There is a particular pleasure in walking into a bookshop where the person behind the counter has read the book you are holding and will tell you, honestly, what they thought of it. That sort of recommendation is not a marketing strategy; it is a by-product of a shop small enough to care. Supporting those shops is less about grand gestures than repeatable habits: turning up, ordering through them, and letting them become part of the week.
Start with what you already know: the high street, the market square, the arcade behind the station. Independents are often smaller than you expect — a single room, a narrow shopfront, a doorway beside a café — and easy to miss when you are not looking for them.
Then widen the search. The Booksellers Association keeps a directory of member shops, which is a quick way to check a town you are visiting. Library noticeboards, local magazines, community groups and the free papers stacked by the door all help. So does asking: a librarian, a teacher or a neighbour in a book club will usually know.
The rough test is ownership. A shop owned by the person who runs it, or by a small local company, is independent; a branch of a national chain is not. Some independents have two or three branches and still qualify. There are specialists worth seeking out too — crime, poetry, children's books, maps, second-hand and antiquarian — plus community-run shops and book corners inside museums, galleries and cafés.
Most independents can get almost anything in print, and ordering is where a shop earns its keep. A few practical points:
If you cannot visit, check whether the shop sells through its own website, or through a platform that passes a share of the sale to independent booksellers. Ordering direct by phone or email works too — a short message with the title and your number is enough. Subscription clubs, wrapped "blind date" books and signed first editions are other ways to buy from a shop rather than a warehouse.
Bookshops run more than they appear to. Launch nights, signings, poetry readings, crime evenings, children's story times and writing workshops all happen in the rooms above and behind the shelves. Most are free or cost a little; some ask you to buy a book, which is fair enough.
Finding out is the main hurdle, and it is easily solved: ask to join the mailing list, follow the shop on social media, and read the window. Then go. Events are often small, so two or three extra people change the atmosphere completely, and booksellers remember faces.
Libraries and shops both host reading groups, and most welcome new members. If your shop does not have one, ask whether it would host a group you bring together — six people buying a book a month is real trade. Do not feel obliged to have finished the book, or to have liked it. Disagreement is the point.
If you have a useful skill — stewarding, proofreading, taking decent photographs — it is worth offering, while accepting that some shops have volunteer rotas and others would rather manage alone. Ask; do not assume.
Libraries Week, held each October, is a good moment to join a library, take children along to an event, and remind yourself how much the two institutions depend on each other. Libraries and bookshops are not rivals: authors are made by both, and a town with neither is a poorer place to live. Join, borrow, and buy the books you want to keep.
Beyond that, mark a few dates. Independent Bookshop Week falls in June, Books Are My Bag and Bookshop Day in October, World Book Day in March and World Book Night in April. Local literary festivals, poetry nights, open-mic evenings and second-hand book fairs fill in the rest of the year. Attending one thing a season is enough to stay in touch.
Pick four things for the next month. Introduce yourself to the bookseller and join the mailing list. Order one book you would otherwise have bought online, and pre-order one that is not out yet. Go to a single event, even if it is only a signing on a Saturday morning. Use your library once properly, and buy one book as a gift.
None of that is dramatic. But a shop survives on regular customers rather than occasional goodwill, and the recommendation you get in return — the one that puts the right book in your hands at the right time — is not something a warehouse can offer.
Photo: StockSnap / Pixabay
