Indie Spotlight: Bel Canto Books
Like the spine of a book, Bel Canto Books is held together by local love, the community of Long Beach, California, and the store’s owner Jhoanna Belfer.
After a successful fifteen years in the hotel industry, Jhoanna began setting her sights on a lifelong dream: opening an independent bookstore. Through hard work, community outreach, and inspiring words from the great Anne Patchett, Bel Canto Books emerged as part of a local shop collective. But like many small and independent businesses, Bel Canto had to think on its feet in 2020 and navigate a painful year. Hard fought and well earned, Bel Canto Books has come out the other end of 2020 with a supportive reading community, a write-up in Forbes, and growing fanbase near and far.
Read more about Jhoanna and Bel Canto Books below!
About Jhoanna Belfer
I was a voracious reader from an early age, and one of my favorite pastimes was walking to the bookmobile with my sisters once a week. I was free to pick out whatever I wanted to read and would come home with armloads of books. Even now, my favorite thing is to get completely lost in a big, fat novel, happily spending a whole day reading. Luckily my husband is used to my antisocial behavior!
From Corporate America To Bel Canto Books
I had been working in corporate America for almost fifteen years and was starting to think about what I wanted to do next. Then in early 2017, just after the inauguration, I was lucky enough to hear Ann Patchett, one of my favorite authors and a bookstore owner herself, speak at a writer’s conference. She talked about how her bookstore had become a place of solace and inspiration for her community during the long election cycle and its aftermath. She suggested that if we could open a bookstore, we should. That was the aha! moment for me. I started immediately researching how to open a bookstore and signed up that summer for Bookstore Bootcamp, a week-long deep dive into the nuts and bolts of starting an independent bookstore, run by Paz & Associates.
We started small, hosting a monthly book club that would meet at local wine bars and popping up at local street fairs and in front of established businesses with a table of curated books, all while I was still working full time. By 2019, I knew I wanted to pursue this dream full-time, and I quit my job that May. As luck would have it, a local shop collective called The Hangout was looking for a bookstore vendor to join their space, and by November 2019, we moved in.
Again, we started small, with a 10-foot wall of curated books which we changed out monthly, along with a slowly expanding roster of author events and workshops. Of course, everything changed in March of 2020, and, with the shop collective closed from March to May, we had to find new ways to connect with our readers. I started a book concierge program, delivering hand-picked books to folks in Long Beach and beyond, and moved all of our event programming online. By July, we were able to reopen and the support from the community has been incredible.
I’ve lived in Long Beach for almost ten years now, and I feel incredibly lucky to live here. It has a vibrant small-town feel while being the seventh largest city in California, and the residents here have really embraced the #shoplocal movement. We have thriving farmer’s markets, several distinct business/shopping districts, and a big public university. I had gone to graduate school in Long Beach ten years prior, and back then, there had been several new and used bookstores in town. Many had closed over the years, due to the recession and the high cost of living, but I felt that if any place could sustain an indie bookstore, it would be Long Beach.
In Love with Indie
I am awed by the level of support and encouragement we’ve received from our fellow bookstore owners and our reading community. I’ve been able to learn from what colleagues are doing around the country to sustain their stores and continue serving their community, taking inspiration from all these stories of survival, dedication and adaptability.
Having the bookstore has saved my sanity. The hotel industry that I used to work in has been devastated by the pandemic, and I likely would have lost my job or been working very limited hours in a high-stress situation. The love and support that we’ve received from our readers—in Long Beach and beyond—is almost unbelievable. Folks have told me that our bookstore, book concierge program, and online events have allowed them to still feel part of a community, even as they were isolating at home. There have been so many bad days in 2020 and 2021, and being able to go to the bookstore and talk to fellow book lovers, instead of wallowing at home, has been such a blessing.
The Bel Canto Books Experience
Community and curation are built into our design. We’re inside of a collective space that is always changing, with other vendors and local brands, so our bookstore is alive in a very real sense. We’ve changed locations within The Hangout, expanded our bookstore space, and completely redesigned the look of the bookstore since we first moved in at the end of 2019. I love that locals come into the store each week, just to see what’s changed or new to the space.
We feature books based on a monthly theme and all of our books are hand-picked by me, but I also listen to what our readers have to say about books they’re reading now or want to read. Once I get to know customers’ reading preferences, I’ll buy books with them in mind or share upcoming book notices with them. We also host four online book clubs across four different genres or themes with folks joining from as far away as Hawaii and the East Coast.
Current Favorites
That’s like asking a mother to tell you her favorite child! I have so many favorites depending on my mood, but I’d like to recommend a recent read: Padma Lakshmi’s Love, Loss and What We Ate, a wonderfully written memoir about her childhood in India, her early struggles as a model and actor, and her profound relationships to food, family and creative expression. I knew her from Top Chef fame, but I knew little of her backstory as a first-generation immigrant, child of divorce, and Endometriosis Foundation co-founder. Part travelogue, food journal, and memoir, it’s a real page-turner that entertains while it inspires.
When Customers Become Collaborators
I love when customers refer their friends to us, and I feel even luckier when those new customers become friends and collaborators. In late 2019, I ran the book table for Julie, a local business owner who had invited a zero waste expert to speak at the city library. At that event, she introduced me to her friend Renate, who I met again at a pop-up market hosted by a local coffee shop. Over the course of getting to know each other, I learned that she was thinking about starting a book club to discuss the “burning issues” of the day. I offered to help out, and we launched the Burning Issues Book Club in January 2020. We’re now in our second year, and Renate and I have helped each other weather the pandemic with socially distanced lunch dates, commiserating on the phone, and bouncing ideas off each other. I now count her as a good friend and co-conspirator in making our city a better place to live.
Indies First
I’d love to ask your listeners to shop #IndiesFirst whenever they can. Whether it’s their local farmer’s market, restaurant, coffee shop, or indie bookstore, supporting small businesses means supporting their local economy and ensuring that they have a thriving community for years to come. I hope that this is one of the great lessons we learn from the pandemic - how important a sense of community is and our very necessary role in preserving it.
Listen to Bel Canto’s first featured episode below!