Years ago, back when the Internet was fun and people weren’t terrified to interact on it, I hit on an idea for a brick-and-mortar strip-mall store called “G33kz.” It was going to be a one-stop shop for the poor souls with a nerd in the family who had no idea what to buy them for Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, Flag Day, whatever. I wasn’t going to stock the stuff you could find at Barnes & Noble, the local gaming emporium, or (at the time) Media Play. No, I wanted the whole “indie record store” experience. I was going to go straight to the merchants and artists who sold unique oddities at Gen Con (technically, InConjunction was the local flavor back then) and staff my store with salespeople sporting the kind of elite, lovingly judgmental expertise you only see in the movie “High Fidelity.”
If your geek was a music fan, we’d sell you on a Gentle Giant or Luke Ski CD while recommending an album so obscure it only exists on a forum post from 1989. If they were gamers, we’d offer semi-precious stone dice sets that roll nat-20s at least twice a year if you store them under a waxing gibbous. If they were fanboys, we’d stock the most unhinged limited-edition collectibles from that fandom, lovingly articulated, chromed, glow-in-the-dark, and probably banned because the jetpack actually fires little plastic rockets. Maximum delight, minimum mainstream.
Sadly, ThinkGeek launched and beamed my dream right out from under me before I’d even picked a location. No foul, they got my Crhristmas bonus every year keeping my friends’ stockings filled. Their mighty empire eventually crumbled, and now it’s the lamest appendage grafted onto the GameStop empire, which itself is on life support most of the time, depending on which crypto-bro day trader you ask between protein shakes and inspirational tweets about “diamond hands.”
Lately, though, I’ve returned to a scaled-down version of the idea, targeting exclusively the writer in your family. Regardless of age, gender, or genre, we’ll have just the thing, plus a team of expert salespeople to help you locate it without making you feel like you’ve failed 8th-grade English. Most writers, even if you’re a tried-and-true typist like me, still appreciate a unique pen or a cool notebook, even if we’ve completed the 12-step program and sworn off paper and couldn’t write a legible sentence with a pen if you held a gun to our head. The only thing I use a pen for these days is signing bar tabs when I go home, and even I wouldn’t mind whipping out a dark-oak fountain pen with a 14-karat gold nib to present my waitress with her heroic 15% gratuity. Hang on, just going to pop over to Amazon real quick …
The real opportunity is marketing to what we’ll call “Lifestyle-forward writers.” It’s a fancy name for people who are more in love with the idea of being a writer than with actually getting any writing done. You probably know a few. There’s the ritualist who can only draft when the moon is waning, the candle smells like “lavender and teakwood with a hint of wild animal musk,” the Darjeeling is precisely 178 degrees Fahrenheit, and the house is silent except for rain that isn’t too rainy. Tragically, conditions haven’t been right since 2004. Then there’s the café migratory species who never leave the coffee shop because “the light is wrong at home,” so they spend their days drinking $7 macchiatos, arranging pens like a chess opening, posting photos of their scone with the hashtag #amwriting, and staring out the window while inventing backstory for their author photo. Finally, there’s the industrious brand-builder who launches seven different newsletters/blogs because they’re “trying to build the fanbase before the book is done.” Meanwhile, their six subscribers keep asking, “So … what’s the book about?” and the answer is always “It’s complicated,” followed by a link to their Substack manifesto about aesthetic direction.
To serve this market, alongside the usual assortment of clever fridge magnets, T-shirts, and mugs with quippy writing slogans, we’ll debut our signature “rustic line,” which is, in reality, junk we found at garage sales, and came up with a “secret tragic history,” before giving it a spritz of mildewy basement water for ambience, and marking it up tenfold. Picture the sales potential of possibly-haunted, scribbled-in ledgers; sealing-wax kits that promise your letters will smell like the tears of a Victorian Lady; and a curated selection of malfunctioning typewriters, each with “just a hint” that it might have belonged to a woman who wrote semi-autobiographical romance novels that suddenly vanished shortly after she, herself, passed away under mysterious circumstances. The trick here is to artfully hedge until we figure out whether the mark … er … cutstomer … is a true-crime or romance writers. Sometimes it’s hard to tell at first glance, especially when they murmur, “My protagonist is morally gray,” and then ask if the ribbon comes in “trauma red.” (All items sold as is. No refunds if actually cursed. Results may include chain-smoked inspiration.)
Yes, fine, I own a couple of cute writer-themed T-shirts and NaNoWriMo coffee mugs. I’ve finished of a half-million words (that I’ve kept) since the turn of the century, but I’ve never bought into “the lifestyle.” Aside from this blog, which I don’t even really promote to people, I’m not the guy who will sit and verbally outline his epic 12-novel series while your eyes glaze over and you jab a pen into your thigh just to feel alive again (but, I will, with encouragement). I don’t post daily word-count goals like it’s my Fitbit. I don’t do writing sprints where we all shout our accomplishments at each other every ten minutes. It annihilates any hope of immersive, narrative flow and turns it into competitive typing. Most of all, I don’t maintain a color-coded card system detailing subplots and character arcs and a software dashboard tracking progress toward each of my twenty-seven goals. (YWriter is plenty. This isn’t NORAD, and we’re not intercepting incoming adverbs.)
I’m not withholding secrets. Ask me a question—I’ll answer it. Want a draft? They’re linked somewhere in the margins depending on whether you’re on your phone or a larger screen. Ask what they’re about and I’ll use as few words as possible, like “sci-fi buddy cop,” when I’m actually dying to say, “near-future wrong-man techno-thriller about the fluidity of identity, the role of external perception as dictator of subjective reality, and the symbolic death of humanity in the face of artificial intelligence that has no concept of identity, perception, or subjective reality … oh, with two police officers who riff through ’80s buddy-cop tropes to keep things rooted and interesting for the normies.” I can do the long version, but I know you don’t care. I’m respecting your time and my blood pressure.
“What are you working on?” is just something polite, non-writers ask. They don’t really mean it, and they don’t really want the answer. It’s right up there with “How’s your day been?”, “What’s new with you?”, and “Will you marry me?” If you genuinely want to support a writer, ask, “Do you need two hours of quiet?” or “Should I bring a spicy curry with garlic naan and then leave?” or “Is $12 enough to buy a pen that makes you feel like a Victorian sea captain?” The answers, in order, are yes, yes, and absolutely.
So yes, a store for writers of all types could absolutely work if it understands the real audience. Sell the dreamy gear to the Lifestyle-Forward crowd (they’re happy, bless them), and toss a lifeline to the actual pages-get-written crowd like beat sheets, generic spiral bound notebooks, comfortable headphones that don’t squeeze your head like a medieval device, and pens that don’t skip like a moral compass at a hedge-fund retreat. Offer honest advice. Skip the performative nonsense. Maybe even offer a 3000-word money back guarantee if it doesn’t help them find their flow.
