A small hallway with boxes stacked in the corner and a narrow, tightly packed bookshelf leads to Dale Steffey’s “store.”
Inside the room, the walls are lined with shelves stacked two rows deep with his collection.
Selling rare books online is his business. His “store” is a spare bedroom in his house.
“Books take a lot of space, and I’ve pretty much filled one bedroom,” Steffey said.
Steffey is one of millions of Americans who work from home, a trend that has become more popular since 1999. About 9.5 million people worked at home in 1999 and by 2005, the number increased to 11.3 million, according to the most recent data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The same trend is also happening locally. Adam Wason, assistant director for small business and sustainable development for the City of Bloomington, said the number of home-based businesses is increasing, but the exact number is not recorded.
“There are some good success stories,” Wason said. “It’s just a matter of going about it in the right way.”
But these home-based business owners aren’t working from home because they have to but because they want to.
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Steffey’s store is cluttered with piles of books on the ground, papers with pricing information sticking out of some books and a computer hidden in the corner. But Steffey knows where everything is. He hasn’t lost a book yet.
He says his work is never-ending but smiles as he thinks about it. He turned a passion for collecting books into an online business, and he loves his job.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just having fun right now, really,” he said while laughing. “I enjoy what I do tremendously.”
Steffey started collecting books 15 years ago, and in 2006, decided to start selling his collection online to earn some extra money. Unlike other book sellers in Bloomington, Steffey says he’s one of the only people selling fiction novels.
He started with 110 books listed online, and now he has 2,300 for sale and about 300 more that are ready to be posted.
“I’ve been trying to get more books online, more books listed because it seems like it’s somewhat a numbers game,” Steffey said. “It seems like there might be a tipping point where if I have enough books listed, they will produce enough sales.”
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Kelly King has also seen her home business, Kelly King Design, grow throughout the last 10 years.
In fact, it’s expanded so much that she’s in the process of moving into an office and out of her home.
Her business is focused on designing brands for companies and helping them improve how to target customers with their overall goals and values.
She started her branding business online so she could stay at home with her children, an option she believed was right for her at the time.
“It’s definitely a great way to get started,” she said. “It has been a good fit for me.”
Wason said depending on the type of business, running it from home may or may not be a good option. If there aren’t any deliveries or clients frequently coming to the house, like with King’s business, he said it’s possible to run a home-based business.
But, for example, Wason said if a chiropractor were providing services from home, seeing 20 clients per day would cause a lot of extra traffic in the neighborhood and isn’t allowed in Bloomington.
“The main issue is not creating a burden on the neighborhood,” Wason said.
But the disadvantages of working from home have pushed King to move into an office space. She said it’s very easy to get distracted at home, but at the same time, it’s easy to never stop working.
“You have to love your work because it’s easy to walk away from it at home,” she said. “I have no problem sitting down to work. I have a problem walking away.”
Another issue, she said, was finding meeting places with her employees and customers. Having people at her house is stressful, she said, because she has to make sure her house is clean all the time, which is difficult with children.
Once, when meeting with a new office manager of a medical office she’d worked for in the past, she set up the meeting and assumed they would meet in his office. But the new manager drove to her house and thought they were meeting there.
“I just about died when I found out he was at my house,” she said. “That was a little awkward.”
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As an online seller, Steffey doesn’t get to meet his customers.
“I oftentimes don’t know who the people are other than I get a name and address,” he said. “A lot of times it’s interesting to see where they’re going.”
He often ships books to California, New York or Washington D.C., but he’s also sold to other countries such as France, Japan and India. He checks his e-mail everyday to see if there are any new orders.
“Being online, the book store is essentially open 24/7, and it’s open worldwide,” he said.
He has considered getting a storefront but says it’s not likely to happen.
“A store ties you down, and that’s not the part that I enjoy,” he said. “The part that I enjoy the most is being out scouting around and looking for things.”
One of Steffey’s most expensive finds was “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain. It is up for sale for $6,500.
Steffey takes extra care of this classic novel by storing it in a box.
“You know a book’s special when it’s kept in its own box,” he said.
Steffey said it’s the illustrations that make this copy particularly special.
In addition to the book, there is a portfolio of all the illustrations, and they are signed by the illustrator, Barry Moser.
Usually Steffey likes to buy the books at a cheap price, but this was his most expensive purchase. He paid $1,500 for it from a library sale in Iowa.
Although Steffey has traveled to other states to look for books, he primarily searches in Bloomington. He goes to a variety of book sales, thrift stores and flea markets.
“The best thing is to find a book for a dollar at a garage sale or thrift store or something and have it be worth several hundred dollars, and I’ve had a lot of good finds like that,” Steffey said.
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Steffey has collected thousands of books so far, plenty of them valued at more than $1,000, but he doesn’t have a strategy for his job.
“I scan titles and publishers and that sort of thing, but I’m also looking for the thing that sticks out,” he said. “I’m pretty good at finding things.”
But even with his good searching skills, a collector will never find everything he or she wants.
“I will go my whole book-selling life without seeing some books or titles,” he said.
“But what I think I’ve discovered about scouting or searching is that if you’re looking for something specifically, you’re probably not going to see it. So you have to keep an open mind and be curious and just be open to what’s there in front of you.”
