One Year In, Bookshop is Turning Surprise Pandemic Success Into a Stabler Future for Bookselling

One Year In, Bookshop.org is Turning Surprise Pandemic Success Into a Stabler Future for Bookselling

HFC is taking time to look at the real-world impacts of the work we do with our partners, beginning with Bookshop.org following its recent FastCo Most Innovative Company Award win.

Michelle Haring’s Cupboard Maker Books is the kind of place books industry news used to tell you can’t exist: a rural independent bookstore that is going to survive.

Haring’s family-run store in Enola, PA — a town with one high school, one library, a major rail yard, and 6,200 residents — evolved from one personally curated shelf in her boyfriend’s custom furniture and country gift store. She married the boyfriend, survived the gift store’s closure after September 11th irreparably sunk their business, had a baby, quit teaching, and expanded her shelf into a 6,500-square-foot new and used bookstore that’s still standing 23 years later.

Haring’s now a gregarious, seasoned business owner, active in the national books industry; the kind who runs eight book clubs and builds a Bookseller Mondays lunch group to socialize with her purported competition.

What almost sunk it all: COVID-19.

First the drive-through traffic between Washington DC and upstate New York — traffic Cupboard Maker relies upon — evaporated. Then, the state closed businesses to blunt the pandemic and Cupboard Maker failed to qualify for the waiver they needed to legally operate, leaving the store’s future deeply uncertain.

“We kept the doors locked, but we came in every single day,” Haring tells me from behind her full desk: lunch in one hand, and the other kept busy keeping a curious dog (unsuccessfully) out of camera view. Her husband and co-owner Jason and their staff — two full-time, three part-time — built 86 new bookcases and moved 40,000 books during the shutdown. And Haring, who handles Cupboard Maker’s operations, leaned hard into a new sales channel: Bookshop.

She had seen the startup e-commerce site previewed as an Amazon alternative that past winter, at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute, a major industry conference that’s boasted keynotes from luminaries such as Colson Whitehead and President Barack Obama.

“I was at Winter Institute saying, ‘This is a scam. How does this scam work? This can’t be real,’” she recalls. “And we sat and listened and I said ‘Oh my god, this is real.’ What we figured was he” — CEO Andy Hunter — “needed us for the legitimacy to fight Amazon.”

Haring freely admits to her distrust of Amazon’s business practices. Once an early Amazon adopter, she stopped selling through the conglomerate in 2018. With a degree in 20th century history, she’s inherently aware of the danger of monopolies. “No one should control 80% of the book market,” she says firmly. “Especially books.”

“Even if I didn’t sell a book on Bookshop and it was just my name,” she adds, “I was on board.”

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Haring’s fierce commitment to a diversified books industry is echoed in how Bookshop’s CEO, Andy Hunter, talks about the contours of publishing — which is unsurprising. He’s long held that stores like Cupboard Maker can exist and are an absolute necessity — and that someone needs to address how Amazon has decimated them.

Hunter’s track record through the intersection of publishing and technology lies in the independent bookseller’s trick of absolutely knowing his audience. He’s been part of a string of successful publishing world institutions, including daily digital magazine Catapult, storied New York indie publisher Soft Skull Press, and literary publication Lit Hub, which covers so many aspects of books culture it’s more a mycological root system than a newsfeed.

“When we made our plans, we weren’t planning on a pandemic,” Hunter says, almost apologetic. “We didn’t design it as an ecommerce solution for stores in a pandemic, but it turned out it was a perfect solution for that.”

A goal of $30 million in revenue by 2023 — never mind 2020 — was quickly left in the dust by COVID-induced demand that saw the certified B-Corp Bookshop rapidly roll out affiliate partnerships with Big Five publisher Simon & Schuster, the Today Show’s book club, and PEN America, and exceed $60 million in their first year. “That was extremely rewarding; it was also very stressful. We only had four employees when that year started and we had to ramp up everything very quickly, build upon a newly-built system at a time when we were getting incredible volume.”

With that booming business and the stress of rapid expansion came another source of pressure: the knowledge that the independent bookstores turning to Bookshop for their immediate survival were increasingly those in small towns and rural regions, where local retail is more thinly distributed, more precarious — and more crucial to the fabric of a community. “Big, urban stores didn’t need us as much,” Hunter says. “It’s not really the top stores that we’ve mattered so much to; it’s the mom-and-pop stores, the small-town stores serving small communities. That $10,000 — which is the average amount a store made (through Bookshop) last year — made so much of a difference. Those are the same stores that don’t have the resources to set up, build, and maintain an ecommerce site.”

Bookshop has thrown itself into meeting the needs of those smaller, more precarious businesses. By February 2021, Bookshop was ramping up their affiliate share pool payments — a stable 10% of all profits paid out to registered bookstores, no questions asked — from semi-annual payouts to monthly. The program has already raised approximately $14 million for its 1,000 affiliated US stores, a number Bookshop pointedly keeps track of in a discreet but persistent banner at the top of its site. It is impossible to purchase a book on Bookshop without knowing exactly what you’re supporting.

Hunter estimates at least $8 million of those funds have gone to retailers who didn’t have existing ecommerce capacity. The Top 20 stores are getting six figures in online revenue, but like many in the books business, Hunter’s focused on the long tail effect: a much larger quantity of bookstores earning $5,000 or $10,000 through his platform. “[It] isn’t enough to completely change their lives,” he grants, but it has proved enough to pay a few months’ commercial rent in a pandemic downturn that’s seen sales falter by 20–40%. “In those cases, the difference that Bookshop’s revenue has been able to make has been the difference between staying open and being forced to close. We’ve been told by dozens if not over a hundred stores that the money they’ve been able to earn through Bookshop has been the deciding factor.”

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However, that additional money has also piqued an appetite for expansion from independents and publishers themselves for reasons that are much more complex than a Silicon Valley rescue narrative might suggest.

As Bookshop makes clear, its mission is to take customers not from local booksellers, but from Amazon — and Amazon’s years-long practice of tactically wrenching deeper discounts from publishers has lined its own suppliers up behind the first viable competitor.

For some retailers, it’s knocking one more thing off their to do list that’s proving the deciding factor. Haring prefers not to handle new cookbooks — “I have so many used, I don’t want more” — and she’s happy to fulfill orders for them without having to handle the books herself or navigate policies around prepaying special orders.

Special orders are frequently an independent store’s bread and butter — and one of the most time-consuming tasks. Lali Hewitson, owner of The Portal Bookshop in York — a specialty store combining science fiction, fantasy, and “all of the LGBTQIA books we can source” — echoes how lightening that workload is vital for their new and growing business. “The ability [for customers] to search for a book [via Bookshop] and then designate your bookshop to receive the affiliate sale is absolutely brilliant. It’s like fielding requests for ‘Can you get…?’ without having to do anything.”

The tactful way it relieves small bookstore owners’ operational load may prove to be why Bookshop — which faced early skepticism — is now seeing itself actively invited in. Spurred by talks with The Booksellers Association, a professional organization comprising over 95% of UK and Ireland bookstores, Hunter pushed Bookshop’s UK rollout — one originally planned for 2021 or 2022 — to November 2020. Working this time with East Sussex-based distribution heavyweight Gardners, Bookshop UK launched with over 400 participating bookstores, just in time to capture the nation’s first pandemic Christmas.

With Bookshop’s UK rollout, the indie bookstore approach to big books business has proved itself to be more than a peculiarity of lockdown economics, with three vital weeks of England’s Christmas shopping season spent outside of stay-at-home orders. As reported in the Guardian, Bookshop’s first four months of UK business raised £1 million (about $1.4 million USD) for UK independents from over 200,000 customers: a massive welcome to the UK market.

Bookshop has followed that up with a move into Spain and Portugal, combining the model and technology with teams staffed from the local books industry to ensure a cultural fit. “The head of our bookstore partnerships in the UK was a bookstore owner himself previously,” Hunter explains; Mark Thornton, a former owner of Abingdon’s Mostly Books, who took the role with Bookshop after selling his shop on to another “passionate book lover”. “He really understands the environment, he understands the needs of the stores, and he knows a lot of bookstore owners already.”

Bookshop’s meticulous, culturally sensitive expansion is geared to give it staying power — and very much a sign of an independent bookstore mindset, where your success is rooted in understanding not just what’s on bestseller lists, but the reading tastes of the people on your block.

The value assigned to sense of place is markedly visible browsing Bookshop UK’s front page, where alongside the prize-winners, new releases, and indie darlings, featured authors from London-based women’s magazine Stylist’s first online literary festival and “Superb Scottish Writing” take pride of place. On the American version, it’s recommendations from working-class American essayist and bestseller Lauren Hough and an Oxford University Press-curated list of “Books That Remind Us That Democracy is Fragile and Worth Defending.” Bookshop Spain’s top list has been compiled by author, translator, and culture journalist Xesús Fraga in honor of Galician Literature Day.

“I don’t try to go into these markets as an American company,” Hunter explains. “I think that’s the wrong approach, because we are a company that at our core wants to support small independent businesses and we can’t really do that well as Americans going into markets. We’re here to facilitate.”

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Back in the United States, as Bookshop barrels into its second year, the strongest sign of Bookshop’s potential staying power comes from the books professionals who were never in need of rescue — but are finding innovative ways to build entirely new businesses with it.

Minneapolis bookseller Emily Kallas soft-launched Emily Has a Bookshop in the days after COVID shut down retailers — partly to alleviate her own isolation. “I was like: ‘I need to talk to people about books! How can I connect with people and stay in the book business?’”

She’s been a bookseller in Minneapolis’s vibrant books scene since 2012, working at airport bookstores, chains, and independents, with industry roots that go even deeper: five librarians on one side of the family and parents who met at library school. “Books,” she says, settled in front of a gargantuan shelf lined with double-shelved hardcovers, “are home for me.”

When she saw early press around Bookshop’s affiliate program — one that pays 10% of the purchase price to the recommender after a sale, more than twice as much as Amazon’s 4.5%, and matches it with a 10% donation to the affiliate pool stores like Cupboard Maker and Portal are drawing from — she realized she’d found a way to expand a habit of playing book detective for friends into a more solid business. “I thought: Oh, maybe I could make something of this — tap into all of my skillsets. How can I make this available to not just my inner circle? I set it up and started playing around with it — and I’ve been playing around with it ever since.”

Kallas is growing her fledgling business from the widening network of friends and family who rely on her recommendations. She’s just launched a new website, where she’s already starting to see her following grow. In the meantime, she’s considering her Bookshop storefront the foundation for a plan — “very far-off,” she emphasizes — to potentially open a brick-and-mortar store. “I fully admit, on my commute to my day job I see empty spaces saying ‘For Lease’, and I go: ‘Oh. How would the layout be in there?’”

“It’s great for books people who’ve always had a dream of having a bookstore,” she says, while detailing the business she’s envisioning — a combination of the social media work she does now, her hand-selling experience, and the love for visual merchandising that makes her own bookshelves so beautiful. “I’m creating my dream job.”

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As for Haring and Cupboard Maker Books, they’re fully open for business again — having had their best revenue year ever in 2020, even with the ten weeks lost to COVID. With their Bookshop storefront still humming along in the background, Cupboard Maker is on track for another year of record-breaking sales.

And Haring has found another use for Bookshop: being able to show her appreciation to the readers who kept her business alive.

Once the shutdown lifted in June, Haring went through her list of purchasers and sent thank-you letters to every customer who bought from Cupboard Maker on Bookshop, with an offer for a free used book the next time they came in — one that never expired. “It was really a true thank-you,” she emphasizes. “I wasn’t playing. That first extra cheque, when it came in June — I needed that so much.”

The thank-you coupons are slowly being redeemed as Cupboard Maker restarts its eight curated community book clubs, plans a Bookstore Romance Day slumber party, and returns to in-person business — with a few lingering COVID precautions. The wide aisles Haring designed to be mobility-accessible are now doing double duty for social distancing — though she’s less concerned about airflow. “My ceilings are really high here in the main store; fourteen to sixteen feet high. That’s a lot of air, and my building is not hermetically sealed.” Haring laughs ruefully. “This building is from the 1920s,” she assures me. “There are holes.”

Haring, her husband, and their full-time staff discussed applying for Book Industry Charitable Foundation’s current Survive to Thrive grant program — funded heavily by Bookshop, major publishers, and founding partner Ingram — and decided it should go to retailers who need the support more. “We needed the one in July, but not the one that’ll be coming up this year.” And she grins. “Because our customers are wonderful.”