What’s it really like to run your own bookshop?
As yet another film romanticises the literary lifestyle, Anita Singh talks to bookshop owners
Georgia Duffy realised her dream of opening a bookshop almost a year ago. “We had a great first week. We had a book launch and everyone was celebrating with prosecco, and sales were really good.” This week, Duffy issued a plea on social media. “We only took £12.34 today,” she tweeted. “If anyone was thinking about buying a book, now would be a great time.”
Has a job ever looked so appealing on screen as bookselling? There’s Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, strolling along to the shabby-chic Travel Book Co, where customers include a Hollywood superstar and a shoplifter so refined that he tries to steal the Cadogan Guide to Bali. Or Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, filling her adorable children’s store with adorable children and Tom Hanks.
The latest in the genre is The Bookshop, adapted from the Penelope Fitzgerald novel of the same name and starring Emily Mortimer as Florence, a plucky widow who opens her business in a picturesque Suffolk village in the Fifties. The audience is invited to swoon as she runs her hand over the shelves of clothbound classics, and feel pangs of envy as she curls up in an armchair to devour the latest novel.
Florence encounters problems – the building is damp, the local grande dame (Patricia Clarkson) wants to claim the shop for an arts centre, and she attracts the attention of a mysterious recluse (Bill Nighy) – but, before we know it, her business is beginning to thrive.
In real life, as Duffy discovered, things can follow a different trajectory. The 28-year-old gave up a job as a hospital radiographer to open her shop, Imagined Things, in the North Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate.
“I expected that things were going to take time, that people needed to find where we were, and I planned for that. But recently things have dropped off a cliff and I don’t know why. We had a lot of really bad days, and then some really bad weeks. There’s only so long you can sustain that when you’re not an established business and you haven’t got any reserves.”
Duffy’s £12.34 takings on Monday were from greetings cards; that day she didn’t sell a single book.
Bookselling is a precarious business. In 1995, the UK and Ireland had 1,894 independent bookshops. By 2013, that figure had dipped below 1,000, and by 2016 there were just 867 left, felled by the double whammy of Amazon and the troubled British high street. But last year there was a glimmer of hope: the decline was arrested, and the net figure went up by one. Imagined Things was one of 39 new openings in 2017.
It’s not the career to go into if you’re looking for a comfortable life. Banish memories of Meg Ryan’s brownstone apartment and a Manhattan store the size of a small Tesco. Likewise, Hugh Grant’s Notting Hill character, Will Thacker, who pleads poverty while living in a split-level flat in one of Britain’s most expensive postcodes.
“Hugh Grant in Notting Hill is minted,” says Simon Key, co-owner of The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, north London. “He doesn’t have to worry about the fact he doesn’t have any customers. Whereas the reality is, most people who run independent bookshops are completely the opposite, and do it because they absolutely love it and are passionate about it, and it’s not about the money. God, it’s really not about the money.”
Key and Tim West, his business partner, opened their shop a decade ago after being made redundant from their jobs in a local branch of Waterstones. They took out a £60,000 loan and began building a community of book lovers, blogging about their plans and setting up a Facebook group. When they got the keys to the premises, a former internet café that was shabby, but definitely not in a chic sense, Key put out a message asking for volunteers. At 9am the next day, he turned up to find 12 people waiting outside, ready to rip out the fittings and decorate.
On their “epic” first day, they took £3,500. On their second, they took £100. There have been peaks and troughs since. They currently sell 30-40 books a day to walk-in customers, and around the same number online. On Saturdays, it’s about £500-£600 through the till. But that’s just a small part of the business. To make money these days you have to reach your audience in different ways.
Key operates a book club where, in return for a subscription, members are sent a new book each month. Meryl Halls, managing director of the
‘Hugh Grant in Notting Hill is minted – he doesn’t have to worry about a lack of customers’
Booksellers Association, says selling books is such a low-margin business that successful shops are the ones that have diversified into events, setting up stalls at festivals, visiting schools and selling higher-ticket items such as stationery or jewellery. “The leading ones know how to operate in a challenging environment,” she says.
The Bookshop does at least make the job look like hard work, as Mortimer lugs boxes of books around the place and struggles through meetings with an unsympathetic bank manager.
But, in general, as Hollywood tends to do with other occupations (lawyers, journalists, architects), the film sells a fantasy version of the job. Key, for example, does not spend his days reading books. “No, no, no, no. I’ve far too much to do,” he says. “There is a romanticised view of running a bookshop and it’s being able to sit here waiting for customers to come and chat all day, drinking coffee and selling hundreds of pounds worth of books to rich people. And it just doesn’t happen. You’ve got to work so hard to get customers. And it’s physical hard work. It’s exhausting, and terrifying, especially if you haven’t got any money to start with.”
But would he do anything else? Not a chance.
Key is also sanguine about the threat from Amazon. “I’ve kind of got the opinion that the biggest threat to people buying books are other things apart from reading. Like Love Island. If we can encourage people to spend more of their free time reading books, whether they’re from Amazon or us or Waterstones or Sainsbury’s or wherever, then their lives will be enriched.”
Duffy, despite her despairing tweet this week, is equally optimistic. Her plea for customers has been met with a deluge of support. “The phone has been ringing practically off the hook with people wanting to place orders,” she says. “Despite everything, as tough as it’s been, I’ve never been happier. It’s my complete passion. I wish I could go back and tell my younger self that one day I’d have my own bookshop.”