I'm £96k in debt and it's all going very well

Tills, like sleigh bells, are a-ringing

Our bestsellers this week

1. What Just Happened?! by Marina Hyde - signed copy

2. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

3. Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi - coming to our Backstory book club this month

4. Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

5. Taste by Stanley Tucci

6. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

7. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

8. Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

9. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell - winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction book of the year

10. The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

Upcoming events at Backstory

(all at 71 Balham High Road)

THIS WEDNESDAY 7th Dec, 7.30pm Daniel Harding, Gay Man Talking

14th Dec, 7.30pm Sebastian Payne, The Fall of Boris Johnson SOLD OUT

15th Dec, 7pm Christmas Jazz, drinks and browsing (no ticket necessary)

THE GOOD NEWS IS I’ve now paid off £4,000 of Backstory’s start-up loans. The bad news? There’s £96,000 to go.

All being well, Backstory should emerge from indebtedness onto the sunlit uplands of prosperity some time in the final quarter of 2026, shortly after we have celebrated the launch of Richard Osman’s 15th book. The champagne is very much on ice.

The strangest thing about running a start-up is to look at an enormous debt pile like that and conclude: Yeah, pretty much all going to plan.

Partly that is because, as in the rest of life, numbers do not get proportionately scarier as they grow. Just as one death is reckoned a tragedy and a million a statistic, so I find myself worrying much more about the £500 I need to pay off my credit card next month than the silly sum the bank loaned me for my mortgage.

THE Marina Hyde at a Backstory event. Yes, really!

But mostly it is because business is all about credit and its comfort blanket, confidence. Are we paying the bills on time? Yep. Are the customers coming through the door at roughly the rate we predicted? Yes, sometimes faster. So what’s the problem?

Which is not to say that I don’t sometimes think: bloody hell, what have I bitten off? I am conscious, too, that these are very early days and that we are still surfing on a wave of goodwill, especially from the very many Balhamites who have wanted a bookshop for ages and are very keen to do what the can to keep it. The cost of living crisis is still probably far from its peak. And tills were always going to be a-ringing when Santa was a-coming: arguably the real test will come in the spring - especially February, notoriously the quietest month for book sales.

Even so, I am cautiously optimistic. Because we sold 252 books yesterday (massive shoutout to Amy and Rory). Because we persuaded Marina Hyde to come and be bloody brilliant in Balham this week and 120 people showed up. And most of all, because people seem to genuinely enjoy hanging out in our shop and keep coming back to perch at the bar, not least because of the truly lovely team I count myself lucky every day to have assembled: Denise, Steph, Amy, Rory (and Humphrey the dog).

So there’s a long, long road ahead. But I think we’ve found the right path.

Still, perhaps you could push us a little further along the path by buying some Christmas presents from our list of our favourite books of the year?! (You can also always order any book in print from us.)

Either way…in case I forget to say this later, thank you SO MUCH for all your support this past year and Merry Christmas,

Tom