How Tiny Bookshop became a cozy love letter to literature
Tiny Bookshop, an adorable game about selling books out of a small trailer, draws inspiration from some unexpected places.
Books were always a big part of my childhood. My dad bought and sold rare books out of our home, and, after exhausting our supply of children’s literature for bedtime stories, my mother would read us classics like Mutiny on the Bounty.
Perhaps that’s why the adorable indie game Tiny Bookshop resonated with me so well. Developed by a small team with a clear love of literature, you’ll manage, decorate, and curate a trailer-bound storefront to sell and recommend books to the residents of a quaint seaside town.
If this sounds like a tempting proposition, you aren’t alone. Since its launch a little under a month ago, Tiny Bookshop has sold over 300,000 copies on Steam, and earned itself 1900 “overwhelmingly positive” reviews.
To learn more about Tiny Bookshop, we spoke with David Wildemann, one of the game’s lead designers, to chat about the game’s somewhat unexpected success, the unique mechanics behind it all, and how Pokémon inspired a game about selling old books.
ROGUE: Tiny Bookshop recently passed 300,000 copies sold, and has accrued around 2,400 overwhelmingly positive reviews in a little under a month. That's pretty amazing. How do you feel about that, and does any part of that success surprise you?
David Wildemann: Yeah, I'm pretty surprised, to be honest. It was a fantasy of mine, and I knew some bookworms really enjoyed it, but it's tough to gauge how many gamers are also into books, so this really surprised us.
Rogue: The core of the game is clearly about a love of books. Do you have any background with books as a trade? Are you just an avid reader, or was this just an extremely cute idea?
DW: I was a huge reader in my childhood, and then that sort of declined a little bit through puberty. But for me, I came to this from the angle of the tiny living movement. After high school, I bought a camper van and wanted to live and travel with it, along with my then-girlfriend, now fiancée. It broke down pretty much immediately. We never really got to live the full year in the camper van, but we spent three months on the road in France, and from that, I took the love for these tiny spaces and for traveling around. But also, you're really isolated from the communities you visit, and I think that's really something that's miserable, especially if you're not super fluent in the language.
I was pretty burnt out during my studies, and I came across a tiny bookshop on wheels called the Custard Square Bookshop. Every book cost the same amount, and an older man sat out front under an umbrella reading himself. I just saw this, and knew I wanted to do this, but because I was on vacation, I couldn't just start right away, so I ripped a couple of papers and made a card game prototype.
