Zibby Mag

By Natalie Jenner

Six years ago, I realized my lifelong dream of opening a small bookshop near the shore of Lake Ontario, in an idyllic and vibrant downtown community. For someone who had long ago given up trying to get published herself, yet still craved a way to make books a bigger part of her daily life, this was a tremendously exciting time. With my one child in high school and my husband semi-retired, I saw the bookshop as the final project of my working life. But not for the first — or last — time would life have a different plan in store for me instead.

Given the skyrocketing rental market in a downtown that included a L’Occitane, an Anthropologie, and other high-end stores, we were lucky to get a short-term lease from two local entrepreneurs for a small 500-square-foot space in the alley behind one of their restaurants. For six months, I had peered through the window of this vacated former jewelry store and knew that — with its dark-grey hardwood floors, deep blue walls, and well-placed halogen lighting — all it would take to turn it into a bookshop would be a series of black Ikea Billy cabinets and about a thousand books. We shook hands with our new landlords and opened our doors three weeks later.

To distinguish our store — now christened Archetype Books — from Amazon and big box retailers, I focused on a highly curated selection, showcasing books that people would hopefully be excited to discover. Bulk sales were never the goal so I preserved as much shelf and table space as possible to keep covers turned out to the customer, rotating which ones were most visible on a regular basis. I would watch customers pick up a book solely due to its cover and turn it over in their hands, and I noticed that the longer they did that, the more likely they were to buy.

I also learned just how difficult it is to distinguish a debut book in a crowded market, where thousands of books get released every week. A decade earlier, I had written five different manuscripts and been convinced of their quality — and equally heartbroken when I had failed to land an agent, let alone get published. One New York agent had even told me — in response to a manuscript dealing with the music industry — that if I had actually worked as a personal assistant to a rock band, he would have had no problem selling my book. At the time this did not make me feel better. Yet now, standing amidst all the boxes of books in my own shop, I truly understood the cold hard reality behind his blunt words.

I was also getting an eye-opening window into what readers really wanted.

One Saturday morning, a woman ran into the shop in the middle of a rainstorm, still wearing her pajama pants under her raincoat and holding onto the leash of her soaking-wet dog, as desperate for a copy of Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld’s retelling of Pride and Prejudice, as I have ever seen anyone need anything — and I remember thinking that Jane Austen was really onto something.

I learned how difficult it is to distinguish a debut book in a crowded market, where thousands of books get released every week. A decade earlier, I had written five different manuscripts and been convinced of their quality — and equally heartbroken when I had failed to land an agent, let alone get published.

Here is also what flew off the shelves of my shop: new releases such as The Little Paris Bookshop, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, and The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend. Less recent books such as Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookshop and The Shadow of the Wind. And the historical fiction that people could not get enough of: The Nightingale, The Summer Before the War, the My Brilliant Friend series by Elena Ferrante.

These were the books that customers came running in to buy, that word of mouth spread throughout the neighborhood, that my customers would literally push into the hands of other customers — strangers to them — who were standing nearby. Books about books, books about the love of books, books about how that love can connect, comfort, and save us.

Sadly, I was about to learn that lesson myself.

Just a few months after opening the bookshop, my husband was given a devastating medical diagnosis. As a family, we had to make the very difficult decision to start winding down the shop at the very same time that we were building it up. The rest of the year was a blur; we closed down on Christmas Eve, 2016, almost exactly a year since we had opened. To cope with the medical challenges ahead, I read a lot of books — especially Jane Austen’s — as a form of distraction. I took a solo bucket-list trip to England to walk in the footsteps of my favorite writer. And eventually, I surprised myself by wanting to write again.

I remember sitting down at my laptop and thinking to myself, if I write another novel from beginning to end, then it only has to do three things, but it has to do all three: I have to love writing it, my husband has to love reading it, and it has to have a hook. Otherwise, I knew it wouldn’t stand a chance in such a crowded market.

I thought about writing a book about a group of people who get together to try and save a country house, like Downton Abbey. Perhaps set in the past, a time of war, of hardship. Or having something to do with books, and their power to comfort and connect us during difficult times. My daughter remembers me looking up from my reading one day and saying, very simply, “I am going to write a book about a group of people who come together to try and rescue Jane Austen’s house.”

I remember sitting down at my laptop and thinking to myself, if I write another novel from beginning to end, then it only has to do three things, but it has to do all three: I have to love writing it, my husband has to love reading it, and it has to have a hook.

Today, that is still the tagline of my debut novel, The Jane Austen Society, which was released in May 2020. When I sat down to write my next book, I knew I could only set it in one place. Coming this May, Bloomsbury Girls is my love letter to independent bookstores, the staff that works there, and the wonderful array of people that walk through their doors.

Recently, a writer friend jokingly said that in running the bookshop, it turned out I was doing unintentional market research on what kinds of books sell. And over time I have indeed come to appreciate my year in the bookshop as something much more profound than a waste or a loss.

Instead, my bookshop will forever be a source of invaluable insight and inspiration as I — suddenly a new author in middle age — continue with my own next chapter.

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Natalie Jenner is the internationally bestselling author of THE JANE AUSTEN SOCIETY (2020) and BLOOMSBURY GIRLS (2022). A former lawyer, career coach and independent bookshop owner, she lives in Oakville, Ontario, with her family and two rescue dogs.