BREMERTON — Suzanne Droppert, owner of Liberty Bay Books, is responding to customer feedback in a great way: the pop-up location of her bookstore is sticking around in Bremerton.

Droppert said she got the idea first from Bremerton business approaching her about expanding in order to fill a void in Bremerton, and recently from an employee who had thought about opening her own bookstore in Bremerton before changing her mind. The employee told Droppert to check the area out.

“The goal was to see if it could do good business in November and December,” Droppert said of the pop-up location.

But then customers started pouring in.

“We kept hearing the feedback of all the customers,” Droppert said. “Everyone asked us to stay, everyone that came in said, ‘Please stay.’ “

Kate Daniels, an employee of Liberty Bay Books, said, “A lot of people come in just to say that they’re glad to have us here, and that they’re spreading the word.”

Bruce Rogers, a longtime resident of Bremerton, is one of those customers.

“I’ve been here for 16 years, and we have not had a good bookstore here,” Rogers said. “We’re overdue.

“I prefer coming downtown to driving all the way to Poulsbo, for instance, although I have done that obviously.”

Rogers said he’s been a patron of Liberty Bay Books even before they opened in Bremerton.

Liberty Bay Books was first opened in Poulsbo in 1977, known then as Shotwell’s Bookstore. Droppert bought the business in 1996. It carries a wide variety of reading material, offers ebooks through Kobo Books, holds monthly events such as Local Author Sunday and employs staff who are always happy to help readers find their next book.

The Bremerton location is located at 409 Pacific Ave., and is open Tuesday through Sunday.

Droppert said the new location is about half the size of the shop in Poulsbo. It also lacks an in-store coffee shop, as in the Poulsbo location, but as Droppert said, “we’ve got the awesome coffee shop next door, Hot Shots Java.”

“I think books and coffee kind of go well together,” Droppert said.

So far, the Bremerton location has also lacked monthly events, since it’s only been open two months, originally only as a pop-up, temporary location. But over the next month or so, Droppert said they’ll be arranging “book clubs, coloring events, local author events.”

“We wanted to get through the holidays,” she said.

So why was the pop-up location such a success? Perhaps it really is about location.

Poulsbo has the original Liberty Bay Books, Silverdale has Barnes and Noble, Port Orchard has used book stores, but Droppert said, “Bremerton doesn’t have anything … no new, or used.”

“We’re trying to have a little bit of everything that’s (in Poulsbo),” Droppert said of the inventory, “all genres of books. They’re not that dissimilar from Poulsbo.

“We’re just trying to bring our favorites, (and) we’re trying to ask every customer what they want to see.”

Daniels, who works at the Bremerton location a few days a week, said that cookbooks and other nonfiction actually seemed to be the most popular.

“I think a lot of people want to know about the environment and current political events,” Daniels said.

Her favorite genre, though, lives in the fiction section: fantasy.

“I think books tell stories of life and of different perspectives on life,” Daniels said. “Everybody’s going through something, and there’s a book for everybody.”

If a customer wants a book not carried, Droppert said employees will call the Poulsbo branch to find out if they have it. In the near future, Droppert said she hopes to have a shared system so that the inventory of both locations can be accessed from either store. She hopes to have that in place by the end of February. Of course, they will special order in a book for a customer if neither location stocks it, and they also offer ebook sales.

What excites Droppert the most about the new location?

“The response,” she said. “And trying to respond to the customers of what books we should carry, and to bring more customers to shopping local and shopping downtown, and not going to an online store.”

“I’m really happy about this,” Rogers said, “and I hope it is successful, so that we have a bookstore here to call our own.”

So a temporary adventure with a pop-up location, Liberty Bay Books’ doors will stay open permanently in Bremerton. What sort of books are you looking forward to finding in their shelves?

For more information on Liberty Bay Books, visit libertybaybooks.com.