From The Bookseller:
Last week I spoke at a local secondary school about bookselling and running a small business. One of the questions asked was “What’s the hardest part of owning a business?” “Fear of failure,” I said. What I didn’t say was that, at the moment, things are scary.
We’ve led a fairly charmed life for the five years we’ve been in operation. Even the period during Covid-19 proved successful, once we made it through the first lockdown with sanity just about intact. When our children could go back to nursery in June of 2020, and we could open the shop doors for click and collect, takings rocketed. Everyone who could was working from home, which gave our residential location a huge advantage, and Waterstones was closed. It was this period that gave us the capital to move and expand our Bristol shop and open a second store in Portishead.
Last autumn these moves were paying off. This autumn has been another story. Costs are up, takings are down and the Christmas sales uptick only arrived in December, six weeks later than normal. For the first time since we opened in 2018, nerves are, if not frayed, feeling a little worn.
The cold comfort is that we’re not the only ones. Seeing the stories on Facebook from other bookshops, and hearing reports from the various sales reps that visit us, times are tough for everyone. Other sectors are also feeling the pinch. I met a friend yesterday whose restaurant has grown and grown for the past decade (both in size and profit). As we had lunch he told me his takings are 28% down year-on-year!
As the interest rate hikes bite on people’s mortgage renewals, as food prices stay stubbornly high, as the cost of every activity and product has to increase to cover costs (or gauge prices in the case of some of the big brands), shopping habits are changing. People are buying less. Last year our customers may have bought a hardback as a gift, this year it’s a paperback. Last year they may have bought two or three books for one person, this year it’s just one.
. . . .
The increased prices of books haven’t helped. Non-fiction paperbacks have broken the £10 barrier. Big title fiction hardbacks are now £25, up from £20. I will happily argue that this is exceptional value for the lifetime of joy you’re getting, especially in comparison to the £4 coffee that lasts 30 minutes. But to those buying presents while watching their budgets, these price increases, even if just psychologically, are putting people off.
Link to the rest at The Bookseller
I understand the bookseller’s concerns. It’s hard to compete with Amazon, who will deliver the book to your door/Kindle.
Some of the answer, I believe, is to focus on the Niche Market:
– genres
– home-schoolers
– self-publishers (perhaps in combination with local printers with access to print-on-demand machinery)
– book clubs
– hobby clubs – boating, ham radio, cooking enthusiasts – allow resale nights, with the clubs getting a split with the store, and running the whole shebang
A local bookstore in my former home city had a thriving business, just taking in books that could be re-sold, and issuing store credits that discounted my book reading considerably.
Based on the kinds of books this guy seems to like, I suspect the homeschooling and self-pub niches are a hard no for him. It also sounds like he overextended, not realizing that the COVID boom times wouldn’t last forever and that the supply of tell-all books by royals was always going to be extremely limited.
Agreed, L.
Any retail establishment has to satisfy enough customers to make a profit. A physical or online bookstore has to be successful in satisfying its customers.
The challenge for a physical bookstore these days is that Amazon is very, very hard to beat on price. So, as a physical bookstore, I think you discount from suggested retail, then work like crazy to make your store the most interesting place around for your local customers.
Whining about Amazon is not the way to succeed. You say, “We’re better than Amazon because we have A, B, C, D and E. Plus every time you come into our bookstore, you’ll be treated like an individual and find that a lot more interesting things are going on in our store than are happening on Amazon, plus you’ll be greeted and treated as an individual with service Amazon can never deliver.