The weekend after Thanksgiving, the traditional beginning of the holiday season for retailers, was a mixed bag for indie booksellers this year. While many indies around the country reported a solid turnout, with shoppers intent on shopping local, some observed that foot traffic and sales on Black Friday, or Plaid Friday, exceeded Small Business Saturday traffic and sales.
Up and down the West Coast, booksellers enjoyed crowded stores and ringing cash registers. “Friday was one of my busiest days ever,” said Diana Portwood of Bob’s Beach Books in Lincoln City, Ore. In La Jolla, Calif., Warwick’s was likewise packed on Friday, said book buyer Mallory Groff: “Everyone seemed happy to be out and about and supporting local businesses," with some shopping for themselves, and others buying gifts for others. This holiday season might be a short one, Groff pointed out, but the enthusiastic start last weekend “makes me believe it will be a powerful one.”
In Las Vegas, shoppers appear to have planned ahead. “Our sales were much more spread out this year,” observed Drew Cohen of the Writer’s Block. “People have been shopping earlier. We saw far more foot traffic in the weeks leading up to Black Friday and Small Business Saturday than previous seasons, up about 25%, and flat sales” right after the holiday. Cohen found this pace “much more manageable for our store, honestly.”
Meanwhile, in the Midwest, booksellers got socked by extreme wintry weather. Nina Barrett of Bookends and Beginnings in Evanston, Ill., said the impact was “financially devastating” and renamed the day “S’No Business Saturday.” Sales at Bookends and Beginnings were down 50% for the weekend, the same percentage reported by other Chicago bookstores, including Women and Children First and City Lit Books
“I certainly don't fault people for not coming out—it was brutal,” Barrett said, adding that she’s “extra grateful” to be a participant in the Chicagoland Independent Bookstore Alliance’s inaugural Bookstore Holiday Trolley, transporting booklovers to various indies on December 6, 7, 13, 14, and 20. Barrett hopes that "the weather holds" so that she and other area indies can recoup their losses with this promotion. As for Stephanie Kitchen of City Lit Books in the the Logan Square neighborhood, she noted that online and shipping orders were up during the weekend, and expressed optimism that sales would bounce back up "once it warms up a bit again," as her community "really values shopping small and with local businesses."
Other Midwestern indies had an even worse weekend, missing anticipated SBS bumps that pump up fourth-quarter revenues. “My shop was closed all weekend due to 15 inches of snow,” said Cori Theroux of Green Dragon Bookshop in Fort Dodge, Iowa. “It was a total loss of the weekend.”
Victoria Ford of Comma: A Bookshop in Minneapolis reported a 20% drop in sales on SBS and a flat weekend overall, while Bob Dobrow of Zenith Bookstore in Duluth, 154 miles north, reported a 20% increase, with customers enticed out of their homes by hot cocoa, in honor of Jólabókaflóðið, the Icelandic holiday tradition that loosely translated to “Christmas book flood,” as well as ARC giveaways and local authors’ book signings. The weekend bestseller, perhaps fittingly, was John U. Bacon’s The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald (Norton/Liveright), a new account of the famed shipwreck on Lake Superior 50 years ago.
"It's hard to predict, because of so much uncertainty in the world, and in the economy, but we're expecting a very good holiday season," Dobrow said.
Uncertainty in the air
Moving east, where the weather was seasonably cold without storms, booksellers’ experiences still varied, perhaps reflecting economic uncertainty and consumer anxiety. Katya d’Angelo of Bridgeside Books in Waterbury, Vt., said that “excellent” sales on Friday gave way to a lackluster SBS, “which was incredibly surprising, given the extra push to avoid big box stores and shop small for activist reasons.” But, d’Angelo added, November sales overall “tracked virtually the same from last year, so that the SBS drop was made up through the rest of the month.” Bridgeside seemed busier “earlier in the month than previous years—perhaps people were holiday shopping extra early. I am cautiously optimistic that this will end up being a decent season for us.”
As for Stacy Whitman of Curious Cat Bookstore in Winsted, Conn., sales overall were down compared to last year. “I'm honestly worried about December,” Whitman said, noting that a “perfect storm” of tariffs, leading to price increases on such sidelines as stuffed animals and “even stickers,” along with job losses in a formerly industrial area contending with an approximately 20% poverty rate, is having an impact.
Heading south, David Landry of Class Bookstore in Houston reported that sales had been “slow,” but picked up significantly when the store participated in a holiday market organized by Mossrose Bookshop, a new pop-up romance bookstore.
Class Bookstore celebrated its fifth anniversary on Friday, and Landry rose to the occasion with strategic sales at the holiday market. “We knew people were feeling the crunch under this administration and that hardcovers going for $35 were going to be a hard sell,” he said, “so we brought a bunch of zines with us from Microcosm, and they sold like crazy.” DIY titles such as How to Make Soap: Without Burning Your Face Off by Raleigh Briggs and Unfuck Your Bread: Gluten-Free, Paleo, and Keto Recipes for People Who Miss Bread by Dr. Faith G. Harper were popular with Class customers.
The store’s “runaway bestseller,” though, was Matriarch by Tina Knowles, the mother of Houston-born superstar Beyoncé. “We have sold at least 250 autographed copies so far,” said Landry, “and not just to locals, but to people all over the country. Everyone wants to find out the origin story of the best female performer in history."
In Nashville, Sarah Arnold, Parnassus Books’s marketing manager, also reported a great start to the holiday season, “up a bit from last year, a promising sign amid some fears that folks will generally be spending less this holiday season.” She added that Parnassus booksellers have heard “some widespread negative sentiment towards a few of the big box retailers;” so that despite “the economic question marks right now, there are also some reasons for local retailers to be optimistic.” As for books, Arnold said that she and her colleagues observed that customers were asking for “light and happy book recommendations.” Perhaps, she added, “people are looking for an escape from the constant deluge of deeply troubling news coming out of Washington.”
Sunny skies, happy customers
Speaking of our nation’s capitol, East City Bookshop in Washington, D.C. had a comparatively exuberant start to the holiday season, with book buyer Emilie Sommer reporting that, “in contrast to the general heavy mood in D.C. this year, happy customers filled the store, eager to shop and appreciative of our presence.”
East City plied visitors with homemade baked goods inspired by its booksellers’ favorite cookbooks, conducted flash sales throughout SBS, and gave away free wrapped ARCs with each $50 purchase. Virginia Evans's debut novel,The Correspondent (Crown) was East City’s top-seller, as it was at just about every other indie reporting to PW, along with children’s titles Big Jim Believes (Dog Man #14) by Dav Pilkey (Graphix) and Partypooper (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #20) by Jeff Kinney (Abrams). Buckeye by Patrick Ryan (PRH) was also mentioned by a number of booksellers as a hot pick during the weekend.
“Small Business Saturday is always one of our favorite days of the year and thankfully this year was no exception,” Sommer said, “We're looking forward to a busy, enjoyable season despite our stressful location on Capitol Hill.”
In the other Washington—Washington state, that is—Andrea Griffith of Browsers Bookstore in Olympia declared it “a great weekend. We did not have one grumpy customer, and our sales were markedly higher than last year.”
North of Browsers, Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Co. did brisk business thanks to a couple award-winning titles, plus a few surprises. Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay’s senior buyer, said customers are seeking out David Szalay’s Booker Prize-winning Flesh (Scribner) and Portland-based author Omar El Akkad’s National Book Award winner One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This (Knopf). Simonson added, “We’ll get to see what Sven Beckert’s 1,400 page Capitalism: A Global History does with Penguin Press” this holiday season.
In San Francisco, the new Best Bookstore in Union Square—a sister store to the Best Bookstore in Palm Springs—rushed to open in time for the Thanksgiving boost. “A big surprise for us was how ravenous people were for history: it was definitely our hottest section in nonfiction,” said Sarah Lacy, who co-owns the store with Paul Bradley Carr. “I had to rearrange shelves and face out titles all weekend.” She noticed “deep dives into niche or forgotten subjects,” such as Charlie English’s The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature (Random House).
The Best Bookstore co-owners also observed a strong trend toward classics. “We sold a pile of Frankenstein due to the movie, but everything from the section was flying,” said Carr. “One notable difference to Palm Springs is that we sold noticeably fewer Orwells and Huxleys. Perhaps proximity to Silicon Valley means readers have had their fill of surveillance dystopia.”
“I think fancy editions of classics are going to keep ruling the holidays,” Lacy said. “A lot of best friends and mothers and daughters want to read classics together.”
