We’re a transbian couple in Wichita, Kansas. We currently run an online queer bookstore and want to expand into a physical location so that we can increase our inventory, create a safe hangout space for queer folks, and provide more services to the local community. As we don’t have access to traditional sources of capital (unfortunately neither of us picked the “senior software dev” skill tree when class speccing), we’re reliant on crowdfunding to get our start before more traditional sources like business loans and grants become available to us.

Hi! We’re Alex & Lilith Tackett, we’re a trans & lesbian couple out of Wichita Kansas. We run Sapphic Sweets and Reads ICT, a queer bookstore dedicated to selling queer-centered fiction and nonfiction. When we initially started the store at the beginning of this year, we saw a void to be filled in the Wichita queer space & community: Wichita has no dedicated queer bookstore, and very few not-21-plus queer-focused places for folks to hang out and exist for a bit. This is in spite of a metro of well over half a million people, and a thriving queer community.  It’s difficult for queer folks of all ages to find a place to casually socialize without the expectation of paying for something, while access to rarer and harder-to-find queer books is often only available through big retailers like Amazon or disparate and individual author-specific sites.

Beyond the immediate concerns of our local community, we are also cognizant of the wider landscape and reality of queer fiction. While representation has grown in the past decade, queer authors and stories account for a relatively small niche in the publishing industry; many up-and-coming queer authors are stuck self-publishing through their own sites, relying on personal PR vs being displayed in a more traditional storefront, and face more obstacles being signed onto larger publishers than their cishet counterparts. Independent and specialized bookstores, like queer-centric bookstores, are able to offer an alternative to folks who might otherwise be unable to ever be considered in a “traditional” bookstore.

In light of this, we decided to start the bookstore with some of our own limited funds and donations sent in by our friends & family. For the last year, we’ve been selling online and at in-person pop up events, and have been stunned by the positive feedback we’ve gotten from folks finding out about us for the first time. Our conviction has only grown that Wichita needs a queer-focused-and-dedicated space, both for the queer community itself and for representation in the wider city community.

Alex Tackett (she/it) was born and raised in Wichita, KS, attending a local highschool co-op and then Wichita State University, where she is currently finishing up a degree in sociology after taking a few years off to attend to her personal and professional life. Her time is currently split between tending to the store, school, and taking care of her extremely rambunctious six year old.

Lily Tackett (it/she) was born in Chattanooga, TN, where it attended highschool, before moving to Texas and then Kansas. It is currently also pursuing a sociology degree at Wichita State University, and spends its time managing the social media and graphic design of the store in between school and being a mom.

Both of us are avid writers and have past experience with business administration & management. We’re involved with an effort to start a local LGBT business affinity group / chamber of commerce, and have continued to develope our connections with the local queer community. We’re confident that between our plan, experience, and connections, that we can make this bookstore a reality for ourselves and for the Wichita queer community.

We want to open a physical space in the city, most likely in the College Hill, Downtown or Riverside area (this is where most of the “city core” commercial real estate is available; newer developments tend to be further on the boundaries of the city). This would allow us to dramatically expand our inventory and  our visibility, and furnish a lounge/hangout/event space. To achieve this, we’re looking at properties around 1,000-1,500 sqft; large enough to fit a retail storefront and a furnished backspace, but not so large that operating costs will immediately cripple us.

Of course, it doesn’t just end at buying the property; we’ll need to expand our inventory to fill the shelves, buy furniture, and pay for any remodeling/redecorating necessary to get the space usable. 

In total, we expect to need around $60,000 to make this work. This represents a few different significant costs;

• The Lease: From talking with commercial real estate brokers in the city, it’s clear that with a new business like ours, we’ll need to pay a year’s rent upfront to be able to reassure potential landlords of our viability. It’s also good practice to have a significant cushion on inflexible expenses like leases. Businesses take anywhere from one to three years to turn a profit, and so having your first year guaranteed does a lot to alleviate any potential worries of the landlord during that time.

  Based on our research, the current running rate for properties suitable for our use are approximately $18/sqft/year for the lease, $6/sqft/year NNN costs (costs associated with a triple net lease), and $1.5/sqft/year utilities. Based on a 1,500 sqft estimate, this brings our total estimated one-year cost to just under $40,000 ($38,250 to be exact). Being able to show a prospective landlord that we can cover not only the simple lease expense but the totality of the property’s costs would go a long way towards convincing potential leasers to work with us.

• The Inventory: With half of our store space being used to stock, a quarter for lounge spaces, and a quarter for administrative / support space, that leaves 750sqft to stock full of books. How this space is actually used varies heavily, between endcaps and display cases, but we’d like to start at 2 books/sqft, which brings the total cost of initial inventory to just over $10,000.
• Furnishing & Remodeling: A deceptively simple line item that’s simultaneously cheaper and more expensive than anyone expects; this accounts for everything from bookshelves to chairs to floors to paint. It’s difficult to pin an exact price on this as it’s space-and-layout dependent, with some retail spaces already being set up for our type of storefront, while others may need entirely new flooring. We estimate that $10,000 is what we need to be comfortable and not run into a situation where we have insufficient funds to actually make the store ready for day-to-day use.

But the fundraiser is set at $65,000? 

This is to account for the fact that Indiegogo takes a portion of the funds both in transaction fees and as a buffer against refunds on their part. It would suck to raise what we need, only to realize after the fact that we’re actually several thousand short.

A bookstore has a lot of expenses that can come up, and we make no secret that we aren’t operating with significant personal savings to cushion hiccups. If we’re successful in raising past our goal, that money will go into the store’s general fund to expand inventory, improve the store further, and keep the lights running.

The question every fundraiser has to face, what if we don’t raise enough? Thankfully, there are improvements that can be made to the business even if the fundraiser comes up short of its goal. The second most frequent question we get after “do y’all have a physical store” is “when are y’all getting more in/new titles in?” Inventory expansion is a self fulfilling prophecy in many ways, with new and returning customers stopping by our online storefront for new books. For every ‘standard’ book we sell, we’re able to stock books with much slimmer margins, generally from indie authors selling limited print-on-demand books to us. While far less glamorous than a physical store (and to be sure, we’d very much prefer to be in a physical store), having the funds to expand our digital business would still greatly assist in our mission to get lesser-known indie authors and publishers stocked and displayed to a wider audience.

(or: What We Want To Do Part 2)

In a perfect world, where we raise all the money we need for this and more, what comes after the store opens?

Locally, we’re in touch with a handful of queer support and affinity groups that are always in need of an accepting place to meet up and hold events at. As soon as possible, we’d like to start offering our space to these groups, and coordinating with local organizations like the Center of Wichita for holding educational and information distribution events.

Regionally and nationally, we’d like to offer authors stipends to be able to come out for book signings and readings. Indie queer authors in particular rarely get the opportunity to meet fans in person outside of the convention circuit, and are often doing it out of their own pocket when they do. Being able to pay for their travel expenses and host them at our store would allow these authors a chance to connect with the local community, and draw more attention to the local queer community in the process.

In the print world, we already have some experience acting as an independent publisher, in the form of putting together the Emptied Spaces anthology. While we are not and do not intend to become a full-fledged publishing house, with the resources we already have, we were able to put together an anthology of stories overwhelmingly submitted by first-time queer authors who were brand new to having a published work. We would like to be able to use our spare resources to continue to undertake projects like this, and to use our storefront as a place to promote these much more niche works.

Not even the best ideas are guaranteed, and businesses often face significant hurdles in their first few years of establishment. We’ve done our best to be cognizant of potential hurdles ahead of us, and want to be transparent about the things that could hold us back.

• A lack of business. While the Wichita queer community is stronger than it seems at first blush, it is still a fraction of the larger population. While our marketing is very queer focused, we suspect we will still have regular foot traffic from our non-queer neighbors as well, but obviously we won’t have as much general reach as a less specialized independent store.
• Local controversy. Wichita is a surprisingly queer-friendly city, with a strong anti-discrimination ordinance in place that protects sexual orientation and gender identity at the local level. Nonetheless, there are still folks who would very much not agree with our business, and there are certain risks that come with that. While we don’t think that we’d experience any major blowback for being open about our business, it’s not a possibility that should be outright ignored either.
• Unexpected building repairs. A majority of the properties we’ve investigated are being offered through NNN leases; that is, the rentee must cover all associated costs of the property, including maintenance. This is in contrast to a traditional lease, where the landlord is responsible for major repairs. In the event of a catastrophic accident, such as a water main burst, we’d be reliant on our own insurance to attempt to cover it.

With all of these potential problems, though, come their own mitigations.

• We are first and foremost a local business; even now, local pop up events account for the majority of our sales. Nonetheless, we do continue to try to diversify our business, and set ourselves apart from the competition we face at the national scale. We are already the only international provider of several of our listed books, and are in talks with some indie publishers about formally partnering with them for this purpose. This sort of diversification can help buffer local slow-downs and provide an additional revenue stream to pull from for auxiliary projects.
• As previously stated, we are supported by a (currently) sympathetic city government, and a largely ambivalent local population. After a string of queerphobic vandalism happened in a downtown Wichita neighborhood, the local community banded together to help the neighborhood and reject the idea that this represented what the city thought of its queer residents.  In the event that we found ourselves in unsavory crosshairs, we’re confident that our neighbors would band together to treat us just as well.
• When it comes to the property itself, this is one of the hardest things to mitigate. NNN leases are fantastic deals for landlords and very much not for tenants. We would do our best to ensure we had sufficient insurance policies in place for anything catastrophic, and would ensure that any property we did sign a lease on was inspected beforehand for any risks of such catastrophic events.

We are already an established online store selling books from some fantastic authors, which means word of mouth does amazing things for us. Spreading this fundraiser around, or even just our name around, helps us a ton. If you want to contribute to us but not necessarily through the fundraiser, we have our full inventory available, as well as gift cards that are now live for the holiday season. If you want to boost us (easily one of the most important things in this process), we’re on social media at:

• @SweetReadsICT on Twitter
• /SweetReadsICT on Facebook