KATE AND I MET ON MONDAY AFTERNOON. We were both kind of wiped out, each at the end of a long weekend, rolling back into the work week. She was coming off four days at the annual science fiction/fantasy festival NorwesCon, traveling back and forth to SeaTac each day. I was coming off four days traveling more than 300 miles across the peninsulas. It was one of those glorious early spring sunshine days. Mellow. Birds singing. Cars passing. People milling about downtown. Kate has owned the downtown Bremerton bookstore Ballast Book Co. for nearly five years. We’re talking about how different things were in the area back then. And how different it was when she first started managing the store when it opened even further back in 2015. Kate looks around at groups of people walking by this afternoon. Back then, she says, you’d be lucky to see three people all day. The conversation moves from the Downtown Brem-aissance to the upcoming all-local-authors festival, Bremerton By The Book, which Ballast will be hosting on Quincy Square in May. We talk about local authors, like Gig Harbor author Matt Dinniman, who’s sold more than six million copies of his Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and nonchalantly stopped into Ballast on Indie Bookstore Day last month. And another local author, also romance fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review, Olivia Waite, who will be giving the keynote at the upcoming festival. We got in the weeds a bit about the difficulties of running a small businesses, the backwards logic of triple net leases and other seemingly shady landlord practices like legally allowing a building decay until it’s determined a public health risk and demolished by the city at no cost to the property owner… But it all came back to this little bookstore and the growing community it’s created which reaches far beyond the walls of it’s tiny brick-and-mortar space.
SMOKESTACK: I KNOW ALOT PEOPLE KNOW THIS ONE ALREADY, BUT I LOVE THE STORY OF WHERE BALLAST BEGAN, LET’S START THERE? KATE LARSON: Of course. I was working in bookstores since 2012. I worked at Booksamillion in South Carolina. Then I moved to Poulsbo and worked with Suzanne Droppert at Liberty Bay Books. After about year of working just a couple days a week there, she said, ‘Hey I’m gonna open a pop-up store in Bremerton…’ And I was like, ‘Where? What is? Um, ok… I’m not sure.’ She goes, I want you to run it but it’s just gonna be for November and December. That was November of 2015, when we first started. Technically we were there on Halloween to hand out candy, so Halloween is our anniversary, but our official anniversary is November 1st. Because it never left. It never un-popped.
HA, ‘NEVER UN-POPPED…’ PERHAPS BECAUSE IT POPPED OFF? It popped off, and so it never popped down… [We laugh.] Suzanne wanted to retire. I was moving to Connecticut in 2018, so she asked, one: if I would not go, and I said, ‘No, I’m going…’ But then she asked if I would want to buy the store when she was ready to fully retire. And I said, yes. I love Bremerton, I love the community here, I love how nerdy it is. I love everything about this area. This is where I’m gonna be for the rest of my life. Twenty-twenty happened, then 2021 she called me and was like “do you still wanna buy this store?” She had sold Liberty Bay Books in January 2020… terrible timing for the new owner, who’s also named Suzanne… but, then she had to change the name of this one and changed it to Ballast Book Company.
WAIT, IT WASN’T CALLED BALLAST BOOKS ORIGINALLY? Nope, it was Liberty Bay Books Bremerton…. There’s a little easter egg in the building that we’re in, that I won’t say because I want people to hunt for it. You have to hunt for this little easter egg that says Liberty Bay Books. And I am not telling my landlords about it because I don’t want it to go away. I like to have it in there for the legacy.
IT’S A GOOD BUILDING TO BE IN, IT SEEMS… ITS NICE SEEING IT ALL FILLED UP WITH BUSINESSES… IT WASN’T REALLY LIKE THAT BACK THEN.
Hot Java had just opened a couple months prior, so it was just us and Hot Java, really… And then Ashley’s was in their small location, but I think they opened right after, like kind of within the first year of us being there.
THOSE WERE DIFFERENT TIMES. I’M SURE IT’S A LOT, BUT IS THERE A WAY TO PUT INTO WORDS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO KEEP A BOOK STORE ALIVE…
There’s been a really great local movement, nationally even, to shop local. I think it started in 2020 when people realized that if all the shops have to be closed, they are gonna disappear. Because their expenses don’t stop. Landlords were still charging rent. There was nothing saying that they couldn’t. And so they were still charging rent to every business that was legally not allowed to be open. So the push to shop locally and to call your bookstore, go to your bookstore’s website is still kind of going strong. It died down a little bit and now its coming back even more with all of the corporations just kind of doubling down on all of their terrible investments and choices and… all the roll backs of the programs that they did when they were hot programs, and now they’re choosing to remove them because of the current administration…. Customers see how local businesses aren’t doing that. They are just sticking with what they are about, with their community and their involvement on a grassroots level.
ON A NEIGHBORHOOD LEVEL… Yeah, in your neighborhood… and all of your people around you.
IS THE BULK OF YOUR BUSINESS PEOPLE WHO PHYSICALLY COME THRU THE DOOR, OR WHAT DOES YOUR ONLINE SALES LOOK LIKE? Yeah… If you hear about a book and you want a particular book, you can go to our website and order it and then pick it up in the store. You don’t have to come in, tell us you want a book, go home, come back and pick up your book… You can tell us on the website. That’s the majority of our orders is just people telling us they want a book, we get it in, we message them and then they come in and grab it. There’s no extra fee…
SO THEN, YOU CAN KIND OF CURATE YOUR IN-STORE SHELVES HOWEVER YOU WANT? Yeah, it’s based on what sells, obviously, in the area. But it just so happens to overlap with my interests… like with T Kingfisher, that’s one of our bestselling authors.
THERE’S A LOT TO THAT TOO. THE RECOMMENDATIONS FROM EACH OF THE BOOKSELLERS ARE NEAT. THAT’S ANOTHER THING DOESN’T HAPPEN QUITE THE SAME ON THE INTERNET. The current conversation right now is with chat, right, or AI. It’s: ‘Yeah, why not just ask AI?’ Well, because it’s using a glass of water when you do, and it’s gonna recommend whatever is at the top of the algorithm. So it’s gonna recommend the same old, same old. It’s typically gonna be white authors. It’s typically gonna be books you’ve either already heard of or everybody that you know has already heard of and read. It’s definitely not gonna be the weird interesting small press book. Because they can’t afford to pay to be on the top of the algorithm, so they’re not gonna be recommended…
WHICH LEADS ME TO A BOOK YOU RECOMMENDED TO ME AND HOW THESE IN-PERSON EVENTS FACTOR IN… THE BOOK WAS ‘DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL’ AND YOU HAD A BIG EVENT WITH MATT DINNIMAN LAST YEAR… Yeah, that was the biggest event we’ve ever done. Four hundred and seventy five people… and then a couple extra who tried to slip in at the end…
MASSIVE! THAT ONE’S AT THE TOP OF MY MIND BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT LAST, BUT YOU ALSO DO A LOT OF OTHER EVENTS… Yeah, the latest, most recent event — everybody wants to read about Matt Dinniman so we can talk about that if you want to… — but the latest event was last Wednesday at Dog Days Brewing, it was Lish McBride and Kendare Blake. And they are just really good friends of ours through the bookstore.
WHY ARE THESE EVENTS IMPORTANT TO YOU, EACH ONE HAS GOT TO BE A SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNT OF WORK… Yes, they are a lot of work. But It’s a way to connect with our community on a business level where we can connect with some of the other business owners where we can bring our readers to them as well as bring their regulars to a book event. Maybe they haven’t read a book in the last year and maybe they see that we’re doing a book about ‘Most Likely to Murder’ or something… someone might think: ‘hmm, that sounds kind of interesting’ and they can come and hear about it in an environment they are familiar with, and maybe we can get some more reading going. It’s so hard right now, because you have all of the entertainment that you could ever want at home. It used to be before the internet, before phones, before TV, if you really wanted entertainment, if you really wanted something exciting to happen, you had to go outside your home. Now you can have all of this ‘excitement,’ either watching a show or vicariously by watching other people doing on stuff on tik tok or whatever… so you don’t need to leave your house to get that. But it’s a different experience when you do. And I think that’s important. I think people need to reset and have that human connection again. // INTERVIEW w/ BILLMAN
Check out: Bremerton By The Book Vol 1, a new all-local author book festival, 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. May 23, free, all ages at Quincy Square, celebrating self-published authors with books for sale, artist interviews, live jazz and a keynote by Gig Harbor author Olivia Waite. Find more Ballast Book Co., check out their plentiful monthly book clubs and order books at ballastbookco.com
