Foyles to launch subscription book club

Foyles is poised to launch a subscription book club as it positions itself to capitalise on Christmas trading in the final quarter of the year.

The “Year of Books” will initially be offered in six packages: hardback fiction, paperback fiction, hardback non-fiction, paperback non-fiction, children’s, and fiction in translation, with the prices ranging from £135–£250 for a year.

The venture will take inspiration from the Foyles Book Club from the 1950s and 1960s, Foyles chief executive Paul Currie (pictured) revealed at a recent event at its Charing Cross Road flagship store in central London with publishers to showcase some of the retailer’s plans in the run-up to 25th December.

“We are going to be relaunching what was a very important part of our business in the 1950s and 1960s, what was known then as the Foyles Book Club,” Currie said. “We are going to be relaunching it as a subscription service, a personally curated range of books that are targeted at groups of people that value reading as part of their lifestyle. We believe that the curation and the development of the range of books that go into the subscriptions will be unique. We are really excited about that and we think it will lead onto a lot of future development.”

The Bookseller understands the Book Club is due to launch at the end of this month.

At the same event, head of marketing and brand development Simon Heafield revealed that the company was set to bring back its Christmas catalogue, which will contain reviews from booksellers and focus on a smaller number of “campaign” titles than last year so booksellers can focus on giving more attention to each one.

“It will be our biggest printed catalogue we have ever done in my time,” Heafield said. “It will be a really valuable tool for customers and staff to recommend books.” It has a print run of 10,000 and will be in stores in time for October half term.

He added that “rather than presenting this huge unwieldy list” of titles the retailer is backing for Christmas, this one is “tighter”, which means “each title can get the attention it deserves”.

“It also makes it much easier to communicate that list to our staff who don’t have as many titles to remember, and to our customers too,” he added.