I don’t think we’d be here without Story Sale. Jenny had planned for it way back in 2019. We even had a test edit from Sarah, shot on her phone on the pavement between our U-Haul storage units. But we were selling in-person twice a week, sourcing and processing in between, so it sat on the back burner.
By March, we learned what stay-at-home meant. In a panic, we live-posted the test sale. We built each one in Instagram, each minute. It was a nightmare. But we sold them all. It was DMs and Venmos - the social media equivalent of selling books out of our trunk. We only left the apartment for the storage unit and the grocery store. We’d have hundreds, maybe a thousand books scattered all over, shoot them on our phones with window light, with Sarah writing and categorizing remotely.
Over the next year, we kept improving. Better photography, more detailed information. Tethered shooting and continuous light. Google Sheets. Photoshop. Trello. Notes by @readingbrb. We did three sales a week during that peak time. We lived it from morning “til night, every day.Now, almost 100 weeks later, with close to 200 Story Sales under our belts (we haven’t really kept count 😬), we have a website that’s growing and a pace we’re confident to keep up as we prepare for our physical store. So thank you for joining us each week, it means so much to the three of us, and we hope you enjoy our show as much as we do.
Weekly Story Sale / Thursday March 3, 2022
Chris Capizzi is co-owner of A Good Used Book. He lives and works with Jenny and their two dumb cats in Los Angeles.
