The Realities of Running a Bookshop
We were excited to get a mention in the news last week in a short piece on the resurgence of bookshops in New Zealand.
As someone who spent a lot of time in the U.S. prior to the pandemic, I noticed that independent bookshops of all sizes are much more prevalent there than they are here and I often wondered why that is.
It’s easy to assume scale and costs are the main factors but other comparatively similar retail - in terms of discretionary spend - are equally prevalent in New Zealand towns as they are in the US, here I’m thinking of cafes, dress shops and gift stores.
Are we buying and reading more e-books and audiobooks than physical books in Aotearoa? Do we prefer to borrow books from the library? Or is it something else?
I don’t know the answer yet but the warm welcome we’ve received from Greytown readers suggests to me that there is a real thirst for more bookshops, even in a small town. And we don’t seem to be alone. According to the news piece, a new bookshop is opening in New Zealand every three months on average.
But please, prospective bookshop owners beware: Booksellers NZ* CEO Dan Slevin suggests in the story that people are looking to open bookshops as a way to get out of the rat race.
Perhaps some booksellers are looking for that, but Dan knows and I’ll happily corroborate that running a successful bookshop is no quiet and contemplative life. If that’s your goal, better, perhaps, to get a job behind the counter at a bookshop than open one of your own.
* Mrs Blackwell’s Village Bookshop is a paid member of Booksellers NZ.
