Andy Hunter pauses for so long before answering my question, it’s awkward. He’s racking his brain. I’ve asked him to tell me about the night he came up with the idea that led to his improbably successful bookselling startup, Bookshop.org. As a former magazine editor, he wants to get the details right.
He remembers the easy stuff: It was 2018. He was on the road for work. At the time, Hunter ran the midsize literary publishing house Catapult, a job that required schmoozing at industry events. The night of his big brainstorm, he was away from his two young daughters and his usual evening obligations—dishes, bedtime rituals—and had a rare moment to think, and drink a beer.
But what kind of beer? “It was, uh, a Dogfish Head IPA,” Hunter finally answers. OK, so, picture this: There he is, alone in a tidy Airbnb, a light-blue bungalow on a quiet road in Berkeley, California. His brown hair is a little mussed, and he’s nursing a pale ale. He’s grooving to music. (“You can say I was listening to Silver Jews,” Hunter says.)
He couldn’t stop thinking about something a board member of the American Booksellers Association, the industry’s largest trade group, had said to him during a recent work dinner. What if ecommerce was a boon for independent bookstores, instead of being their existential threat? The Booksellers Association ran IndieBound, a program that gives bloggers and journalists a way to link to indies instead of Amazon when they cite or review a book. But it hadn’t gained much traction.
That night, in Berkeley, the unusual combination of evening solitude and a touch of alcohol knocked something loose in Hunter’s brain. Or maybe it knocked something together. Either way, by the morning, he wasn’t hungover and he had a proposal for how to grow IndieBound, including simplifying the logistics of buying online and integrating it with social media. Plus: “I wanted it to be better-looking,” he says.
When he got back home to New York, Hunter sent his proposal to Oren Teicher, then the CEO of the Booksellers Association. Teicher liked the idea, but said no. The trade organization wasn’t actually interested in expanding IndieBound. But if Hunter was willing to take on the project himself, to create this new-and-improved version on his own? Well—the group could invest some money.
Even though Catapult kept him plenty busy, Hunter really believed in his vision of a souped-up ecommerce platform uniting the indies. Little stores deserved to find customers online, too, even if they didn’t have the resources to set up their own online shops. Offering them a way to band together felt like a righteous crusade. Plus, Hunter figured it could be a low-effort side gig.
What started as a favor done on a business-trip whim has since become the great project of Hunter’s professional life. In its first few years of existence, Bookshop defied even its founder’s expectations and demonstrated how helpful its model could be for small businesses. Now, Hunter has a new plot twist in mind: He wants to show business owners how to scale up without selling out—without needing to kill the competition.
THE PROBLEM FOR independent bookstores is that many of them don’t have the bandwidth to run their own online stores. Their inventories and shipping capabilities are limited by their non-Amazonian budgets. Plus, sometimes they don’t want to participate in ecommerce; the romance of stuffed shelves and reading nooks and thoughtfully selected staff picks are central to their existence. Removing those experiences seems antithetical—even though it might be necessary—to the bottom line.
Bookshop offers another option. Say you’re a small bookstore owner. It takes only a few minutes to set up a digital storefront on Bookshop’s website, list what books you want to sell, and, if you want, curate collections of titles to reflect your store’s worldview. You don’t have to actually stock any of the books yourself; Bookshop partners with the wholesaler Ingram to fulfill orders, so you’re off the hook for inventory and shipping. You get a 30 percent cut of the cover price on any book sold through your storefront. (If you’re a blogger, writer, influencer, or other bookish type, you can join Bookshop as an individual, even if you don’t own a brick-and-mortar bookstore, and take home a 10 percent cut on whatever you sell.)
Bookshop itself also sells books—you can type a name in the search bar at the top of its homepage and soon find yourself staring at an Add to Cart button. Physical stores can make money off of these sales, too, if they join the company’s profit-sharing pool. Bookshop gives 10 percent of these sales to the pool.
Technically, Bookshop doesn’t need independent stores to join its platform. If the goal were merely to sell books online, it could do just that, like Barnes & Noble or an early-days Amazon. But then, of course, it wouldn’t be special. And Hunter would have never bothered. Helping the indies is the whole point, something he feels an almost spiritual drive to do.
Hunter had the turbulent childhood of a young-adult novel protagonist. His dad left when he was 11, and his mother was institutionalized for mental illnesses at different points throughout his youth. Many times, Hunter and his older brothers had to figure things out on their own. Without an adult regularly looking after him—someone to make sure he had clean clothes or shampoo—Hunter struggled to make friends. He spent a lot of time alone.
His Massachusetts town didn’t have a bookstore, but it had a library; he headed there after school and on weekends. “I became a reader, in the beginning, because it provided me solace,” he says. He read everything; he read all the time. The Chronicles of Narnia, Judy Blume. He became so obsessed with Watership Down that he carried a copy with him wherever he went. Even his teachers teased him about it.
One summer, when Hunter was 16, his mother took him and his brothers to a cabin in Maine. While the others swam and sunbathed, Hunter raided the cabin’s library. The owners had shelves of books that astounded the teenager: Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, James Simon Kunen’s The Strawberry Statement. “Those books completely blew my mind,” Hunter says. He went on a countercultural binge, staying up late and reading by the fire.
During the next few years, Hunter’s social life took a turn. "By the time high school ended, I was in a better place socially than I was at 11,” says Hunter. “Because I didn’t have parents around, we had huge keg parties … That made me popular.” Hunter remained an avid reader—he studied philosophy at the University of Massachusetts—but he no longer lived in the margins. In 1993, shortly after graduating from UMass, he cocreated a music fanzine with the Freudian title Mommy and I Are One, and hosted events and parties with performers like Cat Power.
After graduation, Hunter wasn't sure what to do. He moved to LA and started working at Disney—not exactly his dream job. After six years, he finally landed a gig as the editor of Mean magazine, a freewheeling project started by some former staffers of the Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal magazine. While there, he began dabbling in small-scale publishing on the side—an early sign of his entrepreneurial spirit. “If you wanted a magazine, I’d make a magazine for you,” he says. Clients ranged from the music festival Lollapalooza to a neuroscience organization. (It put out a magazine called Brain World.) He also met a visual artist, Alison Elizabeth Taylor. They fell in love.
In 2004, Taylor got into graduate school at Columbia, and they moved to New York to live together in student housing while Hunter worked remotely for Mean. Taylor would go on to establish herself as a significant force in certain contemporary art circles, and watching his partner pursue her creative dreams, Hunter wondered whether he should take his own writing ambitions more seriously. He enrolled in Brooklyn College’s MFA program, where he met Scott Lindenbaum, a fellow student. As they commiserated over how hard it was for literary magazines to find audiences, Hunter’s publishing itch returned. He and Lindenbaum decided to make a magazine anyone could read online for free. In 2009, Electric Literature debuted; it drummed up buzz by releasing a Rick Moody short story line-by-line on a nascent service called Twitter. It was a proudly techno-utopian creation, one Hunter and Lindenbaum claimed was the first literary magazine with an app.
“Electric Literature was born in a time where there was tons of anxiety about what digital was going to do to literary culture,” Hunter says. “We decided to become the optimists in the room.” The literary establishment disdained digital, but it turned out people wanted to read about books on their laptops.
Electric Literature was a hit from the start, attracting established writers like Colson Whitehead, Michael Cunningham, and Lydia Davis and accumulating a loyal subscriber base. It was never a huge moneymaker, and its operating budget was measly. They shifted to a nonprofit model in 2014. Hunter, now hooked on entrepreneurship, began eyeing his next projects.
He had made connections with people such as Morgan Entrekin, the president of the independent publishing company Grove Atlantic, who liked what he was doing with Electric Literature. With Entrekin, Hunter cofounded the newsy literary-culture website Literary Hub in 2015.
That same year, he also cofounded Catapult, with Elizabeth Koch. (Yes, from that Koch family.) Catapult soon merged with Counterpoint Press, which meant Hunter was suddenly in charge of an imprint that had put out books from authors who had blown his young mind, like Gary Snyder. Catapult also hosted writing classes and published an online magazine. Electric Literature had brought Hunter into the publishing world, but Catapult took him to a new level. For a time, Hunter worked for the three companies simultaneously, and though that meant shelving his 650-page novel, God Exploded—about a guy who tries to start a religion around the idea that the Big Bang was actually the suicide of a deity—Catapult’s books and magazines won critical recognition, including a National Magazine Award and a PEN/Faulkner Award.
(This year, Catapult abruptly shuttered its writing classes and magazine as Koch shifted her focus to Unlikely Collaborators, the New Agey nonprofit organization she founded in 2021.)
All the while, Hunter watched as Amazon steadily obliterated bookstores. He started obsessing over how to stop it. The answer seemed to lie in getting small, independent booksellers online. He remembers discussing the idea of a nonprofit alternative to Amazon with industry insiders—and being met with derision.
AFTER THE AMERICAN Booksellers Association passed on Hunter’s plan to enhance IndieBound, he decided to go ahead and bring to life his vision for ecommerce. But to do so, he had to find more money. Hunter was still working full-time as the publisher of Catapult while also serving as the publisher of LitHub and chair of Electric Literature. Whenever he could, he aggressively pitched potential investors. “I was schlepping from meeting to meeting,” he says. “It was just me, and it was very lonely.” As soon as he had enough funding, he went looking for help.
In 2019, Hunter approached the boisterous, bearded veteran magazine publisher David Rose, who had spent years at the London Review of Books and Lapham’s Quarterly. When Hunter laid out his plan in their first meeting, Rose remembers “seeing dollar signs.” He thought it was wild that the model Hunter was proposing didn’t exist already. Here, thought Rose, was the rare lit nerd with a business brain. Hunter considered it a miracle that the well-respected Rose believed in him, and he brought Rose on as executive director—Bookshop’s first hire.
At the time, Rose had been consulting for the left-wing magazine The Baffler. For a while, the pair tag-teamed the startup sprint, with Rose handling administrative details and Hunter working on the logistics of launching an ecommerce site on a shoestring budget. Eventually, they hired two others to manage the company’s social media presence and to develop partnerships with booksellers.
Rose continued to work for The Baffler and had a desk in the magazine’s office. He didn’t like trekking to the Catapult office, which was small and hot, so he asked The Baffler’s then-executive director, Valerie Cortes, whether Bookshop could also squat in The Baffler’s Manhattan headquarters. The two staffs mingled, sometimes grabbing drinks or going out for karaoke—but not even Rose’s involvement could convince the team at The Baffler that Bookshop was a good idea. “People weren’t on board at first,” Cortes says. According to Rose, the Bookshop team felt like the “weirdos in the corner,” grinding away at a pipe dream. “There was a running joke about how long we could last,” he says. Going up against Amazon seemed like a fool’s errand.
Even Bookshop’s investors, including Morgan Entrekin, didn’t have high hopes. “In my email to the handful of friends that I asked to get involved, I said, ‘Look, supporting this is a very worthy thing to do. But you’re not going to get a VC return,’” Entrekin says. Still, Hunter got his money, including an investment from William Randolph Hearst III. He persuaded around 200 bookstores to sign up in advance of the launch, and he struck a deal with Ingram, the book-wholesaler, which ensured that getting books to buyers wouldn’t be an issue.
On January 28, 2020, Bookshop.org went live, and it made its first sale at 7 am. Some Baffler staffers suppressed their skepticism long enough to celebrate with the Bookshop squad that evening. Even then, Hunter erred on the side of restraint: Rose teased him about bringing a single bottle of champagne for the whole group to share. Hunter, who says he only expected his staff—of four—to be there, believed in the project, but he worried about its chances. “We had a very, very short runway,” he says.
Hunter figured maybe, eventually, they might earn a million dollars. He kept his day job as the publisher at Catapult.
BUT THEN, THE pandemic. “A stroke of luck for Bookshop,” as Entrekin put it. Lockdowns left many independent shops, dependent on foot traffic, in deep trouble—they didn’t have digital stores. But here was Bookshop, with a low-stakes ecommerce option for brick-and-mortar booksellers. All they had to do was create a digital storefront and Bookshop took care of everything else, including fulfilling orders and paying taxes.
The financial and promotional support from the American Booksellers Association helped legitimize the new company in store owners’ eyes. Bookshop didn’t have an advertising budget, but Hunter hired a publicist, and she pushed the anti-Amazon angle hard. Stuck at home, people wanted to support local businesses; Bookshop’s first wave of press showed them that there was an easy way to do so just as they went looking for one. Suddenly, Bookshop became the sourdough of ecommerce. It rose with surprising velocity, taking even its teensy staff by surprise.
Bookshop smashed Hunter’s million-dollar goal in four months. “We sold $50,000 worth of books in February,” he remembers. By the end of March, Bookshop was doing about $75,000 per day in sales, setting a new daily sales record of $102,000 on the 31st. Hunter and his handful of employees worked frantically, sometimes logging 18- or 20-hour workdays to keep up with customer service requests and ensure orders were shipped on time. “We really had to scramble,” Rose says. They knew people were trying them out for the first time, so botched orders could sink their reputation. “It was intense,” he says.
That summer, Bookshop got even bigger, reaching a sales apex it hasn't yet replicated. “$900,000 in one day,” Hunter says.
Every six months, Bookshop dumped 10 percent of its sales, in equal shares, into the accounts of bookstores that had opted into its earnings pool. Some store owners were caught by surprise when they checked their accounts. VaLinda Miller, who runs Turning Page Bookshop in the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina, was facing a crisis when a broken air conditioner caused a gnarly mold outbreak in her shop. She realized she would have to move but couldn’t afford to give a new landlord several months’ rent, replace damaged merchandise, and pay movers all at once. When she finally remembered to check her Bookshop account, she was astonished to see that Turning Page had more than $19,000—enough to cover the move. “It hit during the perfect time,” she says. “It’s been a blessing.”
Danielle Mullen, a former art curator and the owner of Semicolon in Chicago, never liked worrying about online sales. Her curatorial flair makes her store a distinctive community space: Art she selects hangs on the walls, shelves are stocked with books primarily from writers of color, and her sales associates are knowledgeable and chatty. She was focused on the store as an in-person experience, a gathering place. But one night, while drinking spiked hot apple cider with a friend, she signed up for a Bookshop page on a whim. For her, too, the service suddenly became the store’s “lifeblood,” she says. “The most necessary thing.”
As uprisings for racial justice swept the United States in the summer of 2020, Bookshop highlighted Black-owned bookstores and curated anti-racist reading lists. Mullen is only the third Black woman bookstore owner in Chicago—a fact that appealed to book-buyers looking to support Black businesses. “I think we did $2 million on Bookshop that year,” she says. “It was crazy.”
I met Mullen last summer at a café next to her shop on a busy street in Wicker Park. It was so hot out that the metal patio tables burned to the touch. Mullen was in a great mood. Semicolon was doing great. So great, in fact, that she was planning to open an outpost in Miami. She wasn’t sure she’d stick with Bookshop indefinitely. She preferred focusing on her brick-and-mortar store, and she didn’t especially like the idea that indies needed a third-party tech company to compete in online sales, even if said third-party tech company had good intentions.
Mullen isn’t alone in her ambivalence. Jeff Waxman, a former bookseller who now works as a publishing sales representative, was a consultant for Bookshop before it launched. He worries that the company is diverting people who would have bought directly from their local store to its own website. “The fact is, it’s always going to be better to buy a book directly through a store than through a middleman,” he says.
Hunter understands these critiques. He agrees that the best way to buy a book—for bookstores, the economy overall, and for local communities—is to wander into your local shop and purchase one in person. He doesn’t even think Bookshop is the second-best way. That would be buying directly from these local bookshops’ own online stores, if they have them. Hunter sees Bookshop as the third-best option, the Good Samaritan middleman. And this third-best way happens to be critical because of the most popular way people actually buy books: They click “Purchase” on Amazon.
AMAZON CONTROLS MORE than half the US book market, according to Peter Hildick-Smith, president of book audience research firm Codex-Group. Jeff Bezos’ company sells approximately $4 billion to $5 billion in new books each year. By comparison, Hunter says that Bookshop sells around 1 percent of Amazon’s share. Between Bookshop and Amazon, it’s not apples and oranges so much as a single heirloom apple tree versus the world’s largest commercial citrus grove.
But Hunter wants to grow. Approximately 2,200 stores in the US and UK participate in Bookshop’s profit-sharing. Someday, Hunter wants to take the Bookshop model beyond books to help small businesses like hardware stores or toy stores with their own affiliate platforms—to be another Everything Store of sorts, but one built around preserving small businesses instead of competing with them.
For now, that’s a daydream, but a real expansion is underway. Hunter wanted to compete with Audible, Amazon’s audiobook and podcast service, by helping independent stores offer alternative formats to physical books. In 2020, he set up a partnership with Libro.fm, a startup that sells audiobooks. Like Bookshop, they partner with independent stores and split profits, so teaming up felt natural. Now Bookshop customers are directed to buy audiobooks on Libro.fm.
Last year, after considering a few directions he could take Bookshop, Hunter set his sights on ebooks. He set out to raise $2 million for the project, but Bookshop doesn’t have a pitch tailored for traditional venture capital. If anything, it has the opposite. Bookshop’s stockholder agreement forbids a sale to Amazon and its ilk (“any retailer then-presently ranked among the top 10 largest retailers”), which means there won’t be any big acquisitions down the road. Despite the rocky economic climate and his un-VC-friendly pitch, Hunter has raised over $2.3 million. (I can attest to how persuasive he sounds when he waxes poetic about the importance of alternative ebook platforms.) The largest investor is, as was the case the first time around, William Randolph Hearst III.
People will be able to read Bookshop’s ebooks in their browser, or on apps that will work on Apple and Android devices (but not, as of yet, on Kindles or through Kindle apps). This arrangement will make for a difficult business proposition and a clunky experience for readers. For starters, Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all revenue made through its app store. Hunter is hoping people will take the extra steps of buying Bookshop ebooks through their browsers rather than Apple’s app store and then reading them on Bookshop’s app, which would circumvent the Apple tax.
One ebook startup has already attempted this kind of project and failed, unable to woo customers away from the Kindle world. Hummingbird Digital Media, which also allowed indie stores to set up their own storefronts and take a portion of the profits, has since been purchased and rebranded—it’s now called Booksio—pivoting to donating to charities instead of bookstores.
Hunter is optimistic he can succeed by building on Bookshop’s preexisting customer base. Part of his plan is to connect ebooks to the social web, to “make them more of the online conversation.” He wants to make it easier for people to share links to ebooks, the way they share snippets and links to paywalled content from The New York Times or The Washington Post. He has hired one engineer so far and is bringing more on board. “We’re using a lot of open source technology that has been built to support an alternative ebook system already,” Hunter says. “But up until this point, it’s pretty much been libraries using the technology.” He aims to have the platform in beta by the end of the year.
There’s more. This fall, Bookshop will publish a collection of short stories by Lydia Davis—a partnership about as glam as having Miuccia Prada design a capsule collection for some tiny boutique.
It was all Davis’ idea, too. When she published her last book, she realized how much she disliked the idea of Amazon profiting off her work. “I made up my mind. For the next book, I would do everything I could to avoid Amazon,” she said. Her agent supported the decision; her longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, however, nixed it. (“Contracts and repercussions,” Davis offers by way of vague explanation.) Davis’ agent suggested asking Hunter for advice on publishers who might be willing to alienate the Everything Store. “It was a surprise to both of us when he said he wanted to publish it himself,” Davis says. She’s been delighted by the process. “He’s been very fast, very efficient, very resourceful.” Davis knows her sales will suffer, but she doesn’t care.
It’s the debut of a project called Bookshop Editions, to be sold exclusively through Bookshop and independent stores. Hunter isn’t planning to turn it into a full-fledged imprint, but Davis, for her part, hopes her actions might inspire other authors. “I’m just really happy I’m doing it,” she says. “I have no regrets whatsoever.”
WHEN I CAUGHT up with Danielle Mullen of Semicolon on a gloomy Chicago afternoon, the sun hadn’t been out in days. It was the kind of weather that compels you to Google SAD lamps—or move to Florida. Mullen had been jubilant the last time we talked, brimming with her own expansion plans. Independent bookstores were on an upswing. More than 300 new shops had opened in the past few years. There are people—just enough of them, it seemed—who simply prefer physical stores like Semicolon, so I was expecting a happy update from Mullen. Had she opened her Miami outpost yet?
“No,” she said. “Actually, everything has changed.”
Her beautiful Wicker Park shop had flooded repeatedly, and the landlord was no help. It got so bad that Mullen decided to move the store back to its original location, a smaller spot on the ground floor of a 130-year-old apartment building in River West, a bustling neighborhood with trendy Italian restaurants and luxury condos.
She is putting in an offer to buy the whole building, with hopes of having a permanent presence in Chicago. Exciting stuff—but expensive. So expensive that Mullen has once again found the money Semicolon generates from Bookshop crucial: “Kind of like how it got us through the pandemic.”
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