Will the last person to buy Claire Keegan please turn out the reading light?
Why Small Things is a really rather big thing
Upcoming events at Backstory
(all at 71 Balham High Road)
Tuesday 21st March, 7pm
We can’t breathe underwater, but lots of amazing animals can. We’re so excited to welcome two thrilling storytellers to talk about how and why we can look after the ocean. Laline Paull, whose new Women’s Prize-longlisted novel Pod is an epic, tribal tale of family and home told from the perspectives of a symphony of sea creatures, in conversation with Tom Mustill, a biologist and filmmaker, who wrote How to Speak Whale after a close encounter with a whale almost killed him.
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.
Yaba Badoe: An introduction to YA (young adult)
Tuesday 11th April, 7.30pm
Yaba Badoe is a Ghanaian-British documentary filmmaker and writer who has judged a few YA book prizes. We're going to talk about her experience writing for young adults and judging prizes in that category. Come to learn about all things YA, what it takes to build new worlds and create memorable characters.
Wednesday 26th April, 7.30pm
The Costa Book Prize-winning author of Unsettled Ground and Swimming Lessons joins us to chat all about her latest, The Memory of Animals. In the book, a pandemic is sweeping the planet. Neffy joins a vaccine trial, cut off from the outside world. The novel puts isolation and humanity under the microscope.
Team pick of the week
Darby recommends: Wintering by Katherine May
I have a particular love of stories that play with genre and structure, and Wintering piques that interest. It is at once a memoir about a difficult season in the author’s life and also an investigation into winter as a concept, both in nature and in our own lives. With beautiful language that often dips into poetry, May challenges her readers to stop and breathe during busy seasons, reassuring that it is okay and even healthy to seek rest.
I also highly recommend this one to anyone who loves learning fun or interesting facts. I've found myself referencing this book on topics ranging from cold-water swimming to home-schooling to waking up in the middle of the night. It is certainly one that sticks in your mind.
Our bestsellers this week
Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus - now in paperback
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey
Send Nudes by Saba Sams
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera - March’s Backstory book club
I’m Sorry You Feel That Way by Rebecca Wait
Foster by Claire Keegan
How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
MY JOB IS ABOUT lots and lots of books, and also about a tiny number of books. The former assertion requires little explanation. At any one time, we have about 2,500 or so different titles on our shelves and seemingly about the same number in my “to be read” pile downstairs. For every book I get through, I usually add two more to the list.
But it was the latter point that I dwelt on as I climbed the stairs from our stock cupboard for the fifth time yesterday, hefting a very similar stack of books each time. Of the 238 books we sold yesterday, 24 were copies of the same four books. In other words, less than 0.2% of our range accounted for more than 10% of our sales.
This was not a one-off. The four titles will be familiar to diligent readers of this newsletter from our weekly bestseller lists: Cleopatra and Frankenstein, Lessons in Chemistry, Really Good, Actually - and, of course, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, which has been a bestseller since day one. Yesterday alone, we sold nine copies of Cleopatra…
I suppose some would see this as a problem. How boring to keep selling the same book again and again! Aren’t there lots of great books out there? Why is Lebanese non-fiction never in the top ten? etc etc. And if you wanted to treat it as a problem, the cure would be pretty simple: you could make the front of the shop as wilfully obscure as possible, a sort of bookish equivalent of one of those cryptic New York Times headlines, tucking a lone copy of C+F away in a far corner under “Fiction: M”.
There certainly are lots of great books out there. And it’s one of the joys of running your own bookshop to be able to shout about them, regardless of how commercial or otherwise they will prove. One shelf at the front of the shop currently features face-out copies of My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd, which is just a great, great book despite being published in 1999, and which I’m determined to single-handedly keep in print if I have to. (If you haven’t read it, you should: It’s a beautifully written account by the Times’s war correspondent of covering his first conflict, in the Balkans, while battling demons of his own.)
But a lot of bestselling books also happen to be great. Claire Keegan is one of the few authors who unites the entire Backstory team in admiration, and I challenge anyone not to be moved by Small Things Like These or Foster. Lessons in Chemistry is simply great fun; I rarely discuss it with another reader without beaming, or reflecting that we wish Six-Thirty was our dog. (Note to Humphrey: I don’t expect you to master 1,000 words, but it would be helpful if you understood the difference between “hardback” and “paperback” as well as “fetch”.)
And we should be wary of a narrow definition of a Great Read. Books can be literary masterpieces, but they can also be entertainment. They can be diverting, maddening, amusing…hell, they can even be, as in the case of Spare, great gossip. And once you’ve got a reader hooked, they might trust you to lead them a little further off the beaten track. How are you going to preach the news about that undiscovered gem you’re desperate for everyone to read if you don’t have the book they came in here to buy first?
Two thoughts from all of this. One is that all of us on the team need to know what our ten bestselling titles in each section are at any given time and make sure they are always in ready supply (hence the five trips up and down the stairs yesterday). Otherwise we’re missing out on really easy sales.
Second, maybe we need to be better at thinking of clever ways to use the current bestsellers as “pegs” on which to hang other books we love that aren’t selling as well. The Site That Shall Not Be Named built a business around a “customers also bought” algorithm. What is a quirkier, human equivalent? All ideas welcome.
In the meantime, anyone for Anthony Loyd?
Love from the stock cupboard,
Tom
At Mr B’s in Bath they have a lovely gift experience called a Book Spa. You sit with one of the sellers and chat about books you’ve enjoyed in the past, books/genres you’d be interested to try but don’t know where to start etc then they go around the shop finding a set of books they think you might like and you get to choose a number of them. You also get tea and cake!
I don’t know if that’s viable for your shop but you could always try book spa evenings where it’s more of a communal thing? Like everyone pays for a ticket and has discussions with others about books etc and they get to take one book home with them up to the value of x.
Oh and there was that one time when I went in Blackwell’s in Oxford and said, I came in here a year ago when I was skint and wanted to buy a book but didn’t. It was on this table here, it had a green cover and it was written in quasi-Old-English. One of the staff was able to recognize the book from my description and provide me with a copy of WAKE by Paul Kingsnorth.