What's it like behind the scenes of Booklarter, Seattle's culinary bookstore? Today, we're going to find out! Welcome to Everything Cookbooks, the podcast for writers, readers, and cooks. I'm Kate Leahy, and here with me today is Molly Stevens. Hey, Molly. Hi, Kate. One of the things I've noticed traveling to different cities is I like to kind of see what indie bookstores they have. And what's fun is that there's a lot of genre-specific bookstores out there. If you're in Manhattan, you can go to the Mysterious Bookshop, which is for mystery lovers. If you're in LA or Brooklyn, you can go to the Rip Boddess. If you really love romance, there's bookstores for people who love travel writing, bookstores for people who, I don't know, like fishing, I'm sure, that they're out there. Obviously, we love bookstores that focus on cookbooks. We've had a couple of people on the podcast to talk about their cookbook stores. Today, we're going to find out what goes on behind the scenes of another cookbook store. I think we can learn so much from booksellers, but especially, I love this notion of the single-focus bookstore. And obviously, like you said, we're going to be talking about cookbook stores, primarily. Right, because you can learn so much about the evolution of cookbooks, the trends, some of the trends. When you're writing books, you might be in the weeds of your own project. And when you look up, you don't realize what other books have been coming out that season. And bookstores, they know. And say, if you're following bookstores online, like Book Larter, like Laura Hamilton, who we will be speaking with today, their Instagram feed is just a treasure trove of information of what's going on in the business, what's exciting, what are the new releases, what sort of subject matter I might have overlooked. These resources are just really invaluable if you love cookbooks and if you write cookbooks or both. Yeah, it's funny. I think about part of the reason we started this podcast was because we're all in our lonely little silence, writing our books with our heads down. And it's this idea of creating community and having a more sort of macro sense of what's going on. And I think culinary bookstores, one of the best places, or an indie store that has a robust cookbook section as well. But I've often thought a great job for someone who's interested in writing cookbooks would be to get a job at a bookstore and learn what goes into selling them. Today, we're going to be talking to Laura Hamilton. She founded Book Larter in Seattle in 2011. I've done events there. Molly, you've done events. Tell me about the last time you were in Book Larter. What was your event like? I was there in November of 2019. It was when my all about dinner book came out and I was an author talk. So a local food writer, reporter, journalist, Nancy Lesson, who's followed my career and likes my books, came in and she asked me questions in front of a audience. I remember it was right before Thanksgiving because I was just remembering she started off with a Thanksgiving rapid fire questions, which I was not prepared for it. She was like, all right, potatoes, you can go older russets stuffing in or out. It was pretty funny, but it was great. It was a nice sort of icebreaker, but we had a great time and told a bunch of books and it's a beautiful space too. It really is. Yeah, beautiful welcoming space. How about you? What were your events? The last one I did in person was actually, I was going to say 2019, but in 2021, I was in the store masked up and did an event for Wine Style. Oh well. It was lovely. People came out. We did tastings with wines, bought at a shop down the street with different flavored popcorn and a galette all from my book. It was just a really nice conversation. It was sort of like that time where people were starting to inch their way out of their homes and wanting to do community events. It also just helped me get excited about the book all over to be able to be in person talking about a work that I was doing during the pandemic and when it came out, now it's in the world. It just was kind of a full circle moment. Yeah. And you got to sell some books? Yeah, I got to sell some books. Yup. I love author events. I miss them. I do too. And yeah, I would say I love stopping by book Larger. Even when I don't have an event, I always make sure I go by when I'm visiting Seattle. It's a great job and I can't wait to hear from Laura because even though I was there and I met Laura, I never really stopped to ask. So what made you want to open a bookstore? I know. So let's bring her on so we can ask. Laura Hamilton, welcome to everything cookbooks. Thank you for having me. Oh, it's so nice to see you. You too. Molly and I have so much we want to ask you about your beautiful store book Larger, but we'll start first with the origin story. Take us back to when you made the decision to open book Larger and I'm really curious also just why a cookbook store of all things you could open. What made you want to do it? Well, you know, it's funny. I definitely did not invent this concept. There have been other cookbook stores before book Larger. When I travel, I go to farmers markets and I go to bookstores. I always go immediately to the cookbook section to sort of get a feel for what a local culture is like sort of through its books. Even if I can't read the language, you can flip through and look at pictures and that sort of thing. And Seattle is such a wonderful book town and it is such a wonderful food town that I always just thought that would be a great place to do it. And in fact, there have been cookbook shops in Seattle before, but it had been a long time since there was one when I opened book Larger in 2011. That's so interesting what you do because I do the same thing when I go to our city. Like, I want to know where the bookstore is. I want to know like, you know, what they're selling locally. Yeah. Yeah. Why not kind of merge those and grocery stores. But had you been in the culinary field at all or had any experience with culinary professionally? No, I was working at Microsoft in human resources and I was a cookbook collector, particularly British cookbooks and an avid home cook. I actually, for my 40th birthday, my husband gave me a week at basically adult summer camp. And I was in the process of really trying to think about what I wanted to do next with my life. I was working in high tech, had been doing it for 15 years. And I had always viewed that as sort of a way I would get to sort of move to Seattle, but didn't really think of it as something I would do for 15 years. And I loved my job. I appreciate everything I got to do there. But my husband gave me the summer camp experience. Tom Douglas, who's one of our local chefs, used to do a thing for, he'd get, you know, sort of 20 adults together. We'd cook, we'd go all over the city and do food things. Chefs would come in and talk to us and cook for us. And it was this very eye opening moment of, wow, these are my people, you know, like this is, this is sort of what I've been looking for. And there were people there who had not necessarily taken these like direct linear paths into working in food. So for example, Tom CEO at the time, Pamela Hinkley had worked for Red Hook Brewery when they were still just a local Seattle company and had worked for Theo Chocolate and help them get started. And then she was basically running all the restaurants for Tom, but it never necessarily like cooked in restaurants herself. And so I was trying to figure out like how to find my way into food without working in a kitchen and wanting to keep that connection to books. And I always think of that sort of summer camp experience. Shortly after that, I read Julia Child's My Life in Food and realized that she didn't even really start cooking seriously until she was nearly 40 herself and thought, okay, like this is the time. If I'm going to do something, it needs to be now. And so I left Microsoft in early 2010. And I did a little bit of work for Tom, just like kind of running some projects for him. They were very nice to sort of take me under their wing and help me figure out what I wanted to do. And I sort of always had this idea kicking around in the back of my mind, like, let's do this cookbook store thing. And so I reached out to a woman named Kim Ricketts. She had a corporate author talk business and a sort of a passion project also did occasionally cookbook author dinners in restaurants. And so she needed some help. So I basically sort of volunteered with her. We started to talk about the idea of doing a cookbook store because she had also been thinking about it. And tragically, she was diagnosed with a terminal illness very shortly after I started working with her. And unfortunately passed away before we really got the chance to develop the idea together. But sort of being that close to someone or working that closely with someone who was going through something so dramatic so quickly was a real motivator for me. It was like, you know, what do I really have to lose? I'm not going to wait around. And so by June of 2011, I'd signed a lease and we opened that October. And I look back on it and think how in the world did that? I know. Absolutely. Like it was so fast. And of course now with like all the construction delays and permitting delays and things post pandemic, it would never happen, right? But yeah, that was sort of the whole story. The neighborhood you're in, correct me, Fremont? It is Fremont. Yeah, sort of the upper part of Fremont, if you're familiar with Seattle, there's like a main central Fremont, we're up there. How did you choose that location? It's very close to my house. And I had spent many, many years commuting across this very big lake and spending a lot of time in my car. And so it was very important to me that it be close to home. And actually, Kim was the first person to see that our specific space was for lease. She happened to be driving past. And she called me and was like, Oh, I saw this place, you should go check it out. And I'd been looking at all kinds of spaces basically in that area. It's great because we are between two very long term destination businesses and an old family-owned building. The neighborhood is changing very quickly. And so, I mean, I don't know if our little family-owned building will be there forever, but it's been great because we're between a yoga studio and an eyeglass shop. And we've also got some really great destination restaurants in the area as well. There's a sort of a cult sandwich shop across the street. There's a really great brand new bagel shop up the street that's had a line out the door since they opened. There's actually a record store in our neighborhood. So it's just a very, it's very residential, but also has like a commercial core that works really well with what we do. What was the space before it was booklarter? Just for people who haven't been in the store, it's a really inviting space. You walk in, like it's aesthetically really beautiful. You have this demo kitchen, but it's also cozy at the same time. Did you have to completely redesign it? Or were you walking into something that already had like some sort of kitchen infrastructure? Oh no, we had to redesign it. And actually, so for a year before I signed the lease, it was a flower shop. But previously, it's kind of funny actually. For many years, it was a place where you could buy dance costumes. And the woman who did alterations there was also an expert scuba gear repair person. She could like fix your wetsuit. And so for the first couple of years, we had many confused people walking through the door with like children in tow, thinking they were going to get dance costumes, you know, whatever. Or people with like their wetsuits in their arms, you know, thinking and being very upset that they couldn't be kind. This person who knew how to fix a wetsuit. So yeah. Oh my gosh, that's great. Yeah, that's funny. So Kate mentioned the vibe of the store and the design. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about designing it. Did you always know it was going to have this big kitchen, demo kitchen in the middle? And just, I mean, you're branding, everything is so on point. And I'm just curious about that process. Yeah, I mean, I worked obviously with a couple of really great people putting it together. But definitely the kitchen was always a part of my vision. I wanted a way to sort of bring the books to life. And I think that also ties to that experience I had going to that summer camp, where chefs doing demonstrations were such an important part of how we learned. And so demonstrations and things like that have always been an important part of our events. Before the pandemic, we had a very active cooking class schedule, which we haven't really figured out how to get going again for a whole variety of reasons. But it's that sort of making that connection of the book to what it can actually do so that it doesn't just sit there. And giving people so many cookbook authors are wonderful instructors. And it just gives them a chance to shine and really demonstrate and talk about what they do in a different context, rather than sort of having to give their pitch about the book alone. That's a really good point because on the podcast, sometimes we joke that cookbook authors, we don't do readings. We're not sitting in front of a bookstore with our book like reading about, you know, in a hot pan, melt the butter. We're not doing that. But oftentimes, we'll tell the story about the book and being able to also have that culinary experience. Someone's tasting something, smelling something, watching you do something and makes the book much more alive for the buyer or just somebody who's just like kind of interested in the subject matter. It also draws people into the shop. And I think one thing you say in all your taglines, a community bookstore, and these events seem very designed to, you know, increase the traffic and have people come to the shop for an experience in addition to just shopping for books. Absolutely. I mean, I wanted a place where I would want to hang out if I didn't own it, also knowing that I was going to have to spend a lot of time there. You needed to be an inviting environment for me as well as everyone else. Did you play around with different names or did you always know Book Larter? Yeah, you know, it's really funny. The very first name I thought of was Book Pantry. And then there is a cooking school in Seattle that was getting underway. At about the same time, I was developing the ideas for Book Larter, and I knew one of the at that time owners and had talked to her quite a bit. And she was like, "Oh, yeah, we're going to call it the pantry." And I was like, "Well, that doesn't really, you know, I can't call it Book Pantry, thank you. That'll be confusing." And then immediately it was like, "Well, I want to have all these imported British books, so why don't I just call it Book Larter?" Yeah, that was it. Wow. When a name feels right, you don't even think about their might have, it might have had a different name before because it just feels like the right name for the right place. So that's really cool. Well, it's funny, too, because I love the word "larter," but I hesitate to use it very often, because it's British usage mostly. And I don't know that people really understand it, but I love the word. And I think on its own, it sometimes confuses people, but in the Book Larter, it's just got a really nice ring to it. So do you, customers come from all over Seattle? Do you have people who come from far away to visit? Do you get a sense of that? Yeah. Actually, we have customers from all over the world, and it's funny, summer, especially as the time when so many tourists will come. Sometimes they are people who are visiting family, who are in town, but sometimes they've come to Seattle, they've seen us on Instagram, or they're heard about us somewhere else, and they decide to visit. And that's just it has grown and grown over the years. So you have this community focused. People coming from all over, say, if you're a tourist in town, you want to go into a shop that you might not have where you live. This is a great place to go and explore, but also you have to curate a selection. I'm always curious about how books get on shelves. So how did you learn how to curate the selection? How is it different now than it was when you were starting out? How does a book make it onto the shelf at Book Larter? Oh, it's interesting because it's, I've thought about this a lot and tried to explain it to other people. I tried to explain it to my staff all the time, and it is one of those things that you just kind of get or you don't. If I think about the shop overall, I want it to be a place where you can feel a real sense of discovery. But along with that, you need some familiar things there that make it not feel overwhelming. We always have mastering the art of French cooking on the shelf. We always have the silver palette on the shelf. If there's a joy of cooking in print, it's always on the shelf so that you can walk in there and see that thing, Edna Lewis' books, Modern Jaffrey's books, so that you can walk in there and see that thing that might have been on your family's cookbook shelf for one. But also, you might be able to then buy and share that book with someone else if you loved it. But you also will hopefully find things there that you aren't necessarily going to see anywhere else in some cases, or that, you know, quite honestly, with all the online shopping, then an algorithm is not going to feed you because it's something that flies under the radar a little bit more. So that doesn't really answer your exact question. No, it does though. But it's a wonderful image, this idea of this framework, this context of things that are recognizable to people who understand cookbooks and know it. But then, within that, back in the summer, there was an Instagram post that you put up about these sweet selection of books from the National Trust, I think. Is that right? Yeah. And it's these 50 scones or 70 jams or this collection of these little books. It was a wonderful post, but what I loved is that then Celia from omnivore commented on the post that she had just been able to find those books or something. Like, it was this exchange of two independent culinary bookstore owners talking about getting books that weren't in the mainstream. Yeah. And there are so many wonderful mainstream books. Like, I don't want to say like, you know, we only carry, you know, things that only got a 500 print round or something. But it is like, if somebody's able to just go online and do a quick search and buy something, you have to give them a reason to want to buy it from you. And so, the events do that for us. The idea that you can just go in and browse and do that for hours and get some good advice does that for us. But also just being able to find that thing that, like I said, some algorithm was never going to get you. Hopefully, it does that for us as well. You know, if you want a single subject book on Medlar, so you can find it at book order, or elder flowers, or quince, or something like that. It is true. I know if I'm looking for books, algorithms are usually not my friend. Like, they're not going to select books I actually want. And I do find online book browsing really hard. It's so much easier to do it in person and to talk to somebody and ask them what they're excited about. And then all of a sudden, you're kind of like interested in a book that maybe you would have seen somewhere, but you wouldn't have like had that sort of a conversation that kind of ties you like, oh, I need to pick up this book. That's actually really interesting. And I think too, for our listeners, if you're an author, and you are thinking of like where your book would fit on a shelf, you go into a store, like book Larter and Talk and say, okay, I'm working on a book about, I don't know, coffee cakes. Where would this fit? Like, what would be my competitive titles? You know, how would I position this book to interest an agent also? Yeah, absolutely. And authors will do that regularly. Curious about this discovering how you mean, you're creating a sense of discovery for your for your customers, for your clients, but how are you discovering? I mean, yes, are the big publishers, then the sales reps, I'm sure reach out to you seasonally, or I don't know how many times a year that happens with their list. And you know, we're excited about this. Here's the catalog. But you go beyond that. I mean, you have to evaluate based on, you know, the big publisher's catalogs, but then how are you finding books beyond that too? A lot of that is, well, the staff, obviously, I think live a little more online than I do. So besides sort of the store's Instagram account, they will all have their most of them have their own Instagrams where they follow people more closely that they're interested in, and they might see that that person has a book coming out in the UK, or that person is doing a GoFundMe to do a self-published book or something like that. And so some of it is just trying to keep my ear to the ground through largely through my staff, also through I go to the UK a couple of times a year, and I will talk to people there about what they're excited about. Really, you know, you kind of live and breathe this industry in a way and just try to stay aware of things. I mean, customers will always bring things to our attention as well. They'll have seen something somewhere, or again, they'll have a cook that they follow and really like and ask about it, or let us know that they've got something coming out. Do you ever see seasons where a few publishers have several books on the same topic? And then it's a matter of like, oh, I can only have one cookie book or a couple of cookie books on the shelf. You know, does that happen a lot? Do you see like these trends where like, why did everybody acquire cocktail books for the season? But then the next season, there's like nothing cocktail related. Do you see that? Yes. Now it is non-alcoholic cocktail. It's the low ABV, no ABV cocktails. Pretty much every publisher has at least one coming out. Some of them have more than one. This is actually one of the nice things about digital technology is that a lot of the publishers are able to put up little previews of books. And so we can kind of get in there and at least see sample recipes and kind of read some text, especially if it's by an author we're not familiar with and kind of get a sense of their style and that sort of thing. You mentioned cookie books. There will always be room on our shelves for lots of cookie books because we have a big baking section. Our customers love baking. So cookie books have have no fear finding a place of book murder. But something like cocktails or non-alcoholic cocktails, when the store first opened, it was meat. Everybody had some take on how to make a steak. And some of that is the luxury of being a single subject store is that you can offer people multiple choices, right? Like you can get a sense of like, okay, this seems like a book where like, again, if it's by an author, you're not familiar with, this person has a strong point of view. This looks like a reasonably well-written recipe, you know, nothing funky in the, you know, a table. It says a tablespoon here and then it says a teaspoon in the body or whatever. And so that's actually one of the nice things, you know, is that you can, you can say you want to book on cookies. Here's eight options. And again, might be overwhelming. But it gives you the chance to offer something to meet that sort of cook where they are in terms of what they're looking for. That's something that if you're a general bookstore, you might not have that luxury. You might have maybe one or two books on, you know, non-alcoholic cocktails because you have to have, you know, your sci-fi fantasy readers, you have to have your rom-com readers, you have to have your non-fiction autobiographies or whatnot. For you, you can say, no, we're doing cookbooks. Do you also carry memoir? We do. We have a pretty good sort of food writing and memoir section. Yeah. And that's actually one of the ones that tends to, from a publishing perspective, it's like feast or famine. You know, there will be like 10 come out one season and then there aren't any for a year and then like 10 more come out. So yeah, but there's a lot of great stuff in it right now and a little bit more fiction as well, just a tiny bit. Oh, really? You know, it's funny because we're, we've been seeing cookbooks sort of folded into into a novel and it kind of like, oh, that's that's kind of an interesting thing we're seeing. And so how does that fit with like the cookbook audiences or like crossover appeal between the fiction readers and the cookbook readers? Yeah, for sure. There's a, I'm not going to remember the author's name, but there's a Japanese novel called Butter that's out right now that has this, the UK edition, especially is this very dramatic cover, illustrated cover of like a murdered cow, basically. And people, I mean, just on the cover alone, right? Like people will pick it up there, these little cozy mysteries from the UK, you know, like the latest ones called Dead and Scone. And Ruth Reichhel, of course, has written a couple of novels. So we do see, you know, M.F.K. Fisher wrote a novel, you know, we do see people who've built careers in food, branch and fiction as well. And so there is a little bit of fiction sneaking in there once in a while. One question dilemma or I don't know what it is. I was wondering about football stores is it seems like, especially cookbooks, there are more and more cookbooks every year. I mean, maybe I'm just my vision of it, but you have a limited space. I mean, it's not a huge store. It's not tiny, but it's not, you know, so more books are coming in. They're coming in. Where do you fit them? Do you have to get rid of the back list? You know, I've just served like, how does it work? There's only so much shelf space. Yeah, we do. And especially because we also made the decision because of the events to basically limit ourselves to the perimeter of the store. Right. And then we have tables through the center of the store, but we have chairs underneath them and the tables are on wheels. And so whereas in a lot of stores, you would just add more vertical shelves to the center. We haven't done that. So we haven't really increased our capacity over the years in ways that might otherwise mean we can have everything possible. But it keeps these selection that we have curated, I think. And again, because of the internet, it's much easier for us to get a copy of something that we might have carried once, but we don't have space for now and that sort of thing. We actually just had our summer sale. We use that as an opportunity to really clear out the shelves, you know, and all bookstores will have sort of their own parameters around like how long something is allowed to sit on their shelf before it sells and that sort of thing. But we this year decided to besides, you know, sort of having those books on sale, having books that maybe we'd just ordered a few too many copies of on sale, we made the whole store 10% off as well. And so we moved a whole lot of titles out because I think we're bringing in 80 new titles between September and December, which for a general bookstores, not that many, but for us is huge. All of those 80, maybe there's no average, but imagine some of the big titles you're ordering lots of. What's the range? Will it be like one or two copies of a certain book or? Yeah, I mean, sometimes we do just get in a single copy of something because we have no information about it and we just want to see what it is and then we might order more. But for the most part of a fall book, we'll order like three copies of something as sort of like a baseline. Again, depending on when it comes out, because if it's coming out in August, September, we'll order fewer copies knowing that we'll be able to reorder. If it's coming out in like November, we'll order more because you run into all of the shipping problems and potential reprint issues and all those kinds of things start to rear their head in like November, December. So there's a little bit of a cycle to it in terms of, we probably place smaller orders and refresh them more than a store with more square footage would do. Just because we want to have more titles and we got to have room for them. Now that's really, really interesting because I have so many thoughts going into my head of which is like what authors can do to just like stand out a little bit more. And one of the things is if I'm an author and I can do an event in Book Larter, that's going to automatically increase sort of like the team will know the book better, there's more local people will know the book better, more copies will be ordered because they'll be an event. So, but you can't do events with everybody. So how do you create your event schedule? It's a mix actually, working directly with publicists at big publishers. It's funny. That's one of the places anybody who's in cookbooks will not be surprised here that that's one of the places where the bigger publishers have made cuts and authors are expected to do a lot more of that work on their own these days. So sometimes we work with the publicists from the big publishers. Sometimes we work with the authors individually and they've come to us and sometimes we'll reach out to them, you know, because we know they've got a book coming out. Sometimes that's the easiest way to make something happen. This is one of the places where we try not to overwhelm the calendar from a subject perspective. We also have to think about things like staffing and just our own capacity for doing multiple events. But we know that, you know, September through Thanksgiving or actually now it's more or less week of August even through Thanksgiving, we have probably three events a week and sometimes more. But I would also say if you're an author who can't make it to Seattle, we are finding and I know lots of other small indies are as well that sign books are more valuable to people than not signed books. So if you reach out to your indie, send them book plates. So you know, the sticker with your signature on it, that also means that they will probably order more copies of the book and you can cross promote on your social media through your sub stack, like whatever, whatever it is that you're doing. It also gets you sort of flagged on our website that we have signed copies. And so if somebody's just does a search for signed copies, they can see all of them and yours will show up there as well. Again, especially post pandemic, those have been fantastic in terms of helping move books. That's really interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting. Authors worry a lot about author platforms and agents want to take on authors that have a platform and we talk about whatever platform means. It means different things to different people. But I'm also wondering just from a bookstore owner, do you also look at author platform? Because I would think that if an author has a way to reach readers, there might be more sales that come to say, if I'm sending people to book larger to get a signed copy of my book versus if I don't do that at all. Yeah, of course, it always helps. And you can look at the New York Times bestseller list for what it's worth of cookbooks and see that it's, you know, it's full of people with big TikTok followings or whatever, if a cookbook even makes it on there anymore. Yeah, platform definitely matters. We do look at it, especially again, if it's an author that we haven't worked with before, we try to get a sense of, again, we use a lot of Instagram, but how many followers do they have? But also like who's following them, right? Are there people locally that we work with and that we know that are also following them to try to get a sense of their audience? And I would say as an author, the more you know about your audience, the better in terms of where they are geographically. The other thing that we'll find is it's not necessarily even just like a big social media following. I think Substack is playing a much bigger role in turnout as well and Patreon. So authors who have people who are reading their newsletters on a regular basis, which sounds so old school, but they have the most loyal followings, right? That's at least what we're finding. You know, we worked with an author last fall who actually has a TV show and things like that. But a lot of the people who came to the event had found her through her newsletter and then started watching the show, you know, like it wasn't it wasn't the other way around necessarily. And so I think that's where readers feel like they have that more direct connection to the author is where they're really turning out for events where they're buying the signed copy from the indie, you know, that sort of thing. It's very encouraging too to think that it's the writing that, you know, it's the reading of a newsletter that's bringing people to books and supposed to television. So your author events, what's the structure? Is there always cooking? Is it always a demonstration? And how big is the attendance? Again, not a very big space. So we can seat up to 55 people in the store. So for like a seated author talk, sometimes authors will just come in and talk about their books and answer questions. Sometimes they will do a demonstration of something from their book. Again, like as long as it's something that's easy to put together in a one hour format and can be shared. What about like cooking smells in the bookstores? Is that ever a concern? Well, that's Molly, how do we get to that? Because if your cooking books smell like seafood, yeah, exactly. No, we had we had an author recently who really wanted to show off this fish recipe. And I was like, no, sorry. Right. Well, and also we find our building is of undetermined age, it is over 120 years old. And the ventilation is terrible, even though we have a hood and things over our range. So this same author demonstrated something that he used a very spicy paste as part of the demonstration. And almost immediately, even with the fan blowing full speed, the whole room just starts coughing. And I thought, and I'm like, we're frantically passing out water to people who had it, you know, we're like coughing the most. And you know, it's just these things that happen where you're like, got him off the fish, but didn't think about the choice. Yeah, the chilies. So yeah, exactly. So yeah, so sometimes there is a demonstration, but yes, to your point, Molly, hopefully, of things that only generate happy smells. You know, those nice, those nice, you want to sell your house smells. But then sometimes we also do conversations. So sometimes the author might have a friend in Seattle who's also a writer in they chat, or we have we match them up with someone and they talk about their book with that person. We also a lot more this year are starting to do rather than author talks just signings, because we can accommodate a lot more people that way. So for example, when Ruth Rachel was last in town for the Paris novel, she was coming at a time of day that didn't necessarily make sense for us to go get an offsite venue or that sort of thing. So we did a signing and we had over 200 people come through and get their books signed. And our capacity shifts, we also do offsite events. You know, we rent a venue if we have a really popular author come through. And occasionally we partner with other organizations like Seattle Town Hall and Seattle Arts and Lectures and booksell for them as well. Imagine it's been a process of growing over the years when you first show up on the scene, you're not on anybody's radar. You know, the big name authors aren't like, oh, got to go to Seattle and do booklarter. And so sort of building that over the 13, 14 years, because now it seems like just looking at your event page, anybody who's on book tour, if they're in the Pacific Northwest, they're going to make an appearance at booklarter. Right. Yeah, we hope so. Yeah. I guess it's not really a question. It's just sort of talking about how you build a brand, really, but establish yourself. Yeah. I mean, luckily we got started at a time when there were a lot more full-time publicists on a broad range of publisher payrolls, so to speak. You know, those connections have been great. I mean, there are people that I've worked with the whole time I've had the shop and you can't say that a lot about a lot of industries. So that's a really good point. When it comes to say fall versus spring books, I know that, you know, fall gets really busy. There's a lot of fall releases. Do you see any kind of shifts to benefits for spring and maybe even summer releases? Because I'm wondering if you start selling a book in the spring and the staff likes, loves it, the community loves it, you have to reorder copies, word of mouth kind of spreads. And by the time it's the holidays, do people kind of forget about that book or is it even more top of mind? Because it's sold well, people seem to like it. Is that kind of changing? Because I think there's still that tendency of like, fall is where the important books come out. But I don't know if that's still the case. Yeah, I don't think that that's always true. I think that a book I've said before, it's almost like it has a little more room to breathe in the spring, so to speak. You know, in the fall, we have trouble figuring out how many books we can have face out. And you'll look at our new release Tuesday videos if you follow us on Instagram and these stacks will get huge. And it's fun and it's great and all those things. But in the spring, it's a much more manageable situation. And your book, I think has a little more possibility of getting some media attention at the time. What happens? It's kind of like the way that the film industry releases all the Oscar bait movies, so to speak, at the end of the year, is the same thing happens in the book industry. That's why fall is so full is everybody makes their best of the year lists, right? And starts to think about like IACP awards and James Beard Awards and all those kinds of things. And it does tend to be that the books that come out later in the year, you'll see more of them on the list. Now, is that just because more books come out that time of year? And that's why they make the list, or is it because Eater or whoever's making their list forgot about some of those springbooks? Now, I know the people who make those lists work very hard at making sure they don't fall into that trap. So that is no shade on anyone who is responsible for creating those lists. But I think there is just that perception in the industry that you have a better chance. You'll be new at the holidays, which for cookbooks especially is the biggest hands down sale season of the year. And so therefore, more people will be likely to pick up your book as a gift. But again, that's where I think like a good indie is going to also make sure that not everybody falls into that trap because like we were talking about how there are so many wonderful baking books coming out this fall, Benjamin Aboy released a really great book in April, I think it was. That's a baking book where we made sure we ordered a whole lot of extra copies of it. So we would have signed ones for the holidays, because that book is going in our baking recommendations for the fall. So a passionate bookseller is your friend. If you have a springbook release as well. Yeah, absolutely. Can you talk to us a little bit about your Instagram presence? Because you've been on it for a long time. It's very smart what you do on Instagram. And I wondered like how it evolved over time. And why do you use it? We started using it from the beginning. Some of the very earliest posts are of our windows, paper it over, you know, book order coming this year sort of thing. We use it because a lot of our customers and our authors are on it. Cookbooks are so visual. And so it's a really great place to feature what we carry. You know, everybody who's there will tell you it has changed so much in the time that they've done it. In the early days, I did all the posts and then or time more members of staff started to do them. But we tried to really stick with some key themes so that again, like people kind of knew what to look for when they come to our page. It's a great way, I think, to stay in touch with what's going on in the industry, with what's going on in food, with what the conversations are sometimes around food. I was never a Twitter user, thankfully, because it sounds like it's become a painful place to be over the past couple of years and Instagram could go the same way. I wish it was a little more, it used to feel a little bit more like a community than it does now, but I think it's still for us at least it's the best way to again, like stay in touch with those sort of two core constituencies, our customers and our authors. I hear what you're saying Laura about, it used to feel more like a community, but I sort of, I feel like there's that community is still within it. It's just, it's easy to lose sight of it, because we're fine with our podcast. We have, our community is very much on Instagram. I mean, that's where we mostly connect with our listeners. So I do hear what you're saying, but I still, I have moments where I was like, God, this is great community in others where it's like, okay, moving on. You've mentioned your staff a few times and I'm just curious, how big is your staff? Goodness. How many of us are there? Six of us. Wow. I think being a bookseller or working at a bookstore, a single focus bookstore could be an incredible experience for someone who is interested in the field obviously. Yeah. And I think it's really important when I say in our job descriptions, I'm always very clear that like, you will like this job the most if you really love cookbooks, you know, like, and not like, I have some on my shelf and I like to cook, like, you have a stack by your bed. And you read them like novels and you know, you're constantly in the struggle to find more shelf space and you think, oh, yeah, I'm going to get rid of a bunch and you, you know, you can't break the connection with any of them no matter how many you have. It's that sort of thing. And they're done that. Yeah. Yeah. We all we know. Yeah. Exactly. Have a podcast. You really love cookbooks. Yeah. So I've been incredibly lucky. I have absolutely wonderful staff. My store manager, Mira Courage, just celebrated her 10th anniversary as a full-time employee at the store and has been the manager for, I think, eight of those years. I have another part-time employee who's been with me for eight years. A former employee who actually now has a bakery once called, "Working at Book Lord or a Unicorn Job." And I think that's about right. So for the people who like, find it and really love it. I try to create an environment where you can do your job while you're there and then you can walk away from it and not have to think about it again because I think that jobs are part of your life, but they shouldn't be your whole life. I mean, if you want that, you can go somewhere else and you can find lots of jobs that are willing to take over your life. But I think coming out of tech, it was really important to me that we have those kinds of boundaries. Your work can be your passion, but it still work. I don't think if anybody was thinking about doing something like this, it's always like the first thing I tell people is the first five or six years I had the store I cooked a lot less than I did before I had the store, which was always the weirdest thing. But anyway. You didn't have time. And one of your employees, Paulina, she's written a couple of cookbooks. Now she's working on, I think, her third. So you have alumni who are now published authors, right? For sure. For sure. Paulina and Kim O'Donnell also has written a couple of books of her own. To be clear, Paulina was already working on a book. Kim was an author before she came to work at the store. I take no responsibility for either of them. And would you ever want to write a book? Would you have you ever had a thought? I never have, actually. People ask me that all the time. And I truly do not have the focus or the patience for it. Don't know that I have something that I feel like that is that compelling to say, to commit an entire book to. It's so interesting. I'm really glad to hear you say that because I think one of the reasons we love having you on the podcast is because our community, yes, a lot of them are aspiring cookbook authors, but they're also a lot of people who just love cookbooks, have relationships with cookbooks for whatever reason. And there's a lot of room in that. You don't have to be wanting to write a cookbook. You don't even have to want to cook. I mean, there are other things adjacent. And so I do really appreciate hearing you say that. This is a random question, but do you do mail order at booklor? I should know the answer to this. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that's part of the reason, it's the main reason, actually, that we haven't brought our cooking classes back is because post-pandemic, we do so much more online business than we used to. And so all that requires space. Yes, we definitely do. We ship all over the world. And you had a podcast for a bit. Was that mostly a pandemic thing? Or is that something you might bring back? I mean, there's still, we'll link to it. There's still some great episodes up there. Yeah, yeah. Oh, no. There's some really great stuff. And we actually, we also have a YouTube channel, which is where all of the zooms that we did during the pandemic are there. And you can listen to those like podcasts. So we have a lot of, there's a lot of booklorter content out there in the world. The podcast was, we had an office manager at one point, who also happens to produce this podcast, Absoluteella. She was producing the spilled milk podcast, but was interested in really developing sort of her own editorial skills and doing something that allowed her to sort of shape something on her own. So she did that basically as part of her job. It was a great thing for us and a good growth experience for her. You know, if she ever wants to come back and be our office manager again and do that, that'd be great. But if we talk about it all the time in terms of like, well, should we start this again? We still have all the equipment, should we do it? And it really is just a capacity thing. Somebody still has to post it and put it together. And it just is one more thing that kind of goes on the list of things we should be doing that don't get done. So I think that's like the story of my working days. I'm like, things I need to do that I will get to at some point, I hope, but you know, some things just get put in front of the other things. Before we let you go, we want to ask you, you know, we've talked a lot about fall cookbooks. You know, it's the Oscar season for cookbooks. So what trends are you seeing this fall or what books are you really excited to see anything we should just be aware of? I mean, in terms of trends, we talked a little bit about the non-alcoholic cocktail books. That is absolutely a trend. It's a trend in supermarkets as well. And so you will have lots and lots of options if that's a subject that you're interested in. It's also going to be an excellent season for baking books and cookie books. As we mentioned earlier, I can think of three off the top of my head that are that are coming out. I'm sure there are more that I'm not thinking of. As far as books that I'm excited about, I mean, we've mentioned my love of British cookbooks. And one of my favorite books so far this year is Anna Jones's Easy Winds. It came out in the UK in April and will be out in the US in September, October. But it's excellent. And if you are looking for more ways to eat vegetables and you want sort of a pantry focus to your cooking, so I've got a lot of olive oil. I've got lemons. I've got, you know, chilies, whatever. It's broken out in 11 chapters that way. And everything I've made from it has been outstanding. Great title, too. Yeah, really is. Yeah. And the cover is beautiful. She's a wonderful writer. So if again, you like to read them like novels, that's a definite one. Julia Tertian has a new book that I haven't seen yet, but I can't wait to see called What Goes With What. She always writes such approachable books. You know, she's been doing these sort of cooking classes through her sub stack. And I just really, I'm excited to see sort of how all that teaching influences what she's writing. Christina Cho, who wrote Moocakes and Milkbread has a new book called Chinese Enough that I'm super excited about. We're getting to do an event with her. And she's just, again, got such a great writing voice and has such a good way of sort of conveying her own personal story through her recipes as well, that I'm just excited to see that one. Nicola Lamb, who's another British author, has a book called SIFT that again came out in the UK earlier in the year, but will be out in the US in November. And if you like a lot of sort of detail behind your baking recipes, the first sort of third to half of the book is all technique. And then it's applied in the recipes. And that was a really fantastic book, I think, for both a new or an really experienced baker. Oh, and speaking of baking, Pella has Bodega Bakes. She founded Bakers Against Racism. The book just looks so fun. You know, I can't wait to see what she does with, again, like ingredients you can find in a Bodega through her through her lens. The spring actually, I think, is interesting because we've seen a lot more African books. We saw quite a few more in this previous spring, and we're going to see more next spring. So Eric Ajapong has a Ghanaian book coming out. Habahasan, who wrote In BB's Kitchen, has a book that's not exclusively African, but is again sort of taking her approach of talking to people who cook in lots of different scenarios and full of essays and really great information. And so I hope that that's those sort of own voice authors or a trend that we see continue, because it just adds so much richness to the variety of books you can read, but also flavors in your kitchen, and I am happy to see it. That's an amazing lesson. I'm so excited, but are there any books that you think need to be written that you aren't seeing or any areas? I think it's one of the wonderful things about cookbooks, especially in this moment, is that there is increasing diversity in the subject matter, both regionally and also just expertise-wise, if that makes sense. So the past couple of years have been a wonderful time to just be a home cook with not a lot of time on their hands. I think especially coming out of the pandemic, you know, like everybody's written there. These are the recipes that got me through it, and they tend to be really simple. They use a lot of pantry items. They repeat ingredients, and I actually think that kind of book has filled a really great gap for people, and so I can't really think of. Sometimes I hear agents or editors ask, "What book do you wish was like coming into your inbox that you want to represent that you want to publish?" And a lot of times the answer is, "I don't know it until I see it." So it's like I wouldn't have known. I wanted a mid-century modern take on Scandinavian cookies or something like that. When you see it, you're like, "Oh, I need this book." That book, Dolce, that's coming out this fall with the Italian-American kind of twist on baking. I'm super excited about that. Would I have thought, "This is a book I really need on my shelf," but then I see it. I'm like, "I need that book on my shelf." Absolutely. One of my most used cookbooks of the past two years is by Laura Lee. It's called A Splash of Soy. Would I have ever noticed that I had all of these Asian ingredients in my pantry that I was not using if she hadn't written that book? And it's become like my favorite thing, and there are a half a dozen recipes from that book that are on repeat. And I didn't realize that that was something that I wanted so badly until I had it. So inspired. Yeah. Laura, thank you so much for joining us in this conversation. It was so great to get a peek behind the curtain of how Book Larter came to be and how it operates. So thank you for that. I learned a lot, Molly. I'm sure you did too. Absolutely. I don't have seen me. I'm scribbling down notes through my cookbook purchasing. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. It was a lot of fun. Thank you for listening to Everything Cookbooks. For more episodes and ways to contact us, go to our website, everythingcookbooks.com. The show is available wherever you get your audio, and if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It really helps. Any book mentioned on the show can be found on our affiliate page at bookshop.org. Thanks, as always, to our editor, Abby Circletella, and until next time, keep on writing, reading, and cooking.
Molly and Kate speak with Lara Hamilton, the owner of Book Larder Seattle's community cookbook store. Lara shares the motivations behind opening the store, why Seattle was the perfect base and how she sees the connection between food and books. We learn the origins behind the name, location and design of the store as well as some behind the scenes insights into ordering, event planning and curating its unique selection. Lara talks about her thoughts on trends, author platforms and building a space that is a must stop on author tour before revealing her most anticipated Fall titles.
