If you are a book lover and planning to do a small business, then you can start a bookstore/ book shop. While there are millions of books being released every month across the world, children, youngsters, rs, and adults would keep enhancing their knowledge with various books available on the market. In this article, I would discuss steps on how to start an awesome bookstore.
10 Steps on how to start an awesome bookstore
1) Know your goals
You should first know what are your goals and why do you want to start a bookstore. Based on your goals, you’re planning to open a bookstore would depend. Is your goal to make money? Do you want to sell books at a low cost? Do you want to help people who like books?
1) Start a bookstore if you are passionate about books
While you can open a bookstore to make money, it would be more useful for you, if you are passionate about books. This passion would create more interest in selecting books required by readers by doing in-depth analysis and your sales can increase drastically.
3) Choose a location to rent a space
Select a place where there are more pedestrians so that your bookstore would get easily noticed. You should keep in mind that the bookstores would also get good traffic where there are schools and colleges. You should choose the size of the store based on the business size you are planning to start. Rent a space within your budget.
4) Choose what type of books you want to sell
In the initial stages, you may not be able to sell all kinds of books. Check the below books which you want to start.
- Fiction books
- Storybooksks / novels
- Romantic books
- Children books
- College books
- Management books
5) Prepare a business plan required to open your bookstore
Prepare a plan which includes all costs required to open and run a bookstore.
- Start-up costs – Onetime costs which include advance for lease space, cost of racks, the cost for posters, painting, name boards, etc.
- Inventory costs – Cost for buying books for an initial period of 3 months where you may not have any revenue.
- Maintenance costs like rental for the bookstore, staff c, posts, and any other maintenance costs to run your bookstore for 6 months period
- You need to prepare your business plan assuming there would not be any sales or minimal sales for the first 3 months
- Also don’t keep the high expectations of profits on the bookstore. You should cut down your profits by half in the initial period.
6) Legal requirements
There are legal licenses to be obtained to open a bookstore depending on the country. In India, a general license to sell books can be obtained from the local authorities. In some areas, to hire the staff, you need to labor licenses, etc.
7) Funding for bookstore
There are 3 ways where you can fund your bookstore.
- In the initial stages, you should have your funding.
- The Second one is borrowing from your friends or relatives.
- Once your business has kick-started, you can approach banks to have working capital loans.
8) Select book suppliers
- You need to select wholesale book distributors to supply books for your bookstore. However, in the initial period, they cannot supply books with credit. You need to pay cash to get them. But once you settle down, you can request books on credit which they should be able to accept.
- You can also approach book publishing companies for direct supply. However, they prefer to pay them in cash before you supply, hence it would be difficult for you to get books on credit from them.
9) Maintaining perfect inventory
One of the successful ways of maintaining a bookstore is having a perfect inventory.
- In the initial stage, you should be slow on inventory as you do not know which book would move fast.
- Start with a few types of books in the initial stages to lower your inventory cost.
- Keep a record of fast-moving and slow-moving books. You can then keep a good stock of fast-moving books to make quick money.
10) Marketing your bookstore
There should be a perfect strategy on how to market and advertise your bookstore. You can consider the below tips.
- Advertise in your newspaper and magazines
- Distribute free books at libraries, schools, and colleges
- Create a Facebook page and post the latest arrivals at regular intervals. People love to share such things with their friends and you would get good branding of your bookstore.
