When Dan Earl opened Sundance Bookstore in northwest Reno in 1985, it was his third career.
The Oregon State University graduate was a chemist with a product-testing company in California, then a card dealer at the Club Cal-Neva in Reno.When he and his wife sunk savings into a bookstore a first business venture for either they combined her name, Sun, with his, to get Sundance.
They opened in Keystone Square Shopping Center, on West 4th Street near a cluster of medical and legal offices and the University of Nevada, Reno.
"Many of our initial customers were associated with the university," Earl says.
"They got the word out that there is a wonderful new independent bookstore in town, and it has interesting things on the shelves, not the usual mass-market type books." Billing itself as Reno's only locally owned independent full-service bookseller, Sundance also sells magazines and newspapers, books on tape, greeting cards and espresso.
The store broke even within three years of its opening, Earl says.
His business partner since 1990 is Christine Kelly, who grew up in Las Vegas.
(Sun no longer is connected to the store.) They employ two full-timers and seven part-timers, and log long hours themselves.
"That's the nature of a small business," Earl says.
Sundance sandwiched between a monogramming business and beauty supply store maintains its original 4,500 square feet.
In the past five years, national chains Barnes & Noble and Borders opened large stores in south Reno, and Sundance suffered a three-year dip in sales.
"We since have exceeded levels we were at before they came," Earl says.
"Reno is a growing town." What sets you apart from the competition? Most of the other independent stores tend to be specialized, whether religious or used books.Ours is a complete bookstore, from A-Z, all categories, all types of new books.
Most chain stores will carry just an author's most recent paperback and latest hardback.
Christine has made a tremendous effort to get back-list titles.
Chain stores don't know or greet or serve their customers as well.
Chain stores may try two or three different sources for special orders, and if they can't get them, give up.Whereas, if the book's in the United States, we will figure out how to get it.
What categories sell best among your 40,000 titles? Contemporary general fiction and suspense.
Next are psychology/selfhelp, and Nevada.
Best months for business? December.
Christmastime.
Secondarily, the winter months January, February, March.
You're stuck inside.
It's dark and cold.
What effect has Amazon.com had on your sales? It affects us in a similar way that Costco affects us.
They tend to take the cream of the crop of the very big books.
I was told that Amazon shipped something like 20,000 copies of the new
Harry Potter book in the northern Nevada area.
We sell hundreds of copies ourselves, but can you imagine what our sales would have been if we had had even a small share of those 20,000 copies? But that still leaves plenty of business for us.
How do your prices compare? Almost all books have a manufacturer's suggested retail price.
We do charge that.
There are exceptions.
Our top 10 hardback best-sellers always are discounted 20 percent, plus we have a large category of sale/promotional books.
Furthermore, our Frequent Buyer Plan tracks the dollar volume of an individual's purchases, and at the end of an accumulation of $100 we give the customer a $10 credit toward the next purchase.
After a year, a customer will have paid about the same as at a chain store.
What do you stock that a chain store doesn't? We have a whole section of Nevada and Western history books, and books published by local authors.
For example, Doris Cerveri's "Pyramid Lake: Legends and Realities." And we have most of local author Stanley Paher's Nevada history books on mining, gold hunting and ghost towns.
We host a variety of local author signings.
We are able to get nationally noted authors, as well.
We had Brian Jacques, author of the children's Redwall series, published by Putnam.
The store was crowded with about 100 parents and children.
What else do you offer as a community bookstore? We hold community outreach events, which are not meant to make money for us.
The morning after Chautauquan scholars performed at Rancho San Rafael, they were in the store to interact one-on-one with interested customers.
Who are your customers? I would say 60 percent are women.
We get a broad spectrum, from people buying toddler books to high school students buying books for AP reading requirements to middle-aged readers and older people.
Probably two-thirds of our customers are either native Nevadans or those who've lived much longer in Nevada than recent immigrants, who perhaps have come from California, and all they really know are large city chain bookstores.
They don't really understand the goodness to society of an independent, responsive bookstore.
The native and longtime Nevadans feel that they are being pushed aside by the California mall/chain-store type of commercial business.
They wish to retain their independence by patronizing stores like us.
There's loyalty factor.
About 90 percent of our customers are repeat.
Reno's commercial "center" has shifted toward Meadowood Mall with the
population boom in south Reno.
How has that affected you? Try to travel to the south Truckee Meadows between 1 and 7 o'clock at night, and you realize how dreadful the traffic is, especially around South Virginia and McCarran.Where we are, it's a single traffic light at Keystone, and you park not more than 10 feet from our door.You get here easily off of Interstate 80 or Keystone or West Fourth Street.
It's one of the simplest places to get into.
Plans to expand? We're considering getting into used books.
It could happen in the not-toodistant future.
It probably would be at the same site, and if successful, would branch off.
And we haven't ruled out opening a second new-book store.
Profit margin? In the industry as a whole, it's in the neighborhood of 40 percent.
The bookstore business is not a humongous moneymaker.
But it's a pleasurable business and you can make a decent living at it.
There's an old joke: How do you make a small fortune in the wine business? Start with a large fortune.
The same thing applies to bookstores.
It takes a great deal of love and affection to want to get books and ideas out to the public that wants them.
