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Scottish booksellers have trumpeted a strong year of trade in 2017, despite economic uncertainty and competition from online retailers.
The Scottish market grew in value terms for the third year in a row in the 12 months to the end of December 2017, with sales increasing by 0.32% year on year, according to Nielsen BookScan. While the top sellers of the year mostly mirrored those south of the border, with Jamie Oliver, David Walliams and Lee Child selling in high figures, indie booksellers also flagged up books by Scottish authors which sold well, including The Bothy Bible by Geoff Allen (Wild Things), Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari (Luath) and 404 Ink’s feminist anthology Nasty Women.
Indies say they increasingly looked to grow their events programmes in an attempt to lure book-buyers away from online shopping, with a number saying that political instability, caused by the EU membership referendum and June’s general election, also benefited their sales figures.
Rosamund de la Hey, owner of The Mainstreet Trading Company in St Boswell’s in the Scottish Borders, revealed sales at her shop were up across the board in 2017 after it held a record number of events. Similarly, Golden Hare Books in Edinburgh experienced its “best year ever”, partly as a result of hosting more events than it had in any other year of trading, it said.
De la Hey plans to build on her events programme in 2018 and believes the outlook for her business is “very exciting” as the shop enters its 10th-anniversary year. “Given we opened in the teeth of the recession of 2008, it feels like a real achievement to be marking 10 years. Most people thought us fairly crazy to embark on this adventure,” she said, adding that political uncertainty had become the “new normal” and dismissing it as a potential concern for the trade in 2018 as the UK goes further down the road of disentangling itself from the European Union. “We plan to stick to our guns and be positive and proactive,” she said.
On the flip side, Lighthouse Bookshop, a radical indie in Edinburgh formerly known as Word Power, believes the political upheaval helped to boost sales. “In a year defined by toxic politics, it felt like a lot of people were turning to us, a radical, left-leaning bookshop, to help them face the storm,” owner Mairi Oliver said. “People wanted to read non-fiction to equip them to take on a broken system and embrace the diversity of voices on our shelves in response to what seemed a very homogenous, backward-looking public narrative,” she added.
However Marie Moser, owner of The Edinburgh Bookshop, said that sales of political books at her shop had dropped, a result, she believes, of customers suffering from “Brexit fatigue”. Despite this, Moser said overall turnover at the bookshop increased by around 5% year on year in 2017, repre- senting the fifth consecutive year of growth for the bookshop.
Looking ahead, Moser said she was feeling cautious because she expected a rise in inflation but did not anticipate it to be matched by a rise in people’s wages, which have remained stagnant for many for a number of years. As a result, consumers could have less disposable income, but Moser hoped her business would overcome this challenge because books are, comparable to other forms of entertainment, a relatively low-cost purchase.
This piece is part of The Bookseller's in-depth focus on Scotland. Other stories in the focus can be read here.