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So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

poetryfoundation.org

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Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#181

Post by biztos »

roel_v wrote: post #39
keiferski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most smaller art galleries get 5 visitors a day, tops. That industry revolves around openings, events, and networking, not people walking in off the street.

Then why bother at all opening during the day? Surely not for the $5 in profit?

As another commenter said, "to have an art gallery," but also because you don't know which of the (imaginary five) might be your best collector in five years.

A big part of running an art gallery is being available for people who want to look at art. Some of those buy, some of them spread the word.

In the end a small number of people are going to keep your gallery alive, if it stays alive. But you have no way of predicting who they will be or whence they will wander into your space. That VP of Sales in town for a conference who only has Wednesday afternoon free and is starting a collection of $YOUR_SPECIALTY.

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#182

Post by WalterSear »

Terretta wrote: post #158
dragonwriter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be more accurate to ask: “How the F can anyone make any money when Starbucks is on every other street corner and has the advantages of scale they have.” Source and roast your own beans, don't overroast the beans, charge a premium over Starbucks for not producing crap coffee from overroasted beans. Starbucks does some impressive work with the candy flavors it adds to distract from their coffee, but...

Objections from sibling comments aside, roughly ‘everyone’ who has compared coffees for taste feels Starbucks is ‘overroasted’. Curious then why Starbucks doesn’t adjust. Is it something in the scale manufacturing, such as, more margin for error in the overroasted side, so taste will be the same signature burnt at every Starbucks in the world? Is it that their market is former fast food coffee drinkers used to bland…

By and large, Starbucks drinkers are looking to drink sugar and cream with caffeine. The bitterness of cheap, overroasted beans enables excessive sweetness without being cloying.

The people complaining here aren't the average Starbucks customer.

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#183

Post by wolverine876 »

clarkevans wrote: post #62

The author talks about this as a charitable (501c3) vs for-profit endeavor. I don't see any talk about using a cooperative structure. Cooperatives don't need IRS approval, since they operate commercially; any profits (and there won't be) are distributed proportionally to the users of the facility via 1099-DIV. Then, you run a membership drive to raise money. The membership then is used to select the board. Anyway, th…

I was a member, and later board member, of the housing co-ops in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Inter-Cooperative Council (icc.coop). In many ways, it was an incredible institution (and maybe still is; I'm long out of touch): Highly democratic and very successful. It's continued to exist and grow since the 1930s, with almost complete turnover in membership every two years. They owned at the time around 20 properties, housed around 600 people affordably - their primary mission - and had assets and budget well into the millions.

I still don't understand quite how they did it. They did have a small permanent staff of an executive director, financial director, and a couple maintenance people. Everything else was done by mainly college-age membership that, as I said, turned over almost completely every two years; they were the board of directors, maintenance, collected membership dues (the equivalent of rent), made major investment decisions (buy a new house?), etc. etc. One contributing factor may have been that it was a bunch of intelligent people, self-selected for their commitment, who had little long-term vested interest (they'd be gone in a couple of years). I might expect the latter to be a disaster, but it also eliminated a lot of politics - nobody had a career, a future, a promotion, a reputation, or much ego depending on the outcomes.

Based on your links, I'm pretty sure you know about the ICC. Any thoughts on how it, and similar organizations work, where others that require community commitment, like the bookstore in the article, fail?

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#184

Post by lukasb »

1123581321 wrote: post #174
curuinor wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metafilter and Something Awful have successfully banned assholes multiple times. The secret: paywalls. Only truly dedicated crazy people are willing and able to spend a hundred bucks on annoying people.

Metafilter is great at stopping spammers and obvious belligerents. It is very poor at keeping out thankless community-ruiners (the “hobby revolutionaries” from the article.) They burnt out mathowie and are currently sniping at cortex for refusing to turn the community over to them (presumably without wanting to take on liability.) The story of a communal online space and physical space can be similar.

I can't find anything on metatalk that looks like sniping at cortex - but then, I'm way out of the MeFi loop at this point. Link?

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#185

Post by specialist »

wiz21c wrote: post #118
specialist wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing your experience. I've been chewing on an idea. Please bear with me. A friend's MBA thesis (WIP) is on the business model of evangelical churches. How the players build their flock, manage the brand, shape the culture, revenue, run their meetings, etc. Kinda eye opening. I'm even going to church again, a new one every few weeks. To gleen the strategies and techniques that have been hiding in plai…

>>> The Field of Dreams "Buit it and they will come" strategy doesn't work. could you elaborate on "why" ?

I don't know. Sorry. My best guesses is somewhere between "culture is hard" and The Tyranny of Structurelessness http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/structurelessness.htm thesis.

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#186

Post by jurassic »

antt wrote: post #67
tomcam wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please write about your experience! Also, sorry you had to go through that.

Writing about it would drive you insane, here it is in image, gif and email form: https://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com shitnoisebridgesays.tumblr.com A high point for me was getting my site ddos'd and ssh brute force attacked when I decided to run a course in another hacker space after being stuck for committee approval for 3 months. The saddest part is that I knew it would happen and scraped the site into a static…

Early in my career, I nearly quit tech because of a negative experience I had with some douchebros at a noisebridge javascript event. In retrospect those guys were just a couple insecure idiots and really not representative of the average tech man, but as a woman trying to break into the industry I thought that’s what I was going to have to deal with every day in every job. Nonetheless I persisted.

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#187

Post by lostlogin »

jakobegger wrote: post #22
chrisseaton wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do coffee shops like Starbucks mange to support 20 working part time plus a corporate headquarters and make a profit, from the same small store you would operate as a hobby?

By selling a LOT of coffee. Starbucks stores can have a 1000 orders per day [1] A poet / artist space will be lucky to have a few dozen people come in every day. [1]: https://www.quora.com/How-many-customers-does-an-average-Sta...

There is one I used to go to that was very busy and they would make 300-600 per staff member per day and there were 6 of them. This reddit thread gives similar numbers per barista. https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/barista/comm...

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#188

Post by specialist »

tarr11 wrote: post #138
specialist wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing your experience. I've been chewing on an idea. Please bear with me. A friend's MBA thesis (WIP) is on the business model of evangelical churches. How the players build their flock, manage the brand, shape the culture, revenue, run their meetings, etc. Kinda eye opening. I'm even going to church again, a new one every few weeks. To gleen the strategies and techniques that have been hiding in plai…

Gimlet did a Startup podcast series about this, they called it "Church Planting" https://www.gimletmedia.com/startup/church-planting-1-the-mo...

This is terrific.

Of course there's a church planting industry, conference circuit. https://exponential.org

My friend's thesis is descriptive, not prescriptive. I've been struggling to harvest actionable advice. These resources will help. Just having the right phrase ("church planting") helps.

Thank you.

Re: So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale

#189

Post by bsenftner »

I was a founder and operator of the Los Angeles free co-working space DropLabs. We lasted for 3 years before closing out of lack of interest. We never intended anything other than a free place for geeks to collect and work. We had events in the evenings, which were fairly popular. Having multiple partners with graduate business degrees, we chose not to incorporate, we just rented a space and called it "Droplabs" (why invite the taxman?)

However, our location was near downtown, and the 20-something geeks were both afraid of downtown and would rather pay $40-$60+ per day to have a chair in a WeWork space in Hollywood or Santa Monica. It did not make sense, so I tried spending a week at each of the more popular co-working spaces, and learned they were not occupied by geeks or "real" startup people, but wealthy 20-somethings playing a startup game, dating one another, and with zero serious intent other than wasting their parent's money.

I learned to be a success as a co-working space, one needed to create a "dating safe play pit" for white wealthy 20-somethings. I have zero interest in that.

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