That was lovely. Thank you. Now back to our regularly scheduled....

Indie Bookstore Day 2025–how good was that?

April’s driving force was the run-up to Indie Bookstore Day last Saturday, and what a beauty it was. Our queerly awesome author and maker guests had an amazing time meeting over 100 of you marvellous people. Our pop-up guest, romance specialist Perfect Match Bookshop, got to start dozens of new relationships. Folks showed up expecting the best of us and left with books, talking of how happy they were. Our new layout seems to have met the challenge of accommodating more table guests and tons of browsers, hurray! 

Also, congratulations to the winners of our Indie Day raffle for prizes that included gift cards, a copy of My Shelfie from our friends at Games on the Drive, and even a book a month for a whole year! All have been notified and one person has already used their gift card—it’s always so cool to see what people choose, you know?

Don’t forget, your book purchases on Indie Day are your entries into the Contest for Booklovers, a nationwide drawing for one of five gift cards to your favourite indie! Click here to register—entries close on 2 May so you’ll want to get that done. If you need a copy of your receipt, we can help if you provided your name at time of purchase.

Filling this bookstore fills my heart with hope for its future. Thank you.

The other side of the coin

We are not making rent. Unfortunately, our beautiful Indie Day could not make up for weeks of slow sales, and our current special on used books has not made a notable difference. In the last three days, sadly, we’ve had only about 15 visitors. This, even with a smokin' Buy-1 Get-1 deal on used books! Overall, April is down about 25% from March. This, combined with smaller accumulated shortfalls from January and February, means we are once again up against it. 

I think everyone is feeling beat up by the uncertainty emanating from the US, and inflation on necessities…two of our folk shared that they’ve been laid off due to the Trump’s economic misbehaviour. It's going to harm entire communities as well as individual members. For us as a small shop focusing on queer community and this neighbourhood, it does highlight that a place like this needs lots more friends, if only to share more widely the effort of keeping it standing.

Even in our slowest times, almost every day we have someone talk about how necessary they feel we are, how much they cherish the experience of being here. It happened again on Monday—a day when only six people crossed our threshold—the browser who said as they were checking out, ‘I needed this. Thank you.’ People find so much more than books here. So we keep trying to get it on its little financial feet, but that is simply going to need a lot more people showing up every day.

What the future holds

• We are still paying on the back rent from last year. The last $9800 will come due at the end of June. 
• Our landlords recently told us they are rescheduling our triple net billing to align with the calendar year, for an additional $1200 they want paid by that same time. Yes, they can do that. (Mercifully, our rent will only go up $250 starting in July, so not as hard a blow as last year.)
• We will get a bill for any excess usage on our Equal Pay hydro plan (last year it was $1200 so we switched to a higher monthly payment to prevent at least some of that in future). 
• Our phone and internet contract is up for renewal at the same time, and will not get cheaper. 
• Some taxes come due at the end of June.

What this means: in the next 8 weeks, we have to make our regular baseline of about $26,000 (rent, utilities, books and merch sold, current loan payments). We also have to sell enough books to pay off that $11,000 in back rent and triple net by the end of the lease year, plus an estimated $1000 in additional utilities, plus about $2000 in taxes. And we have to pay for the books sold to cover those expenses. If most of those books are new (almost all the queer books we sell are new because hardly anyone actually lets go of queer books) they will cost us $20,000.

That’s $60,000 in two months. 

That's 1818 average purchases ($33). Sounds like a lot, right? It breaks down to 30 people per day. Someone can buy a $5 sticker and someone else can fill a tote with $60 in books, but at our average sale of $33, that's how many times we have to sell books each day, to make it into our next year. 

However we do the math—in April we have averaged only 9 such sales per day. So that’s a big hill to climb. We have to more than triple our average daily sales for the next two months. It's a huge number. Breaking it down into a number of people per day, rather than looking at it as a giant lump sum, makes it seem more doable. Seeing how many folks visited on Saturday also fuels that hope.

Can we do it? I don’t know. I do know that if we do, it will be thanks to you.

So. Keep telling your friends about us. Come to some of the amazing events we have scheduled for May. Support both us and the authors when you buy their books! Choose from some of the amazing books coming out in May that are available quickly from our preferred local warehouse! Invite your friends to meet you here, especially if they're among the folks who tell us they've been meaning to visit but haven't found the time. People showing up, every day, is the only way places like this keep existing.