About Bookhead
Bookhead was created by Sam McAlilly. He learned to code when he was a bookseller and the store wanted to redesign the website. Years later, after time spent working as a web developer, he decided to sell his book collection online but he wasn’t happy with any of the available software for bookstores. All of the bookselling software was either too expensive, ugly, hard to use, or not specific enough for a bookselling business.
He built a prototype when he was stuck on the couch with a broken foot. He realized that he could combine his experiences as a bookseller and web developer to make something useful for bookstores if he put in some more time and effort, but working on the project in his free time burned him out. The project sat around collecting dust, with random bouts of inspiration when he worked on it. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to commit to providing software that people depended upon for their business. That is a serious undertaking!
He decided to start working on Bookhead full-time in July 2024. Bookhead’s services include the software marketed on this website and a consultancy that helps book-ish enterprises sell online. We can help your independent bookstore, small press, or library with your website, automated tasks, digital marketing, and design. Email sam@bookhead.net if you’re interested in working together.
Mission
Bookhead’s mission is to help people use technology to promote literature. We believe that literature is one of humanity’s most prized creations, and we can use technology as a tool to keep this gift alive. That’s a fancy way of saying that we promote the literary arts by providing book people with technology tools that help them with their work in bookstores, libraries, and publishing companies.
We serve the users of our software. Bookhead is an employee for every bookstore that uses our software, in an abstract way. We see code as a replication of our labor. Using Bookhead software is like hiring clones of us.
Bookhead is not a startup. We are a small business that makes software. Our worldview is antagonistic to startup culture. We are hackers at heart, as far away spiritually from venture capital as one can be. We have no outside funding currently, and won’t take any unless the capital provider aligns with our values.
We are not looking for an exit. We will never sell to Amazon or private equity or any nonsense like that. That sort of action would be a failure of our mission and completely at odds with our values, as those vultures are not passionate about books and don’t care about helping our customers. We’d rather be dead.
We wish that a small technology business could exist without being associated with that world. Creating Bookhead is our attempt at that wish, an antidote. We believe that our approach is the right way to make a technology company, proving a better way forward.
Right now, Bookhead is a one-person venture and the focus is on staying alive. Once we begin hiring, Bookhead will become a worker-owned cooperative. Since we see code as a replication of our labor, the laborers should have the option to own this manifestation of their work. But creating a cooperative at this point in Bookhead’s life is a distracting waste of time and money.
We don’t take ourselves too seriously, except when it matters. We want to take pleasure in our work. We don’t want to dread going to work on Monday. We work hard enough so that we can provide reliable, high-quality utility to our customers, leaving us with enough energy for a fulfilling life outside of work. We want a healthy work environment, avoiding stress and anxiety and toxic behavior. We recognize the seasonality of productivity and expect our output to reflect our productive seasons while giving us times of rest, much like a farmer whose work follows the natural cycle of a year.
We care about the people we serve. We don’t want our products or customer service to make people feel bad. We intend to create software that people enjoy using. We are committed to the success of our customers. We value our relationships, working together as collaborators. We don’t take lightly the role that we play in their businesses. Trust is very important. If our customers don’t trust us, then we have no business.
That’s a lot to say, but we needed to spell out the implied parts of our mission: we help people use technology to promote literature.
Created by Sam McAlilly
I'm a programmer, writer, and former bookseller. I've led and contributed to software projects for libraries, local governments, journalists, and researchers. I worked for an independent bookstore where I designed websites and print materials, promoted events, and marketed books online.
Email: sam@bookhead.net
Notable Work
I worked at Square Books as a print and web designer, and also managed social media and email marketing. I taught myself how to code HTML and CSS so I could redesign the e-commerce website. I promoted and helped facilitate readings. I handsold my favorite books until I learned how to match a book with a reader instead of subjecting people to my tastes. I dressed up as the Grinch. I made coffee. I ran errands. I cleaned toilets. I moved around a lot of boxes of books, and more boxes. I moved house plants inside for winter and outside for summer, one time accidentally knocking over a shrine for the beloved writer Larry Brown. I did many different things, like booksellers do.
DataMade is a civic tech consultancy based in Chicago. I was a lead developer, which means that I built software and managed projects. I made interactive maps, data visualizations, web applications, and data pipelines for local governments, journalists, and researchers. I was a significant contributor for projects like the Illinois Wastewater Surveillance System, Agenda Watch, Land Use Insights, and more.
Patron Point has a suite of marketing automation tools that serve libraries across the world. I maintained and built components of a system that emails recommendations to library patrons based on their reading interests. The recommendations were generated from Library Thing's recommendations, as well as recommendations created by library staff (what an independent bookstore would call "staff picks").
