Quick Take
The Burning Ember opens this week in downtown Santa Cruz, stocking romance and romantasy. Trailside Books is set to follow next month in Aptos Village, with shelves built around adventure, children’s books and local history.
In an era of AI-generated content, the continued growth of e-commerce and regular media discourse around the state of American literacy, two local entrepreneurs are setting their sights on something decidedly analog: the brick-and-mortar bookstore.
Marissa Swett and Charese Allen have each had long careers in other fields – teaching and therapy, respectively – and are now embarking on their next journeys as bookstore owners.
Swett is preparing to open Trailside Books in Aptos Village next month. Allen’s new venture, The Burning Ember, opens this week in downtown Santa Cruz, with a focus on one of the book industry’s fastest-growing genres: romantasy, a portmanteau of romance and fantasy.
“I love my work, but I want to do more than just be a therapist,” said Allen. “I’ve had a long dream of opening a bookstore.”
Swett echoed that sentiment. After many years of teaching history, including the past 22 at Soquel High School, she retired at the end of the 2025-26 school year to pursue Trailside Books. It was an idea she’d considered long before finally pulling the trigger.
“I’m 47, I have enough time for another career,” said Swett, who grew up locally and remembers there once being as many as nine independent bookstores in the area. “When I told my sister, she said I had been talking about it [owning a bookstore] since I worked at a bookstore in high school.”
The two stores join a local bookstore community that includes Bad Animal and Bookshop Santa Cruz downtown and Two Birds Books in Pleasure Point. That’s a reversal of fortunes for Santa Cruz County’s book lovers, who saw the closure of Capitola Book Cafe, Logos Books & Records, The Literary Guillotine and Kelly’s Books in Watsonville over the past 15 years. Even book retail giant Borders couldn’t make it, shuttering its downtown store in 2011 as the rise of Amazon reshaped national book sales.
After years of stagnation, the bookselling industry is seeing significant regrowth. According to the American Booksellers Association, 422 new indie bookshops opened in the U.S. in 2025, a 31% rise from 2024. National retailer Barnes & Noble is also on the uptick, with more than 25 new stores opening nationwide in the past year and more on the horizon.
Burning Ember and Trailside are opening against the backdrop of two other, converging trends: the rise of artificial intelligence and national discussion around whether Americans still read books.
As a longtime high school teacher, Swett is tuned into much of that latter discourse, especially the concerns about whether young people still read. Contrary to popular belief, she said, they do.
When she told her students her plans for her post-teaching career, they were excited and eager to tell her about the books they were reading. One thing that struck her was that many of the boys told her they used to read all the time when they were younger, but struggled to find books that held their interest once they aged out of series like “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.”
Finding new books for readers like that is part of what Swett hopes to accomplish with her new venture. While Trailside won’t be limited to one genre, it will focus largely on books with what she calls “an adventurous spirit,” a nod to her interests as an avid backpacker and trail runner. Her selection will also include children’s literature, cookbooks and local history, among other subjects.
Both Swett and Allen describe themselves as voracious readers who want their bookstores to be more than places to purchase books. They want to host author talks, book clubs and writing groups, creating what are known as “third spaces —” social environments outside of the home and the workplace.
For Allen, it’s also about creating a community for those who, like herself, are huge fans of romance and romantasy, a genre widely described as one of the fastest-growing in publishing. U.S. print romantasy sales grew from $454 million in 2023 to $610 million in 2024, according to Bloomberg. The boom has been fueled largely by BookTok, a subcommunity on TikTok focused on books and literature, and the popularity of series by authors like Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros.
“In a world with so much division, people are embracing this,” said Allen, who calls herself an OG romance reader. “Romance as a whole, what I love about it – especially as a woman – is that it’s focusing more on women growing and finding partners who want to grow with them.”
In other words, today’s romantasy books aren’t your grandmother’s Harlequin novels of yesteryear, though many maintain some of those same steamy elements.
Allen said she appreciates the rise of strong female characters and also has an interest in the “dark romance” subgenre. More women writers are entering the fantasy space, she said, and a lot of these books really lean into female empowerment. She believes that focus is part of what makes the genre so popular.
Burning Ember will hold a grand opening from 2 to 9 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 30, at 1128-B Pacific Ave. in Santa Cruz. After that, the store will be open Wednesdays through Mondays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and closed Tuesdays.
Meanwhile, Swett is working hard to transform the Aptos Village retail space into her vision in time for a Nov. 14 opening, with a bigger celebration slated for January. That vision includes building a giant tree that will serve as the store’s centerpiece and hiring a former student to paint a mural. She’s been documenting the process – which also includes meeting with booksellers and publishers and curating her inventory – in her Substack newsletter.
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