Laura Zastrow
Co-owner Sandi Torkildson says the store is healthy, but she's ready to open a new chapter.
Independent booksellers are on the upswing and that bodes well for preserving the legacy of A Room of One’s Own, the 41-year old Madison institution. Eight potential buyers have already expressed an interest in acquiring the downtown bookstore, says Mark Kaufman of Paz & Associates, the training and consulting firm that is helping owners Sandi Torkildson and Nancy Geary recruit new owners.
Torkildson and Geary announced June 5 they were looking to retire and find new owners for the store.
According to industry observers, new owners would enter a healthy market for independent bookstores, which have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years on the national level, despite the growth of online mega retailers.
Kaufman, who trains bookselling professionals along with his wife, Donna Paz Kaufman, says Paz & Associates is not acting as a traditional business broker, but more like a matchmaker, attempting to find an owner (or owners) who shares the company’s vision. “What Sandi pointed out is what’s more important to them than how much they might be offered is to find someone who is going to preserve the legacy of the store and keep it an integral part of the community,” says Kaufman, who is based in Amelia Island, Fla.
In a press release, Torkildson and Geary said they were looking forward to retirement and spending more time with good books. “We hope that you, someone you know, or a group of you will want to be the next owner of A Room of One’s Own.”
The odds of finding a new owner with similar values are good, says Kaufman, who notes that a “Bookselling Bootcamp” facilitated by Paz & Associates and offered at different locations around the country is often filled to capacity. “We’ve discovered there are a number of people who harbor a lifelong dream of owning a bookstore,” says Kaufman.
Meg Smith, membership and marketing officer for the American Booksellers Association, says the national trends for independent stores are clearly positive; membership has grown for the past seven years. “Book sales in independent stores grew almost 8% in 2012 in the U.S over the previous year, and independent bookstores held on to almost all those gains in 2013,” Smith wrote in an email to Isthmus. “In 2014, for 47 out of 52 weeks, unit sales of books were up over the year before.”
And 2015 was a banner year for independent bookstores, says Smith, pointing to a 10% increase in sales.
“It has really been terrific for us to see such a tremendous resurgence of independent book stores all across the country,” says Kaufman. He believes people are still patronizing local stores because the public is growing “disenchanted” with giant online retailers like Amazon. And he notes the sales of ebooks is declining. He chalks it up to “screen fatigue.” Says Kaufman: “If you spend all day on a computer, the last thing you want to do is look at a screen. People are buying books.”
“Part of the whole thing about bookstores is that you can browse and discover things, and you just can’t do that same kind of browsing online,” Torkildson told Isthmus in 2014 after receiving an “Isthmus Indie Award” for being a “remarkable retailer.”
All of this bodes well for the future of the iconic store. “We are very confident that we will find the right match for the store,” Torkildson wrote in an email. “We are not in a hurry, the store is doing very well, and the market in Madison and nationwide is strong.”
