Morgan Moore knew the future of private little literary havens like her startup, Pantego Books, wasn’t the brightest when she opened the shop almost two years ago.

She did it anyway — and, so far, with no regrets.

Sandwiched between a Mexican food restaurant and a mattress store in a smallish strip center — at 2910 W. Pioneer Parkway, Pantego Books technically resides in Dalworthington Gardens. 

Since both Pantego and Dalworthington Gardens, adjoining municipalities, are surrounded and vastly outpopulated by Arlington, this gives Moore a unique status: She owns the only private book shop in the 100 sprawling square miles of Arlington, though there’s still big time competition from brick-and-mortar outposts of corporate rivals like Barnes & Noble or Half Price Books. Not to mention the digitally global mammoth bookseller: Amazon.

Moore, 36, grew up and lives in Pantego. She attended Arlington High School, then UT-Arlington. 

“I called it Pantego Books in recognition of my hometown,” Moore said.

With short blonde hair, knee-worn tattered jeans, a T-shirt requesting “Read Moore Books” and a wrist-to-shoulder right arm of tattoos — a sort of a family history and tribute in ink — Moore does not appear stereotypically bookish as she wheels about a stocking cart that patrons have dubbed “Dolly Carton.” 

Stocking doesn’t take long. The store, all 1,800 square feet of it, offers a modest 4,000 titles, heavily weighted toward best-selling genres like romance, fantasy/science fiction and kiddie books. Pretty much all full price. Very little of that discounting business.

Which brings up a question: Is this a hobby or a business intended to generate real income?

“We are now solidly in the black,” Moore says. “But would I have been able to start this business without my husband’s income? Probably not.”

The how of this profitability involves several strategies Moore adopted. First, though, a bit of book stuff background is required.

Though the market goes up and down, Americans do buy a great many books, almost $26 billion worth annually. But a big chunk of that is online, and e-books or audio books — purchased to read or listen to on devices like phones, Kindles or other tablets — make up a growing part of the market.

Amazon claims about 38% of U.S. book sales, Barnes & Noble about 12%. The U.S. now has slightly less than 11,000 bookstores of all types, down from slightly more than 12,000 as the 1990s came to a close. 

Independent, typically smaller book shops like Moore’s establishment now make up less than 2,000 of that total, though the trend in recent years has been slightly upward generally for niche book shops. Those shops perhaps cater more to specific demographics, offering art classes or doubling as coffee and internet shops.

“I think books for many are a tactile thing,” Moore said. “They can touch it, scan it, mark it, smell it, and when they have (a connection), it’s immediate.”

Moore gets credit for being a quick learner when it came to the entrepreneurship necessary to operate a small book shop, which certainly includes selling books off the shelf but also focusing intently on a trio of cash flow strategies. The big one is author events, followed by order deliveries, followed by book clubs. The shop sponsors four.

“Where you make the money in indie bookstores is by doing author events in general,” Moore said. “Day-to-day sales are not enough.”

As it turns out, Moore says, both authors — even bestselling writers — and their publishers are hungry for exposure. And their readers are anxious to meet them.

Pantego Books isn’t big enough for such venues, so Moore collaborates with Theatre Arlington, utilizing their stage on dark theater nights.

Those recent meet-greet-talk-and-autograph-books authors include Ryan Cahill, an epic fantasy author from Dublin, Ireland, and Colleen Hoover, an American author who writes novels in the romance and young adult fiction genre, best known for her 2016 romance novel, “It Ends with Us,” which was just released as a film. Christopher Ruocchio, an American space opera and fantasy writer famed for his “Sun Eater” series that earned him the 2019 Manly Wade Wellman Award, also made an appearance.

Though Moore’s initial business strategy seemed, to her, complete, she did make one unanticipated discovery: online sales.

“From the first day I opened, customers asked me to order books for them, which surprised me,” she said. “Now we do a booming business in mailed orders and particularly in obtaining signed books. That’s now a bigger part of what we do than in-store sales.”

O.K. Carter is a columnist at the Arlington Report. You may contact him at o.k.carter@arlingtonreport.org.