Random thoughts

I just had this thought.

What I’m doing with Tiny House of the Heart (Thoth), the ‘bookstore’, is potentially a new-new thing.

I like to read, just as you might like to cross-stitch, take pictures with a DSLR camera, or build water pumps to water the hydroponics vegetables. It the ’something’ that we are passionate about.

After a while of doing, you begin to yearn for company. So you start telling your friends about your pieces, and even go so far as to recommend them to sink $1,200 so as to go take pictures with you on Friday afternoons.

In my case, with books, I started looking at how people buy books and discovered that major retailers missed out one big thing - recommendation. When you go to Borders or Kinokuniya, you get tens of thousands of titles grouped into broad categories and people who can help you find the book, as if you ‘already know’ what is it that you want.

Every one of us knows exactly what we’re thinking about, what is it that we’re on to. What we do not know is that there is a book about that thing out there already. I believe this to be the main reason why many don’t read.

There is a huge niche and potential here, I thought. There are many people who want to cook, as many would want to understand their children, and just as many would be contemplating about life.

The twist is that you cannot stretch and cover all of these niches, because you basically become another major retailer.

The trick is to be small, even tiny.

Thoth is a tiny bookstore for people who want to find out who they are, their spirits and passions, their hearts and soul, their creative potentials, and their search for meaning.

In time, my living-room-of-a-bookstore will be an address that strangers would walk in and spend a day reading a good book. And since we all have the same vibrations, a group will take form, then a community. I think that will a good thing.

And in the meantime, I will make a little profit from the books sales to pay off the rent and replenish the coffee counter

After all, what I really want is to meet and talk to more people, not the astronomical (relatively) profits of a big book retailer.