You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
One: Pot, Pan, Planet by Anna Jones (Fourth Estate) has topped Bookshop.org's Indie Champions list for May, its monthly chart of books generating the most money for indies on the platform.
Jones' cookbook's success follows a special event the site hosted in Maywhere she discussed the book with food writer Bee Wilson. Customers were able to attend the event by purchasing a copy of One via Bookshop.org or an independent store.
Jones said: “I feel incredibly proud to be top of the Bookshop.org charts. Supporting local shops and booksellers has never been more important to me. I am so proud that the people who buy my books feel the same way.”
Elsewhere on the list, British Book Awards winners fared well with Maggie O'Farrell's Fiction Book of the Year Hamnet (Tinder Press) at number two, Author of the Year Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club (Viking) at three, and Book of the Year Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador) at five.
Also in the top five was Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) while lurking just outside at number six was Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest by Suzanne Simard (Penguin).
Hold Still: A Portrait of our Nation in 2020 (National Portrait Gallery Publications), The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green (Ebury), The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Canongate) and Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (Serpent’s Tail) complete the top 10.
Nicole Vanderbilt, m.d. at Bookshop UK, said: “It has been brilliant to see publisher and author support for independent bookshops make such a difference to the books that appear on our May Indie Champion list. The success in particular of One: Pot, Pan, Planet is a testament to the ways in which we can work with publishers, authors, and independent bookshops to deepen their relationship with readers. This month’s list also shows how the human recommendations found in the lists on our site are helping readers to connect with books across a wide array of genres.”
Speaking about One, Sue Steel, of Simply Books, said: “We loved this book as soon as we saw it and the icing on the cake was the opportunity for our customers to meet Anna Jones, albeit virtually, through Bookshop.org. This made a huge difference in terms of our book sales before and after the event (six fold) and created a buzz and excitement within the shop. Customers have all been comparing recipe results and the book continues to sell well. The events programme with Bookshop.org works really well as we can concentrate on audience and sales and not have to manage the IT.”
This Independent Bookshop Week, which runs from 19th to 26th June, Bookshop.org is encouraging everyone to use the hashtag #chooseindielinks and direct readers to the site or an indie bookshop instead of Amazon.