A holiday season that started later than usual gathered steam in December, resulting in a strong finish to 2024 for many independent bookstores. Fiction was hot this year, booksellers told PW, as were nonfiction releases with environmental and social justice themes and titles in established humor series for young readers.
Carrie Koepke, cofounder and manager of Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Mo., noted that store personnel were, “like all retail, concerned about the shortened shopping season,” which began in her area with a stormy Small Business Saturday that impacted traffic and sales. After that slow start, “our customers 100% showed up,” she said: sales ended up topping 2023’s strong holiday sales. Koepke described publishers as “much more on top of production and shipping” this year, with stock quickly replenished in most cases.
Skylark’s wide-ranging holiday bestsellers included a title of regional interest—The Flower Sisters by Michelle Collins Anderson —as well as national bestsellers James by Percival Everett and The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Weyward by Emilia Hart and the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series by Toshikazu Kawaguchi were hits as well.
Sarah Hollenbeck, co-owner of Women & Children First in Chicago, also felt that SBS sales “had us worried.” That turned around and “sales happily spiked in December," Hollenbeck said. "Our online orders were way up and our weekdays in-store felt extraordinarily busy compared to recent years.”
James and All Fours by Miranda July were WCF’s “big hitters along with the new Elizabeth Strout,” Tell Me Everything. Hollenbeck also “saw a lot of love for community-building nonfiction,” including Ayana Elizabeth Johnson's What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures and We Grow The World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson. “Not being able to consistently get The Serviceberry back in stock was a huge loss,” she added.
In WCF's children’s department, customers paid attention to the store staff's gift guide full of recommendations. The gift guide was “instrumental," Hollenbeck said, in directing customers towards such front- and backlist children's books as We Are Definitely Human by X. Fang, Nosotros Means Us: un cuento bilinguë/A Bilingual Story by Paloma Valdivia, Dress Up Day by Blanca Gómez, and I Like Your Chutzpah by Suzy Ultman. “For young adults, Heir by Sabaa Tahir flew off the shelf,” Hollenbeck added.
In Duluth, Minn., Zenith Bookstore owner Bob Dobrow said that holiday and fourth quarter sales were down about 5% from 2023. “This was not cause for concern,” he said, “in part because the previous year's sales were exceptionally strong, and gift card sales—which only count toward net sales when they are redeemed—were almost 25% higher than last year. I would speculate that the slight drop in-store traffic and book sales in November and December was a reflection of mood and anxiety following the elections and uncertainty in the economy.”
While the store’s bestseller was The Serviceberry, the other top sellers were by local authors—I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger and The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon—as well as Minnesota author Anton Treuer's YA release, Where Wolves Don't Die. Several backlist titles also appealed to customers: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. Zenith's top-selling book for young readers was another book with local connections: How the Birds Got Their Songs by Travis Zimmerman and illustrated by Sam Zimmerman, a bilingual picture book inspired by a family story, translated into Ojibwe by Marcus Ammesmaki.
For the seventh year, Zenith enticed customers into the store with its Jólabókafloð (“Yule Book Flood”) holiday promotion, inspired by an Icelandic tradition: booksellers wrap up each book in plain paper and attach to the package a sleeve of hot cocoa mix produced by local entrepreneurs. "This is our favorite time of the year," Dobrow said, "So many of our customers tell us how they have started holiday traditions gifting books for everyone in the family.”
Rearranging Store Layouts and Rethinking Release Parties
Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Ore., undertook a significant reorganization last fall, and this holiday season showed positive results.“It was 10 years ago that we last undertook such a massive move,” said Powell’s store manager Bryanne Hoeg. “The genre sections, particularly sci-fi and fantasy, manga, and romance have been growing quickly since 2020. Moving the genre sections to the second floor allowed us to double the size of these sections and provide wider aisles and more space for browsing. We’ve seen as much as a 30% increase in sales in some of those genres after the move.”
Powell’s also created a ground floor space with plants, cookbooks, and sidelines, modeled on Powell’s Books for Home and Garden, a branch that closed in 2020. “The success of the old store centered around cross-merchandising books and gift products,” Hoeg said, and the re-created home goods area, plus local businesses’ pop-up shops, reinforced Powell’s downtown location as a community hub.
During the holidays, Hoeg said, a sold-out visit with Robin Wall Kimmerer cemented The Serviceberry’s superstar status. Other top sellers included James, Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man 13: Big Jim Begins, Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot, and the same surprise sleeper hit mentioned by Zenith Bookstore, Hawk's Never Whistle at Night. Although Never Whistle came out in 2023, it was “championed by booksellers and featured on several displays, rising to a Powell’s bestseller by word of mouth,” Hoeg said.
In addition, Powell’s saw “increased interest in romance, manga, and even role playing,” notably in the updated 2024 Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, Hoeg added. “We also saw people shopping more used books this holiday season.”
Along the California coast, Bookshop Santa Cruz likewise rearranged a few shelves and handed out bookmarks listing fiction favorites and “hidden gems” to encourage readers. “Prior to the holiday season, we created a New Adult section next to YA which sold well,” said bookstore president Casey Coonerty Protti.
Protti heard from customers who wanted book recommendations that could pry teens and twentysomethings away from their phones and social media. “My go-to answers were Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir or Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin,” she said, “but there are many other books that work.” Other Santa Cruz regulars “wanted to turn off the news and read more books,” Protti added. “We definitely saw a post-election bump that went into the holiday season.”
Bookshop Santa Cruz planned early when ordering, Protti noted: “One thing we predicted was that some of the biggest titles for the season would actually be books that came out in the first half of 2024, and we were right,” she said. “We ordered up on titles such as Everett's James, Kaveh Akbar's Martyr!, and Miranda July's All Fours. Beyond that, we saw fiction sales outpace nonfiction and customers looking for hopeful books.” Other major sellers were The Serviceberry and, for kids, Pilkey’s Dog Man 13: Big Jim Begins and Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid 19: Hot Mess, “although Mac Barnett and Sydney Smith's Santa's First Christmas was right up there” too.
Copperfield’s Books, headquartered in Sebastopol, Calif., listed James, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, and Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red as top-performing adult titles. For young readers, Brown’s Wild Robot series remained in high gear, and an October visit by Katherine Rundell sparked excitement for Impossible Creatures. Rundell “was just conspiratorial enough that kids felt they were in on some secret,” general manager R.M. Horrell said, and everyone went home with a signed copy.
Catering to families, Copperfield’s threw a 6:30 a.m. event for Pilkey’s Big Jim Begins at its Petaluma location on December 3. Because children can’t—or probably shouldn’t—hit a midnight release party on a school night, children’s events director Patty Norman organized a before-school book launch, slinging coffee for caregivers and donut holes for everyone.
“We had a line out the door,” Horrell said. “It was really great event, and I think that’s something we’re going to incorporate more often” for the junior crowd and their minders. The release doubled as a promotion for Shannon Messenger’s Keeper of the Lost Cities: Unraveled.
Copperfield’s has nine store locations across three counties, and while racking up sales, they also give back to the community. “We do a book drive every year for various nonprofits,” assistant general manager Amber Reed told PW. Individual stores partner with different organizations “to get books in the hands of kids who need them.” The 2024 beneficiaries included the Sonoma Community Action Network and the Friends of the San Quentin Prison Library. “We really talk to our customers about the things we believe in,” Reed said.
