buy. Still, it seemed to me the store was paying out more money than it was taking in and had become something of a lending library for a few regular customers.
In the end, the lesson I learned was that there is a difference between loving books and selling books, just as there is a difference between fishing and being a fishing guide, and cooking and owning a restaurant. Often, the things we love about our hobbies are completely obliterated when we try to monetize them.
I completed the project right after Thanksgiving and was never so glad to be done with a job. On the bright side, any latent desire I might have had to work in a bookstore was extinguished in the 16 hours I spent working there. Now and then, though, I’ll walk into a Subway, and it all comes back to me.