Michelle Crosby is the owner of B For Butterfly Books, a small independent bookshop based in Brooklands, Sale. She graduated with a law degree in 2000, “armed with the knowledge I wanted nothing to do with the legal profession,” and spent the next two decades working her way from a university bar to senior university administration before a career break, a temporary Christmas job, and a global pandemic pointed her somewhere else entirely.
Today she runs a general bookshop that sells everything from picture books to literary fiction, hosts a monthly book club, and has strong opinions about AI that she is not afraid to share. This is her story, in her own words.
A Yorkshire Childhood Built on Library Cards
Michelle grew up in Morley, a small mill town near Leeds. Both her parents came from working-class backgrounds and grew up on council estates. Her dad worked hard and eventually bought the family a house, something Michelle says felt like “a massive thing” to him. Her mum was a dinner lady and a school cleaner. Her dad studied engineering at night college and stayed in the same job his whole working life.
Michelle was the first in her family to go to university. But it was her dad who gave her a love of reading, taking the family to the local library every Saturday without fail.
“That was our thing, and I just took out book after book after book,” she says. She still remembers the little orange library cards, the ones you slotted into a book before scanning existed, and even played at being a librarian at home with them.
The Cat in the Hat did the job when she was four and stuck at home with chickenpox, but the book that really stuck was one most people have never heard of: Calling B For Butterfly by Louise Lawrence, a novel about children lost in space, chosen from a school book brochure when she was eight. It’s out of print now. She still owns her original copy, and it’s where the name of her shop comes from.
That early instinct for backing under-the-radar books over the obvious choices has stayed with her. She recently shared a statistic on her Instagram stories, taken from an article by Kate Mosse in the Guardian, showing that only 5% of GCSE students study a text by a female author. Michelle is quick to point out that isn’t because there aren’t women writing brilliant books. It’s that schools default to the same tried and tested set texts, year after year.
Why a Law Degree Led Nowhere Near a Law Firm
Michelle came of age during the Blair years, when there was a national push to get 50% of school leavers into university. Going wasn’t really a question, it was assumed. What to study was less obvious.
“I’ll do law because that’s powerful and impressive and amazing,” is how she describes her thinking at the time.
University changed her mind. She realised she was an emotional person who struggled with the black-and-white nature of legal thinking, and had a strong moral compass that didn’t sit comfortably with parts of the profession. She also, in her own words, “didn’t want to study for any longer than I had to.” She came out with a law degree in 2000. She never worked as a lawyer.
The Twelve Years Before the Break
Michelle doesn’t view her degree, or the years that followed it, as wasted. University gave her life skills beyond the subject on the syllabus, and it’s also where she met her husband.
Between 2000 and 2012 she moved through a string of jobs while she worked out what she actually wanted to do. There was a stint in debt collection, knocking on doors around Morecambe, which she admits “was not my forte.” Then she landed back at Lancaster University, where she’d graduated, starting in postgraduate admissions and working her way up to Quality Assurance Manager and Executive Programme Manager for the Management Development Division, before moving on to the University of Liverpool as a Quality Assurance Manager.
Commuting from Altrincham to Liverpool with two young boys at home eventually became too much. “I just thought, this is enough,” she says. So she stopped, to look after her children and figure out what came next.
The Career Break That Was Hard to Escape
Michelle has said before that career breaks are harder to break free from than anyone tells you. Asked whether that was because she didn’t want to go back, or because the opportunities simply weren’t there, her answer is clear.
“I think it’s that the opportunities weren’t there,” she says. Despite a degree and senior administrative and managerial experience in higher education, she couldn’t get so much as a foot back in the door. When UA92 opened in Manchester, she applied repeatedly and didn’t even get responses.
“It is actually quite hard to get back into what you were doing before you had kids,” she says. That realisation is what pushed her to look elsewhere entirely. In the years that followed, Michelle kept busy as co-chair of her sons’ primary school, volunteering for Twinkleboost, and working as an exam invigilator, filling the gap while she waited for the next thing to reveal itself.
Rekindling a Love of Books at Waterstones
That next thing turned out to be a temporary Christmas job at Waterstones Altrincham, which turned into a permanent position. Michelle is keen to dispel any illusions about what that actually involved.
“I’d really like to dispel this myth that we just sit around drinking coffee and reading books,” she says. “That would be amazing, but it’s really not it.”
What she did love was the people. Waterstones staff are paid minimum wage, she points out, yet the shop floor was full of people with degrees and master’s degrees, writers and artists, all deeply knowledgeable about books. Working alongside them gave her back something she’d been missing during her career break: a sense of community and belonging.
What she didn’t love was the corporate machinery underneath a much-loved brand. Waterstones is owned by an American hedge fund, and some of its policies grated against her instincts, like a half-hour training session on how to “pyramid” books on tables that ended with a senior manager producing a ruler to measure the exact gap required between each one.
“At that point, I did start questioning my life decision,” she jokes. Still, the love clearly outweighed the frustration, because it set her on the path to opening her own shop.
Emporium M33: The Testing Ground
Michelle left Waterstones in March 2019 with no fixed plan. B For Butterfly Books began online in 2020, which she affectionately calls her “COVID baby.” In 2021, just as the country came out of lockdown, she took her first physical step, opening a stall inside Emporium M33 in Sale, a space often compared to Manchester’s Affleck’s Palace.
It turned out to be exactly the low-risk environment a new business needs. No need to take on her own rent or business rates, and a staffed front desk meant customers could still be served even when Michelle wasn’t physically present, giving her the flexibility she needed with two young boys still at home.
“It gave me that opportunity to see: is the bookshop viable for me?” she says, a way of testing whether this was a real business without betting everything on it straight away.
Going It Alone: Brooklands, March 2025
Eighteen months ago, Michelle opened her own standalone shop in Brooklands. It wasn’t a plan she’d been carrying since day one at the Emporium.
“I didn’t know it was going to go well, put it that way,” she says of the decision. What she did always want was the freedom that comes with your own space: setting her own opening hours and, crucially, being able to host events, something that simply wasn’t possible within the shared Emporium setup.
She’d been quietly scouting retail units around Sale for a while, with a couple of near misses on properties that never quite felt right. Brooklands wasn’t an obvious pick, and opening outside a traditional town centre carries real risk around footfall. But the location had a primary school around the corner and a tram stop a minute’s walk away, and by that point her youngest had started high school, freeing up some of the caring responsibilities that had shaped her decisions for years.
“It just seemed like the right time to do it,” she says.
The shop splits roughly in half between children’s books and adult titles, alongside a curated selection of cards and gifts. Despite the butterfly name and a striking willow tree sculpture in one corner, made by local artist Des of Willow Goat Crafts, it isn’t a children’s specialist. Literary and commercial fiction sell strongest, non-fiction is kept deliberately tighter given how broad the category is, and almost anything in print in the UK can be ordered in within 48 hours.
Eighteen Months In: The Highs and the Reality Checks
Ask Michelle what’s been the best part of running her own shop and she doesn’t hesitate: the book club. It started with five people. The mailing list now sits at around 150, with 15 to 20 turning up on any given month, no obligation to attend every session or even finish the book.
“It’s just a really nice group of women,” she says, adding wryly that the one man who ever joined came twice and was never seen again.
The low points are just as vivid. Michelle describes a day that started with someone picking a fight with her on social media, continued with signed special editions arriving damaged and hours on the phone to publishers sorting replacements, and somehow also included a Guardian journalist walking in unannounced wanting an on-the-spot interview about business rates and the mayoral election. The till that day: £30.
“You think, what the hell am I doing,” she says. “But there are more highs than lows.”
There’s no predictable rhythm to retail either. Her husband, who handles much of the data side of the business, can point to a Tuesday where takings were strong by 10am, followed by the next Tuesday where nothing came in until 2pm. “It’s completely random,” Michelle says. “I think that’s just the joy of retail. You just have to go with it.”
Competing With Waterstones and Amazon
Michelle is candid about the economics of independent bookselling. She’s part of a bookseller network group where independents across the country compare notes, and she knows full well that a book she’s selling for £22 will often be available for £11 at Waterstones.
“I can’t say to you as a customer, I can give you £11 more value from that book, because it’s the same physical product,” she says.
What she can offer is everything that surrounds the book: genuine hospitality, a reason to walk back through the door, and the knowledge that shopping with her supports a small, local business rather than a warehouse. She’s based in a leafy, loyal part of Cheshire, and that customer base has stuck with her even as shoppers become more price-sensitive.
Events are a big part of that offer. Most take place inside the shop, often with local authors published by imprints like HarperNorth, running Q&As on Wednesday evenings, alongside quizzes and craft nights. The goal isn’t to hard-sell a book on every visit. It’s to make sure people leave with the right thing, whether that’s a purchase, a promise to come back for an event, or nothing more than a good experience.
Running the Business as a Team of Two
B For Butterfly Books is essentially Michelle and her husband. During her time at the Emporium, she found herself answering emails at 11pm most nights. Since taking on the physical shop, she’s drawn a firmer line: work time is work time, and outside of it, emails and texts wait, even the well-meaning WhatsApp messages asking her to order a specific book.
“I’m not ignoring you, but I will be answering that in work time,” she says. “You have to set some boundaries.”
Her husband joined after circumstances at his own company forced a change. He’s not a bookseller and has no retail background, but he’s taken to the spreadsheets and financial admin, freeing Michelle up to focus on the shop floor. “It’s nice to be able to actually share that with someone,” she says, “because I’ve done it on my own quite a long time.”
The Social Media Paradox
Michelle has a self-described love-hate relationship with social media. She’s noticed a frustrating pattern: posts that have nothing to do with books tend to perform well, while posts about the books themselves often go quiet.
She doesn’t chase trends or the next viral audio, she just posts what she wants and takes what comes. That approach occasionally invites conflict, including a recent exchange after she shared the GCSE statistic about female authors, where a comment describing Shakespeare as one of the “dead white men” children are made to study drew a heated response from a commenter whose profile was aligned with Reform and MAGA politics.
“It does affect me sometimes if someone gets into an argument with me on social media,” she admits. “I find that really hard to step back from.” Her husband tells her to ignore it, which is easier said than done, but she stands firm on one principle: don’t let people bully you out of posting what you believe.
She’s also had a genuine viral moment, a photo of her own fed-up face captioned with a joke about posting about books to silence, which racked up over 45,000 views and roughly 500 new followers. The catch was that most of those followers were in America and Australia, nowhere near Sale.
“A viral post is all very well and good, but it doesn’t benefit me locally,” she says. “Sometimes the metrics on social media are a bit vanity.” What actually brings people through the door is word of mouth, built through real relationships with other local business owners, something Michelle admits sits uneasily alongside her genuine dislike of the word “networking.”
“If you told me this was networking, it would make me freeze,” she laughs. “But yeah, I do talk to people locally, and that word of mouth is really important.”
Strong Opinions on AI
Few topics get Michelle talking with as much conviction as artificial intelligence. She’s not opposed to it wholesale. If AI can help solve genuinely huge problems, in medical research or tackling poverty, she’s all for it. Her issue is with using it for things that don’t need it, particularly in creative work.
“We are seeing a flood of AI-written and AI-created books, pieces of art that are becoming really difficult to tell the difference between people and AI,” she says. “Why do we want to do the work so that computer programs can take away the pleasure? Stories are very personal, and they should be written by people.”
She’s equally concerned about the environmental cost of running AI at scale, and about the difficulty of reining it in now that it’s embedded itself in so many systems. She doesn’t use ChatGPT or AI tools in Canva, and is clear that authenticity is central to her brand.
She’s also seen the darker side of the industry up close. Secondhand bookshops recently grew suspicious of unusually large bulk orders, tracing one shipment back to a warehouse where the books were being destroyed and scanned to train AI models. A recent settlement involving Anthropic saw authors compensated for works used without permission, but Michelle points out the payout per book is lower than the retail price, which does little to deter the practice.
“I think we just have to call it out,” she says. “It’s a battle that is going to keep going, and it’s going to get more important, but I think we as individuals can take a stand.”
A Shop Built on People, Not Metrics
What comes through across the whole conversation, from the library trips with her dad to the fight to keep AI out of storytelling, is a consistent thread. Michelle Crosby has built B For Butterfly Books around people rather than algorithms, footfall projections, or industry convention. A career break that felt like a closed door turned into the push she needed to build something entirely her own, and eighteen months into her own retail space, the business is still finding its shape: one book club meeting, one awkward viral post, and one damaged delivery at a time.
B For Butterfly Books, an independent bookshop based at 8 Brooklands Road in Sale, Greater Manchester!
For more info https://bforbutterflybooks.com/
With over 80 attendees, Alex & His Sisters continues to be a standout networking event in Altrincham, bringing together inspiring speakers like Michelle who share their real-world insights and practical advice. A big thank you to Michelle for this engaging talk, and to all the attendees who make these events so impactful!
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