A change is going to come

Just a teeny bit slower than originally anticipated

Over in renovations land, our poor builder has been derailed by a double round of real flu, stalling progress in the real shop. Even though we’ve been popped-up for far longer than anticipated, we’ve been hearing some nice things.

“Great covers!” one friendly new customer said of our selection. “As a designer, I’m ashamed to say I choose my books solely based on their covers,” he confessed. I didn’t like to admit that, as a bookseller, same.

But we’re getting there! So long as everyone keeps taking their echinacea double strength (don’t worry contractors, this round is on me!), we are looking likely to re-open early next week.

If you’re local, you might have spied progress. What in a previous line of work I’d have referred to as ‘an iteration of the brand’, and now we can call ‘expensive re-decisioning’, the shop is no longer BRAT green. Thanks for all who followed along with our paint mixing woes. This new chapter we call blackcurrant. Yes, the shop is now plummy, yummy purple. Far more bookish.

How is business?

Grand overview: books are selling. Maybe not as many of them as we need, and it’s hard to pick whether a day will boom or bust based on weather or day of the week.

Rather than the fond I-love-you’s of evenings past, Anthony and I tend to sign off the night with a unison sigh of “ahh, small business”, but that’s probably more symptomatic of three kids than it is to blame on our foray into independent retail during a cost of living crisis.

Mother’s Day was the first big sales uplift of the year, and how grateful for it we were. So much so, that we can’t wait until September for the dads’ turn and so I’ve actually devised a monthly rotation of family members you’ll need to drop cash on celebrate. Look forward to seeing you on Second Cousin Saturday!

I jest. Ish.

So what can you do, I imagine I hear you ask! Please, let us order in that book you’re looking for that we don’t stock. We have readers here already doing exactly that and I am so grateful.

Don’t have any cash for books right now or you’re reading this from a distance? Sling us a Google review - it costs nothing and makes a big difference to us.

Don’t read paper books, just on devices? We’ve got tote bags coming soon and your Kindle will fit in there alongside plenty of other things!

Or just follow us on social media, engage with the posts we put on there and be a part of the community, forward this email to a local bookish friend. It all helps and us lot at Ramona will be very grateful.

Events!

One of the biggest insights from the last three months is how critical events will be to making our business work out. It can take two days in the shop to sell the number of books we sell in two hours at a sold-out author event in the city.

We are so grateful to have had a big roster of events; the Baker’s Book launch, The Power of Choice at the Wheeler Centre, Decolonising Solidarity at Northcote Library, Kinky History at the Athenaeum. Really exploring the full scope of literary topics in sex, death and cake.

We’ve got a couple of biggies coming up, that I’m very excited about:

• The launch of Anna Snoekstra’s brilliantly twisty The Ones We Love, at Cam’s Kiosk at Abbotsford Convent on June 15th, 3pm. Anna will be in convo with Mel Fulton - what a combo!

  I can’t wait for this, I get to sell a book I believe in (currently reading), with a glass of something fizzy in hand, while skipping out on childcare on a Sunday arvo? Bliss. Do come along.

• We’ll be selling Alyx Gorman’s All Women Want and Georgia Grace’s The Modern Guide to Sex at Pursuits of Pleasure at the Wheeler Centre on 4th July. They’ll be having a frank conversation about women’s pleasure. Get your tickets here. No, right a bit. There.

Other things coming: BOOK CLUB. I’m working on it. Drop me a line or comment below if you’re interested and whether you skew fiction or non-fic. I’m burning through Advance Reading Copies trying to find new release gold for book club launch.

But our events roster will start low key with wintery Storytime. Because lets face it, parents rained out of playgrounds at 10am on a Sunday morning, and their hyperactive 3 year olds aren’t going to be the harshest of critics. Stay tuned, I’ve just got to find some floor cushions and courage to ‘do voices’ in public.

What I’ve been reading.

A fair bit since we last spoke. Not because I’ve been reading fast, but because I’ve been Substacking slow.

Stinkbug by Sinéad Stubbins

A darkly comic debut novel from a Melbourne writer, about a company retreat where things aren’t quite what they seem. This one is for fans of Green Dot and Woo Woo. Absolutely stunning cover, but as someone who’s been on a few too many company retreats and eventually had to hit the eject button on corporate life, it wasn’t a comfy read. Out next week.

Cure by Katherine Brabon

I hadn’t read Body Friend, but picked up the reading copy of Brabon’s July release. Going in cold, I wasn’t prepared for how lyrical her style is - I wondered if I was missing something. But once I settled into it, this felt reminiscent of Deborah Levy’s August Blue in that it’s very internal, dances a line between reality and imagined and takes place in a European summer.

Little World by Josephine Rowe

Warmed up by Cure, I dove in head first to this stunning little novella from Black Inc, which bears my absolute favourite literary trope: the perspective of a dead character. This time the corpse of a child saint. Multiple view points and timeframes act as little vignettes and leave plenty to be read between the lines. It’s elegiac and ornate in tone, which lends itself to novella size. A brilliant, weird, weekend read.

Bloomer by Carol Lefevre

I’ll be honest, I picked this one up because the publisher is running a competition: the bookseller who posts the best review of this title on Instagram wins A YEAR OF FLOWERS for their shop. I wanted those flowers. But holy shit. This is such a beautiful book. A look at ageing in a woman’s body, accompanied by notes from the author’s garden journal, that made me feel very grateful for the older women in my life and life in my own female body. And who can say that post-partum?! Such is the power of Lefevre’s writing. I might not get the flowers, but I got that.

Run For The Hills by Kevin Wilson

Not as absurdist as his other stuff, this took a good 50+ pages to find its feet. An only child whose father left when she was young, discovers that he’s been upping and leaving families across the States, leaving a trail of at least three siblings. The newly connected siblings get in a (so frequently name-checked brand of) car (that I assume PT Cruiser sponsored the book) and journey to find their father and his reasoning. This builds to something both humorous and poignant. A sort of half way house between Greta & Valdin and Tom Lake.

I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena

Another local author, this time taking on the literary ethics genre, this ARC was sitting on my bedside table for a good two months before I realised there’s a face wearing a balaclava amongst the graphic. Sweet dreams, honey. And that’s how this one sneaks up on you. It’s got an unlikeable protagonist and a literary lie, which calls to mind Yellowface or The Anniversary.

But tell me, what have you been reading?

See you in the new new Ramona soon!

Katie