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Independent bookshops have reported robust Christmas trading, with 72% saying sales increased on last year, reflecting a buoyant market for indie bookshops amid the best Christmas for physical book sales in five years.
Altogether, 72% of bookshops that participated in The Bookseller’s Christmas Trading survey saw sales increase year on year indicating that, despite the number of indie bookshops in the UK falling, those that remain are performing well.
Booksellers Association c.e.o. Tim Godfray revealed that before Christmas the number of independent bookshops in the UK had dropped by 31, to a total of 895, over the course of 2015. Despite this, those shops that saw sales rises reported that the annual percentage increases ranged from as little as 1% to as much as 35%. Of the 51 booksellers that responded to the survey, conducted between the end of December and the 5th January 2016, 8% said sales were down on 2014’s festive trading figures, while 20% said that sales were flat in comparison to a year earlier.
Footfall was also up this year, according to a similar survey conducted by the Booksellers Association, with 54% of the 70 bookshops surveyed reporting that the number of customers enticed into stores had increased. The BA survey backs up The Bookseller’s results, in which 69% of shops reported year-on-year increases in sales.
The figures reflect a rejuvenated market for physical books, with Nielsen BookScan recording sales up by 9.6% in value terms (to £256.4m) in the first two weeks of December (sales for the week ending 1st December to w/e 16th December). That figure represented the best total for five years when compared against previous years’ December sales in the opening fortnight, according to Nielsen BookScan. Sales were also up by 9.4% in volume terms, to 30.2 million units sold.
As also reported by the chain bricks-and-mortar retailers, the Michael Joseph series of Ladybird parody titles by Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris were top sellers for independents, despite the titles going out of stock for a week in December. Other books that performed strongly for indies were The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees by Robert Penn (Particular Books), Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling (Doubleday), The British Library’s Crime Classics series and Norwegian Wood by Lars Mytting (MacLehose Press).
Harry Illingworth, marketing and communications manager of Goldsboro Books in central London’s Cecil Court, said that the shop saw its “best December ever”, with like-for-like sales up by 12% . “We made an active attempt to engage with our customers on a more regular basis through our newsletter and social media channels, alerting them to what we believed to be ideal gifts, highlighting precious books they could own as book lovers and/or collectors, and also telling them exactly why these books are special,” Illingworth said.
“As a result, our customers were able to choose more easily what they wanted to purchase, and the knock-on effect was that we saw a big rise in sales of older and more collectible books alongside good sales of contemporary books— especially the new Ladybird series.”
Tim Morris from Booka Bookshop in Oswestry, Shropshire, meanwhile, claimed: “Books are back!” He added: “People are reconnecting with and loving books and bookshops. The quality of publishing was also high and we had an extra trading day in the week leading up to Christmas in comparison to last year.”
Anna Dreda from Shropshire’s Wenlock Books said that the BA’s Civilised Saturday campaign gave the shop a “huge boost” and brought new customers through its doors. “The town holds a very successful Christmas fair, which usually gives us our best trading day of the year,” Dreda said.
“We held two Christmas events for children, on 21st December and 24th December respectively, which were very successful, and all our regular groups had Christmas specials, which people enjoyed,” Dreda added. “If Christmas Eve had been dry, cold and sunny instead of wet and warm our percentage increase would have been even better.”
Several other shops also praised the effect of Civilised Saturday, with 60% saying they would like to see the promotion—supposedly a bookshop’s tranquil antithesis to the perceived frantic activity of Black Friday—return in 2016.
The Children’s Bookshop in Muswell Hill in north London, however, reported that the heavy discounting of Black Friday by high-street chain stores impacted on the shop “negatively”, with shoppers hitting the town centre instead of visiting the bookshop as they usually would, “so what would normally be a busy Saturday for us wasn’t at all”.
Peter Donaldson of Red Lion Books in Colchester, Essex, said he thought that the “overall quality of titles this year was high with more publishers looking to improve the look and feel of physical books”.
Bookshops also reported fewer problems with late delivery of titles this year, with only 19% of respondents saying they faced issues, in comparison to 54% who experienced problems last year.
Most bookshops reported that they were feeling “optimistic” for 2016, with physical book sales back on the rise and the threat posed by Amazon thought to be abating.
Judith Charlesworth from Caxton Books & Gallery, located in Frinton- on-Sea, Essex, said: “Incredibly, we have been open 10 years now, and I really feel the whole threat, looking over our shoulder at Amazon, has diminished. Now we just feel that providing we are doing our job well, being innovative and keep doing the events, we’ll be all right. Turnover on the books seems to be growing.”
Meanwhile, Harry Wainwright of Oldfield Park Bookshop in Bath, Somerset, said: “We are optimistic. Compared to five years ago we are sailing in calmer waters. The threat of recession is low and I also think people have worked out how to use the internet—by that I mean that now people buy the things they need to have online, but they come to shops for the things they don’t yet know they need. People are choosing to not shop online for books.”
However, some booksellers noted that the rise in the National Living Wage in April 2016 (to £7.20 per hour) might present a challenge to business.
Sarah Swinson from Aardvark Books in Bucknall, Staffordshire, said: “The rise in the Living Wage is going to be a threat to us; that’s the main threat on the horizon. But people’s pleasure in buying books—buying beautiful books and standing by production values—is getting better.”
Chain retailers also reported strong results, with Waterstones stating that it achieved a “modest” single-digit percentage increase in sales year on year; Foyles celebrated a 4.7% like-for-like hike in sales in December; Stanfords enjoyed a 6% like-for-like rise; and the Dubray Books chain in Ireland reported a 12.5% surge in like-for-like book sales in the final month of the year. And Blackwell’s reported a 3.1% like-for-like increase in sales in December.
News of the positive December trading for bookshops comes as figures from Nielsen BookScan have revealed that almost 10 million more print books were sold in 2015 compared to 2014. The figures represent the market’s first year- on-year rise in value terms since 2007. Sales for the entirety of 2015 increased by 8.4% in value terms on 2014 (to £1.5bn) for the 53 weeks* to 2nd January. In volume terms, meanwhile, 190.6 million books were sold through the TCM in 2015, a 5.6% rise on 2014.
*Nielsen BookScan’s annual data for 2015 was calculated from a 53-week “year”; the extra seven-day period is added periodically in order to recalibrate the calendar and make historical and future comparisons more accurate. For more information, see The Bookseller’s Review of the Year.