We are very excited to announce a new initiative here at Brown and Dickson Bookshop, one that we think might shake things up a bit. It’s a creative, ridiculous, and affordable idea that is an old/new one but is filled with good possibilities. It’s these opportunities for greatness/oddity that we crave, and need, so we’re gonna do it FULL TILT!
You might remember that we recently sent out a survey asking for feedback on a bunch of different shop stuff, including memberships. What we heard back was this: memberships are good but we miss your Patreon. If you weren’t a Brown & Dickson frequenter during 2020-21, our Patreon program offered back all money spent on a subscription a top up of 50% in shop credit. So, if you had a $5/month Patreon, you’d get $7.50/month in book credit. The credit accumulated without expiry, so many of our patrons built up quite the little credit hoard during that time to use for Christmas presents or gift certificates, or for mindless, guilt-free shopping during Zoom meetings.
Patreon also included early access to New Arrivals and other monthly bonuses including local band download codes, zines, mugs, tee shirts, and stuff like that. A bunch of people have told us that this was preferred over our current membership system. Who are we to argue? It was pretty awesome.
So to quell your heaving hearts, we are bringing back our tiered credit/cool merch program with a monthly subscription just like before! Fortunately, we can do this all through our website now, so no one has to worry about giving the corporate overlord Patreon part of their membership money (which was an issue for some).
It will work just like before, with a $5 monthly membership offering you $7.50 in book credit. $10 gets you $15. $25 gets you $37.50, and so on. Each tier is more and more credit and bigger and bigger rewards…just like leveling up in Borderlands 2 (which we’ve been playing obsessively and streaming on our dumb Twitch channel.)
Higher tiers will include all of our ridiculous Brown and Dickson merch that comes down the pipeline, such as our Fuck It mugs and pins (a big hit, that one), any books we publish (our first will launch very soon), podcast exclusives, private talk invitations, sales, and the like.
We really do love our membership program and are excited to start making weird stuff for all of you again. So please do sign up if you can! Cataloguing books is great. We love it, but we also need an outlet where when we think, “We should have a pencil case decorating contest” and we can just do it, crowning the winner in a chapbook celebration of high school style. Little pencil case books with boring lunch-time/space period graffiti on them sound amazing.
Or, in another example, our first book under our new imprint has a comic about getting loopy with zine paste, and if that isn’t a reason to celebrate, then we don’t know what is. Getting loopy with zine paste is the most accurate description of our past year’s emotional state we’ve read thus far.
Get your heaving bosom of credit immediately by signing up. In the meantime, brace yourself for the incredible, smart, dumb, and invigorating merch/event ideas that we will create. The existential dread of our times must be filled somehow and those stupid 3am ideas just might do the trick.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
