What makes a bookstore succeed?
So, a while back my wife and I took a trip to Portland, and took a look at Powell's. I was blown away for several reasons, but mostly because of the discouraging contrast the "World of Books"s success (it has multiple flippin' locations throughout town!) has with the bookstores in my own city, which are steadily closing down one by one. It made me really wonder what Powell's (and others like it) are doing right, and what my own are doing wrong.
I'll kick it off with a few, not entirely satisfactory, theories I've heard already:
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(From a friend who lives in Portland) They make the real money with their rare book room. I'm skeptical; I passed on getting into the rare book room myself (which I regret), so I didn't see what they had, but that seems like a pretty niche market. How many of those can they sell a month? It can't be enough to pay for an entire city block of real estate, plus adjacent parking garage.
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(From a Portland guidebook) Portlanders just like to read more than other cities. I think we can mark that down as more Portland-style back-patting, and move on.
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It's a tourist attraction, not a local store. I'll believe this is about half of the story; clearly, it has a name for itself, and I was there after all. But on the other hand, that fame had to come from somewhere, and looking around at the other patrons, a lot of them had a local vibe to them. "Visit the hugely popular bookstore" as a tourist draw only makes sense if the bookstore was already hugely popular.
Anyone else have any big-picture ideas on what makes a bookstore a thriving local business, or alternatively drives it to bankruptcy? It would be a good question to answer because the second outcome seems to be pretty common these days.
