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Indie bookshops are kicking off 2018 with confidence after the majority reported sales rises over the Christmas period. But while most are optimistic about the year ahead, some have urged publishers to take more risks and work harder to build authors into brands this year.
Answering The Bookseller’s Indie Bookshop Christmas Trading Survey, 56% of indie-bookshop respondents said their like-for-like sales were up year on year in December 2017. The majority said their sales were up marginally, though a handful reported double-digit rises. A quarter of indies said festive sales were flat, and 19% said they were down.
A similar survey conducted by the Booksellers Association revealed that 44.9% of indie booksellers said their December sales were up; 17.4% reported turnover had increased “a lot”, while 27.6% said it had grown “a little”. Altogether, just over a third (34.7%) of respondents to the BA survey said they thought footfall was up on 2016.
While the 56% figure is lower than the percentage who reported sales rises last year (68%), it suggests indies took their fair share of the festive book pie. Nielsen BookScan TCM figures showed 9.6 million print books were sold, for £86.7m, in the week ending 23rd December 2017: which is a rise on 2016’s equivalent week of 4.1% in value and 1.6% in volume. The pre-Christmas week was the biggest single week for book sales in value terms since Christmas 2007.
Last week, Waterstones reported its like-for-like sales were “a little” down in December, citing snowfall that may have deterred shoppers in the middle of the month and the lack of a “standout” trend or title to lure Christmas gift buyers into shops, which likely benefited Amazon.
Sainsbury’s said it too was impacted by the bad weather, but “fortunately we pulled a lot of it back over the crucial, final 10 days”, its head of music and books Pete Selby told The Bookseller. Meanwhile, an investment in e-commerce was partly responsible for Blackwell’s sales growing by 15% in the period, the academic retailer said.
Indies also complained of a lack of a big title or trend that helped to entice buyers through the door, but others believed the contrary: that this contributed towards their success. “For me, the lack of a standout bestseller was helpful as I have both a W H Smith and a Waterstones in a relatively small market town,” said Antonia Squire of The Bookshop in Bridport. “People came in to browse rather than run to the chains for the hot book at half-price.”
The Bookshop in Salts Mill, Saltaire
Jenna Warren from The Book Corner in Saltburn-by-the-Sea, North Yorkshire, concurred. “There was certainly the lack of a book ‘trend’ this year, but I wouldn’t say that really affected sales. It just meant people bought a broader range,” she said.
A breadth of titles performed well for indies, with a number referenced in the survey. Those mentioned most often were Mary Beard’s Women & Power: A Manifesto (Profile Books), former “Test Match Special” commentator Henry Blofeld’s Over and Out (Hodder & Stoughton), The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young (Faber) and The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris (Hamish Hamilton). The spread of sales reflects a year-long trend: sales of the top 50 titles in 2017 were down 19.8% on 2016’s top 50 (£83.7m), but the value of the market as a whole was up 0.09%, to £1.592bn, through Nielsen BookScan. It suggests book-buyers’ purchases throughout the year were less weighted towards bestsellers, and more evenly spread across a breadth of titles.
However, many indies said they sold copies of Philip Pullman’s chart-topper La Belle Sauvage (David Fickling/Penguin Random House Children’s), despite the book being heavily discounted at supermarkets and chain retailers.
Waterstones m.d. James Daunt joined several indie bookshops in praising the cookery line-up, which the retail chief said “did better than for many years”, with offerings from Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Nigel Slater and Ruth Rogers.
However, many indies lamented problems with availability of stock, with Blofeld’s book, Blue Planet II by James Honeyborne and Mark Brownlow (BBC Books), Private Eye Annual 2017 and Dawn French’s Me. You. A Diary (Michael Joseph) proving tricky to get hold of for some. One retailer respondent, who asked to remain anonymous, stated: “The wholesalers were hugely useful, but we are a shop whose supply is predominantly direct. We use wholesalers for customer order supply. By buying direct from publishers, I can take more risks with titles and experiment with range—that I cannot rely on my regular suppliers at the crucial time of the year is worrying.
“Reprints and out-of-stocks were a major issue this year; this could largely be down to buying kicking in quite late, leaving insufficient time for reprints to turn around. It could also be down to print runs and where existing stock is being sent. A lot of titles disappeared in early to mid-December and I knew they would not be back before Christmas.”
Some business owners lamented the lack of marketing support for début authors. “Début fiction authors in paperback are not selling well because the marketing and branding is poor,” said one indie bookseller. Making the author the “star” of a marketing campaign would help to build their brand; instead many publishers appear to put the book at the centre, to the detriment of the writer’s career, the retailer argued.
“That doesn’t work long-term,” the retailer continued. “Lots of the new books are aimed at Millennials, which means the content has been hastily shoved together at the whim of a sales department algorithm. We need fewer one-off books aimed at 20 to 30-year-olds. We need more investment in series—particularly in crime and women’s fiction—mature books aimed at 35 to 80-year-olds. With a long-term series, the customers will come back for more.”
Despite this, the majority (74%) of indie bookshops also reported they were feeling optimistic about 2018, with just 7% saying they were feeling pessimistic. The sentiment rides on the back of more optimism around independent bookselling in general, with The Bookseller reporting in December that the number of indie retailers holding Booksellers Association membership was up year on year for the first time since 1995—increasing by one, to 868 stores. (In 1995, there were 1,894).
Many said they hoped to grow their business in 2018 by holding more events in order to sell books and raise their profile, partnering with more schools to engage children, and reaching out to customers to recommend more titles.
Hazel Broadfoot, owner of Village Books in Dulwich, south London, said: “For us it’s all about events and personal recommendation. Online, you can’t buy meet-the-author experiences or a chat with a bookseller who knows their stuff and has read what they are recommending.”
Meanwhile Bob Johnston, from The Gutter Bookshop in Dublin, said he would like to see bigger names and publishers offering indies more authors for events. “[We need] more support from publishers for independent bookshops in terms of events, launches, promotional materials and ‘indie exclusives’,” he said.
“I think there is still a lot of talk about the importance of indies, while the big discounts and big events and exclusives go to the chains and online retailers owing to their power in the marketplace. I’d like to see more ‘indie tours’ where a publisher brings an author to several indies for events. I’d also like to see publishers creating ‘indie exclusives’ that were only available from independent bookshops.”
Altogether, 43 indie bookshops completed the online survey between 22nd December 2017 and 8th January 2018.