What Sheila Did Next… Exciting developments for 2019
2018 was a year of change for me. I left my role at Village Books, a role I thoroughly enjoyed, not least so because Hazel and the team at the bookshop was a joy to be part of. I stepped down from my role on the Booksellers Association Council and moved from South London to the West of Ireland.
I miss many parts of my “UK bookselling life” but none more so than reading a book that I love and having the chance to hand selling it to readers. Chatting with Camilla and Aideen from The Dingle Bookshop reinforced that I am happiest when talking books, authors and events.
Working on behalf of Camilla, the bookshop and the Féile na Bealtaine, I am pleased to say that I’ve already secured my first author event of 2019, and a Man Booker winner no less… More on that later. As I chatted with the marketing and publicity teams at Hachette and PRH Ireland I became more and more excited about the books being published in Spring ’19.
What I also want to explore is podcasts. This is a growing medium and one that I believe will become more important in 2019 for championing books.
The combination of exploring podcasts and reading upcoming books proved too tempting not to be combined. With the help and guidance from Deanna O’Connor the result is O’Reilly Reads. These are my book recommendations both in print and as a podcast.
I will also be setting up two book groups/reading groups in West Kerry. The first group will focus solely on debut novels and a second group will be self-selecting in their book choices. If you would like us to consider your book for reading at either group let me know.
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Village Books of Dulwich Village – A New Chapter Begins.
In December 2016 I bumped in Hazel and Tracy from Village Books who asked me what I was working at. I said that I was footloose and fancy free and they replied, “oh come and work for us”. This was too good an opportunity to miss, I knew Hazel for many years and despite being competitors we always got on well.
I began working there in January 2017 with the key task of persuading publishers to work with us and host book events with Village Books in Dulwich. This proved to be a very easy task, mentioning Hazel and myself in one sentence turned out to be a winning formula with author and book events quickly coming our way.
We kicked off our 2017 events with Maggie O Farrell discussing writing to 225 eager fans, quickly followed by Cathy Rentzenbrink and Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan discussing A Manuel for a Heartache. We rounded off our Spring/Summer events with none other than Gail Honeyman talking about Eleanor Oliphant.
Our autumn events included authors Judy Murray, Rachel Joyce, Sarah Winman, Yotam Ottolenghi, Alexander McCall Smith, Judith Kerr, Robert Harris, Adam Kay, Salley Vickers, Evan Davis, Alison Weir and our highlight with Philip Pullman.
The Spring of 2018 saw us host the lovely Tom Kerridge then Elly Griffiths, Joanna Trollope, AJ Pierce, Christie Watson, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Antony Beevor.
Hosting the best author and book events in Dulwich continued into the autumn of 2018 when I set up events with Sebastian Faulks, Graham Norton, Sir Chris Hoy, Yotam Ottolenghi, Patrick Gale to name a few.
Leaving in June 2018 was sad as I thoroughly enjoyed being part of such an experience bookshop team. Hazel’s knowledge, experience and insight in our industry is a skill to be marvelled at and a pleasure to work with. However, life changes for us all and a move home to Ireland had always been on my to do list.
Saturday June 30 saw the car packed and we set off for the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin and a new life.
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It’s Au Revoir from me and onto my next challenge.
So the time has finally come and I’m moving on from Dulwich Books, leaving the bookshop that I loved and where I’ve worked for 12 years. It’s been a fantastic roller coaster ride and now is the right time to step back. Susie’s investment in the shop is an amazing commitment to the future of Dulwich Books and she is perfectly placed to drive her vision forward.
What will I miss you might ask? Well you, I’ll miss you our customers and yes you the publishers and of course authors. The best time in any bookseller’s career is finding a great read and sharing that book with customers. My favourite phrase when I saw a customer was “great to see you, I have the perfect book for you”. Or customers returning saying how much they enjoyed the book we recommended them.
Sharing knowledge of great reads and new authors is a love and a mission that will not leave me. The customers of Dulwich Books were wonderfully supportive of me and the bookshop and, even now as I bump into them in local shops or on the train, they share their thoughts with me. Over the years we never felt like a small team of 5, it was like us and our customers together, meeting the challenges of eBooks and Amazon head on. Anchoring the bookshop at the heart of our local community, making it a place where anyone could pop in for a browse, chat or a friendly face is an achievement I am very proud of.
For me, that is the key to success for any small retail business, your customers. Of course you need someone to create the product to sell, yes you need a company to put it together, however if no one will buy the product then none of the businesses in the supply chain can function as commercial businesses.
I have some wonderful specific memories from those 12 years, one of which and certainly the highlight was being voted the best independent bookshop in UK and Ireland 2014. I can still see Dave, Chloe’s and Annie’s faces when they called out Dulwich Books at the awards ceremony and the following morning we were unable to work due to the proudest smiles.
I know many people thought we were bonkers but we did enjoy the madness that was hosting 75+ events in a year. Our customers really appreciated that they could walk down 
the road to their local bookshop and hear an inspiring and fascinating discussion about
books. Memorable events such as the discussion between Cathy Rentzenbrink and Max Porter or managing the queue for Julia Donaldson that snaked around the block. And I will always have a fondness for the wonderful Victoria Hislop – the only author to bring us a present to say thanks for hosting an event to promote her book.
We were lucky enough that when Philip read Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries he thought it was so good he wanted to meet the author. So he contacted Eleanor direct and asked her for an event. The result was a brilliant chat between Eleanor and her editor Max Porter the evening before she won the Man Booker Prize.
Evenings like that are good for the soul.
It’s been brilliant as well to be part of the regeneration of the physical bookshop. I believe, maybe naively, that high street bookshops are in a strong position. If they survived the past 10 years of the eBook onslaught and Amazon they are true entrepreneurs. There may be less bookshops but the ones that are trading as standalone commercial businesses are stronger, more flexible to make decisions, and are working in close partnership with publishers. At the same time the best publishers now get that the physical bookshop may not make a bestseller but is critical and essential to putting books in front of customers. With both bookshops and publishers working together, pulled along by a reinvigorated Booksellers Association, it feels to me that it’s a team effort. We are all trying to reach the customers and with initiatives such as BAMB and Bookshop Day there is a feeling we are in this together and together is stronger.
So what next you might ask? It’s been a straight 19 years of work for me so a holiday is on the cards before hopefully returning to a role in the world that I love – books. A role involving books and championing new writers and great storytelling to readers would be my ideal job.
Thanks so much for your support in making Dulwich Books a great fun place to work and I wish Susie and the bookshop many more years of success.
The high street bookshop in 2017
How do independent bookshops survive? That’s a question I often get asked and my response is “oh there are hundreds of thriving, successful independent bookshops throughout the UK & Ireland”. Quickly followed by “seriously, but how do they survive? I say that they are run by passionate booksellers with a drive that every customers leaves the bookshop having bought a great read and that equals a successful business.
For me it is all very simple: excellent customer service. Know your customers, and by that I am not referring to sexy IT systems to tell you who bought what and when. That’s for a chain, managed by anonymous figures at head office, no, as an independent bookseller you know your customers, often by name, certainly by their likes, their dislikes and always by face.
One might go so far as to say that loving your customers more than loving books could be the key to success. Making your customers and your community the centre of the bookshop’s world, building relationships with customers means they will respond. It’s not unusual to be unpacking a box of new books to pick one up and say “oh I must show that to Ms X when they are next in the bookshop, they’ll love this author.
I was reminded of this on many occasions on a recent holiday in Ireland. In many of the shops I visited, and yup I did frequent quite a number, there was a smile, a nod of the head to acknowledge my entrance, and always a bit of a chat when I made purchase. At my local bookshop in Dublin – Rathfarnham Bookshop I was ordering Solar Bones by Mike McCormick and when a customer came up to the till to buy Light Between The Oceans we all had a good long discussion about that book, the story and who was right for the movie roles. This book was a joy to hand sell to customers over the years, a wonderful story, well written and thought provoking.
That scenario is repeated throughout the hundreds of independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland. Independent booksellers that have survived the challenges of the past 10 or more years are passionate about their work, love books and dedicated to ensuring that more people read, more people buy books and love introducing authors to their customers.
The most brilliant aspect of working in an independent bookshop is the opportunity to talk to customers, about books. Being out on the shop floor no matter how small the bookshop is, tidying and shelving ensures you are there on hand to strike up a conversation.
Where bookshops have a greater challenge than other high street retailers is that every product they sell can normally be purchased cheaper somewhere else. My philosophy is that you have to offer what a strategist probably calls “added value” but I would call good old fashioned service to your customers. A place where customers are the sole focus of attention, a place where they feel comfortable and welcomed and not an interruption. Most of all that they can ask you if you know the book mentioned last week on the radio, about a man or was it a woman, set in 18th, no maybe 19th century that they’d like to buy. The best independent bookshop and booksellers will know immediately what book that is and that knowledge comes from immersing ourselves in all things books.
It’s not easy being an independent bookshop and now I realise there is no training course or computer system to prepare you for the job. It’s about loving people and books, about seeing a child’s eyes light up when they find the book they cannot wait to read and most of all it’s about hand selling a book to a customer for them to come back in a week or so later so say thanks, they loved it and have recommended it to friends.
Books empower and enrich our lives
“Let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons”, says Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. That’s a thought-provoking statement, and it makes me proud to be part of an industry that produces and sells books.
However, books are not easily accessible to everyone. Sometimes in our industry we forget that not everyone can read, or read easily; we forget that books can sometimes be intimidating, and that bookshops and libraries are not necessarily welcoming to everyone. This is not a situation I feel proud about.
One organisation looking to address these issues is Quick Reads, produced by the Reading Agency. You may not have heard of the series, so you might be surprised to learn that in the last ten years Quick Reads, supported by Galaxy chocolate, have sold or given away over 4.7 million books. That’s nearly 5 million people now reading who might not otherwise have picked up a book.
Each year Quick Reads commissions and publishes six new titles by major, award-winning authors. The books must be no longer than 100 pages, with sentences averaging about 15 words and chapters kept reasonably short. The books are sold at just £1 through major retailers and bookshops, and are available in libraries. They are aimed at people who have never read, people who have lost the ability for extended periods of concentration, readers recovering from treatment and anyone who enjoys a brilliantly written but short and accessible story.
According to research commissioned by Quick Reads into our reading habits, published this month, books have had a profound impact on readers’ lives. The research reports that 20% of readers have been inspired to make positive changes to their health and take up new jobs; 45% of readers said they gained a better understanding of different people and cultures; 39% said they realised that they are happy with the lives they have. These are powerful statistics, and there are many more of them.
The key point is that emergent adult readers are in every respect the same as other readers, except in their familiarity and confidence with the written word. A beginner reader is not a beginner thinker; but they will now have higher aspirations for themselves and society.
To sum up in the words of Andy McNab (who had the reading age of an 11-year-old on joining the army): “every time you read a book you get a bit of knowledge, every time you get a bit of knowledge you get a bit more power”.
Take a look at the Quick Reads series, which includes authors like Ann Cleeves and Roddy Doyle. The 2016 titles have just been published and are available in all good retailers. For more information visit the Quick Reads website.
A Busman’s Holiday in Denver
“Denver beckoned at the end of January for five UK independent booksellers and nearly 600 US indie booksellers as we gathered for the 10th annual American Booksellers Association Conference.
“Why did we five think it worth the trip? There is general agreement in the UK book trade that our compatriots in the US have to deal with ‘issues’ about eighteen months before the UK. That being so, the UK Booksellers Association felt it worth sending a delegation, albeit a small one, to attend, pick up on the issues and gather ideas.
“The UK independents who survived the eight-hour flight in economy to arrive with only a little jetlag were: Nic Bottomley from Mr B’s Emporium in Bath; Roz de la Hey, owner of Mainstreet Trading Company in St Boswell’s, Roxburghshire; Polly Jaffé of Jaffé and Neale in Chipping Norton; Jane Streeter from The Bookcase in Lowdham, Nottingham; and myself, Sheila O’Reilly from Dulwich Books in South London. Meryl Halls from the BA also joined us.
“It would be true to say we were a little overwhelmed ‒ and that was just Denver, a city that is a mile above sea level and a challenge therefore for any facial cream to fight the elements. Our guess was that no TV commercial was ever filmed there to promote ‘beautiful looking skin that will take years off you’!
“What are the issues facing US indie booksellers? Despite being thousands of miles away and in a different country, the issues are the same as in the UK: Amazon, minimum wage and rent. So what are they doing to tackle those issues? When addressing the issue of Amazon they are very blunt about its impact on their trade, their society and culture. We saw shocking presentations about Amazon and its contribution to killing our high streets. Full details of the survey are here: http://bookweb.org/news/true-cost-amazon-revealed-new-study. However, one killer stat is that ‘Amazon sales produced a net national loss of 135,973 retail jobs, and the study showed that a total of more than $1 billion in revenue is lost to state and local governments.’ They have no problems with naming and shaming Amazon, unlike on this side of the pond. But it’s still a tricky subject because research shows that 67% of book buyers who use independent bookshops believe that Amazon provides a good service.
“The minimum wage is coming into being, just as in the UK, and there are serious concerns about how businesses that cannot control their prices can cope with rising staff costs. And as for rents, again just as in the UK, if an area becomes gentrified, then the rents invariably tend to rise very quickly, pushing out the very shops that helped bring about that gentrification.
“In the end it was the energy, enthusiasm and love of great books of those booksellers that carried us through three intense days of seminars, talks, roundtable discussions and lectures. Sales of print books are up in both the US and UK for the first time in many years, and many of the US booksellers present were looking either to expand their existing shop or take on another location. What I wanted to do was bottle that feeling, bring it back with me, and when the going gets hard in Dulwich, open it up, smell the energy and regroup.”
Are publishers’ marketing campaigns relevant to booksellers?
Yes is the short answer. Now for the slightly longer answer: Why do I think that only the best publishers’ marketing campaigns are relevant to what we do in bookshops?
“Many people think that marketing is an easy job: you have a super product and all you have to do is tell people about it. How hard can that be? You love the book, you’ve read it, told all your friends about it and now you’re telling the world.
“And yet, when you’ve done everything you can, but the Nielsen data arrive at the monthly management meeting and your book, your favourite book of the year, registers only 249 sales, the focus turns to you, and the question comes: Why, why only 249 sales when we’d budgeted 800?
“Why? Because marketing, good marketing, is very hard to get right. Take The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton, for example. This is a historical fiction title by an unknown author, a genre that’s recognisably hard to market and very hard to deliver to the wide book-buying public. Yet Pan Macmillan put together a brilliant and effective campaign for Jessie, which included bookshop visits, Twitter campaigns, magazine interviews, radio slots and embracing bloggers.
“Camilla Elsworthy, also from Pan Macmillan, was superb when given the challenge of marketing a memoir from a debut author about her brother being left in a vegetative state after a road accident. OK, the author might have been Cathy Rentzenbrink, a star in the book trade, but totally unknown outside the industry. Yet through an amazing campaign Camilla had Cathy everywhere: BBC, chat shows, Woman’s Hour. This meant that bookshops throughout the UK took the book into stock, it was put face out, catching buyers’ eyes, backing up the appearances and features that Camilla had organised. As a result, The Last Act of Love went into the Sunday Times bestseller list in the first week of publication.
“Bookshops need well-run, coordinated marketing campaigns that they can support, work with, ride on the back of, so that they can build their own marketing campaigns around the book and in turn tell their customers about how great the book is. We are more likely to order a book (or books) when we know that a certain marketing individual, one with a track record, is responsible for the campaigns; then we’ll put the title face out in the bookshop and hand sell the heck out of it.”
Do Book Awards sell book?
The two major book awards in the UK are the Man Booker for fiction and the Samuel Johnson for non-fiction. The Man Bookerwas won by Richard Flanagan for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Even after it was shortlisted Flanagan’s novel did not feature on the bestseller charts. However once it won the prize it leapt into the top 5 bestsellers with 1000’s flying out the doors of bookshops throughout the UK. To date Flanagan has sold 56,500 copies of his book however a more telling statistic is that his win has had no impact on his previous novels!
The non-fiction companion, the Samuel Johnson award, was won this year by Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and in the week of its success it sold over 4,500 copies which has now built into a sales total of 39,430. In one of the weeks prior to the award “Hawk” managed to record just 492 sales, so I guess the short answer to the question in this case is yes.
Publishing is a complicated, risky business, there is no sure-fire guide as to what will sell or will not sell. Even being is shortlisted for a prestigious book award is not a guarantee of sales. However I know from being a bookseller of many years, and talking to customers who hear or see the book award announcements, that being nominated does extend the reach and broaden the appeal of the listed books. There is a dedicated band of readers that will routinely buy the Man Booker shortlist and read it and a bigger group that buy the winner just because it won the main award.
The non-fiction sector is less straight forward. Readers of fiction, who buy books, will take a chance on a novel that has won an award, however non-fiction buyers are less likely to take a chance on a something, just because it won an award. With a work of non-fiction there is a higher chance that readers will take a view on the subject, whether that be a person, a time, or a place and therefore the “winner “needs to either appeal to the buyer’s interests by bringing something new to light or be extremely well written, otherwise the best bookseller in the world will not persuade the book buyer to make a purchase.
Booksellers probably have a different slant when evaluating the sale potential of a new book. We want the best written and most engaging books, with the widest appeal, to be chosen as winners. Such gems don’t often come along however with the publicity of an award win there’s an opportunity to pull more book buyers into bookshops and raise the profile of non-fiction writing.
Have a lovely Christmas; do remember to support your local independent bookshops of which there are many in South London. In fact as a book lover you are spoilt for choice – a rare occurrence, let’s keep it that way.
Visit www.dulwichbooks.co.uk and follow us on Twitter @dulwichbooks.
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Book Awards – What I think
Book awards, a bit like buses for me; I had never been a book award judge and now I am about to begin my second judging role in as many months. If you are a passionate bookseller (I am) being asked to read a large pile of books in a set time is like Germany beating Brazil in the World Cup 7 -1, it’s your greatest dream come true. However, for Germany, once they have contended the final on July 13th, it will be all over, whereas I will have a second large stack of books, so will be reliving the dream for weeks to come. Though since Germany have now won the World Cup their celebrations will continue over the next four years until England claim the title in four years.
The book award judging process that I am taking part in is the 2015 Costa Awards. It has five categories: Poetry, First Novel, Fiction, Biography and Children’s, so they need a lot of judges. I am lucky enough to be on the Biography panel along with two others. The Costa’s are one of the major book awards in the UK, along with the Man Booker Prize and, for those of you about my age, you will remember them as the Whitbread Awards, originally launched in 1971. Somewhere in 2006 the marketing bods in Whitbread felt that the awards would have a broader appeal if they changed the sponsorship from beer to coffee. Try telling that to Bailey’s who have just taken over the sponsorship of the Women’s Prize for Fiction for which A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing by Eimear McBride won in June.
Back to the judging, I was of course thrilled to be asked having thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the judging for the Independent Bookshops Book of the Year. That award was won by Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life – a book I would highly recommend you read. Judging the IB Book of the Year involved reading 10 books, a very achievable number, over my Easter holidays. So once I said yes to the Costa organizers and got the instructions emailed back, can you imagine my apprehension when I saw that upwards of 70 books are entered for the Biography Awards. My first thought, even though I am a fast reader, was that this is going to take more than a 10 day holiday to get through that number. I shared this thought with the bookshop team that I might have to take an extended holidays for reading purposes and you can imagine the laughter that brought on.
In order to avoid total meltdown amongst the judges the books are sent out in batches. This has lots of benefits in that you don’t feel overwhelmed and enabled me to focus on those 8 or 10 books that arrived that week. However it did build up my expectations as I spent moments wondering is the winner is this stack of books, or will it be in the next box.
There are three judges and we each choose our top 3 or 4 from our selection and those titles are consolidated to become the shortlist. Each judge then re-reads the shortlist. We subsequently meet up and discuss the merits of the shortlist and choose a winner over lunch I am hoping.
My first of four boxes of books arrived about two weeks ago and there was quite a lot of excitement to see exactly who might be in contention. I was slightly surprised to spot a book or two that had already been published that I’d never heard of! Should I worry, am I reading in the too small world that is Dulwich I wondered?
So what are the criteria for the Costa Book Award? We have heard a lot about how the Man Booker has now opened itself up to, heaven forbid, writers in America and beyond. This will allow the likes of Donna Tartt and Jonathan Franzen to be included. Or Richard Ford, a writer who John Banville suggested on a recent event at Dulwich College was the best writer ever. However I feel that UK authors’ fears can be allayed by my prediction; I am going to stick my neck out say that an English writer will win the 2014 Man Booker Prize, it will be a woman or a man, one of the two. But then what do I know, I predicted that the 2013 prize would go to Jim Crace.
Anyway back to the criteria for entering the Costa Book Award, to be eligible the author must have lived in the UK/Ireland for at least 6 months of the year, during the past 3 years, that the book must have been first published in the UK/Ireland between 1 November 2013 and 31 October 2014 and lastly the author has to have been alive on 1st November 2013. What I am on the lookout for is a book that sparkles something that is eminently readable book with broad appeal. I want the award to lead to large numbers of book buyers wanting to read it and to recommend it to their friends.
So without further ado I am off to find the most outstanding autobiography or biography of the past twelve months. I will update you in August and tell you how I am getting on.
Who do you think should be included? Send me your suggestions of books you have read and should be on the longlist.
Book Awards – Now well into the reading
I am now well into reading the submissions for the Costa Biography Book of the Year 2015 and what an amazing and wonderful challenge it is proving to be. One on the brilliant benefits of having to read a selection of books that has been already chosen by someone else, is that it is like being a member of a book group. I am reading books I might not necessarily otherwise have read. Inevitably there a number of books that probably will not make my shortlist of three, that are nonetheless most enjoyable and will be featured in my recommends for the bookshop.
To remind you, the eligibility criteria for entering the Costa Book Award are: the author must have lived in the UK/Ireland for at least 6 months of the year- during the past 3 years, that the book must have been first published in the UK/Ireland between 1 November 2013 and 31 October 2014, and lastly the author has to have been alive on 1st November 2013.
When I pick up each book to read I ask myself does it sparkle as an eminently readable book with broad appeal? I want the winner of this world class award to be a book that encourages large numbers of book buyers to read it and to recommend it to their friends. (And hopefully even buying the book through their local independent bookshop.) I have put all the book titles into a spreadsheet in order to compile an audit of each title based on my personal marking criteria.
What are my marking criteria? Well that would be sharing my secrets but suffice to say that it criteria is grade on a one to ten scale and if the book received a 1 after a few chapters it will not be appearing on my shortlist, whereas the any books or maybe book which received a 10 I re-read before deciding to argue for it on the short list. My spreadsheet is password protected so don’t think about hacking in to find out!
When I left you in July I had received most of the books, I could have had them on an ereader and that certainly did appeal. If we had not been travelling by car on holidays I probably would have had to say yes. I suspect every book award judge will handle their reads in different way, however what I did first would not necessarily been possible on an ereader… I think.
My first step was, to avoid reading a book on a similar theme/subject one after another, to split the books into separate groups. It’s funny because if you’d have asked me I would have said a biography/autobiography can be straight forward either it is or it isn’t but they can in fact be split into smaller subcategories. So for example I gathered all the biographies with a history or music theme, ones without a human, yup there are a few, and the like, into separate piles. This meant I would not, for example, read two biographies set in WWI or say WWII one after another. I felt, and I might be wrong in this, that I might be comparing their views on the history period (a bad thing) rather than the quality of the writing or engagement with the subject. It also meant that as I worked through the submissions I would be reading books after one another that were quite different.
So first day of my holiday, onto the lounger surrounded by books what better way to start a holiday? As they do before crime dramas on TV, I am putting in a “spoiler” warning here; if you are a budding writer stop reading now.
As I picked up each book I reminded myself of the criteria of the award, I also reminded myself of how I recommend books to customers and set the target that the book must grip me by chapter 6. Of course many of the books submitted for the Costa Biography Award are long books and chapter 6 might not be that far in, however if you are going to engage the reader, pulling them into the story, I feel that the author should have them gripped by chapter 6, it is after all normally a few hundred pages into the book.
Taking my spreadsheet for the books to move from the to-read pile into the shortlist pile they must have achieved a marking of 5+ by chapter 6. Regardless of the marking at this stage, as I have already mentioned, I did read on with some books that failed the grade but I was enjoying the book and wanted to finish.
What happened to the shortlist pile you may ask, read next month’s column to find out.
O'Reilly Reads with Sheila O'Reilly 