It’s time to think small.
This year, Small Business Saturday falls on Nov. 29, and the event is always a good excuse to support one of Southern California’s 80+ local independent bookstores while also shoring up your TBR pile.
And it’s about to get even more interesting. The shops that make up the San Gabriel Valley Bookstore Friends – Black Cat Fables, dym books & boba, Fables & Fancies, Matilija Collective, Octavia’s Bookshelf, and Underdog Bookstore – are teaming up for an event that could potentially save you some money on a future book purchase.
Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more
“This is the first time we’re doing the passport program,” says Black Cat Fables store owner Nicole Fabry, who says the idea was first proposed by Underdog’s Kealie Mardell-Carrera and agreed upon by all the stores.
Read the details and fine print on Black Cat Fables’ Instagram, but in short, it’s like this: Register online for a free passport, pick it up on Nov. 29, and use it to collect stamps from each store. You’ll need to spend a minimum of $20 at each store to get a stamp, and you have until Dec. 14 to get your passport fully stamped.
“It’s a two-week period. We didn’t want to force everybody to run around that one day. That way, you at least get to spend some time in each bookstore, especially if you haven’t been there before,” says Fabry, though she admits, “Some overachievers will probably try to do it the same day.”
If you do complete the challenge, you’ll get a coupon for 20% off one item at each of the stores. And one lucky winner – the person who records a fully stamped passport first – will win a $25 gift card to each store in the group.
(Though, really, if buying books gets you discounts to buy more books, well, we’re all winners, aren’t we?)
As well as encouraging readers to shop locally and support their communities, Fabry says another goal was to highlight the wealth of stores in the area.
“We’re all fairly new. Everybody just opened within the last 2 to 3 years,” she says. “So part of it was just to make everybody aware that there are quite a few bookstores in the San Gabriel Valley now.
“Spending your money locally really benefits your local community and the people in it,” she says. “Amazon has purposefully driven small businesses, especially bookstores, out of business by underpricing their things and selling things at a loss, which I think not everybody is aware of. So that was another goal was to raise awareness because a lot of people still are like, ‘You know, I can get this so much cheaper on Amazon,’ and it’s like, Yeah, that’s intentional. They’re purposefully underselling to try to put me out of business.”
In contrast to a winner-take-all attitude, these bookstores are not only friendly with each other, but are actively supporting each other.
“Oh yeah, absolutely. We’re big proponents of ‘the rising tide lifts all ships,’” says Fabry. “We are all really good friends. We go to each other’s events, and if somebody needs a book, we reach out to the group chat.
“Or if we just want advice about stuff. It’s been really great and really, really helpful. And yeah, genuinely, we’re all rooting for each other, and we all want each other to succeed. I think that was kind of the impetus of the passport, too. We’re doing OK, but we could be doing a lot better, and so kind of trying to share the business as much as we can.
“We all kind of try to carry slightly different collections so that everybody has something slightly different,” she said, adding how she, like the others, will send shoppers to the other stores. “We’re always talking each other up.”
Since you have plenty of time to plan now, mark your calendars for Nov. 29. Enterprising shoppers may even want to start visiting stores now and plotting their routes.
And if you’re planning to visit stores in other areas – there’s a Long Beach book crawl on 4th Street tomorrow, Nov. 15, for instance – use the Indie Bookstore Map to check out independent bookstores in Riverside, Orange County, Los Angeles County (and beyond) to create your own crawl around the Southland.