Richard Coles and Hollie McNish take part in Independent Bookshop Week 2022

The Booksellers Association has revealed the initial plans for this year’s Independent Bookshop Week, involving around 700 bookshops as well as authors such as Rev Richard Coles and Hollie McNish.

The annual celebration of independent bookshops across the UK and Ireland takes place this year from 18th to 25th June, and is sponsored by Hachette. 

McNish, poet and the bestselling author of Slug (Little, Brown), will create a bespoke poem to support the campaign, which will be shared on 22nd June.

The Independent Bookshop Week (IBW) children’s bag will feature the mouse and the lion from the award-winning picture book The Lion Inside (Hachette Children’s Group) by Rachel Bright and Jim Field. The bag will be part of the IBW point-of-sale kits, which will be available exclusively from indie bookshops during the event.

Coles, whose debut crime series is due from Weidenfeld & Nicolson this spring, will do an extensive tour of independent bookshops throughout June, signing stock of his upcoming crime debut Murder Before Evensong (Orion), as well as a number of independent events and public signings. Marc Morris will also be doing a bookshop tour to celebrate the paperback publication of The Anglo-Saxons (Hutchinson Heinemann). Independent bookshops taking part include Booka Bookshop (Oswestry), with more shops to be announced.

Gill Hornby will be marking the publication of her new book, Godmersham Park (Century), with a week-long bookshop tour. She will take part at an event with Sevenoaks Bookshop (Sevenoaks) among others.

Drake The Bookshop (Stockton-on-Tees) is bringing back its Great North Author Tour on Friday 24th and Saturday 25th June. The tour will see authors deliver 20-minute performances and creative writing workshops in local schools on Friday, before going on a whistle-stop tour of Stockton, Saltburn, Guisborough, Loftus, Thirsk and Ripon on Saturday, stopping in local bookshops to sign copies of their books.

Hachette UK will once again gather together a range of its authors to create videos in support of the campaign, which will be shared on social media.

Staff members from the publisher’s national offices in Bristol, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Nielsen BookData will be visiting and working with their local bookshops as “booksellers for a day”.

The High Five for Bookshops campaign from National Book Tokens is back for a fourth year, having enabled indies across the UK and Ireland to give away more than £130,000 to their customers since 2019. Each participating shop receives 100 flyers bearing unique codes which customers enter online to claim a free £5/€5 National Book Tokens e-gift card to spend in-store.
The London Bookshop Crawl will co-ordinate nationwide bookshop crawls, taking place from 17th to 19th June and covering 10 different locations: Belfast, Bristol, Edinburgh, Falmouth, Hastings, Leicester, Newcastle, Norwich, Sheffield and Stratford-upon-Avon. As well as indie bookshops, their crawls will also include second-hand and charity bookshops.

Participants interested in doing a self-guided bookshop crawl will be able to download a welcome pack from the website including a map, downloadable routes, and a bookshop crawl ID that they can use to claim any discounts and perks from the local bookshops they visit.

Building on the success of previous years, the Indie Twinning strand of IBW is coming back for a third year, with independent publishers and independent bookshops teaming up to develop bespoke activity programmes across the country. Publishers already confirmed to take part include Andersen Press, b small, EnvelopeBooks, Firefly Press, Magic Cat and Mama Makes Books.

“We’re really looking forward to celebrating Independent Bookshop Week this June," said Emma Bradshaw, head of campaigns at the Booksellers Association. "With their never-ending creativity and dedication, independent booksellers are already hard at work organising events and activities, and finding new ways to help book-lovers find their next great read. We hope everyone will join in and help us celebrate the incredible role independent bookshops play in their communities.”