All I want for Christmas…

As the year rushes to its close it seems that the world gets more and more frenzied as people try to fit in their whole to-do lists into the ever-shrinking time before Christmas.

For trade publishers it is a whirl of new releases, Christmas catalogues and the launch of a towering stack of new books into the market with fingers crossed that they sell as well as their publishers anticipated.

 As the world moves increasingly to digital retail and we hear stories of empty shopping centres in the US being converted to warehouses for online shopping sites, we might yearn for the days when good bookshops were the primary place to find books. That was a time when Christmas shoppers clogged the aisles of their local bookshops in search of the perfect gift for mothers, fathers, children, siblings and those people who seem to have everything already.

 I wear two different hats this Christmas. One hat is that of a small trade publisher hoping that there is enough stock of our trusty backlist titles in stores to tempt shoppers looking for a braai book or an inspirational story about Imtiaz Sooliman and the Gift of the Givers. My other hat is that of the curator of a book discovery app which tries to solve the problem of finding the right book for the right person in the digital environment. We know that the big trade authors’ sales get bigger each year. Nielsen BookData shows higher sales value from fewer titles and the viability of books by authors outside of the mega-seller category gets more tenuous. Niche books and books by debut authors or local authors battle to get visibility in the world of Bookstagram am and BookTok. I spend much of my waking time working out how our app Bookist can help solve this problem and show users books they might not have seen but are definitely going to love. It’s all in the algorithm and of course the curation, as booksellers will know.

 So, what do I want for Christmas? A world where a huge range of books find homes with readers who fall in love with them so that we grow a more diverse pool of commercially viable trade books, for the sake of authors and publishers. And, of course, the time to read at least some of the books on my want-to-read shelf. Come on, Father Christmas, surely you can help with this?

 Louise Grantham

Louise is the Publisher at Bookstorm, a small South African non-fiction publishing house and a founder and curator of Bookist, a book discovery app available on the App Store and Play Store.

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