Written By: Stacey Ebert
Tell the truth – how many hours have you spent in bookstores? These special spaces transport us to places unknown, heal us in ways we didn’t even know we needed, and connect us to worlds and humans who change our lives for good. A good book can shift our moods, transform our outlook, and grow our own personal stories. We dive into one and before we know it sunlight turns to moonlight. Empowering us, challenging us, welcoming us – these brick and mortar creative homes fill our hearts while fostering our curiosity, wonder, and awe. Our imagination and our minds are stronger because of them.
In this series, you’ll find us wandering the aisles of bookstores, chatting with the humans who bring their magic to life, and uncovering the inner workings of the behind the scenes of the bookstore world. In our second installment, we chat with Becca from Meet Cute Bookshop.
Please tell us the origin story of Meet Cute Bookshop: Meet Cute Bookshop is a queer- and woman-owned, bookshop focusing on genre romance. We opened online and at pop-ups in 2021 and in our first brick and mortar shop in North Park, San Diego, in 2022. In 2024, we moved to a spot with double the space about ten minutes away in La Mesa where we hope to live happily ever after.
What experience do you hope people have when entering or working with Meet Cute Bookshop? I want Meet Cute to be a place for romance readers (and the romance-curious) to meet, hang out, and get nerdy about books. I want every person who enters to feel immediately welcome, to be able to take a deep breath, and to see their many intertwined identities reflected in stories about people who get happy endings filled with joy and community and love.
What advice can you give aspiring writers on their potential publishing journey? Read widely. Understand the market, but don’t let the noise drown out your creativity.
What about the art of books and bookselling keeps you coming back to the world of writers and readers? Books are just so deeply human. In a world full of algorithm-based advertising, where “artificial intelligence” is celebrated for regurgitating pirated ideas, books are about individual communication and connection. Fiction, especially, is about empathy, and I think we need as much of that as we can get. One of my favorite things is finding a reader their perfect book, one that meets them exactly where they are in the moment. That’s a team sport. It requires a kind of vulnerability and mutual understanding, however brief, that a dataset can imitate but never duplicate.
In your opinion, within the past decade, how have the new and various methods of publishing changed the publication industry? Publishing is at once a very slow and very fast-moving business. The big corporate behemoths move at what can feel like a snail’s pace while online discourse zips around in the ether so quickly that it can be hard to keep up. In genre romance, in particular, the last ten years have seen an incredible rise in the profile of independently published authors releasing titles electronically. Following far behind, the traditional publishing machinery has begun to buy up those indie titles and re-release them through classic channels. This has, in many ways, democratized publishing. Anyone with a story to tell and the time to tell it can make it available to internet-users worldwide. But, the internet being what it is and people being who they are, the rise of the indies has not eliminated the biases of traditional publishing. Online virality is not an equal opportunity proposition, and holding an algorithm accountable for its inherent bias is perhaps even more difficult than demanding change from the establishment.
What’s your favorite part about being a member of the Meet Cute Bookshop family? How long have you been a part of that story? Opening a bookstore has brought so many wonderful people into my life. Booksellers are a charming bunch and I am so lucky to count myself among them.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with us? I am also an author! If you’re in the mood for a summery rom-com with a queer cast of characters, you can pick up a copy of Nothing To Write Home About at Meet Cute or wherever e-books are sold! (Though, of course, I recommend bookshop.org.)
Meet Becca
Becca has, at various times, worked as a cupcake bakery cashier, a senatorial campaign intern, a ghost (in two different professional theatrical productions), a non-profit lawyer, a federal judicial clerk, and a speed dating host. She is now both the owner of Meet Cute Romance Bookshop and an author.
Originally from Los Angeles, she moved eleven (11) times between the ages of twenty and thirty. For the moment, she’s back in Southern California. (You really can’t beat the weather.)
She prefers not to be perceived, but she’ll allow it for business reasons.
