About
I’m a bookseller who builds things.
That’s a description, not a slogan. For twenty years I’ve worked in bookselling, ecommerce, and literary nonprofits, usually in more than one of those at once: buying books, working the floor, managing the systems behind the register and the website, and writing the software when the software didn’t exist.
In 2021 I moved to the Olympic Peninsula and joined Port Book and News in Port Angeles, a forty-year-old independent bookstore between a national park and the Salish Sea. I’m still there. I buy for the Science & Nature, Northwest, and Poetry sections, write and produce the monthly newsletter in its email and printed forms, run author events, and look after the store’s website and digital side.
That’s where the consulting practice comes from. Every tool I offer other bookstores was built for a real store first, tested on a real floor, and kept only if the staff used it. The inventory method started as a way to see my own section clearly. The newsletter pipeline exists because I was tired of writing the same review three times. I know the margins, I know the systems, and I know how much time a bookseller actually has for a new process, which is roughly none. That work has settled into three recurring problems: making a store’s data useful, making its expertise discoverable, and making its technology work together. The work page explains each one.
The part I’d do anyway
The part where people learn something together is the part I’d be doing wherever I worked, bookstore or not.
The Science & Nature section at the store is the clearest example. I rebuilt it around thirteen themes, from birds and fungi to salmon and geology, and turned the buying decisions into a series of printed guides, the Field Guide to Field Guides, that customers take home and use to choose. With the North Olympic Land Trust I co-host Lands and Letters, a naturalist book club that reads one book a season and meets to talk seriously about it; it started in May 2026 and has a mailing list of several dozen. I program author events and partner with the land trust, the library, the local nature center, and the Port Angeles Book Fest to put writers and readers in the same room. I keep a nature journal and have talked about the practice in public, badly at first and better since.
If you run an organization on the peninsula that cares about any of this, land, water, reading, and the conversations that happen where they meet, I’m open to talking about how I could help. The same twenty-minute conversation works for that too.
Things I’ve built to find out whether they should exist
Baseweight Books is a bookshop for people who weigh their gear: a curated shelf where every book is listed with what it weighs and what it weighs the same as. TBR.fyi started as a text-message reading list and became an experiment in whether bookstores can see what their customers mean to read next. Neither is a client service. Both are how I learn.