Welcome to From the Front porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South.

Hello and Happy New Year to everybody. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and that you're having a joy-filled and rest-filled start to 2022.

I am, as of this recording, taking a much-needed break at the beginning of January, so to keep From the Front porch on track with weekly releases, our team wanted to put together some special episodes over the next three weeks until I'm back with a brand-new episode on January 27th, where I'll be talking to Hunter about our 2022 reading resolutions.

This episode, we decided to take a look back at 2020 and 2021. A scary, scary feat. Every Tuesday during 2020 and the first few months of 2021, Olivia and I would record new release Tuesday episodes for our Patreon supporters. We would talk about newly released titles out that week, but what it quickly became was a time capsule of running a business during a pandemic.

I would never have noticed this where it not for a Patreon supporter whose name I cannot remember. I have dug through my DMs and I cannot find, maybe it was a Megan, not sure, but someone pointed out to me that listening to those back episodes, those back new release Tuesday episodes on Patreon, was getting a glimpse at what it was like to live through a pandemic and to be running a small business.

So at the start of those new release Tuesday episodes, Olivia and I would give these little updates on how we were doing, how the store was doing. It wasn't even intentional. It was just Olivia and I were mostly working alone at that point, especially early in 2020, and so we would kind of check in with each other.

And you can probably tell by the end that we were exhausted. So the first new release Tuesday episode that addresses the pandemic is from March 17th, 2020.

And then as the episodes progress, we become more and more tired as we're trying to keep the bookshelf afloat and we're also realizing like at first we're keeping track of how many weeks in a pandemic we've survived.

And by spring of 2021, we're no longer keeping track. And it's becoming apparent to us that these weekly episodes are things that are no longer sustainable in the life of the store.

Now here we are at the start of 2022. 2021 was a financially successful year for the bookshelf. We were able to grow and hire new employees and expand our team.

We were able to continue to serve long distance and online customers through shipping through shelf subscriptions through Patreon.

I'm really pleased with and proud of how we were able to function in a year that looked a whole lot like the previous one.

I think we all had these really high hopes for for 2021 and instead it was a lot of pivoting and making hard decisions and canceling things.

I remember when we hosted our first in person author events, just a Saturday afternoon signing in the fall of 2021. So just a few months ago.

And at that moment we were all wearing masks, but we were so excited to have this other a dear friend of ours come into a signing and then the next day we found out someone not one of our staff but someone who had attended that event had COVID.

And so just so much scrambling and so many hard decisions and 2021 just wound up looking a lot like 2020.

But here we are at the start of another new year and I am feeling extraordinarily hopeful and extraordinarily grateful because a lot of other small businesses didn't survive.

Maybe they couldn't survive the pandemic, they couldn't survive the burnout and exhaustion that comes with running a business through a crisis.

And the bookshelf thanks to thanks to so many of you, the bookshelf is still here and that feels like a real win.

And so we're no longer recording weekly check ins or weekly new release Tuesday episodes, but I hope you'll enjoy kind of hearing what those months were like in real time as we tried to

become a totally different kind of business and as we tried to handle new information every day, just like you all were handling new information every day and how that affected our staff and our planning and what we were doing in store.

So special thanks to Patreon supporter maybe Megan for this wonderful idea for giving me the opportunity to kind of go back and listen to these episodes.

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