Bookshops use Rio to entice 'armchair Olympians'

Bookshops are using the Olympic Games Rio as an opportunity to entice customers into stores with window and table displays, despite Olympic-themed books achieving just marginal gains in the charts.

Waterstones non-fiction buyer Richard Humphreys said the Games were a “fantastic opportunity” to highlight the “excellent sports publishing” on offer for armchair Olympians, with many of the chain’s shops curating Olympic-themed tables and displays. “The selections cover a variety of titles, carefully tailored to the shop’s local market, including biographies, sports writing, the history of the Games and many more," he said, highlighting How to Watch the Olympics (Profile) and The Games (Pan Macmillan), both by David Goldblatt, as good examples.

Meanwhile Foyles has put together a special selection of five Olympic-themed books for readers who prefer to "read about other people running around" while celebrating "all things Olympian”. Its key recommendations for titles that give "a glimpse into the cultural significance of the summer games for real sport fans, children and everyone in between” this month were: Asterix At The Olympic Games by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (Hachette Children’s Group); The Frog Olympics (Hachette Children’s Books) by Brian Moses and Amy Husband, 'Orrible Olympics by Terry Deary (Scholastic), Goldblatt’s The Games (Pan Macmillan) which aims to capture "the kaleidoscopic experience of the Games” through research and, This Mum Runs by Jo Pavey, (Vintage), sharing the true story of how Pavey won a gold medal just months after giving birth to her second child.

Display at Foyles Waterloo

Independent bookshops have also been getting involved in the Rio spirit. Chorleywood Bookshop in Hertfordshire, has organised Olympic window displays at its store with a host of books "for fans young and old" - from Usborne's Olympic Games Sticker Book which it says has been a bestseller, to Judo guides, and celebrating the host-nation with Michael Palin's Brazil (W&N).

Chorleywood bookseller Tom Ayling said: "For the armchair Olympian we have delighted in pointing our readers toward David Goldblatt's The Games (Macmillan) - his magisterial history of the modern Olympics, and a useful reminder that sporting scandal is not the preserve of our age alone. And of course, in the spirit of the games, our booksellers have been working like true Olympians: receiving books in record time, recommending holidays reads with the dexterity of champion archers and organising a marathon of events through the summer and into the autumn."

Display at Chorleywood Bookshop

Sales of Goldblatt’s two titles How to Watch the Olympics and The Games have crept up by 8.6% and 8.7% in volume on last week, selling 20 and 150 copies this week respectively, while Richard Brassey’s Story of the Olympics (Orion Children’s Books) saw a 26% jump, selling just shy of 100 copies and entering the top 5,000 for the first time.

But Olympians’ autobiographies have not fared so well, with sales of Andy Murray’s 2014 autobiography Seventy Seven (Headline) declining on last week - still coming down from a spike post-Wimbledon - and Faster Than Lightening by Usain Bolt (Harper Sport, 2014), also dropping, alongside Jess Ennis’ Unbelievable (Hodder, 2013) and Jo Pavey’s This Mum Runs (Yellow Jersey July 2016).

Frances Jessop, editor at Yellow Jersey Press, said she and the Yellow Jersey team will "all be wildly cheering Jo Pavey on in her 10,000m race on Friday", adding: "The Olympic Games are where legends are made, so at Yellow Jersey we’re pleased to have books this summer on legends old and new".

Other Yellow Jersey titles include Richard Moore’s "fascinating investigation into the Jamaican sprinting phenomenon that brought us Usain Bolt", The Bolt Supremacy, just out in paperback, and Richard Askwith’s biography of "one of the most inspiring Olympic heroes of all" Emil Zátopek, out since April, which is up 44% over the past three weeks.

Mo Farah also bucked the trend with both his memoir and children’s book Ready Steady Mo (Hodder Children’s), authored with Kes Gray and illustrated by Marta Kissi. Sales of the latter, which published at the end of July 2016, were nudged 1.3% up on last week, selling 683 copies. Louis Smith’s My Story So Far (Orion, 2013) and Tom Daley’s My Story (Michael Joseph, 2012) also rallied, but only slightly. Daley, who won bronze with Dan Goodfellow in the synchronised diving event this week, is also publishing a fitness and nutrition book Tom’s Daily Plan with new HarperCollins imprint HQ on 29th December 2016, in time to help out with readers’ New Year resolutions.  

Robin Harvie, publisher at Pan Macmillan Non-fiction, said this year’s Games were always going to be “something of a hangover after the success of London” for publishers, but noted the best is yet to come, with updates of past bestsellers and new titles only to be expected in the aftermath of the Games.

 “The Olympics have always drawn huge interest from publishers - either anticipating success, such as with cyclist Lizzie Armitstead this year (Blink, out in September 2016) - or turning sports icons into publishing brands, like with Tom Daley," Harvie said.

"Rio 2016 was always going to be something of a hangover after the success of London and big books by Bradley Wiggins, Mo Farah, Victoria Pendleton, the Brownlee brothers et al. I am sure that someone is on the phone to Adam Peaty (who won a gold medal in Men’s 100m Breastroke) already - perhaps for a fitness book with those abs! But the real question is whether the feel-good factor will run on beyond the autumn celebrity rush. The real feel good factor will come if the refugee team do something incredible, resulting in a kind of Cool Runnings narrative.”

The refugee team was formed as part of an effort "to show solidarity with the world’s refugees” in the context of the growing refugee crisis where war and conflict continues to displace people worldwide. The team is made up of 10 athletes, including swimmers and runners, hailing from countries including Syria, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia, and whose personal stories are said to have “inspired the world”.

Harvie added that Pan Macmillan would update its edition of Goldblatt's The Games along with its book on Geraint Thomas, if he wins gold on the track. “And of course, this increased national interest in sport will help with other recent Pan Macmillan titles such as Anna Kessel’s Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change our Lives and Damien Hughes’ The Five STEPS to a Winning Mindset,” he said.