The UK arm of the company will be run by managing director Nicole Vanderbilt, the former international vice-president of Etsy. launches in the UK on Monday, with more than 130 British bookshops already signed up and 200 expected by the end of the year. But after seeing the success of the platform in the US, shops, publishers and authors in the UK asked him to step up the timeline.
Hunter had been planning to launch Bookshop in the UK in 2021 or 2022. “I think we were so successful because enough people were conscious of that, and wanted to rally around around their beloved bookstores, because they care about the world that we emerge from this pandemic into.” Amazon has gotten much more powerful, while there are 100-year-old stores that are hanging on for survival,” he said. “Bookstores have been in trouble for a while because of Amazon’s growth, but this pandemic has really accelerated it. Hunter believes the reason for Bookshop’s quick success is readers’ fondness for their local booksellers. Rules state that it can never be sold to a major US retailer, including Amazon. “But it was extremely gratifying because the whole time we were getting messages from stores saying, ‘Thank God you came along, you’ve paid our rent, you’ve paid our health insurance this year.’ If you’re going to have to work in insane circumstances and with huge amounts of stress, it’s good to be doing it in something you feel good about.”īookshop is a benefit corporation in the process of applying for B Corporation certification in the UK, created with the mission “to benefit the public good by contributing to the welfare of the independent literary community”. It was a real white-knuckle ride,” said Hunter.
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“We were four employees plus me, working at home, getting up as early as we could and going to bed as late as we could, trying to make it all work. The platform has now raised more than $7.5m (£5.7m) for independent bookshops across the US. By June, Bookshop sold $1m worth of books in a day. “We went from selling $50,000 (£38,000) worth of books in all of February, to selling $50,000 a day in March, then $150,000 a day in April,” said Hunter. Initially starting with 250 bookshops, more than 900 stores have now signed up in the US.
“Five weeks into what we thought was going to be a six-month period of refining and improving and making small changes, Covid-19 hit and then suddenly we were doing massive business.” “It’s been a wild ride,” said Hunter, who launched the site in the US in January. All customer service and shipping are handled by Bookshop and its distributor partners, with titles offered at a small discount and delivered within two to three days.
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It allows independent bookshops to create their own virtual shopfront on the site, with the stores receiving the full profit margin – 30% of the cover price – from each sale. And after a hugely successful launch in the US, it is open in the UK from today.īookshop was dreamed up by the writer and co-founder of Literary Hub, Andy Hunter. It is being described as a “revolutionary moment in the history of bookselling”: a socially conscious alternative to Amazon that allows readers to buy books online while supporting their local independent bookseller.
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