Upcoming events at Backstory
(all at 71 Balham High Road)
Wednesday 8th March, 7.30pm
The author of Maame, an exciting debut novel that sharply depicts Maddie’s sense of being torn between two worlds as she navigates flat shares, dating apps, microaggressions at work, the shock of grief, and learning how to become the woman she wants to be – one frantic Google search at a time.
Tuesday 21st March, 7pm
With Laline Paull (author of The Bees and Pod) and Tom Mustill (author of How to Speak Whale) in conversation about our ocean
1999: Manchester United, The Treble And All That
Wednesday 29th March, 7.30pm
Award-winning sports writer Matt Dickinson talks about Manchester United’s unprecedented 1999 season with Times deputy sports editor James Restall
Wednesday 5th April, 7.30pm
One of Tom’s favourite authors, who writes so well about modern relationships and the body. Talking about her latest, Milk Teeth.
SOLD OUT David Nicholls
Wednesday 22nd February, 7.30pm
An evening with the bestselling author of One Day, Us & Sweet Sorrow
SOLD OUT Music night: Ben Cipolla
Saturday 25th February, Doors open 7pm
An evening of music with one of the UK’s most exciting up-and-coming jazz singer-songwriters
Team pick of the week
Amy recommends: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
In the distant future on a distant planet called Winter, there are humans who are completely sexless, except for when they enter ‘kemmer’, morphing into either male or female in order to reproduce.
Genly Ai has been sent to Winter from a faraway federation of planets. The people of Winter are highly suspicious of this apparent alien, who appears to them a sexual pervert. Genly’s mission soon proves trickier and more dangerous than he could have imagined.
Exploring gender, love, friendship and what it means to be human, The Left Hand of Darkness dares us to dream of creating a better, fairer society. - Amy
Our bestsellers this week
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
The New Life by Tom Crewe - SIGNED COPIES
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera - March’s Backstory book club
Foster by Claire Keegan
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
Send Nudes by Saba Sams
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
Free Love by Tessa Hadley
THANK GOD HE’S GONE. If guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days, then unwanted books positively reek by the end of the three months you have to wait before returning them to the publisher. Worse, the stench is of your own making. A second of over-enthusiasm with a buying catalogue to be regretted at leisure, the potent pong of hubris.
So farewell, then, Lucian. Or, rather, Lucians. I cannot now recall why I thought my new bookshop cried out not merely for one biography of Lucian Freud, but for five copies of each of its two volumes. It must have seemed a good idea at the time.
To be clear, I have no reason to doubt that it is an excellent book. It has probably intrigued and delighted readers and sold very nicely in arty bookshops and galleries. But there has been no stampede down Balham High Road, no customers bursting through the door just before we closed for Christmas, panic etched on their faces, only to collapse in a heap in front of the Art section: thank God you’ve got it!
If I ran a larger bookshop, I might be tempted to hang on to a couple of copies. Sure, it might not be a bestseller, but it’s good to have depth and hinterland. But since we only have room for a few thousand titles at a time - and every month brings a hundred or more new books we are keen to stock - each book has to fight for its place (and make its contribution to our hefty overheads). A book that hasn’t sold after four months needs to find a reader elsewhere.
On the face of it, the sale-or-return system is great. It’s good for publishers, because it makes it much easier to persuade bookshops to take a punt on a new book. And for booksellers, who are free to try out new titles with much less risk. Since the supply chain is somewhat ropey (it takes some publishers two weeks to deliver more copies of a book, more if it is being reprinted), it also allows bookshops to build up a small surplus stock of big-selling books, safe in the knowledge that if they go off the boil they can always return the last remaining copies. Shops can time returns to maximise cashflow - hence doing my first big batch in February, to partially offset publishers’ invoices from the two quietest trading months of the year. (You can help with this too by buying a book!)
But there are good reasons to be wary of relying on it too much. Most obviously, it’s not great for the environment to be pinging boxes back and forth all the time. Nor is it always a sensible business decision: since publishers (reasonably) insist you try books for three months before sending them back, do you really want a lot of capital tied up for a quarter at a time in stock that isn’t shifting? It’s also just a lot of faff, as Rory and I can attest after a week of bundling boxes and lugging books up and down stairs. Better to get the buying decisions right first time. James Daunt, who now runs Barnes & Noble and Waterstone’s as well as his own mini-chain, reckons one gauge of a good bookshop is whether it keeps returns to a minimum.
So I have tried to draw some broader lessons from this first bunch of returns. If this process can steadily make my buying decisions smarter, the impact should be felt long after this month’s bills are paid. The first big takeaway is that biographies are not nearly as popular as I thought they would be. I’ve never been much of a fan but I know that some people rarely read anything else and it seemed to me that good bookshops often had large sections devoted to them. So we set aside an entire bookcase.
But it wasn’t just Lucian we struggled to shift. Sue Barker, David Dimbleby and Hugh Bonneville hung around too. As did the royals: we’ve returned every copy of biographies of Charles and Camilla. Even the Queen didn’t sell. Nor was it only celebrities: Balham was equally unmoved by Stalin, James Joyce and Clement Attlee.
So we’ve slimmed the biography section right down and cut back on music and essay collections, which also proved a hard sell. This has freed up an extra bookcase for fiction, allowing the team more room to indulge their backlist passions. In future, I will be choosier about non-fiction (some of which, especially history and politics titles, do very well) and will order new non-fiction paperbacks in threes rather than fives.
Fiction has fared better, though interestingly genres that are big right now did not necessarily perform well for us. We sent back a fair amount of mass-market crime and thrillers (even “cosy crime”, with the exception of course of Richard Osman), in favour of more niche, “edgy crime” as Rory has it, or crime in translation. We have shrunk back graphic novels and YA (big on TikTok does not apparently always mean big on Balham High Road) to expand the children’s selection, which is performing well in an area popular with young families.
Come and see the new layout, if you haven’t already. Just don’t ask us where to find our Robert Caros.
Until next time,
Tom