Why I bet my life savings on a romcom dream that made no sense at all
I’d been to Lisbon once on holiday, so what made me up sticks and move there with my partner and three-year-old – and then open a bookshop in a country where I didn’t speak the language? Alexandre Holder reveals what happened next…
This summer I’d often find myself standing in shock, hand on chest, the kind of anxiety coursing through me that used to only happen the morning after a big night. Except this time, I wasn’t hungover.
Instead, I was opening a bookshop in a foreign country and I’d just spent my life savings on a rental deposit, shelves and a lot of books I couldn’t return.
I was being told on a near-daily basis that it was very hard to make money from selling books. Yet here I was, having emptied my bank account for something that everyone told me made no sense.
Tell people you’re opening a bookshop in 2023 and their reaction isn’t dissimilar to telling them you’re getting back with an ex. They want to be happy for you, but they can’t help but worry.
And so, after securing a lease on a 60-square-metre shop in Lisbon – a former dry cleaner’s on a cobbled street with a large, arched door – I had a lot of awkward conversations, with friends, family, my accountant and even myself.
My boyfriend Mark and I moved to Lisbon in 2019 after 18 years in London. It was before the pandemic and felt so radical at the time (of course I now understand it really wasn’t).
We knew we no longer wanted to live in London, but with no other sensible option on the table, no job offer dictating location and no friends beckoning us to the suburbs, we decided we might as well aim for the sunshine.
We’d been to Lisbon once before and had a good holiday, but it was what happened when we returned to London that sealed the deal. We kept talking about how happy everyone had looked in Portugal’s capital: living in a city near the sea looked like a good life.
We both had jobs that meant we could work from home and convinced ourselves to go for it by repeating the mantra: “We won’t regret a year in Lisbon before we’re 40”.
When you move countries everything changes on the outside, but what we wouldn’t realise until much later was how it would change us on the inside, too.
We moved with our three-year-old son, but otherwise, we’d kicked away all of life’s foundations, like friends and jobs. We arrived not knowing anyone and had no work unless we could convince employers back in London to keep us on as freelancers. We had to get to grips with a new flat, a new school and a new language that our mouths couldn’t make the correct shapes for. Life became a complete redraft, from who we hung out with to how we spent our money.
In those early days, I felt very unmoored. There were coffees with new friends that felt more like awkward first dates. At a doctor’s appointment in a large city hospital, I got lost and had a cry behind a vending machine before pulling myself together.
On the flip side, Sundays were now spent at the beach instead of the pub and the No 38 bus route was no longer hurtling past my bedroom window, shaking its panes. Between the lonely tears and the sheer elation of sun on a November evening, I slowly found a new me.
For many of the 18 years I lived in London I clung to the corporate ladder, it appeared I thrived in airless meeting rooms and I became used to subsisting on miniature Pret sandwiches caged in plastic. I thought that was all there was.
It took ripping off the London plaster and embarking on a completely new kind of life to truly understand what else there was.
Weeks turned into months and then years and over time we have steadily built a community. I started a book club, I even did IVF here after experiencing secondary fertility. I gave birth to a daughter in that large city hospital, no longer too scared to ask someone for directions. Today, we lead a life that looks and feels very different from what we left behind
But this liberation from place meant I was newly tethered to something else – my laptop. I was staring at a screen most days. I craved community, colleagues, and people to talk to about ideas who weren’t just heads on a screen. And well, there is only so much you can complain about your job and not do something about it. And so, the bookshop.
The idea came easily. I was fed up with buying from Amazon, I missed booksellers and I missed browsing stacks of literary fiction. And surely, I wasn’t alone – 42,071 Britons became Portuguese residents in 2021 alone, and Portugal is in the top 10 countries worldwide for proficiency in English. In a city with more bookstores per capita than any other city in the world there still wasn’t an English language bookshop dedicated to new titles.
What I didn’t know was quite how much it would cost or how slim the profit margins are on books. If I had, I might have guessed why no one else had done what I was now dreaming of day and night.
But the naivety helped. As we evaded questions about our business plan, friends laughed, our parents looked confused and my downstairs neighbour offered me some financial coaching.
But people spend their life savings on all manner of things that don’t make financial sense, don’t they? They buy camper vans, do a master’s degree and go on bucket list holidays.
The money we had saved was in camper van territory, we were never going to be able to buy a flat with it, so why did it feel mad to spend it on a bookshop?
I’d previously written a book about our emotional relationship with money, this helped me realise I had to start thinking differently about this project.
This was a dream… like travelling the world or building a ceramics studio at the bottom of your garden. To accept the cost, I had to start separating the dream from the business plan. On paper, as a business, this was a risk, but as a dream, I was never more certain.
Mark and I got the keys in July. We were shown around in a language we don’t speak very well, nodding at the bare electric cables hanging from the ceiling, smiling when we were shown there was no water coming out of the tap.
It was daunting, but there was excitement too, and thank God, because something needed to push us through a baking hot July and August and the renovations, £10,000 here, £10,000 there.
There was probably some saving face, though we could never have admitted that at the time, there were plenty of sleepless nights, of writing to-do lists at 4am. We argued more than ever and our seven-year-old begged us to stop talking about “the boring bookshop”.
But here we are, it’s September now and Salted Books, with its bright blue walls, has opened its doors. Young book lovers keep tagging us on social media and our opening party a couple of weeks ago was so busy we closed the street. It turns out that readers can really party.
In realising this mad expensive dream, I’ve come to learn that life is full of decisions that don’t make sense but we do anyway: camping, oysters, gap years. I can see why many romcom protagonists work in bookshops, it sometimes feels like I’ve cast myself in some filmic version of a perfect life. I am sure it looks that way on Instagram and to be honest, there really is no better job than choosing what titles to stock and unboxing gleaming, smooth books and placing them on a soothing blue shelf.
And you want to know whether, in the end, it makes business sense, don’t you? Well, the answer is both, yes, and no. We are selling books, more books than I ever could have imagined and it is looking like it could be a sustainable business. But still in the first year we’ll probably only break even based on what we spent on renovations and stock.
I’m glad everyone warned me about how hard it was to make money from books because I tempered my expectations. Not seeing everything through the capitalist lens of profit, profit, profit, is almost therapy for my corporate-trained brain. I think this is what people call (or scoff) “a lifestyle business”. But what do we work for if not a better lifestyle?
It’s becoming apparent that many other people share our dream too. We just put out an advert to hire some weekend staff, and the response has been quite something. Within a day we had over 60 applications. There were neuroscientists, authors, translators and famous curators. Wildly overqualified people who all wrote of their dream to work in a bookshop. They wrote of the peace, the community, and what it would mean to them with a working day surrounded by books. Looking through the CVs, I realise now that I would not have got this job had I applied, the only way I have made this dream happen was to build it.
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