Greetings!

I know. Long time no blog. We've been too busy working at the store to have time to blog about it! But we're re-vamping the store website (www.blackbearbooks.com) and I thought I might give the blog a facelift and do some blogging.

Here's the store news:

First and foremost, we're still alive!!!!! And this is the first March that we have not had to sit down and ask ourselves whether or not we should just give up. So that's a sign of improvement, no?

We have held on by the skin of our teeth since we bought the store in 2009. It's not a good time to be an independent book store. On the other hand, it's not a good time to be ANY kind of a store, so why not be a book store. Like all book stores, the Kindle and it's cousins has made it very tough to survive. We have had to change and adapt and experiment and we're still doing that.

A year ago this May, we moved from our former location to the Boone Mall. We no longer have coffee and we really miss that, but we have something we've never had before: foot traffic! I really love having people wander in, just to see what we have. I get less knitting done, but it has worked very well for the store.

(Speaking of knitting, we moved the yarn corner with us. It is no longer possible to be JUST a book store, but we have found that books and yarn are a good combination.)

Our biggest challenge, since Day One, is trying to keep the store stocked with a wide variety of books and keeping up with the new stuff. That's the challenge of being in a resort area, because every year we have to panic from January through mid April -- will we make it until the summer folk come back? I feel bad about having less stock for the locals, but we have no way to stock the store when sales are down. And sales are down when the tourists are gone.

The thing that has surprised me the most about owning a small retail business is what a drastic impact weather has on sales! Our first two winters, we didn't do well because there was so much snow, on one could get out of their houses. This year, winter sales have been way down because it didn't know. This meant we lost all the skiers, and we also lost the locals, because when no one comes to ski, everyone has a horrible winter. But that's life in a resort area, and I love living in a resort area. We are just learning to roll with the punches. I only wish we could get a longer break between punches.

One thing I really like about the resort area routine is that at least three times a year, we give the store a complete overhaul. We have a "store" for Christmas, a "store" for winter and a "store" for summer. We're currently in the planning stages for the summer store. Our manager has been talking to a lot of our fellow independent book stores to get new ideas and to find out what is working well for them, and they gave us a lot of great suggestions. I'm very eager to try them, but we always have to work everything out in great detail before we sweep in and change it all around.

Our new website should be up in about a week. We have a couple of great spring events booked. (More on that when I'm sure of the dates.) I spent yesterday "springing" up the store and I'll do more of that this week.

Let me know if you're still here!

Happy Spring!

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