Better Off Without Us

I reached out to a local independent bookstore recently with an offer, not a pitch exactly, more of an invitation. I have a show that pairs naturally with author events, a modest advertising budget, and a genuine interest in filling a room together. I proposed combining what each of us had, their audience, my advertising reach, a nearby venue, toward a shared goal neither of us could easily reach alone.

Their first reply was polite and clear. The kind of event I described didn't quite fit what they usually did, and they'd only move a show to a larger venue if they were confident enough people would come to cover the rental. They suggested I try a library instead.

I wrote back and tried to close the actual gap. I explained the show could scale down to almost nothing, no stage, no sound system, just a stool and a voice. I laid out how combining our reach, mine and theirs, made reaching enough people far more likely than either of us managing it alone, and offered several ways we could share the outcome if it worked.

Their second reply was even clearer than the first. They didn't have a list to share, and I'd likely do better reaching out to the venues directly myself, without them.

The Advice That Argues Against Itself

Here's the part worth sitting with. Independent bookstores are widely understood to be a fragile, shrinking category of business, kept alive mostly by the communities willing to actively choose them. The reason they gave for not moving forward, needing enough people in the room to justify the cost, is exactly the problem collaboration was built to solve.

And the advice they landed on was to skip the collaboration and go it alone instead, the very isolation their own explanation had just described as the risk.

I don't know for certain what was actually happening on their side of that exchange. I can only guess, and I try to hold the guess loosely. But it felt like an offer to combine resources got heard as something inappropriate in some way, maybe an angle, maybe a stranger asking to use their list, rather than what it actually was, an attempt to help solve the exact bottleneck they'd just named.

I wasn't trying to take anything from them. I was trying to be part of the kind of local effort that keeps a place like theirs standing. But the offer didn't seem to have anywhere to land once it got sorted into competition instead of cooperation.

What if the advice that sounded safest, go around us, do it on your own, was actually the least safe thing being offered in that exchange?

This idea runs alongside Chapter 7 of The Lens That Changes Everything*, on competition and cooperation, and what civilization needed people willing to do that connection would have made unthinkable. If it's the kind of thing that stays with you, Being Jonas Wilder brings it into the room, live.