this weekend on c-span2. plus right now online at our booktv book club, join other viewers reading "walking in the wind." see what others are saying and post your own comments. find out more at booktv.org/bookclub. .. >> hello, everyone. my name is chuck beard, i'm the sole proprietor and sole staff member at nashville's all local bookstore in east nashville. i'm truly honored and excited to introduce our next featured writer. she is a member of the authentic

little independent bookstore and club. this woman, alongside her trustee husband jack, decided to change theirs and countless others' lives when they opened their own version of what a bookstore in a small town looks like. they moved to big stone gap, virginia, bought a house, then made that house into a bookstore called tales of the lonesome pine used books. a few years gone since that fateful decision, today haven't looked back since. ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome and round of applause to the author of the little bookstore at big stone gap, the one and only wendy welch. [applause] >> thank you, chuck. little bookstore owners have to stick together, particularly in this economy. well, as i'm getting started, i

just want to know how many of you have actually read the book and how many have just heard something about it? okay, that will guide a little bit of what we're talking about today. well, the little bookstore of big stone gap -- and thank you for bringing a copy with you. good. the little bookstore at big stone gap started about six and a half, seven years ago now, and it started because my husband and i fled a job that was soul destroying, and we wound up kind of heartbroken and broke in a very small town in southwest virginia where i was going to take a simple job and do it for a year, and we were going to just hang out and regroup and rent something and get our feet back under us and restore our faith in humanity and move on to something else. i had just gotten a ph.d. in one of the most useless degrees possible, and the economy was tanking. it was 2006. everything was taking a nose dive. and in the course of looking for that little apartment that was going to be very cheap, we came across this huge five bedroom

edwardian,1903. and the only reason we went into it was because the person who was showing us around happened to pick it up that day, and she wanted to, she just wanted to see what was in it. and she knew that we had live inside an old house in england. she said you guys don't mind if we just stop and take a look at this, i've got to list this property tomorrow, and i won't have a chance to see it. so she stopped, and my husband and i go back and forth on whether she set us up or not, because when we walked away from that house, all i could think the whole time i was walking through this edwardian, this huge old house with the squeaky wood floors, all i could think was what a beautiful bookstore this would make. my husband and i were kind of folkies, and we did a lot of weekend road trips to run off to festivals, and when you're driving home from those at 8:00

at night on a sunday, you've got to find something to talk about. and we would always talk about how someday we were going to run a used bookstore. it would be fun to run a used bookstore. so the whole time we're walking through this edwardian, i'm thinking this is the perfect bookstore location. except for the fact that it's in a town of 5,000 people. other than that, it's just really quite nice. and we walked through the house and thanked her, it was a nice thing. we went on and looked at a couple more apartments, and she said why don't you all go and have lunch, and i'll pick you up this afternoon. so my husband and i went to one of two restaurants in big stone gap -- it's a small town -- and we sat there over the chip basket, it was a mexican restaurant, and kind of didn't look at each other. i swore, i swore to myself the word bookstore was not going to come out of my mouth. it was the wrong time. the economy was tanking, e-books

were hoving into view on the surrounding, you know, on the horizon, and i didn't have a marketable job skill at this point. i was, like, this overeducated woman who could do anything but couldn't prove it to anyone. and we're looking at this little, tiny town where yuppie hippies might not be entirely welcome, you know? we might be democrats. this might not go well. and i'm thinking this isn't going to work. so i'm not saying a word. and my husband looks at me, and he said, boy, that house would make a great bookstore. [laughter] okay. you know, this changed the whole timbre of the conversation. i said, yeah, it would, were you thinking of that? he said, no, no, it's too silly to think of a bookstore right now, absolutely no point. i said, yeah, you're right, we couldn't possibly, we'd starve to death. it'd be awful. yeah, it would. he looked at me and said someday we'll start a bookstore. yeah, we will.

he looked at me again and said what if someday's today? and i swear to you that the wait staff must have thought we were crazy because the only thing i did, the only thing i could think to do, i just reached across the table and kissed him on the mouth. and that's why we started a bookstore. it was a dumb thing to do. it was a really dumb thing to do. we did not know what we were doing. we had no clue. we had no market plan, we had no money. we had walked away from a very difficult situation, owning a house outright. so yord to buy the edwardian, we were going to have to get a mortgage which frightened me. we'd always been in the fortunate position of owning the house. but having walked away from this difficult position, i said, you know, if we're going to do this, we're going to have to get a mortgage and tuck down and get in there and make it work. well, one of the fastest ways to insure a success is to be desperate. we were, we were just absolutely terrified that we were going to sink. and we didn't have anything to

sink into. so we threw ourselves into getting this house prepared for being a bookstore. and one of the things we were determined would happen was that we would welcome the community. and, of course, the community would welcome us because we were selling books. who doesn't love books? everybody loves books. it's really cool to have a bookseller in your family, in your community. and we figured we'd throw open our doors, and the community would stream through. well, there's this stuff called advertising, and we didn't know how to do it. and even if we had, we didn't have any money. so we were sitting in this house trying to figure out how to tell people that we were going to open as a bookstore, and we had a whole lot of wooden book schells up -- book shelves up lining the room that my husband had built, and we didn't have any books on them, and we didn't have a plan for telling people how we were going to get started, and we didn't have any more money. this is called a problem.

we need a slight solution here. we began to look at our own book collection. how many of you are by lo files? i was -- bib low files? i was kind of betting. how many of you have, oh, 3,000 books right now? that's what we did. we tallied about 3,000 books we owned personally. 2,000 of them went into the bookstore. and we sat and made deals. we sat upstairs unpacking our boxes box by box, book by book negotiations. you get to keep this one if i get to keep this one. you get to keep positively fourth street if i get to keep croceing with finger punishments. [laughter] two weeks later i was in the laundry hamper, and he found a book he had hidden so it would not go through this process. so we threw our books into the pile, and we looked around for a way to advertise without any money. well, the only thing we had was our home printer and a really good car. the other thing that was

problematic for us is big stone gap is in between markets. there's king's port and then there's roanoke, and we're in the middle. and there aren't any big cities around us. so we're not anybody's market. we had a couple of local issues of the paper that come out a couple times a week, but that's it. if there's a tornado, we get the warning 20 minutes afterwards because we're not on the stream. so there was no way to advertise. well, we had found a local church in the community, and we had met a woman there named terry who ran the local chiropractor's office, and she home schooled, and she really wanted a bookstore for her kids. she was really excited we were in town. she said, tell you what, when you open, i will get free books from you, and in return, you can use your photocopier for free for anything you want. she had a color photocopier. so we quickly sealed this deal, and we went and made hundreds of photocopies and drove around leaving them at local

businesses, hi, there's a bookstore starting. i went to yard sales, hi, i see you like books. and everybody said pretty much the same thing, a bookstore? you're nuts. yeah, we probably are. this is where it started to get interesting. how many of you are from a small town? okay. you probably recognize what i'm going to describe. we live in a small town in the coal fields of ap appalachia, ad there's this funny little drum beat that runs through these small towns. it's kind of on the one hand we belong to ourselves and we're powerful in and of ourselves, and in the other we don't like incomers because they might change the way we are, but they might also, they might also be people who push the boundaries of what we went to explore about ourselves. so what happened was we had people from outside who were e-mailing us and saying you're

not going to find enough people who can read in these small towns that are going to want to frequent your bookstore. and we said, yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you very much. that's not the case. but inside the town we had people saying one of two things is going to happen. either you're going to open the bookstore and it's going to be successful and you're going to go straight up the road to roanoke where successful people go because no one is here unless they get stuck here. no one wants to be here. or you're going to fail, and you're going to stay here, and you're going to be nothing because you're here. now, if you had a daughter who had that attitude in life, wouldn't you just take her to get her colors done and buy her a new dress and talk to her about the way she was thinking about herself? these are small towns. these are sort of the trouble that small towns are having within themselves. and when we saw this kind of repeat mentality, because we had come from a small town in scotland, and my husband often refers to anything north of edinborough as being the rest of

scotland. it's just too small. and there's a saying that runs through scotland, too poor, too wee, too stupid. and that came up over and over again as we explored how we were going to run this bookstore. people kept telling us not that we couldn't run a bookstore, but that we couldn't run a bookstore in a small town in the coal fields of appalachia because there wouldn't be enough business, because we weren't local enough, or there wouldn't be enough business because we were too local, and people would think we were stupid. that is not a recipe for success. it's not a recipe for success over the long haul as a sustainable community, and one of the things i do now as a college professor over and over again is i tell my students, don't buy into that. it's not true. you are wonderful, intelligent, smart people with the ability to change the world in your hands, and you are our best export. it's not coal that we export in appalachia, it's 18-24-year-olds

with brains and vision, and we need you back. so if you're listening to me, i know c-span booktv is maybe not the 18-24-year-old demographic -- [laughter] but let me tell you, come home. come home and build a business, because we need you. that is the wave of the future for us and for all of america, the small businesses that we need. that's one of the reasons we're proud of what happened with little bookstore. we opened, and about three years after we opened we were stabilizing. a lot of things went wrong in those three years. but when we stabilized, i sort of sat down and said to myself, okay, what was that? and there's a wonderful quote by flannery o'connor, i always mess it up. this is a paraphrase, but it basically says don't ask me what i think until i've written it down, because i can tell you when i read it. and that's pretty much what happened here. i sort of sat down and wrote the story of what happened with little bookstore, and when i was telling it to a friend of mine, she said, that's funny.

you should write that down and send it somewhere. well, sooner or later i found someone to send it to who thought it was both funny and charming, and the little bookstore was published. so what happened after that got really interesting. these three covers here, the one on my left shoulder is from korea and then the american one, and the far one is from portugal. when they came out in those countries, we started getting e-mails from booksellers in those countries, and they started saying some of the same things that we had found when we started our bookstore or as we were fighting the big a and some of the other things that bookstores fight these days, any small, independent store fights these days. and we began to find that we had joined and helped stabilize a community sort of like what chuck was talking about. his bookstore in east nashville, our bookstore in southwest virginia. independent bookstores all over the country, all over the world, we are community anchors. the big bookstores like

asheville or the tattered cover in denver, those bookstores are economic anchors. they get down into the sidewalk and the roots of their community, and they pull other stores around them, you know? there are chocolate stores next to asheville's, there are coffee shops, craft stores, bead stores and dog stores, all of them surrounding where these book lovers are going to congregate. same in tattered cover, same in nashville, same in memphis. but in some of the smaller towns, little bookstores are also community anchors. we're less economic because we don't have the power to pull other people behind us. it's not like you build a walmart, and the next thing you do is build an applebee's, but we opened our bookstore six years ago. this past tuesday we opened a café in the second story of our bookstore. the economic stability we bring to our region, we're very proud of.

but more proud are we of the community of people that have been built around the bookstore. we began to get people visiting the bookstore when the book came out. it came out last october. it did better than we expected it to do, and people who were reading it and were within a day's drive or two days' drive began to call us and say can we come and visit? whole book clubs would do that. so currently we have 12 book clubs that have visited the bookstore and nine we have gone to visit for more than a day trip and a bunch of other book clubs that have read it as well. the woman standing at the door, i don't think that can be me, because she's too skinny. anyway, that's one of the groups that came to visit the bookstore. over the course of running it, we began to develop a kind of a sense that when the book came out, a bunch of people came to us, and they were kind of shifting their feet and looking down, and they were kind of grinning, and they said, you

know, we're really proud of you, we're really glad you're still here. this was six years after we opened the bookstore. we're really crowd of you because when you came, we gave you six months. yeah, you guys were the you're nuts people, weren't you? yeah, they were. what's funny about these two quotes is these are actually six years apart. the community said when we came it's not going to work, you're not going to stick the. six years on when the book came out online, there was one of my favorite reviews ever of this book -- i don't really read reviews. my husband reads them, but like many authors, no thanks, you know? if you want to talk to me, that's fine, but i'm not going to read the reviews. a woman was on, i think, good reads, and she gave the book a fair review, but she said i work for a bookseller, and i'm here to tell you, this book is fiction. this is not how you run a bookstore. yeah, baby, i know. [laughter] we got that. we know this is not how you run it. but six years on we're finding

that it is how you work your way into a community. it is how you uphold a community. and that's what i want to talk to you about now. some of the things we do at our bookstore are sort of obvious, you know? every tuesday night there's a needle work night. we plot the revolution. that's owen, the staff cat that's on my lap there. he's sitting on what we call a spay and neuter afghan. my friends and i -- [laughter] >> yeah. if you don't spay and neuter your cat you get row afro after row of cats. but the cat that's sitting there, owen, the reason he got his name is because my editor, nicole, and i early on when we began to work together and she'd looked at the whole manuscript of the book, she said, you know, i really, really like this list of books that you've got that you love. some of them are unusual. but this list of books that you

hate, i had put a top ten and bottom ten list in the book. she said i really can't publish someone who doesn't like john irving's "a prayer for owen meanny." i am sorry that this lowers me in your estimation, i know it will. see, she's crossing her arms in the front row here. i don't like that book, okay? i'm really sorry, but i don't. there, now i've said it. so nicole said, no, we're not publishing anybody who doesn't like that. there was kind of a lot of joking back and forth, and the next foster cat that came through actually was very ill, and he needed to be nursed, so i named him owen meanny. and i told nicole that owen meanny was now gracing the shelves of the bookstore. and she accepted that. she went ahead and published the book. we hold a lot of community eventeds in or near the bookstore, and one of the things we do twice a year is a murder mystery because there is nothing that will clear the air in a

divided community like a good murder. how many of you had school issues in your small town? yeah? we had some issues where the county schools were going to consolidate, and they were going the pull town schools together and locate them out between two communities or, even worse, move one community school into the other community school. and, of course, this was largely about sports teams. people got upset. and be it got so heated people were unfriending each other on facebook, it was that bad. [laughter] so we held a murder mystery, and we murdered the superintendent of schools. and it was amazing how people cheered up after that. [laughter] you know? it just takes one good murder to clear the air. so we hold murders twice a career, and they're always themed on something that's going on in town, and people get out what's bugging them. they're like steam valves for the community. and every year we hold a dance in march and a celtic festival

in september. the first year we held the dance in march, our bookstore was so empty, we started with 3500 books and the shelves just lining around the edge of the bookstore, that big edwardian mansion, we were actually able to hold the dance in the bookstore because it was just that crowded. that doesn't work anymore. yeah. that's the bookstore. you can see owen's checking out a box. he's always working. he's always working with us. so the bookstore is -- i like to say that we work on keeping it alphabetized. my husband likes to say that we are a treasure-trove where you make incredible discoveries every day, and that's because we're so disorganized. i told you about opening the second story café. that's actually their signature dish, the french toast with sea salt caramel sauce on top, and it's a famous seller. that's kelly in the corner there. i think one of the neatest things we've ever been able to do as a bookstore in our

community is provide a need to the community because we had a beloved restaurant called the mutual. it was in a pharmacy, and a chain pharmacy bought the local pharmacy out and closed the restaurant. i mean, they weren't evil, they just needed to do it for their own balance and their own planning. but it wasn't a good move for the community. now, the man who runs that chain for the region lives in our community, and he's a nice man and a good member of the community. but we lost our restaurant because of this business decision. so jack and i cast about for someone who wanted to run a restaurant. we did not want to run one, but we wanted someone to do it. and we found kelly, and we offered her rent-free the upstairs use of our store if she would run a café, and we would make a profit share agreement once she reached a certain revenue rate. and she jumped at it.

they've been open for a week. theyed sold out this morning. -- they sold out this morning. they opened for brother or sister at 8:-- business at 8:30 and they ran out of food at 9 a.m. it comes back to the need for small businesses to be the heartbeat of their community. that's what we do in big stone gap. we are not just trying to make our own money. we're trying to keep our community circulating in and for and of itself. how many of you were aware of the shop sitters story that went out last year? this was actually pretty funny. when jack and i realized that the book was going to be published, we had gone on a tour in 2011 so that i could finish one of the chapters of the book. we had gone out to five states and back up through the next five states, and we had visited small bookstores in little towns across america as far out as we could get.

we never got to kansas before we had to turn around because we only had two weeks. we went to 42 towns. guess how many of them had thriving downtowns? 42 small towns. guess how many of them had thriving downtown areas? more than three. eighteen. eighteen of them had thriving downtowns, and the others you could practically see the tumble weeds driving through. but they all had walmarts and pharmacies on the edge of town, nice bright places that stayed open until 9 p.m. what they didn't have was a downtown section. so we wrote a lot about this in little bookstore of big stone gap, but what we realized as october was rolling around and the release date was coming and we were going back to those bookstores on an author tour, we realized we didn't have anyone to run our bookstore while we were gone. it's a very small operation, it's just the two of us, and it makes its ends meet with the two

staff. so we put out just kind of thinking maybe someone would be interested in this. i contacted a friend of mine called the goodwill librarian who's on facebook, and i said would you mind to put out this little blurb that we're looking for someone who would like to live in the shop? we now live in the basement below it because we put the caée above it, but we said would you ask if there's someone who just wants to come and run the bookstore for two months, and they can live completely off our dime? they don't have to buy anything, they don't have to pay represent, they eat in the café, i mean, they eat in the café across the street or out of our fridge, whatever they want they can buy out of our cash box, but we won't pay them a salary. and do you think there's someone who's thinking someday they might want to run a week store or some -- bookstore or some college kid who's in between jobs, and my friend said i'll find out. so being the great marketer that i am, when i put that out, i

actually failed to mention that it was because i had written a book and was going on a book tour that i wanted this person to do this. so we got all these really interesting e-mails from all sorts of people who were sort of interested in this deal. but it overnight went from four people to about 360 people who were tweeting and facebooking and reposting this status. and by the end of the day, there were a thousand people who had reposted this thing. unfortunately, what was happening was most of the people who like goodwill librarian are employed librarians, so we were kind of poaching in someone else's territory. they were all going i can get a leave of absence, and i'm thinking, oh, great, now i've done it. this is like a pastor who goes to someone else's congregation. but the goodwill librarian actually suggested we get in touch with robert gray who writes the column for shelf awareness, and he said -- we

asked him if he would mind putting in a small ad saying we were looking for a shop sitter. he said, i'll do you one better, i get 750 words and send me some pictures, so we sent some cute pictures of owen climbing the shelves, and we tried to be charming and cute and hoped someone would want to do this. we had 186 applications, and the applications included places like sweden. my husband still regrets there were two women who applied from sweden, and they sent pictures of themselves in their bikinis, and my husband still regrets that we went on the book tour and didn't hire these women. it went everywhere. it went on npr, it went through the l.a. times, it went through a lot of big papers. and what i found was, okay, this was fun. this was nice publicity for the book because the second time we remembered to put the book in there, but it was also, it also reinforced at least two, maybe three things. one, we only did it because we thought it might be b a good

idea. there was nothing cynical about it. it was just a way of making it work. and it went viral. for no other reason than that we just asked nicely, and a bunch of people responded nicely. we did not have people who were cynical about this at all. they were really genuine people. secondly, most of them were from big cities and, of course, we got a few applications that said, you know, idyllic country living, and i are work on -- i will work on my novel and this kind of thing. but for the most part, what we found were people who were kind of longing to get into what they recognized as a small community and kind of be jump-started as a member of it. there was this really poignant wish to be part of a team and a community, and you could see it in the applications that they sent us. and third, the bookstore is not dead. no way is the bookstore dead. if we had 186 people who

actually asked to do this for no pay, just for room and board for two months, and we had a couple of thousand people retweeting and resending this over and over again, reports of the bookstore's death are greatly exaggerated, thank you very much. there's actually an article i'm going to show you in a minute from the christian science monitor said 2012 was the year of the bookstore. it goes pack to what i was saying -- back to what i was saying when we put this story out in the first place. when you do what's in front of you because you think it's important and because you think it's a good idea, nobody can take that away from you. and the consequences of your decision are bigger than just for you. nobody's going to beat amazon, right? but we don't have to. all we have to do is fly below the radar and do what we're doing. people want to come to our bookstore because it's fun. they want to pet the cats, they want to eat the french toast, they want to hear jack's accent, they want to tell us a story. they come not because we're

convenient, not because we're easy, but because we're fun. and because they value us being there. we now employ people in our community. we employ kelly. we have a part-time person who works for us. we are slowly but surely creeping up. now we employ four people in the community, thank you, but in big stone gap that's about .1% of the population. so let's not curse the darkness, right? those of us who are bibliophiles, those of us who love bookstores and small towns, let's not curse the darkness. let's tush on the lights -- turn on the lights, keep the lights burning in our independent bookstores and greenhouses and hardwares across america because that's what keeps a community going. that's what keeps your young people there. so we were really proud of that story going viral. and, of course, i need to introduce you to a few people at the bookstore. that's beulah there in front of the planter. beulah is the shop greeter. of course, you've met owen meanny, he's the staff intern,

and he does the actual brunt work. if we ever have a promotion, he has to do that. and then you see val kitty down there at the bottom, and val kitty is exceedingly proud of the fact that in the large print edition it is her picture that features on the cover. so she would like you to know that. sheshe is the chief financial officer of the bookstore. this is just one of a typical day at the bookstore. we were just having a few friends over for dipper, and someone snapped this -- for dinner, and someone snapped this photo. i told you a little while ago that when we, when the bookstore was -- little bookstore was published in korea and in portugal, people began to e-mail us from bookstores over there. well, it's kind of a joke, but i'm big in korea. [laughter] i'm big in korea. because publisher e-mailed and said you need to give us access to your photos right away,

because we have a chance to put you in the national newspaper, like the big -- "the new york times" equivalent or "the wall street journal", and we need to do it right now. we've only got about four hours. so i said, sure, and i immediately made by translator an administrator. well, this is the picture she picked. so this picture went across korea, and i started to get a whole bunch of blog readers from korea and also a couple of friend requests on facebook. and when i translated the friend request, it said things like crazy people like you, which i hope means i like you, you crazy people. i don't know if it had actually cut off the crazy people like you should be put away, i don't know. [laughter] translator's not reliable. but we're really, really proud of the fact that the little bookstore has created two kinds of a community. we settled into that area, you know, heartbroken and financially broke people just trying to make something happen. and everything we've done has been, for the most part, because we were trying to make something happen. sometimes it happened well, sometimes it didn't happen at

all. but we had no idea when we published the book that this second community would form of booksellers with heart, you know? independent booksellers who wanted to talk to each other, who wanted to solve their problems together. we tapped into, quite accidentally, in portugal there is a community of booksellers that actually gets together once a year and goes on a retreat. there are about 60 of them. and there's a bookstore on the east coast -- well, i'm not sure if it's in the east coast, but they had a seaside resort there, and the booksellers have an awards ceremony and a brainstorming session where they continue to work out how they're going to stay alive for the next year. not just stay alive, but thrive and be members of their community. we had no idea any of that was out there until this book sort of landed and began to make its own friends and bring those friends back to us. so it's not, oh, we're so glad that we got this going. we didn't. we didn't know it was there until we hit it accidentally

with the book, and we're just so proud to be a part of that community and so proud to be a part of bringing that community together. so i think one of the reasons we're proud of bringing that community together is this quote, which i love. i think a lot of you have probably seen the quote which circulates on facebook all the time. it says when you buy from a local merchant, you're not just hoping a ceo get a second vacation home, you're paying for a little girl's dance lessons, sending a kid to college, helping someone plan their retirement. all those things are true. when you buy from your local community, that money stays in your community, and that money does good things for your community. and we're really, really happy that we're part of that movement. this is the article i was telling you about from the christian science monitor that 2012 was the year of the bookstore. i was one of several independent bookstore owners who was interviewed for it.

and again, you can say that america's going to turn into a corporation instead of independent people, but there's always going to be people out there who just do what's in front of them because it's the right thing to do, not because they think they're going to get great financial rewards for it. trust us, we eat a lot of peanut butter, don't we, jack? a lot of mac and cheese. but we're okay with that because there's rich and then there's having a lot of money, and we know the difference when we're booksellers. i'd love to hear from you. these are the ways you can get in touch with me. on the blog, actually, on the blog today you will see chuck featured about this. we're on facebook both as tales of the lonesome pine and the second story café, and then our sales. fairly often jack gets introduced as mr. welch, and he takes it well. but we decided when we got married that he would keep his

last name. [laughter] there's also a video on youtube of some of the craziness that we do from day to day-to-day, and we'd be more than happy to talk to you about that. the last thing i want to do is tell you the story of the day i found out little bookstore was going to get published. my husband and i having sent the manuscript off to my agent which was a long and heavy slog, believe me, that was in april of 2011. we decided that we had been in business for five years, we were still standing, we had eaten a lot of peanut butter, but we were still there. and in celebration of having finished writing the manuscript that we didn't know if it was going to get published or not -- and let me just take a pause here, how many of you like to write? let me give you just one piece of advice. everything you do as a writer, celebrate it. you never know what's going to happen next, and it doesn't matter. when you do the thing that you wanted to do, celebrate it. if something else happens, celebrate that, too, but we

threw a party the day i finished writing the book before with i knew whether i had an editor or not. we had a bunch of friends over. when i got my agent, we threw a party. we like parties. when we sent the book off to the agent for her to shop it around, it was july 3rd, and she said if we don't get this down before july 4th, publishing closes down in august or it's not going to happen until september. we're going to have to look again. so i sent it to her on july 3rd, and then my husband and i jumped onto expedia and looked for half price vacation deals. we were going to celebrate the fact that i finished this manuscript, and we're going to celebrate the fact that we've been in business for five years as a bookseller. don't care what happens tomorrow, we're just going to celebrate. so we found this really cheap hotel and flight deal in chicago where we'd really never been. and we wound up -- i don't know if any of you know chicago, but it was the palmer house hotel which is a beautiful place, just

gorgeous. and we didn't know anything about it, and we landed, you know, two hicks with their suitcase and a paper bag. and we looked up the palmer house has a fresco of the night sky painted on it with all the constellations. and we looked up at that and kind of went -- so we spent a week hanging out in this hotel, and on the last day we were there when i got up in the morning, my phone had a message on it. and it was from my agent, pamela, who was also on vacation. and she had told me you won't hear from me for the whole week you're gone. don't worry about it, we'll talk when i get back. she was in france. but the message was from pamela, and it said call the office. and i thought, oh, i'm in trouble. so i picked it up, and i called, and her assistant was there, and she said, wendy, there are three publishers bidding on your book. i said, is that good? she said, yeah, honey, that's

good. so she explained what was going to happen. one of them dropped out because they weren't quite ready, but the other two moved forward, and they set up phone calls for me that afternoon on which one i wanted to work with. basically, i needed to interview the editors and see who met my needs. [laughter] okay. so i hang up the phone, and i'm just sitting there dazed, and jack who has been dragged from sleep a little earlier than he wanted to be said what was that? i said, we sold the book. that was the last thing michelle said to me. she said it doesn't matter which one you choose, you've sold this book today. we screamed and we whooped and we hollered, and we ran down the stairs, and this is one of those really expensive hotels where they charge you extra for breathing, so we were always going around the corner to the little café and having our breakfast. so we went downstairs to have our breakfast, and jack went in to get the bagels and the coffee, and i sat down, and there was the, i think it was

"the chicago tribune", and it was open to a story that said remaining 400 borders to close their doors. i read that, and he came out, and, you know, i had been like crying with euphoria when he went into the shop, and when he came out i was sitting there all gray and dismal. he said what? he looked at it, and he looked at me, i said there's a borders that we passed about three blocks from the hotel. so we basically left our breakfast untouched and raced over there. and they were unplugging the computers from the walls, and they were taking the stuff down from the second story and piling it on big tables to sell it and closing off the upstairs. and i rooked at one of the guys -- i looked at one of the guys carrying the computer and what i really wanted to know was do you mind if i take a photo of this? because i just wanted to remember that moment. it was horrible. and i just, i wanted that photo as a bookseller. and he -- but when he turned his face to me, when i said can i

ask you a question, he was crying. and i said i just want you to know i'm a bookseller, too s and i'm so sorry. i didn't try anymore empathy. there's pain you can't touch. and we bought a couple of books, and we walked out. when we got home, we hung the bag in the bookstore, it's still happening with a note below it that says in memoriam. so that was how i sold my book. that was the day i sold my book. and, you know, i'm proud of my book, and i'm happy it's done so well, and i'm just delighted that our bookstore is still thriving, but i'm always mindful that there's a lot of us working together to make sure that the world holds itself together and that in the future we have communities that we're proud of where our children are safe and our work is our pride and where we spend our money is because we believe in those people. and that's what i'm proud of about publishing "the little

bookstore at big stone gap." so i would be more than happy to take a couple of questions. we've got about ten minutes for that. >> if you want to go back to the microphone -- [inaudible] i'll go ahead and start it off. your book is great, and your story's wonderful -- >> thank you. >> and as you mentioned with the town of 5,000 people, i'm sure more than 3,000 of them read the book and then told the other two with about it, so what did they think about the characters even though you changed the names? >> there was actually a big joke going around town. not all the names are changed. so the joke was if your name's been changed, there's a reason, and you're in trouble. [laughter] for the most part, the town really likes it. for those of you who haven't read the book, there's a very funny story in it about the local kiwanis club. and you know how small towns things happen every day that no one ever expects to be called to account for. right. so sometimes local towns just get in little power plays and things go silly and things go

sideways, and six months later no one can remember what it's about. well, in this particular power play got written up in the book. and we have numbers -- i'm not going to tell you because you need to read the book or ask someone in town about it, but we hung -- my husband got rejected from kiwanis club membership. now, you have to be bad to get rejected from kiwanis club membership. [laughter] and when we got rejected, we hung the rejection letter in the bookstore. it was; you know, we were supposed to be embarrassed, and we were actually kind of like this is so silly. so we hung the letter up. and people started coming to see the letter and telling us stories of when they had been done by a power play and what had happened and why they felt the way they did about it. well, when the book got published, those poor kiwanians just got it in the neck, right? it's not really their fault. you make a thousand decisions every day that you think aren't going to have any consequence, and all of a sudden one of them goes viral, and oops! we really enjoyed the number of

people who have come and told us their stories about small towns, and in our small town there are a lot of people who just recognize that's the way the cookie crumbles, you know? we always have worked this way, we probably always will work this way. small towns are their own unique sense of community and governance, and that's fine with us. we like being a part of it. so for the most part, everybody likes it. there's a couple of kiwanians who still don't sit with us at christmas dinner. >> understandably. >> yeah. >> anybody else a question? i don't want to butt in. >> we need you to go to that mic back there. i'm very sorry, but your hair looks great. [laughter] >> okay. it's a catwalk. go ahead. work it. >> number one or a, do they still have the trail of lonesome pine in the summertime? >> yes, they do. >> the big part of that question, does that increase your business? are you getting anything from that? >> um, i think it's a two-way

street. now because the book has been a little more popular than we expected, starting -- the book came out in october, and by halloween we had had three or four people who had come down to stay the night with us. the drama doesn't run in the winter. i think some of those people came back in the spring because we gave them the flyer. barbara polly lives up the street from us, and the drama's down the street. also we always advertise every year in the program. >> right. >> so it's a two-way. >> okay. since i'm here, are they ever going to do anything about the highway between big stone gap and lynch, kentucky? [laughter] to make it a little easier to get to you? >> no. [laughter] i'm very sorry, but, no, they're not. [laughter] if you have a question, go back to the mic back there. follow tina, she's on her way. >> i just want to know what's in the pipeline, what's the next book and what's it going to be about? >> there's a book being proposed

right now, st. martin, i think it's called options. they get first refusal, and the proposal's actually with them right now. we're going up to new york november 4th-7th to hang out and chat and see. so i think st. martins is probably going to, we're going to continue to work together. but the book is tentatively titled "little is the new big," or "why little is the new big." and it's about what we've been talking about with community shops and the explosive growth of farmers' markets, the explosive growth of independent bookstores and people looking to reclaim their own lives and, you know, no harm to them, the people who work in walmart are nice people, but to stay out of walmart, to stay out of the ways in which walmart and other very, very large businesses do business that the costs are hidden. the short-term cheapness is paying a long-term, is taking a long-term price out of us and out of our children's futures. be so i'm working on a book

about that. >> well, my husband was born in a ham let in southwest virginia -- >> which one? >> darwin, virginia, which we found recently had more or less disappeared from the map. but when he was six months also, his parents moved to puff frees borrow -- murfreesboro which was like moving to new york city. he had not been back until two years ago we went up there, and what i was just wondering is do you attract sight seers, customers, book lovers from the area? are most of them fairly close by? and i would think that your book would certainly have done something in just making curiosity seekers, maybe tourists in the area? >> yeah. >> pay a visit? but it's a beautiful, such a beautiful area. but it's, you know, it's appalachia. >> yeah. it is beautiful. we're surrounded by that mountain bowl, and it is a cool place to visit. yeah, there are, there are

people who have come to see us because of the book. the farthest away has been oregon, which we found kind of interesting. what we usually find is i don't know how many of you ever looked big stone gap up on a map, you have to to work pretty hard to get there. you're going to be an hour off any major highway. so what happens is people who are planning a trip for some reason deviate, and they add an extra day, or they road trip to the side. so it's not that the lady from oregon said, oh, i must see this bookstore. it was that she knew she was going to be in cincinnati, and she saw that cincinnati was about five hours' drive from us, so she added a day and came down to see us. i like to say i had somebody from oregon come and visit, but what actually happened was she added a day to her trip. of course, big stone gap has been home to some big writers, there's john fox jr.'s trail of the lonesome pine that's already been mentioned. so we have a history of literary tourism, if you will.

and i'm, i'm kind of happy to have joined that. i know that people came when we held the celtic festival, they came to the bookstore, and they filled up the local hotels, and that was good for the economy and good for the town. we're happy about that. >> any other questions? um, i guess we've got time for one more. i wanted to go ahead and say one quote that stuck in my held because i've talked to several people before this session and several of them talked about wanting to or dreaming about opening a bookstore down the line, and you had added a quote by robert specter, page 160 if you get the book out. if you're opening a bookstore because you love reading books, then become a night watchman because you'll be able to read more books that way. [laughter] but i wanted, aside from reading your book and the list that you made clefly within it as well -- cleverly within it, what advice would you give people about chasing that dream to run a

bookstore? >> to run a bookstore? >> uh-huh. >> okay. this is going to sound funny. don't pay rent. seriously. don't pay rent. we made it because we bought the house we lived in, and it pays us to live in it. and when we successed ourself out of living above it, we moved into the basement of it. my husband jack can build anything out of two nails and a 2x4. and i think i knit us a toilet at one point. [laughter] so we live in a scrapped-together but pleasant basement. and run the café out of the second story and the bookstore out of the first, and that's the reason we were able to offer kelly that arrangement where we didn't charge her rent. we wanted the community to have this café. and, you know, we're not stupid. we don't want to pay for having a café. but we had a very gentle profit-sharing agreement for that. so the first advice is don't pay rent. the second advice is don't open a bookstore if you just love books and you don't love people. you will kill someone, and you will go to jail for it.

[laughter] third advice, don't open a bookstore if you're afraid of spiders if you're flying solo, because every box of books that comes into you will have a spider in it. you need a partner who is not afraid of spiders. and if you've got a partner who can kill spiders, if you're not paying rent and you like people, you're going to be fine. you have to be smart. you have to start small, slow, gentle. you don't start within 30 miles of another bookstore, there's no point. but it's amazing where bricks and mortar store, where bricks and mortar stores are in america. it's not your grandma's bookstore anymore. or it is your grandma's bookstore, but it's in a different place. they're in the basements of churches, they're in the back rooms of people's houses, they're in sheds out by the highway. and they're thriving. and some of them are absolutely beautiful. if you ever go to square books or square one books in oxford, mississippi, that store is magnificent. it's beautiful.

but then you can also go to the book barn just outside louisville, and it's not magnificent, but, boy, got a heartbeat that you can hear 40 miles away. it's this lovely place. that's my advice. don't open a bookstore if you don't like people. and i think that's probably all that we have time for. i'm going to be over at the plaza ostensibly signing books, but my observation has been that usually there are two very, very large name authors signing books and everyone else is sitting there trying hard not to look embarrassed, so i would love it if you just came over and talked to me. i'll be crocheting items, and we'll look forward to seeing you there. thank you all for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> author and after this is neil

degrasse tyson on america's call for scientists and engineers. >> as nasa's future goes, so, too, does that america. if nasa is healthy, then you don't need a program to convince people that signed an engine is good to do. because they will see it writ large on the paid for. there will be calls for engineers to help us go ice fishing on your robe with is an ocean of water that's been liquid for billions of years. we're going to dig through the source of mars and look for life. that will give me the best by a just a click of the nasa portfolio today. it's got biology, chemistry, physics, geology, planetary geology, aerospace engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers. oldest infields, science, technology, engineering and math. represented in the nasa portfolio. a healthy nasa pumps that. a healthy nasa is a flywheel that society casts for

innovation. >> over the past 15 years booktv hazard over 40,000 programs about nonfiction books and authors. booktv every weekend on c-span2. >> what inspired you to write a book about charles? >> we had this great captains, great leaders and we read about alexander the great and hannibal and napoleon and wellington, moral broker we're supposed to distill lessons from the military generous country in -- military genius. who were the worst generals? we don't look at situations in which generals prevailed, but whether we look at strategy or tactics, logistics, technology. they were put in very been an evil -- were the public opinion

and bureaucracy or the elected tech not searching have given up on the war. i want to find people throughout history who should not have one and are not responsible for the bleak situation they inherited and yet they prevailed. a salvage. maybe he didn't win it but they saved it. it. >> i would love to go back and talk more about this great captains in those genres of history but first of i care a little more about those you chose. >> that was targeted because everybody asks me that question. he saved the beach when i'm camping. george patton saved the american army after the humiliation and now after. i was looking particularly at situations that have chronological sweeps. all the way to david petraeus and the search but i was also looking for things that wer