Author Jeff Kinney Has Sold A Lot Of 'Wimpy Kid' Books -- Can He Run A Bookstore?

If you are a kid now or were one recently, you know who Jeff Kinney is.  For the rest of you, Kinney is a one of the most successful authors in the world. In 2004 he began writing and illustrating Diary of a Wimpy Kid,  an online cartoon series chronicling the middle school misadventures of one Gregg Heffley. Kids around the world related and laughed. Since then Kinney has written nine hugely successful Wimpy Kid books (a 10th, Old School,  is due  November 3) which have been translated into 45 languages, including Latin. There have been three Wimpy Kid movies. Forbes estimates that Kinney earned $23 million last year.

Since last spring, Kinney has also been the owner of a new independent bookstore and cafe. An Unlikely Story located in Plainville Massachusetts, a town of 8,000 souls where Kinney and his family live, about 20 minutes north of Providence, Rhode Island. Kinney has funded the business with his own money and used his clout in the publishing world to attract big name authors (both for kids and adults) to reading and other events at the store.  In this conversation, which has been edited and condensed, Kinney spoke to Forbes about what he’s learned along the way about what it takes to make a brick-and-mortar bookstore work in an increasingly digital retail world.

While he says,  “It’s fun to talk about this stuff,”  Kinney sounds pretty hardheaded as a businessman.  “There is a lot of discipline behind the bookstore, its acting like a business and its actually paying rent to my holding company. We all think it is very important that it operates not as a charity or an endowment to the town but as a business.  Otherwise we’ll be closing it in a few years.”

Peter Carbonara: So how’s business?

Jeff Kinney: We’re actually doing great, much better than expected.  We’ve always got people in our parking lot.  In terms of volume,  I think we’re doing four times more than predicted. It’s been a strong summer. We’ve had the benefit of a lot of media attention because of the notoriety of my books. It’s hard to disentangle that from the organic, word of mouth of business. It’s been really surprising for all of us. It’s been a delightful surprise so far.

Carbonara: What has surprised you the most?

Kinney: I’m surprised by how many people come from outside of town. Plainville is a town about 8,000.  If I had had to guess I would have said that 80% to 90% of the people in the store at any time would be from Plainville, but it’s more like 70% of the people that come in are not from this town. And sometimes they come from quite far-- Colorado, Dublin --word’s gotten out there and a lot of people are making this part of their vacation.  They’re headed down to Cape Cod and they make a stop here first.

Carbonara: What mistakes have you made?

Kinney: We were understaffed. On the day we opened we had two people on the floor and we had 150 customers in the store at all times so that was eye opening for us. This has been every developmental.  We didn’t know how it was going to do and we’ve been very conservative in our projections, conservative in our staffing.  I don’t want to have to fire anybody.  We’re building very slowly, probably a little bit more slowly than is appropriate.  

Carbonara: What’s your local competition like?

Kinney: We are the only bookstore in the area that exclusively sells new books. Just a few miles down the road we have a bookstore that sells new and used books with the focus on used books. We have a Barnes & Noble about 17 minutes away, we had a Borders that closed that was closer than that.  So we feel like we are fulfilling a need. Most of the people who come here aren’t interested in Diary of a Wimpy Kid, they are just book lovers.

Carbonara: Why did you decide to do this?

Kinney: I definitely didn’t set out to be a bookstore owner.  There was a building in the middle of town. It was really decrepit. It used to be a general store, the nerve center of the town, built in I think 1859. It sat derelict for 17 years before we bought it. It’s really surprising that it didn’t fall down on itself.  Actually it was falling down. The building was sagging toward the middle and the support beams were literally tree trunks.  It was old. When my wife and I realized it couldn’t be restored, we decided to tear it down and put something really attractive in its place. Then we thought what’s the best thing to put here?  And the answer was a bookstore. That sounded a little bit daring.  It felt like a scary choice because we didn’t know anything about this business.

Carbonara: Is this your first go at being an entrepreneur?

Kinney: I still have what you would call a day job working on a virtual world for kids called Poptropica , and  that’s a business unto itself  but the products are mostly digital. I’ve never started something that was brick and mortar retail before.  For me, it was a different experience, for sure.

Carbonara: How much business planning did you do before you got started?

Kinney: We took it really seriously, actually.  Before we decided firmly to create a bookstore, we brought in a group called Paz & Associates from Florida.  They advise independent bookstores about starting up and expanding or modifying their businesses. They are a very comprehensive service. We had them come and study the area and study the possibilities here and we met them several times.  We had some of our employees and even my mother  take their seminar so we understood the business.

Carbonara: What kind of advice did they give you?

Kinney: Their most important bit of advice was that the bookstore wouldn’t work unless we made it a destination and that meant we had to make Diary of a Wimpy Kid a feature of the store.  I was very uncomfortable with that. I understood it and I believed them but we tweaked that a little bit.  We made the store itself so nice and so comfortable that it’s become a destination for that reason. They had envisioned a bigger Wimpy Kid section.

Carbonara: Why downplay something so successful?

Kinney: I’m trying to balance two things. Within my town, the identity of the store needs to be that it is a useful, practical general bookstore.  If I created a Wimpy Kid bookstore and museum here, my town of 8,000 probably wouldn’t be too happy about it and it probably wouldn’t be very useful to the community. But outside this area we want to get the message out that this is a bookstore owned by the author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid because we know that creates some extra interest and extra incentive for people to come here.  If we put an ad in a London newspaper targeting families it’s going to be all about Diary of a Wimpy Kid but in this region it’s going to be about the bookstore and the events we are having.

Carbonara: How is it going financially?

Kinney: We’re making money and we’re projecting to be in the black this year.  Bookstores tend to be low- margin businesses, typically between 2% and 5%.  If your volume is really high, you have to hire more staff to support that so margins stay a bit on the low side for a retail business.   But we’re comfortable with that.  I just want to be break even or better.

Carbonara: Razing the old general store about putting up a new building must have been expensive.

Kinney: We created the building which we knew would be a struggle. We’ll never in my lifetime be able to recoup the costs of the building. It has a lot of different functions –there is office space for my staff, a function room, upstairs on the third floor there will be studio space for me – so it’s not just a bookstore.

Carbonara: What did it cost you?

Kinney: I’m not exactly sure what the answer is and if I did I probably wouldn’t want it out there because it’s a big number. It’s in the millions.  The cost on the building was especially high because it’s a LEED certified building. We were using a lot of recycled materials and everything is energy efficient, top of the line.  We’ll have solar power and all of that so it probably cost two or three times what it would’ve if we’d built it conventionally. The building is very beautiful and we went above and beyond on that.

Carbonara: What is your biggest operating cost?

Kinney: I’m not sure exactly. We’re carrying, I guess, between $150,000 and $250,000 in stock and my staff  has to cost more than that or equivalent.

Carbonara: How many people do you employ?

Kinney: About 20 and that’s a mix of part time and full time.

Carbonara: Do you sell more kid books or adult books?

Kinney: It’s about 50/50. On the floor it looks like about 60% to 70% of the books are for grownups. Kids sections are always the strongest area of a bookstore.

Carbonara: How is the café part of the business doing?

Kinney: The café is doing fine.  We thought the café might carry the bookstore but actually it’s been the other way around. Our food is on the high end side, a lot of organic ingredients, so those costs are probably about 10 % higher than in a normal café.

Carbonara: Is it hard to get people to come out for signings and readings?

Kinney: Even story time here will sometimes bring in 140 people. The attendance is really high. Unpublicized events will have 70 people.  I hope we can grow and grow our events.  We have at least three internationally known authors coming this fall and I just hope we can keep building on that because it’s really fun to bring that kind of culture into a town like this.

Carbonara: Do your connections  with authors help you bring them to Plainville?

Kinney: Absolutely. But we’ve had some surprises.  Kazu Kibisushi  is an internationally known author  and illustrator.  He did the new Harry Potter books,  a few  years ago they re-covered them and he did that artwork. He lives in California and he wrote to me and said, “I really need to be there, I really want to be a part of this.”  So we’re getting some of that. Then Bob Ryan who is a nationally known sportswriter in the Boston area wrote to me and congratulated me on the bookstore and  I asked him to come to an event.  So one part of the Wimpy Kid aspect is bringing people in but I want to see how far we can take that.  I want to see if we can get authors that I don’t know and am not connected with and bring them in.

Carbonara: Do you have plans to expand to other locations?

Kinney: Just recently I’ve thought about that.  It was very surprising the first couple of days  to see police details directing traffic around here . It’s obviously leveled off but demand has stayed really high.  I don’t know if it would be appropriate for me to try to franchise this idea. I think part of what makes it special is that it is unique but I love the idea that an independent bookstore can be such a draw in the middle of a town.

Carbonara: It seems like you are kind of pioneering something here that might work elsewhere, a bookstore built on a successful writer’s personal brand. Have other authors shown any interest in the concept?

Kinney: There are only a small handful of authors who have book stores --Ann Patchett  is the one that people reference the most  -- and that was us coming to her about two years ago and asking how did you do this and what have you learned?  Nobody has really emerged and reached out to us, but hopefully one day. As an author I’ve always taken bookstores for granted to some degree and this has really been eye opening and made me appreciate book stores a lot more.

Carbonara: What did you learn from her?

Kinney: I learned a lot about maintaining a robust event calendar. What's really great about booksellers are that they're very generous with their time and insights. Ann has been especially helpful and I hope our relationship grows over the years.

Carbonara: What have you learned about hiring people?

Kinney: I've learned that it all starts with the right people. I've recently read "Good to Great," and I couldn't agree more with the premise of getting the right people on the bus. Once you get the right people on the bus you can figure out where to go.

Carbonara: Do you feel like you are in competition with Amazon?

Kinney: I don't. Browsing in a bookstore can't be replicated online. As a family, we make purchases from Amazon all the time, but there's nothing quite like being in a bookstore.

Carbonara: What aspect of running a business are you embarrassed to admit you still don’t know how to do?

Kinney: I don't know how to work the cash registers. I've been on deadline the whole time the bookstore has been open. I'm hoping I can get up to speed soon.