In booksellers we trust

It’s a balmy Thursday morning when I cross the road and walk into the bookshop: my workplace for the day. Emma, Hannah and Lauren are busy with book deliveries and already a few customers are in to browse the shelves. The front windows are ablaze with rainbow chalk-paint patterns, and sunlight streams into this little high-street haven, ready-filled with stories and enthusiasm. 

In my seven years in the book industry, I’ve worn a lot of hats. I’ve been a publicist, marketeer, editor and social media manager. I’ve been an events coordinator and programme producer. Most recently, I’ve been an author. But there’s one essential role in the life-cycle of a book that I’ve never tried: bookseller. 

My publisher, the fresh non-fiction imprint Calon Books, have joined forces with the team at Book-ish this year for Independent Bookshop Week. As part of the celebrations, some job-swapping has been going on… and I’ve been invited to try my hand at bookselling for the day – at their award-winning bookshop in Crickhowell.

At first, it feels like I’ve been flung back into work experience days, and I’m half-expecting to be told which neglected cupboard I’ll be clearing out. But then more customers arrive, conversations spark, and quite suddenly I’m persuading an elderly man from Guernsey to finally write that memoir he’s been thinking about for decades. 

The morning flies by, all in an unstemmed flow of book-talk, and I understand, properly, that this is a very special place. Without needing any introduction, I know that I am among friends. In fact, anyone who walks into this shop is. It’s a space created for connection – not just selling – and that’s a pretty powerful thing to have in a community. 

I ask Emma, owner of Book-ish and bookseller extraordinaire, why she started it all – and why she keeps going.

"I enjoy being surrounded by like-minded people," she says, "sharing all of that joy and all of those stories and finding the right story for the right person at the right time. We’ve got 7,000 ideas downstairs, and we get to talk about them to different people every day."

Anyone who walks into this shop is. It’s a space created for connection – not just selling – and that’s a pretty powerful thing to have in a community

We’re sat with a coffee in the sunlit loft above the bookshop’s café, where they often host events. I’ve known about this lovely space for a while, and was honoured to be here just last night, with a few other authors and all the shop’s regular book-lovers, reading from my essay collection and having a generally lovely, bookish time.

But running a bookshop – a high-street business – in 2024 is not an easy feat. And the bigger ecosystem of book publishing can be a tricky one to find your place in. 

"I think often people forget that the best way, still, of connecting people with books, is via other people," says Emma. "And that will always be booksellers."

What’s been most remarkable to me, in my short time at Book-ish, is how quickly and meaningfully those connections are made among the bookshelves. My day has been filled with proper conversations, ones with real depth and meaning, no matter how fleeting. "I think the power of those conversations are still undervalued," Emma says. "But some shops are doing amazing things: I’m constantly astounded by the creativity of other booksellers. Collectively, we’re quite opinionated on the way we think books should be sold – and on the joy of it. So we’ve got a lot to say in that department."

I ask her what it is that makes an independent shop like this one different to, say, a larger chain or online store. "We can put a book in our window and no one else needs to make that decision. Nobody pays us to put books on our top ten, on our table: it is just us. So I think people trust us. We’re not an algorithm."

Emma talks about the exciting work of smaller presses and indie authors who they’ve championed in the past. "That’s where our superpower is: we can shout about things that other people aren’t shouting about, and we can sell hundreds of books just by doing that." 

And she’s right: a little bookshop in a small town in Wales can have a real impact, not just nationally, but personally, too. During my day on the shop floor, I’ve witnessed multiple people come into Book-ish, see my book displayed, pick it up and bring it to the till. It’s been a début author’s dream-come-true. To see Seaglass in strangers’ hands, in the shop window, to hear it talked about like any other publication, big or small, has meant so much to me. 

When my collection was released last month, among all the brilliant buzz my publisher was making, I went into my local Waterstones to check the shelves. It wasn’t there – and perhaps worst of all, I hadn’t expected it to be. But for as long as a small and mighty shop like Book-ish have it on their shelves, I’m a very happy début author. And I see, now, just how mighty they can be.