'So how do you choose the books?'

And other FAQs

YAY for YAEL Hurrah for Yael van der Wouden, whose glorious debut novel, The Safekeep, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction on Thursday night. Obviously I wouldn’t be so crude as to say you read it here first, but I might just note that it was our fiction book of the year for 2024.

If you haven’t heard me describe it enough, it’s an engrossing, claustrophobic novel set in the Dutch countryside in the early 1960s. A young woman tends the family home, long after her mother died and her brothers moved out. When her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay, odd things begin to happen…

It’s fresh out in paperback, in the nick of time. We have a big stack in the bookshop; if you live further afield, grab it from our website. Stick in another couple of paperbacks and you’ll get free delivery, anywhere in the UK.

---

ONE OF THE QUESTIONS I’M MOST OFTEN ASKED — up there with “do you have this in paperback?”, “is there a toilet?” and the classic “can I leave a parcel for your neighbour?” — is “how do you choose the books that you stock?”.

I’ve written a little bit about this in the past, but I was grilled on this topic and others this week by Phoebe Morgan, a senior editor at Hodder & Stoughton, for her insightful newsletter The Honest Editor.

It occurred to me that some of you might enjoy hearing an edited version of our conversation. So scroll on for the answer to that and many other frequently asked questions.

Happy reading!
Tom

What would you say are the biggest drivers of sales for you as an independent bookshop? I think there are a couple of different things to talk about here. One is that there are people who are coming here already knowing what they want, and for those customers, I think it typically depends on their age group. So our younger customers will often come here having gone first to Goodreads or The StoryGraph, and either they have an account themselves, or they might have been sent a WhatsApp or a screenshot from a friend, or they’ll have seen something on Instagram or TikTok, and they will come here and say, have you got XYZ, or, ‘I really must read Butter because I've seen everyone reading it on the tube,’ — that kind of thing.

The other kind of customer who comes in knowing what they want is a slightly older, more traditional independent bookshop customer, who will have read review coverage in the papers, or will have heard, for example, if something is Book of the Week on Radio 4, and they might come in with a picture of it ripped out of the newspaper and say, ‘Have you got this?’ or ‘Can you order it for us?’

So those are the kind of people who know what they want, but I guess, in a way, the more exciting thing for us as booksellers is the people who come here not knowing what they want, and I think in terms of the ways that we like to influence them, there are two different things that go on.

One is people who just come up to us and ask. Sometimes they like to set us a really specific challenge like, ‘I'm buying a book for someone who is in hospital and I want them to read a really light-hearted or cheery read or something that can distract them a little bit.’ And so that's a fun challenge, and we can sometimes just go around the shop and pick out a few. I typically pick out three or four books from the shelf and give them a little selection, a) because I like to actually give them a genuine selection and b), because the more books you pile up in front of someone, the more they're going to buy!

But the other thing that we do to drive book sales is just to really back a book and keep backing it in a big way. I try to think of our recommendations as being authentic (in what we choose) and then audacious (in how many we order).

So that's the case for our Books of the Month, or at the moment, we have a whole summer reading guide where we have 16 pages of books that one of the five of us here has read and loved and that we've really recommended to people. And I do think that that's where independent bookshops do have a bit of an edge: it’s that people trust us, that the recommendations that we give here are genuinely books that one of us has read and really loved, so we’re not picking books just on the basis that we think they will sell. We're picking books that we love, that we also think will be commercial.

We go to the pub once a month and we have something we call Proofs and Pints, where the whole team is expected to have read some proofs (proofs are advance copies of books that publishers sometimes send out to journalists, bookshops and authors) and to make an argument as to which they think should be the Book of the Month, and we'll go around the team and all talk about it, and we'll all get very excited about the books. We'll order all of them, regardless, but then ultimately for one that we think should be Book of the Month, we'll pile that one up on the table and order a huge number of copies, and it's not unusual for us to shift 100 or so of that particular title in that month.

I think the lovely and sometimes very scary thing about that, is that our customers do trust us, and that they will often buy a book on the basis of thinking oh, it's your Book of the Month. You know, there was someone who came in last month and said, “what’s your next Book of the Month, because I need to get them all!” So it's really fun, but it's also a bit of a responsibility because you don't want to abuse that trust. It's important that if ever I read a book, and I don't like it, I won't put up a sign saying ‘I don't like this book,’ but if someone asks me what I think of it, I will never lie and tell them I love it if I don’t.

Can you talk us through how the ordering process works from publishers? How does it work getting a book in here, and in what quantities? I mean the first thing is that there are SO MANY books published, and arguably too many. And so each month I will go through the full AIs (advance information sheets, created by publishers), sort of a catalogue essentially that each publisher will send to me, and they're often 100-200 pages long, depending on the publishing group. I am sent those from all of the major publishers.

How far in advance are you getting sent those? Typically two, three months in advance of publication. Further in advance of that, for books that publishers really want to hype e.g. books that they will call their “super lead” title or similar, they might bombard us. We have to say by the time we've received the fourth copy of the same proof, “yeah, okay, we get it, you want us to sell it!” So for those books, there will be a degree of hype already, which might help when we do come to eventually look at the catalogue.

I will sit down and probably spend a maximum of an hour deciding which of those 200 titles that a publisher has sent me we can stock, because we're probably only going to order 10% of them, 20% of them, in any quantity at all. So, for the majority of novels, we won’t order any at all. And then the quantity that we take of each book selected from that one catalogue will range from between one and 100, or for some novels, maybe even 200.

For the vast majority of the books that we select, we will order in only one copy, maybe three copies, maybe five. And then there'll be a small handful of books where we think, okay, because they are a really established author and we think they’ll do really well, or because it's something we're going to back as our Book of the Month, or something that we really want to get behind, then we'll order it in quantity and really go for it.

But I think, in the main, what you would be looking for as an author if it's a debut, is that hopefully it might be something that we're going to order three or five of to begin with rather than one of, because if we are ordering one, it means that probably it’s just going to be spine out on the shelf and — unless there is a reason that someone is coming in to look for it — it might be quite hard in terms of discoverability, whereas as soon as we decide to put it face out, that's the difference between us actually giving the cover a chance to do its job, and requiring it to be discovered by by the reader.

We work several months ahead. The whole team has access to what we call our gratis spreadsheet, so the team will go through previews from the Bookseller magazine or they'll go through the individual Advance Information sheets and decide which ones they’d like to read.

We will then request gratis or proof copies of all of those, and the team will read them, and that's when we'll then decide which ones we'll really order in quantity. So it’s quite important for us that the proofs keep flowing, and I think it's a really helpful thing that publishers do to support, because, particularly with debuts, unless we've read them, it can be really hard to differentiate between 20, 30, different debuts in one particular corner of the market, publishing in one particular month.

I think that's probably where we can make the most difference, as booksellers, it’s us actually reading those debuts. So for instance, I still haven’t read Butter, and the reason I haven't is because I'm very confident that customers will want to continue buying it regardless of whether I say it’s brilliant or not. Whereas, I think I can be more useful to my customer reading a book that they're much less certain that they'll want to buy and saying whether it’s brilliant or not.

---

---

When you're looking through the AI sheets, how influenced are you by market awareness? If it is an author that's not known to you, for example, what makes you place an order for three or four copies as opposed to just one? The terrifying truth is that it’s usually a 30 second decision, and I’d say it is 90% based on the cover. And I think that's basically because publishers do a really good job with covers in general and the best covers communicate to the reader — and therefore to a bookseller as a reader's proxy — what the genre is, who the target market is, what the hook is, what the overall message is.

We go by covers because I know that customers walk around the bookshop looking at the books, and maybe their eyes will fall on 100-200 books while they're here, and they might only end up picking up 5 or 10 to actually look beyond the covers. So I try to behave like one of my customers when I'm buying books in, and so I don't bother reading all the text on the AIs until a cover jumps out at me, and then I'll look at the text.

So then if it’s a literary title, and it's something that I think would be dependent on the quality of the writing, I'll be looking for whether it has great reviews. If it’s in paperback, did the hardback get good reviews? If it's a hardback, does it have good endorsements (cover quotes from other authors) - though that is a tricky one because so many books have brilliant endorsements and you’re never quite sure whether that is an accurate guide to the quality…

One of the advantages I have as an independent bookseller is a really clear idea of who my customer is, and so I find it relatively easy a lot of the time to look at a cover and think, is that something one of my customers is going to want to pick up and want to own? And sometimes it can be as simple as that, and that's certainly the first judge, and the second judge is, is it also something that after reading they're going to be glad that they read, and want to tell people about?

Do you tend to sell any paperback originals (ie, books that are published straight into paperback, without a preceding hardback edition) or do the books have to be in hardback first? Yes, we sell lots of paperback originals and actually, I wish everything would just be in paperback. Almost all of our customers hate hardbacks! Certainly, very few of our female customers, who are the majority of our customers, prefer hardbacks.

There are a few male customers who —particularly with something that they think is big and bulky and serious — do want a hardback. But, no, I mean, honestly, I would say five times a day, if not more, customers will say, “Ooh, do you have this in paperback yet?” They usually don't understand the 6 to 12 months delay and they're a bit frustrated by it.

I do get from a commercial point of view why, particularly for a huge author, maybe a Taylor Jenkins Reid or Richard Osman or something, why that works commercially to do that. I'm less convinced about the case for it for a debut or for a medium-selling author. And I'm increasingly baffled really by the fact that the vast majority of the publicity effort seems to be towards the version of the book that no one wants to buy. And then 12 months pass by and the format that people actually would want to buy is out, but no one has heard about it…

What's your view on those huge, huge bestsellers (e.g. Osman) and what is your view on celebrity authors; do you have a stance on whether or not to stock them in quantity, or would you rather give more space to lots of different books equally? No snobbishness about it, and I think that what we've tried really hard to be is a bookshop where people will feel comfortable and not intimidated. I'm a really keen reader and have been all my life, and there are, even now, certain bookshops that I would feel intimidated going in. And sometimes there is that feeling that maybe you're slightly being observed, and being judged on what you’re looking at.

And so I was determined that this wouldn't be that kind of bookshop. So the reason that we don’t stock a huge amount of super commercial fiction or crime is not that we look down on it or anything. It's just that it's not typically what our customers are after.

But for instance, when Prince Harry's memoir came out, I went to an event quite soon after that with another indie bookshop owner and the host of the event asked us what our thoughts were on Spare, and I remember the other person saying, “Oh, my goodness, we're not stocking that, and we certainly wouldn't want it.” And I just thought, but everyone's talking about this book, we're a bookshop and we want to be part of that conversation.

So, certainly if there's a big book, and there is buzz about it, we'll have it. We have sold quite a lot of Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid and that’s obviously more towards the commercial end. We will sell 40, 50, 60 copies of a new Richard Osman hardback (in total). That is fewer than we would sell of a literary novel that we really get behind, but we would sell it and we'll have it in quantity. But by and large, we find that what our customer is after is accessible, readable, enjoyable literary fiction. So it's not at the very, very high end of stuff, but it's something that you might enjoy reading, and pass on to any friend.

I think a good test of a book is: will I read it and then will my mum read it? And will she enjoy it? And so for instance, I've just read Albion by Anna Hope and that's probably my favourite novel of the year so far. It's a twist on the country house novel. I loved it, and I passed it on to my sister Jenny who really enjoyed it, and then I've just been on holiday with my mum. She read it last week and I was a bit nervous, but she really loved it too, and I'm so glad about that because I think that means I've got something nailed on that I can happily recommend to most of my customers, and I think not only is it a good book, but they will enjoy it. I think that’s so important.

---

A great book I just read

The Accidental Soldier by Owain Mulligan

Who knew that a soldier’s war diary could be so funny? I really enjoyed this one, from Owain Mulligan’s time serving in Iraq in 2006. Very good on the camaraderie of the squaddies and the reality of day-to-day camp life: the boredom as much as the drama of war. I learned far more about what really went on than from the telly at the time.

---

Want more Backstory?

• Come to one of our events

• Request a book to pick up in the shop (we can usually get a book for the next day)

• Order a book from our website