With New Year's Day and the torrid holiday shopping season behind them, booksellers around the country are able to look back on the past several weeks and assess in full. Initial reports were very positive; we'll have reports from more booksellers in the next few days.
Village Books/Paper Dreams in Bellingham, Wash., was up 9% over last year's holiday season--with net sales for books up 2% and sidelines up 18%, reported co-owner Chuck Robinson.
"With as much business as we do in non-book products--about 49% of the month of December--we ceased calling them sidelines a long time ago," Robinson commented. Village Books' wearables category, which includes scarves, jewelry, socks and even bras, did so well this holiday season that if it was separated from the rest of the operation, it would constitute a "sizable women's accessory store" on its own.
Robinson also reported that Village sold a "boatload" of The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown and Daniel Brown, which was the store's Whatcom Literacy Council pick of the year. "We expected to see The Boys in the Boat do well," said Robinson, "but we didn't expect to sell as many as we have."
Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See was also a huge seller, and two local titles--Murder in the Fourth Corner: True Stories of Whatcom County's Earliest Homicides by T.A. Warger (published by Village Books' own imprint, Chuckanut Editions) and Drive-Ins, Drive-Ups and Drive-Thrus: The History of Drive-In Movie Theaters and Drive-In Food Places in Whatcom County by Wes Gannaway and Kent Holsather--have performed well. For a brief period Robinson had trouble restocking What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe and Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand, but otherwise had no trouble keeping titles in stock.
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Over the past few holiday seasons, Robinson said, the non-book side of his business has continued to grow rapidly. Robinson also reported a calmer, happier atmosphere in the store this season, with fewer staff members mentioning encounters with grumpy shoppers.
"Nearly every staff member commented on how pleasant customers were," he said. "In spite of seeming less rushed, we did notice folks shopping later on Christmas Eve."
For Christine Onorati, the owner of WORD Bookstores, 2014 was the Brooklyn store's best year yet. For the Jersey City store--which opened on December 14, 2013--there was no full holiday season to compare 2014 to, but, Onorati said, this year surpassed her "fingers-crossed sales goal" and "everyone is feeling great about how the holiday season went."
The two stores had many big sellers in common, including Haruki Murakami's Strange Library, Amy Poehler's Yes Please, Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, The Book with No Pictures by B.J. Novak and Once Upon an Alphabet: Short Stories for All the Letters by Oliver Jeffers. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's annual Best American Series, particularly The Best American Comics and The Best American Infographics, also performed well at both stores. At times, Onorati reported, she had trouble keeping both What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions and All the Light We Cannot See in stock, and toward the end of the holiday season also briefly ran out of Yes Please.
In the Jersey City store, Onorati said, she and her staff "upped [their] sidelines game" for the holiday season. Onorati brought in prints from the company Litographs, as well as prints made by Oregon artist Nikki McClure. Several games, including a high-end line of wooden games called Wood Expressions, a line of magnetic block toys called Tegu and the board game Settlers of Catan, also sold briskly.
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| Onorati | |
Beyond the stores' usual schedule of book clubs and a holiday open house at each store, Onorati did not hold any events after Small Business Saturday and Indies First. The open house events both featured, in addition to an assortment of food and drink, "bookseller menus" created by the staff to help customers shop for gifts.
Year after year, Onorati said, customers seem ever more eager to use things like holiday gift guides and bookseller menus, and even to rely more on booksellers.
"I do think that customers want more and more to engage with our staff and ask them for help," Onorati said. "It's great that the majority of customers rely on our holiday gift guide and our staff picks." --Alex Mutter