I'm what you might call an accidental entrepreneur. If I'm being totally honest, it took me several tries to even spell entrepreneur. But last year, when my husband and I found out that our local bookstore was closing, there were only two clear choices: Open a bookstore, or move. We have two small children, and had only barely survived a move a month before our youngest was born. The idea of moving again was out of the question. And so we decided to open a bookstore.

It wasn't totally insane—I'm a novelist by trade, and therefore visit bookstores all over the country for both business and pleasure, and I'd worked as a bookseller in the neighborhood bookstore that was closing. Together, my husband and I had worked as the merch team for The Magnetic Fields, criss-crossing the country with t-shirts in duffle bags and smiles on our faces. We could sell things, we knew, and live to tweet about it. I wrote a little manifesto about how a neighborhood without a bookstore is like a body without a heart, and goddamn if I don't still believe it. And so Books Are Magic was born. Here's how it came together.

First priority: bookshelves

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This is not a great photo, ELLE, and for that I apologize. But not all things in life are beautiful. As soon as we heard that BookCourt was closing, we started looking at spaces, but as you might guess, real estate in Brooklyn is ridiculous, slow, and expensive. And so when BookCourt closed at the end of 2016, we still hadn't signed the lease on our new space, but we knew we wanted as many of their bookshelves as possible. So we filled our garage with bookshelves. I used to think that it was an insane luxury that we had a garage, but now I know that the goddess always had plans for us. And that plan was storing 30 eight-foot-tall bookshelves.

A space that made us gasp

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We looked at a few spaces that were vanilla rectangles—you know, the standard white box that could just as easily be a J. Crew, a yogurt shop, or a dog shampoo emporium, the three hallmarks of any fancy neighborhood. But when we walked into 225 Smith Street, we both actually gasped. I think we gasped. I'm pretty sure we gasped. There was exposed brick, and a second room, and windows, and curved doorways—an abundance of actual character. We knew immediately that we wanted it to be our bookstore. Because it's Brooklyn, and nothing is easy, we didn't sign the lease until February, but we knew right away. This is a photo of our 3-year-old in his hamburger hat, when the store was still a construction site. Actually, from before it was a construction site, from when it was just a plain old filthy mess. He loved it.

A heavensent contractor

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This photo will embarrass him, and for that I am sorry, but the most important thing that happened next was that I got in touch with an old friend of mine from college, Matthew Maddy, who designs and builds and owns restaurants. I don't know what our plan was before Matt came to our rescue—hot glue guns and a prayer? Like a literary version of Chip and Joanna Gaines, without all the bible quotes and shiplap? Once Matt came along, our lives improved about 300 percent. Anything we wanted, he could do: sourcing vintage pink formica in Bushwick, building the kids' bookshelves of our dreams. Sometimes my husband and I would just sit and say "I love Matt Maddy" over and over again, shaking our heads at our beautiful luck. (Note: Find me one other person who can say this about a contractor and I will give you a million dollars.)

The custom illustrations

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We knew that we wanted to involve the community—the neighborhood—in any way possible. Greenlight Bookstore did a community loan program, which we thought about, and other bookstores, like The Lit Bar, have done crowdfunding campaigns, but we have an amazing investor (novelist Eddie Joyce, who has written the first Great Staten Island Novel, Small Mercies, buy a signed copy now at Books Are Magic), and so we didn't need to raise a huge amount. What we did instead was start a founding membership program, which was a wonderful excuse for me to ask my favorite authors and illustrators to make things for us! Joana Avillez drew this incredible broadside to accompany Lorrie Moore's paragraph about eating brains. I could not possibly love it more. The other print we made was for a Colson Whitehead broadside, illustrated by Jason Polan. I love Jason Polan so much, I just bought every single thing he designed for Uniqlo in three sizes so that my husband and two sons can all wear matching shirts.

The helpful suggestions

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One funny thing about opening a bookstore is that everyone has opinions about what you should stock. This is one of my father's lists, and it includes A.S. Byatt, Alan Hollinghurst, Iris Murdoch, and many others. I try not to be offended by these suggestions from people, even when I have OF COURSE already ordered several books by whichever author someone is suggesting, because they don't know that. Retail is egoless. Plus, sometimes I actually have forgotten to order someone, and then I am eternally grateful.

The magical hidey hole

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When we opened, I had two goals: Have a changing table in the bathroom, and have a thing that a kid could climb into to read a book. This hidey hole is magnetic—any child within ten feet cannot resist its powers. Though I had several great independent bookstores nearby as a kid, the store I loved more than anything else was our local video store, because they had a kind of igloo that kids could crawl into. This is our igloo, and my son Miles, in his animal pants.

The magical hidey hole, pt. II

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See? This family gets it. Mom gets extra points for her Books Are Magic totebag.

Oh, and the books

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It turns out that you need to order many thousands of books to fill an entire bookstore. Our opening inventory was approximately 10,000 books. In the first weekend, we sold 2000. The last month has been all about playing catch up on our backlist, learning what the neighborhood needs and wants, trying to guess which books will be smash hits for us. What's really fun—and occasionally maddening—is watching a book that no one expected to be a big hit sell lots of copies, and then scrambling to get it back on our shelves.

The people!

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This is the best part—the kids' room on a sunny Saturday, just chockablock. We have so many regular customers under the age of five, kids who come in every few days and already have a little routine. That's why we opened the bookstore—that's why all this work is worth it.

Finally...the cake

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Jessica Reed, the author of a book called The Baker's Appendix, baked us this cake. It was delicious. I won't lie and say that we opened the store because we thought people would bring us food, but it's a very nice perk. Melville House sent a basket of Pringles. Author Rebecca Dinerstein brought sandwiches from Rucola. My mother just dropped off a tofu banh mi from Hanco's. Honestly, if people didn't bring food, we would starve. If you're reading this, and you're wondering if we've eaten lunch today, on whatever day you're reading this, we probably haven't. We like cheese. We like cookies. We don't eat enough vegetables. And we love you, reader of words, holder of paper books. Come and see us sometime.

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