Important Announcement by Craig Stark 11 May 2026

By Craig Stark

Many years ago, shortly after the dawn of Facebook, and the soon-to-be demise of MySpace - remember that? - BookThink was enjoying a surge in growth on the main BookThink site, and though I had a remarkable business partner in this endeavor, Pamela Palmer, who handled many advertising initiatives, administrative details and nearly all of the site coding work, I felt somewhat overwhelmed on what was happening on my end, which included creating and editing content in the form of weekly newsletters, premium reports, soliciting articles from writers who had knowledge of bookselling along the spectrum of much experience to much less inexperience. Using content from the latter group was a deliberate attempt to connect with those just starting out in the trade of bookselling.

At the time I was also spending several hours a day answering emails, primarily BookThink related, and attempting to run my own bookselling business at the same time. It got to be too much too quickly, and though we had plans for more projects on top of this, I had the bright idea of delegating some of these to others, knowing full well I had next to no time left in my days for oversight. One of these plans was to create and run a MySpace account. It died a fairly quick death. A second plan, given that Facebook seemed to be outrunning MySpace, was to launch a Facebook page. Facebook was growing fast, even then, but not at a pace that made it a good fit for us, "us" being a so-called niche endeavor. And within weeks it faded more slowly but eventually died as well. This wasn't because we didn't have good people working on these projects; it just didn't generate enough users to continue to throw money at. In a way, it lost its identity somewhere and never became truly integrated with the mother site. My fault.

But times have changed. Long gone are the days when Social Media wasn't populated with booksellers at every level. And I've long since lost count of all the bookselling footprints out there, and not just on Facebook but half a dozen or more similar platforms as well. Also, BookThink itself quieted some over time, primarily due to some health issues with my partner and a few of my own. Gaps appeared between issues, a few of them lengthy. But the most important thing hasn't changed - my original intention to maintain a space where aspiring booksellers could learn the trade in a community of fellow booksellers, and along the way build careers doing what they loved.

I still feel this original enthusiasm, but I do miss the many daily connections with other booksellers, whether they were asking questions, answering questions or pointing out errors! Facebook seems to be a path that can recover some of that, and now that my time isn't as carefully guarded as it once was, I'm ready to participate. Are you? That's the unanswered question now. Last night I jumped in and began to build a second BookThink page. It's rudimentary at this point, but I'm going to devote some serious time to growing it, step by step. Today I'm reaching out to our newsletter subscription base to invite you to join us and help build a special landing place that's informative, safe and free. And if you come, please invite others.

For the time being there aren't any hoops to jump through. It's a public place and simple to register. I hope to see you there soon! You can register here.