Indie bookshop numbers look to have remained static in 2023, says Halls

Booksellers Association (BA) managing director Meryl Halls has said that the net number of independent bookshops looks to have remained the same in 2023, after several years of slowly rising figures, while the number of new openings seems to be "holding steady".

In her annual letter to the trade, Halls says that the BA’s membership numbers, which will be released in January, indicate that "bookselling is still a massively attractive career and sector", despite challenges, but overall numbers have not risen this year, the first time in several years that this has been the case.

Many still plan to open indie bookshops, but Halls also said that margins remain low and costs are "bearing down on SME and large booksellers alike", and the industry must create "conditions where bookshops can thrive". Halls said: "That’s partly about commercial terms and ongoing supplier support for bookshop activity, but it’s also about working to create trusted and creative relationships between publishers and booksellers."

Halls also highlighted the importance of the supply chain and the changing "distribution landscape", which has "created concern for booksellers this year". The trade body chief explained in her letter that the BA has been working on raising concerns with publishers and distributors through its Supply Chain Working Party, which is chaired by former BA President Andy Rossiter of Rossiter Books.

Moreover, Halls highlighted the BA’s supply chain survey as well as its other "investigative and representative work". She said: "An important part of that work has been the crucial importance of events to bookshops. Whether a large branch of Waterstones, or a small regional indie, bookshops run events as a key part of their offering.

"Those events are not just a matter of shifting books—they are very often part of their community-building and the cultural landscape they have created. Disruption to the fragile—and often commercially borderline—events ecosystem is worrying, and the consolidation and rise of third-party events providers has been a focus of concern this year. We’ve engaged with the management at Fane Productions, for instance, in fruitful conversation, and have worked with a group of senior publicists to clarify the best practice for creating great bookshop events, breaking out authors and continuing to shore up the importance of what bookshops deliver." 

Halls highlighted in her letter the role of reps and says that the "importance placed by booksellers on the tasks performed by reps was as high as it could have been, and we know from our members’ experience how significant reps can be in the breaking out and building of authors, the consolidation of the publishers’ retail relationships and, ultimately, the sale of books to consumers". This was an issue highlighted by Halls and the BA’s president, Hazel Broadfoot, at the BA’s annual conference this year.