Help Us Save Moon Lane Ink CIC!

Aim: With your help, we aim to offset our recent struggles and get back on stable footing so that we can continue to invest in our community.

Moon Lane Ink CIC, better known as Moon Lane Books, opened in 2018, looking to bring Moon Lane's founding ethos of diversity and inclusion in children’s books to Catford and the wider Lewisham area.

Our mission statement: "Moon Lane works to address inequity in children’s books: inequity of access, representation and roles in the publishing industry, so that every child has access to books that enable them to feel seen, reflected, respected and valued..." has been the driving force behind each decision that we make and we are proud to be one of the most diverse bookselling teams in the UK.

We have absolutely loved serving our loyal customers over the past seven years, seeing baby bookworms blossom into confident readers, steering children and their adults towards books that allow them to happily continue their reading adventures, as well as allowing adults to reward themselves from our selection of general and non-fiction.

We operate as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company, and we pride ourselves on contributing positively to our local area and ensuring we use all of our platforms to provide a route to market for authors and illustrators from groups currently under-represented in UK publishing. We run a wide variety of in-shop workshops and classes, from baby/toddler storytimes to fun and interactive creative classes. We also work with local authors and illustrators to organise book launches, in-store events for both children and adults, and visits to local schools. Throughout the years we have partnered with local schools, helping to diversify their libraries by fulfilling their book orders with an assortment of inclusive titles. We also enjoy participating in local cultural events such as The Catford Arts Trail, where we host several creatives as they sell their artwork, and the Blythe Hill Festival.

We strongly believe that every child deserves to have access to books that enable them to feel seen, respected and valued, giving each and every child the opportunity to thrive. Our work in this area has been widely recognised both by the loyalty of our customers and by the publishing industry.  In 2020, we won Children's Bookseller of the year.  In 2021 we were awarded British Bookseller of the Year and the Children’s Bookseller of the Year by the British Book Awards. We were the first independent, Community Interest Company to win both of these coveted industry awards in a single year.  In 2022, we were honoured to be finalists in the Mayor of Lewisham Business Awards, which recognised our commitment to this goal. 

You may ask, then, why we are having to run this crowdfunder? Well, as with many independent retailers, we have been hit by the concurrent economic crises and the rising cost of living, both of which have affected people’s spending power. Shrinking school budgets have also reduced a key revenue stream for the business. With your help, we plan to offset these issues by investing in marketing to reach the new faces moving to the area and joining our community, creating a strong program of events to attract a larger audience from further afield, and allocating funds to mitigate our monthly outgoings. This will allow us to return to being confidently sustainable, ploughing any additional revenue back into extending our community programmes, to continue serving our community for many years to come. 

£25,000 will allow us to cover rent, business rates, and other overheads for 12 months. Without the pressure of these expenses, we will be able to move forward on a more stable footing, allowing us to focus on running more community projects.

£6,000 will enable us to run monthly free in-store events over a 12-month period. We will pay authors and illustrators to run fun and engaging workshops and events for children of all ages. Those who work in the arts are often under-compensated for their time, and they deserve to be paid fairly for events like these. As we have always endeavoured to support authors and creatives from underrepresented backgrounds, this particular goal is all the more important for us because people are often pushed out of the creative industries when they are not adequately paid for their work and time. 

£500 will go toward running a monthly book club for both children and adults, with a discount on the author's book for that month. 

The remaining funds will be allocated to promotional and targeted marketing campaigns to increase our visibility in the wider community. We also plan to invest some of your donations in refurbishing the shop (including fixing our beloved train!)

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 16th September 2025 at 11:06am