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.