“I’ve wanted to open a bookstore for as long as I can remember,” said Fran Hauser. “As a child, I loved reading. It’s my favorite thing.”
On Thursday, Dec. 12, Hauser made her “lifelong dream” come true as she opened Bedford Books with a day of activities and events. The first of its kind in the town of the same name, Bedford Books has 3,500 new books, both adult and children’s, across a swath of subjects.
And yes, Hauser knows what you’re thinking: Why would anyone open an independent bookstore in the age of Amazon?
While the number of independent bookstores dropped from more than 7,000 in 1994 to 1,651 in 2009, it’s since risen to 2,500 locations that are doing a good business, with sales up 6.9% in the first half of 2023 over the same period in 2022.
“Independent bookstores are on the rise since Covid,” Hauser added. “People are reading more.”
And they’re also looking for an in-person sociocultural experience that online book-buying can’t deliver. Hence Bedford Books’ salon series, author talks, meet-and-greets and more at its location, 13 Court Road.
Anecdotally, Hauser said she knows there’s an audience, because her customers are not just browsing and buying the new releases up front; they’re heading to the shelves in the back for recent titles.
Lest you think she is the Hollywood cliché of the bookstore owner, knowledgeable but unworldly – and captured so charmingly by Hugh Grant in the 1999 film “Notting Hill” and Meg Ryan in “You’ve Got Mail” (1998) — you should know that Hauser has always had a business brain. An Italian immigrant, she came to the United States with her family when she was 2 and settled in Mount Kisco, where her parents, Antonio and Carmela Cambareri, became small business owners – a stone mason and a tailor respectively. At age 6, she was invoicing for her father’s business.
After attending the now defunct St. Francis Catholic School in Mount Kisco and John F. Kennedy Catholic Preparatory School in Somers, Hauser earned a BBA and an MBA at Pace University in White Plains. Ultimately, she landed at Time Inc., where she was president of digital for 10 years.
She went on to become a start-up investor (Hauser Ventures LLC) who has funded more than 40 female-founded companies, while offering business insights in such media outlets as Business Insider, CNBC, Elle, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune and Refinery29, as well as before more than 200 organizations, including Blackrock, The Conference for Women, Google, Mastercard, Meta, NPR and Unilever.
The publishing world can be a particularly brutal one, but Hauser said, “I’m proud of the relationships I’ve built over the course of my career.” That art of gracious networking has helped her to go on to publish the nonfiction books “The Myth of the Nice Girl: Achieving a Career You Love Without Become a Person You Hate” (Harper Business, 2018) and “Embrace the Work, Love Your Career: A Guided Workbook for Realizing Your Career Goals With Clarity, Intention and Confidence” (The Collective Book Studio, 2022). She’s now at work on a third book – this one for the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House – called “Twenty Minutes is the New Hour” about “how to be more effective in less time” and “letting go of the people-pleasing and perfectionism.”
“I know how much time and energy goes into writing,” she said. That’s part of the reason she created “Bookbound,” a podcast that explores the process of nonfiction publishing with successful authors. With millions of books published each year, Hauser said that you have to have an idea that stands out, along with a fresh approach.
Has this lover of fiction as well as nonfiction thought about writing a novel? “If I took that path, I’d want to go back to school for it,” she said.
Regardless, she will remain immersed in books – reading them, writing them, publishing them, selling them, showcasing them, discussing them, always with the goal of “connecting authors to readers.”
A few of a bookseller’s favorite things
For young bookworms – “I grew up reading Judy Blume,” Hauser said.
For readers of adult novels, Hauser said her tastes are wide-ranging, everything from the literary fiction of Ann Patchett, herself the owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, and the thrillers of Katie Sise.
For readers of nonfiction, Hauser loves classic memoirs, including two with local connections – Julie Satow’s “When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion” and Kay Graham’s “Personal History,” about the Mount Kisco-reared publisher of The Washington Post, a woman of grit and grace, who took on the Nixon Administration in the Watergate scandal.
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