Dear Reader,
This isn’t written by an AI. I’m typing this. GPT might give it a once-over when I’m done, but I wanted to make this sound genuine.
I’m Eric, the owner and founder of Book and Mortar. AKA the man behind the curtain; the facade; the illusion. Book & Mortar is a dream that I’ve had - a physical location - but there are tons of hurdles that prohibit small businesses from succeeding in the physical world, such as rent & my generally introverted / lazy personality.
The digital world is the only place where a small person like myself can actually sell books and stuff at scale. During covid, I started using distributors and new suppliers and invested in a LOT of tech to allow me to sell books on multiple sales channels. In the fall of 2023, there was an API connection between my tech stack and Tiktok Shop, which changed my business forever. Within a few months, Book & Mortar had sold over 100,000 books on Tiktok, and this website (the poor thing) gets traffic from TTS as well - I’m still learning how to build functioning websites, but hopefully it's good enough for you to utlize :)
In order for this site to have any visibility via Google, my prices have to be quite low (comparable to amazon). You’ll find that there ARE some things on here that ARE cheaper on Amazon, and I would strongly advise that you save your money and buy it there and not from me (Being honest). They sell most books at a loss to drown out people like me (while subsidizing the loss by extorting 3P sellers via fees etc.... never feel bad for them, they’re criminals). I don’t appreciate that I have to sell things for $0.50 profit, it keeps me honest. And I’m fairly confident that before I die in the distant future, Amazon will not be the giant that they currently are. Kmart has gone the way of the buffalo- Amazon can someday also be sunsetted. As long as I am having fun, I’ll find ways to make this business make me enough money to live on, and I can’t say there’s anything else that I’d rather be doing.
Anyway - if you’re still reading this, you can stop now, the letter is over. You can order a book if you find something that’s interesting, but take a second to have a cup of coffee while you're browsing :)
Cheers,
Eric Auth
PS, quick story. Part of my hustle is to buy used books and vinyl to resell on Amazon. Can be quite profitable. Anyway - someone dies and their children sell the parent’s leftover books because they’re selling the house etc. There was a collection of books the son sold me for $250, and it was a hodgepodge of hardcover romances and paperback spy novels. I should have passed on the lot because those are hard to sell bc they’re common, but I’d driven 40 minutes to get there and wasn’t leaving empty handed. They wrote their respective names and the dates they read the books on the first page of each book. This decreased the resell value of course, but for the last decade of their lives, husband and wife churned through books together, totally skipping GoodReads, amassing something like 800 books stored in apple crates from Costco. I don’t like ‘goals’ because I reject authority, but that’s a pretty nice goal. There is no moral to this story, or point in me saying it. But this is my site and I can type what I want. So there. “Focus on the donut, not the hole.” - David Lynch.