Cardiff bookshops record ‘surprisingly high’ numbers fuelled by lockdown reading boom
MORE than 200m print books were sold in the UK last year, the highest figure since 2012 according to estimates from official book sales monitor Nielsen Bookscan.
The total value of books sold was up 5.5% over 2019, the highest in over a decade.
Some Cardiff bookshops also enjoyed strong sales in 2020 despite the pandemic, in which bookshops were repeatedly forced to close – first in March, then in October and again in December.
The year’s bestselling titles was Charlie Mackesy’s hugely popular The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, closely followed by Richard Osman’s crime novel The Thursday Murder Club.
Other strong sellers included Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing, Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.
Sarah Baskerville, manager at Wellfield Bookshop, Roath, said she was a bit surprised by the high figures, but agreed that the local book market was performing well.
“We have sold a lot of books, more than usual,” she said. “And I think this is down to the pandemic.”
But Hollie Aldridge, events and communications manager at Griffin Books, Penarth, said that despite good book sales, booksellers had been forced to invest more in working hours and infrastructure.
“I’m not surprised but I’d say it’s only part of the story,” she said. “We definitely had a strong year. [But] what it doesn’t show is the work that went into that. We did online events, free home delivery and staff are doing long hours.”
The pandemic has also been tough on less established authors.
“Celebrity books will always fly because they have great marketing campaigns behind them. But authors who don’t have that profile rely on events. Especially children’s authors rely on school visits to sell books,” said Ms Aldridge.
“What we’re hoping to do more of this year is do more virtual events with schools. We think there’s possibly an appetite there to do more larger scale virtual events and to give that profile back to those authors because there’s some brilliant children’s authors out there in Wales and beyond.”
