How Paperbound Started
Welcome to Paperbound!
I wanted to say hi to all of you and welcome to the online part of my entrepreneurship experiment.
My name is Kate and I own a tiny bookstore called Paperbound Books in Cheney, WA. When I moved to Cheney about four years ago, I went from living a few blocks away from a really awesome independent bookstore to not having any bookstores near me at all! I was working at a local coffee shop, had some time on my hands, and had a decent-sized book collection that I was thinking about paring down and thought,
What if I started selling books?
Cut to a multiple-month-long montage of web searches, government site tabs, downloaded business plan templates, and spreadsheets with large amounts of completely theoretical financial calculations while I tried to learn exactly what I needed to start a business without getting myself into a lot of trouble down the road.
And alongside all the research I built a website, opened some social media accounts, met with a local librarian over Zoom to learn about free demographic research tools, and started accumulating SO. MANY. BOOKS. from Facebook Marketplace listings and local school fundraisers.
As a relatively young store owner with no business or marketing background, I definitely have been figuring things out as I go, and flying by the seat of my pants more often than not.
But living in a small town with a lot of other entrepreneurs and working at a coffee shop smack dab in the middle of all of it has helped me more than you would actually believe.
I hyped my store to all my customers and all my friends, started keeping business cards on me to hand out, and pretty quickly was kind of “adopted” by the other business owners in the area, to whom I owe so much. I hosted multiple pop-up tables inside other people’s businesses that summer, and when the Cheney Farmer’s Market was relaunched, I applied for a booth and was accepted!
Within about six months, I had an office full of thousands of books and pop-up events planned through Christmas and was genuinely shocked at how quickly things had developed!
And I genuinely started thinking, What if I had a storefront? What if I could actually turn this into a full-time business?
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I started window-shopping, but despite all the empty storefronts in my small town, the prices were exorbitantly high and the owners were virtually un-contact-able. Until one of the cornerstones of Cheney, the owner of the other coffee shop in town (not the one I worked at), approached me with an offer.
His shop occupies a building in the very center of Cheney’s business district, and the owner of the building had recently decided to lease out more space in the back of the building to make some more income. He offered me a space behind his shop that would be directly connected to the coffee shop, and his father-in-law, the building’s contractor, would do all the construction. I would get to design what I wanted for the space, and they would get it built.
It was a win-win for both our businesses, as it lowered the financial barrier significantly for me and generates consistent business for the coffee shop and income for the building’s owner.
So I built a Pinterest board with ideas, got out some graph paper and started planning everything out, from the layout of the room to the location of the electrical outlets. As construction and back-and-forth conversations progressed, the plan changed significantly several times but the overall vision stayed the same.
I got to watch the progress over the summer and checked in almost every day to see how things were going. I was not as involved in the construction part but I did get to paint and stain a lot of the bare wood, and spray paint some of screws and brackets to match the gold of the ceiling.
Finally, in August 2024, construction was completed just in time for the open! I frantically deep-cleaned the sawdust off all the shelves and floor and we began moving things over. I had so many people help with moving the massive amounts of books — friends, family, and acquaintances with trucks helped me transfer my book-hoarded living room to the store, hang string lights and vines, and set up my point of sale system.
Comics and vintage items arrived later amid the bustle of organization, and I stayed late into the night to organize the shelves the way I wanted them, complete test transactions to make sure receipts and gift cards worked, and respond to comments on the social media countdown posts.
The morning of the soft open, I got there an hour early. I was so anxious that not enough people had heard about the open, that I hadn’t put up enough posters around town, that there just wasn’t enough of a market for books in town. All those fears were unfounded, however, when my store was flooded with friends, and regulars from the coffee shop, and complete strangers who had heard about my store through others and come to support!
Fast forward to a year and a half later, and Paperbound is still going strong. We host author events, support other local authors and businesses, and give back to the Cheney community as much as we can. It’s still just me running it for the most part, but the goal is to grow big enough to be able to be open all 7 days of the week and pay some part-time staff to help me out!
I appreciate you reading this far! Even if you don’t live in Cheney, if you would like to support my small business, consider subscribing or donating to my Patreon! I’ll be posting unique articles and videos for members, and a link to my Discord server where I’ll answer Q&As, give you early access to merch designs, and maybe even stream book-related cozy games!
Every contribution goes directly to the store and contributes to goals like paying employees, ordering store-branded merch, and, eventually, putting together things like custom subscription boxes for those who live futher away!
See you in the next chapter,
Kate
