One of the first brutal lessons a writer learns is that getting visibility for your book is hard. I’m sure I’m not the only writer who sneaked into bookshops to try and find their own book, emerging crushed when it wasn’t there, or was tucked away, spine out, on some low shelf. There are thousands of books published each year and yours is just one of them.

Getting your book in front of potential readers is part of the job. So I thought, if I offer some writers shelf space in a high street bookshop, what could I get them to do for me?

Love The Book Makers, so much to choose from & such unique books

The Book Makers customer

I mentioned this idea of opening a writer-led pop-up to Jane McMorrow, who is director of a charity called Creative Future, which works with underrepresented artists and she got the idea right away. In return for stocking their books, we’d get writers to work to promote the work of new writers who might struggle to make it in the mainstream, either by helping them directly through mentoring, or through events that could help others raise their game.

It would be a shop that sold books by known writers, and also a workshop and event space focused on reaching out to a new community of authors.

Then the second Covid wave came along and everything stopped again. Then, in Spring 2021, Jane came across an offer by Brilliant Brighton, the local retail business improvement district. They were looking for artists to occupy empty shops in the middle of Brighton – rent-free.

This is when I emailed David Headley, the founder of Goldsboro Books. David is a neighbour, and in the thick of Covid, he had opened a new bookshop in Brighton. Against all odds, Goldsboro Brighton was thriving. It’s a brilliant shop, on Ship Street in the Lanes.

It seems to me that one of the crucial things about being a pop-up is that you mustn’t compete with existing shops. You’re there to join them, not make a tough environment worse. Talking to booksellers I knew, one of the hardest jobs is managing your stock. And for a pop-up shop that would be a huge task. If I could get another bookshop to order books for us, I could provide them with some – albeit fairly minimal – revenue in return for them handling that side of it.

David responded with such enthusiasm and warmth Jane and I were totally taken aback. None of us had any idea of whether this project would work or not, but David guaranteed to cover our costs throughout the project, whether he made a penny or not, just because he liked the idea of it. His generosity was what really brought the project to life.

I applied for an Arts Council grant to fund the workshops – which was turned down – on the grounds that the writers weren’t getting paid to contribute. I totally understand their reasons for that. Writers should get paid. But this was a different model. For us, that decision just upped the ante. Now we really would have to sell books, in order to fund the workshops.

And then Brilliant Brighton offered us a gem of a shop in central Brighton, initially on a three months lease. Jane pushed back. We’d need six months to make this happen.

We waited. And then they said yes. The only problem was we had to start right away.

More in The Book Makers Part 3

Back to The Book Makers Part 1

I’ve been so busy with our community pop-up project The Book Makers that I haven’t had much of a chance to think through what we achieved. After six hectic months, The Book Makers finally closed its doors on December 18, so I’m going to do a few posts over the next few weeks to try and talk about why we did this, and what we think we achieved.

The germ of the idea came from a series of conversations I had during Covid/ Back in early 2020, as Covid took hold, I did a series of interviews on Facebook. I spoke to all sorts of people, including writers, readers and book sellers. The book sellers were the really interesting ones.

You would have thought they were the ones with the most to lose when lockdown first happened. I remember talking to The Steyning Bookshop live on Facebook, the day they closed their shop down.

This could have spelled catastrophe. But over the next few weeks I watched as bookshop after bookshop developed new strategies for getting books to their readers. The thing is, all the bookshops I know have worked hard to develop communities around them, and this may have been what gave them an edge over many other small retail businesses. During lockdown many of them worked together with local people to innovate and adapt to the new normal. The kept busy doing everything from shifting stock to digital databases so people could still brows their stock, to delivering by bicycle. One bookshop I know teamed up with their local Waitrose to deliver books alongside groceries.

Those conversations confirmed something I’d been thinking about for some time. Bookshops are extraordinary places that can teach us something special. Ten years ago, we were being told that bookshops were about to be a thing of the past.

This beautiful intersectional space has provided an incredible opportunity for connection & collaboration to our community. Thank you so much.

The Book Makers visitor

In the noughties bookshops had faced a double-whammy. The net book agreement, which guaranteed profits for them had come to an end. That ushered the way for supermarkets to get in on the game, heavily discounting book prices. And then along came Amazon…

In the face of all this disruption, bookshops collapsed. It was an awful time. Big chains like Borders simply disappeared. By 2017 there were only 868 independent bookshops left in the UK, down from almost two thousand a decade earlier.

But the interesting thing was that after that low point the numbers of bookshops started inching upwards again. Why? Because new generation of booksellers weren’t content to sit around in tweed jackets letting their stock gather dust as the world changed around them. The new bookshops connected with their local communities. They weren’t lofty aesthetes. They were people who used books to build relationships with their customers. And as I’ve said elsewhere, books are great at building communities.

The booksellers I meet run book groups. They go out into local schools and take part in literacy projects. They invite authors to events to attract new customers into their shops. They aren’t just retail businesses – they are social businesses.

Since then number of bookshops has continued to grow, slowly but surely, while almost every other sector has continued to shrink. That’s because they have figured out that to thrive they have to do more than just sell books. Bookshops are offering us a model of how we can keep our high streets alive.

Beautiful little book shop. We need more places like this in Brighton

The Book Makers customer

During lockdown I began to wonder if there was a space to experiment with this some more. When the shops opened up again, some of them wouldn’t have made it through those dark days and there would be empty shops. That was a tragedy, but empty shops would need filling. Maybe this was also an opportunity.

More of this to come in The Book Makers Part 2

On 24 November I took part in a Pecha Kucha at Atelier by The Sea, an arts space on Brighton’s seafront. This is the talk I gave about how I think books have changed in my lifetime. A Pecha Kucha is kind of like a high-pressure Powerpoint where you have 20 slides, each of which lasts only 20 seconds. The sound isn’t brilliant, but I hope it makes some sense.

Nice audio interview by Kent Online about why I – and other writers – chose to set their books in Kent.