Bluebird Mobile Book Series Part 3: Where Do You Park?

Want to start your own mobile bookshop? Curious about how I made the mobile bookshop work? Need advice? Welcome back to the Bluebird Trailer Series where I answer all the questions!

Here’s a big one that I get: How do you find places to park?

The first time you ask a business to allow you to pop up is always terrifying. The putting yourself out there and hoping. I was lucky that Lindsey Simpkins at Mudhouse Coffee was SO supportive in allowing me to pop up which gave me the courage to keep asking other businesses.

I launched the trailer in 2021 at a time when businesses were just starting to open back up and because of this, they were looking for ways to drive customers in a way that felt safe for all. The trailer was an easy yes for most businesses: kitschy, new, operated outside, drove traffic.

I focused on partnerships that felt symbiotic, worked for me, and benefitted the business monetarily. Typically businesses did not charge me a vendor fee because of the fact that more customers=more sales for them. And to this day we still take that approach with our partnerships. Our hope is *always* that if Bar Botanical hosts an author event, their sales that day are higher then they would have been otherwise.