So now we had an empty shop. And there were three partners: myself, Creative Future and Goldsboro Books.
Now we needed people:
- Established writers
- Workshop and event leaders
- Volunteers
- Mentees
- – and book buyers
Writers. The original idea was to work with established writers alongside new voices, so I started by contacting about fifteen successful local writers I knew who might be interested.
What an unexpected find. Love it
The Book Makers customer
This is where I should say how amazed I was that so many talented people got on board; but in truth, I was fairly confident I’d hear back from most of them. The writers I know are almost all generous people who have a good understanding about how hard it is to get a foothold in this profession and are nearly always willing to lend a hand if they can. And my promise to put their books in a shop window didn’t exactly hurt.
The positive replies came in quickly over a space of few days from Elly Griffiths, Lesley Thomson, Mick Finlay, Laura Wilkinson, Araminta Hall, Bethan Roberts, Paul Burston, Dorothy Koomson, David Fennell, Heidi James, Mick Jackson, Sharon Duggal and Kate Harrison (aka Kate Help/Eva Carter). They were all local south-coast writers. I also reached out to Londoner Vaseem Khan because with the exception of Sharon, the rest of us were pretty white. These were to be the shop’s potential mentors and evangelists for the project. They were all positive and enthusiastic about the project.
Mentees. Creative Future and I were able to team some of these writers up with mentees; we set up a simple system where the mentees could meet with the writers to discuss work three times over the lifetime of the project. We took a very light touch approach and pretty much let the pairs get on with it.
Wonderful project, has provided so many opportunities for me as an emerging Brighton writer.
The Book Makers mentee and volunteer
Volunteers. Creative Future, meanwhile, were thinking about how we could use volunteers to run the project and how we could run the workshops.
At this stage, this was a project with no dedicated budget at all, beyond the promise of a revenue-share from Goldsboro Books. I applied for Arts Council Funding to pay for workshops but we were turned down – ironically on the grounds that they didn’t like to support projects where artists weren’t being paid. (Understandable, but that was kind of the principle on which the project was founded.)
Finding volunteers wasn’t going to be an issue either; all sorts of people want to work in a bookshop for a variety of reasons. Jane McMorrow of Creative Future identified the need to have a single person coordinating them and found some budget from the Charity to empty a part-time worker, Elsa Van Hefteren, to act as volunteer lead.
Creative Future used their networks to put out a call for volunteers and over the course of the project thirty people ended up working closely with the project. Many were writers. Many were avid readers. All, I think, found it a productive place to be over its six month run.
Thank you so much for providing this space to aspiring writers. It has really helped me. Keep the workshops coming please.
The Book Makers workshop attendee
Workshop event leaders. Because of the short-lead time we had – we had opened in July and wanted the workshop programme to start in September – we had a frenzied couple of weeks putting a the events together. Creative Future did the bulk of the workshop programming, programming a wide selection of events around writing and personal development, including Nature Journaling for Health and Wellbeing, Writing Yourself to Better Mental Health and Hidden His/Her/Their Stories.
Great workshop with a lovely, open, empathetic host. Really glad I got the opportunity to come.
The Book Makers workshop participant
From the start we wanted this to be a collegiate 
project so we invited other Brighton-based writing agencies to take part; two were able to take part. New Writing South were incredibly responsive and programmed a series of four workshops; Colin Grant’s organisation Writers Mosaic generously sponsored and managed two events, one featuring Vaseem Khan discussing the topic of appropriation in writing, and another with Jarred McGinnis about his debut The Coward.
Attending these workshops has given me a positive outlook and assisted with some healing for me, as I have had some emotionally upsetting things recently relating to loss.
The Book Makers workshop participant
I programmed quite a few of the author events. Interestingly, I’d judge the that the workshops were more successful than the events. Covid meant that organisations like libraries had been closed for some time and I got the impression that writers were 
starved of writing support.
Tara has been a very supportive & informative tutor, I know the course will have a lifelong impact.
Nature Journaling workshop participant
That said, we did run some cracking events. The one with Sara Jafari and Dorothy Koomson was one of the most interesting and provocative discussions I’ve witnessed – discussing attitudes to diversity in publishing. As a debut writer, Nadine Matheson was inspiring. And my old editor Rose Tomaszewska, now editorial director at Virago, gave a brilliant workshop on pitching. Joelle Taylor’s event was just brilliant and it was wonderful to have an appearance from the poet who, within a few weeks of her appearance, would go on to win the TS Eliot Prize.
In total by the time we’d completed the run, we’d done 20 workshops and run 12 book events.
I’m new to writing, so all the techniques will be really helpful. I feel that what I’ve learnt will help me with motivation to write
The Book Makers workshop participant
Book buyers. We opened the shop on July 14 and the book buyers started coming. By the time we finally closed 
our doors on December 18, we estimate that around 5,000 people had visited the shop as buyers and we’d sold £13,000 worth of books. We’re proud of that, because working with Creative Future – who had their own wall and table in the shop – we foregrounded many titles by writers from diverse backgrounds.
Amazing event, feeling uplifted & empowered.
The Book Makers workshop participant
Also we did well on books about writing. We had a few surprises. Poetry did really well. We sold dozens of copies of Jay Bernard’s Surge, even more of Joelle Taylor’s C+NTO. We had to keep reordering Mick Jackson’s Underground Man and Umi Sinha’s Belonging did particularly well. In a space like ours, people were after an experience. They weren’t after the kind of books they can buy anywhere.
Shelley Welti of Brilliant Brighton emailed with a few questions for her own evaluation of the project so I’ll use this as a way to wrap this up.
- What attracted you to the project?
- What challenges (!) did you face?
- What was the best thing about running The Bookmakers for six months?
- What advice (that you now know, from all the blood, sweat and tears!) would you want to share with anyone else thinking about taking up an opportunity like this?
What attracted me to the project?
It was that thing I talked about on the first of these posts. I think in recent years bookshops have pioneered a new model of social retail and I admire them hugely. I was very eager to experiment with a social retail project that used the power of books and writers and readers to create something different. And then when we saw the space we were being offered, everything really clicked.
What challenges did we face?
I haven’t discussed the challenges much, but aside from the very long hours it took – mostly from me and Jane – there are real issues taking over a retail property, even if it’s rent-free. There are still business rates to pay, as well as water rates and electric bills. A real difficulty is that it is almost impossible to calculate those costs accurately. Ten months after we signed our lease, we’re still not sure of what the total cost will be. This is simply the way it is. (Had we not had the relationship with Goldsboro Books who had promised to underwrite emergency costs, we would have definitely thought twice about doing this at the start of the project.)
Properties don’t look after themselves. Ours was in a pretty good state, but it still needed a lot of upkeep. Our heating failed early on in the project, so we had to keep warm over the winter on fan heaters. The front doors never opened properly. Our basement was flooded at one point. There was a rough sleeper who came with the property – all fine and good, but there was a certain amount of relationship-management had to go along with that. It wasn’t a fully accessible property and we had to work to make it better. Lots of stuff like that.
What was the best thing about running The Book Makers for six months?
It worked!! Every day we were in there we had great conversations, great compliments. It was such a pleasure to see some of the writers link up with the project. Typical conversation:
‘Are you a writers?’
‘No. No… [Pause] Not really. Well. I write a bit. I’m half way through a novel. . . [etc]’
Beautiful space. Wish it could continue
The Book Makers workshop visitor
It demonstrated how books + a love of writing and reading can create a great shared social space. The project confirmed that most useful single thing people who write can do – wherever they are on their writing journey – is to link up with other writers to build skill and resilience and share their insights into the process. The workshops also demonstrated that there is a very clear and positive link between writing and wellbeing.
We didn’t have the funding to do any in depth evaluation but anecdotally the reactions were amazing.
What advice would we want to share with anyone else thinking of doing the same?
Develop partnerships. Not only can you not do it on your own, if you have a shop, you have a great platform to invite like-minded organisations to contribute to and if you’re excited by it, they will be too.
This was a completely partnership-led project between me, Creative Future, Goldsboro Books, Brilliant Brighton, Writers Mosaic, New Writing South and the brilliant writers who offered their time for free. It’s power came from those partnerships. When I asked designer Richard Wolfströdme, some advice on creating an identity, he created a logo for free and strong-armed the arts installation company Standard 8 to create our amazing shop front. The vinyl alone was worth hundreds of pounds but they wanted to be part of it.