Customers back the high street as independent booksellers enjoy 'excellent' Christmas

Independent booksellers enjoyed "excellent" Christmas sales, with the majority looking to 2020 with optimism, according to The Bookseller’s Indie Bookshop Christmas Trading Survey.

Of the 51 respondents to the annual survey, the majority found a strong offering from publishers and customers opting to support bricks and mortar retailers paid off at the tills.

Around 40% said sales over the 2019 festive period were excellent with 42% saying sales were very good. 16% of indies surveyed found sales to be average, with just 2% experiencing disappointing sales.

The majority of respondents saw an increase in sales year on year with indies reporting increases between 7% and 30%. Others saw sales fall around 3%.

The Booksellers Association (BA) reported that its Christmas Trading Survey of independent booksellers, which had 97 respondents, showed that two-thirds of indies reported increased sales compared to Christmas 2018, despite perceived town-wide footfall being down as UK sales of National Book Tokens in indies went up 3.5% in December, with NBT redemptions potentially representing more than 5% of a bookshop’s takings in January.

Although there was no "Michelle Obama boost" as there was in 2018, standout titles included Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (Ebury), Booker winners The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Chatto) and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton) and Anne Glenconner's Lady in Waiting (Hodder) as well as perennial Christmas favourites: the Private Eye annual and various editions of A Christmas Carol, according to The Bookseller's survey. Indies also reported strong sales on titles with local angles and with "climate emergency" being named Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year it is perhaps unsurprising that Greta Thunberg's No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference (Penguin) also did well.

Nic Bottomley, president of the BA and co-owner of Mr B’s Emporium in Bath, said: "For us the surprise hits were Ann Glenconner and Charlie Mackesy. With The Boy, the Mole . . . there was a bit of a vacuum of random gift books this year and this just filled that completely and I think the Glenconner book did really well after she appeared on Graham Norton."

Christmas falling on a Wednesday this year also had an impact, with Mr B’s experiencing its best day of trade in 12 years on Monday 23rd December.

Bottomley said: "We had a great Christmas and we experienced huge growth in our subscriptions. With Christmas falling on the Wednesday, we fully expected Saturday 21st December to be our busiest day and it was our busiest day ever until Monday 23rd, which just blew us away. It was incredible."

The Chepstow Bookshop also experienced a spike in sales on the 23rd. Bookseller Matt Taylor said: "Generally it’s been really positive with some good titles out there. We had our best day of the year, apart from events, on the 23rd. That was our out of the park day, I’m saying it’s the best day of the decade."

Kate Claughan, from The Book Case in West Yorkshire, agreed Christmas came late. She said: "Christmas was all right. It was down in one of our shops and up in the other one. We found it started a lot later this year, but that seemed to be the case talking to other indie traders on our street."

Sasha Drennan from Lindum Books said Lincoln‚Äôs Christmas market helped with festive trading as the shop also branched out into non-book stock. "Our customers seemed to be looking for the comfort of traditional/perennial Christmas favourites, which are always a feature of our Christmas offering. Lincoln's Christmas Market was interesting this year—there were either fewer visitors or they were more spread out over the four days, and this boosted trade for us as well as other independent shops in our area; it seemed that those who came felt less packed in and rushed and were therefore more relaxed and in shopping mood.

"We've started stocking more non-book stock this year—notebooks and diaries are working particularly well for us. We've also been focusing more on getting pre-orders for the big titles coming out and promoting the signed/exclusive editions we get more effectively and widely We've started using Instagram and our Google business page to promote our events, news and updates."

As Brexit continues to loom large at Westminster, it appears indie booksellers were split on its impact, with 54% telling The Bookseller that Brexit is affecting trade and 46% saying it isn‚Äôt affecting trade at all. One indie said Brexit has actually encouraged shoppers to spend, as “people try to escape from it by reading a good book” as others admitted customers were being “cautious” with their money amid economic uncertainty.

Sixty-two percent of booksellers said economic uncertainty was the biggest threat to their business next year, followed by online competition (44%) and Brexit (36%). Despite the challenges, 67% of booksellers are looking to 2020 with optimism with just 10% saying they are pessimistic.

Customers also appear to be choosing to support their local businesses, with many booksellers citing shoppers "consciously" turning away from online helping to boost Christmas sales.

Tara Spinks from Lutyens & Rubinstein Bookshop in London said: "Some loyal customers did the bulk of their Christmas shopping with us, which made an enormous difference, and we had at least one new customer do the same in direct response to the way that Amazon treat their staff. In our tenth anniversary year, it was particularly heart-warming to know how much we are valued in the community."

Ben Cowper from Browsers Bookshop in Porthmadog added: "People are making a conscious decision to buy from bookshops rather than online. They're choosing to buy in their local community."

The survey results come days after new data from the BA revealed that the number of independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland has grown for the third consecutive year. As part of its annual membership survey, the BA revealed that the number of independent bookshops in BA membership at the end of 2019 grew to 890 shops, up from 883 in 2018, and up from 868 in 2017, with consumer confidence in bookshops, a thriving shop local movement and the "green factor" helping the resurgence.

BA m.d. Meryl Halls said: "It’s great to see bookshops in the UK having a strong Christmas. Bookshops perform a vital role in the book gifting market, playing a central part in book discoverability at Christmas time – as they do throughout the year. Additionally, within the context of an uplift in National Book Token sales in December, and the third year of growth for independent bookshops in the UK, it’s clear that consumer demand for bookshops remains high."