The 2024 holiday season officially kicked off on November 29, and booksellers are reporting strong sales despite a late start to the season and obstacles confronting some stores.
In Washington, D.C., Kamala Harris, VP of the United States, was spotted checking out the cookbooks at Bold Fork Books on Small Business Saturday. Mahogany Books, which closed its District location in August while its owners search for a new location, is operating a pop-up at the monthlong downtown outdoor holiday market. Briana Littlejohn, Mahogany’s events coordinator, reported strong sales throughout the weekend, with staff able to replenish some, but not all, hot titles. Lovely One, the memoir from Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, “went fast,” Littlejohn said, as did Children of Anguish and Anarchy by Tomi Adeyemi, James by Percival Everett, and The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Southeast of Capitol Hill, East City Bookshop also experienced a robust sales weekend, rebounding from a flood this past summer that closed the store for a month. “SBS was a good day” with “steady” traffic, book buyer Emilie Sommer said. “Sales were higher than at least the past three years, but it was never crushingly busy.” James was the store’s hottest book, followed by The God of the Woods by Liz Moore and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney.
“We’re chasing The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer,” Sommer said. “It’s sold out, and we have a lot of people asking. We’re waiting for the reprint from S&S.”
Unlike the other indies that spoke with PW, Malaprop’s in Asheville, N.C., still had a few copies of The Serviceberry in stock, even after selling 160 copies. “We have the best buyers in the business,” said store manager Katie Brown. “We ordered so many, and now it’s on back order. We’re happy to sell the last few to our customers.”
While Malaprop’s sales were lower than in previous years, due primarily to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, weekend sales exceeded expectations, with James and Louise Penny’s The Grey Wolf in demand. “People showed up and were buying books,” Brown said. “The staff had that squirrelly look you get after helping many people.” In addition to in-store sales, Brown added, the store saw a significant and “atypical” uptick in online orders throughout the holiday weekend.
Steve Iwanski, owner of Charter Books in Newport, R.I., said that sales and traffic were down about 5% from 2023, but “the vibe from customers was great,” with respectable sales of Ina Garten’s Be Ready When the Luck Happens and Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Charter had good fortune with the romantasy novels of Carissa Broadbent, author of the Crowns of Nyaxia series. “She’s local and we held a big event for her latest release” he said, “but we're also shipping an average of about seven of her books per day.”
Iwanski added: “I'd be remiss if I didn't say how much we appreciate all the speedy shipping and generous terms from major publishers. The holiday promos for indies are a lifesaver, and we are proactively placing more orders than usual to take advantage of the terms.”
Midwest and Southwest Reads
Carl Erickson, the community outreach coordinator at the Bookworm in Omaha, Neb., reported a line of people waiting for the store to open on Saturday. “It stayed busy all day,” he said, with a 20% increase in sales over 2023. Cookbooks went fast, along with samples whipped up by two culinary-minded booksellers from three cookbooks, offered on discount:100 Afternoon Sweets by Sarah Kieffer, Soups, Salads, Sandwiches by Matty Matheson, and Ottolenghi Comfort by Yotam Ottolenghi. The latest novels by local authors—Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell and Nothing Like the Movies by Lynn Painter—also were popular.
In St. Paul, Minn., James and The Serviceberry flew off shelves “as expected,” said David Enyeart, manager of the Next Chapter Bookshop, who reported that sales for the weekend soared 13% over last year, including a “whopping 42%” spike on SBS. Surprise hits were Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi by Boyce Upholt and Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King. Big in Sweden by local writer Sally Franson found a receptive audience, as did The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book by Lee Svitak Dean, Rick Nelson, et al. “Time of the Child by Niall Williams looks like the book we’re chasing this season,” Enyeart said.
Loganberry Books in Cleveland had a great weekend, “with an especially strong showing on Saturday,” reported communications manager Elisabeth Plumley-Watson. “SBS seems to have taken hold in the general public.” Water, Water: Poems by Billy Collins and The Serviceberry were top picks, while James and Orbital by Samantha Harvey are on back order. But the store’s two bestsellers this past weekend were by locals: a self-published picture book, Many Paths by Sarah Littlefield, illustrated by Karen Dijkstra, and An Alternative History of Cleveland by John Wlasiuk.
At Kids Ink in Indianapolis, readers grabbed Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hot Mess by Jeff Kinney, City Full of Santas by Joanna Ho, and Who Is Taylor Swift? by Kirsten Anderson. Owner Shirley Mullin said that two adult titles, James and A Couple Cooks: Pretty Simple Cooking by Alex Overhiser and Sonja Overhiser, also sold well. The Overhisers “live in the neighborhood, which helps,” said Mullin, “but they also have an amazing social presence, and are such interesting people.”
Alienated Majesty Books in Austin, Tex., took an idiosyncratic approach to holiday vibes with “Black Metal Friday,” which started as an inside joke in 2023. “Since we haven't been around very long, there wasn’t anything we wanted to put on sale,” co-owner Melynda Nuss said. Booksellers dubbed the event Black Metal Friday, “put it on the marquee, and listened to metal all day.” It was so much fun that they ran it again in 2024, this time with graphics and a tagline: “No deals, no discounts. Just black metal all day long.”
Their unlikely scheme worked. A Honduran Creole food pop-up participated, the Austin Chronicle wrote it up, “and our sales for the day were almost double what they were last year,” Nuss said. “Next year, we might get some bands and make a real deal out of it.”
West Coast Hits
In western Washington, Plaid Friday and Small Business Saturday appealed to an energetic shop-local crowd. “People are taking it really seriously” and spending money at places they love, said sweet pea Flaherty, owner of King’s Books in Tacoma, Wash. Flaherty noted steady sales of Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom and On Tyranny, adding that King’s Books regularly reorders Snyder’s On Tyranny: Graphic Edition, illustrated by Nora Krug.
Several Pacific Northwest stores made up for lost revenue after a bomb cyclone on November 20 damaged the electrical grid. Island Books, on Mercer Island, canceled a book fair and stocked shelves in the dark after the storm, but regrouped before the holiday for a robust SBS, owner Laurie Raisys told PW.
At Third Place Books’s Lake Forest Park location, just north of Seattle, power was out for almost four days, said marketing manager Rosa Hernandez. Supportive customers placed online orders in solidarity as the days ticked by, and Third Place was up and running ahead of the sales rush.
Booksellers did brisk business with James, Orbital, and The Serviceberry. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s political inquiry The Message and Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time likewise saw high demand. One backlist title got a Hollywood bump: “Everyone wants to read Wicked again,” said Hernandez, who has found it hard to keep Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel-turned-musical in stock.
Seattle-area stores bet on the regional music scene too. The Sound of Seattle: 101 Songs That Shaped a City by KEXP-FM DJ and Black Tones band member Eva Walker, cowritten with Jacob Uitti, “has been and we think will continue to be popular on the adult list,” said Dan Ullom, co-owner of Brick & Mortar Books in Redmond. Third Place’s Hernandez is hand-selling Mia Zapata and the Gits, a biography of the late musician and her band, written by drummer Steve Moriarty.
Ullom said that inventory has met demand so far. “We have been fortunate that none of our big titles have been ungettable yet,” he said. “I did have to panic-buy Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl and Suji Kim’s Under the Oak Tree. Our system has live warehouse checks, and I think I bought the warehouses out of both.” He also noted that Sharon McMahon’s The Small and the Mighty “has been selling like crazy,” as is Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin’s The Bletchley Riddle.
November 30 marked the reopening of East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, Calif., four months to the day since a fire gutted the former location. SBS “was a Christmas week sort of sale day for us, in a space half the size, and considering I’m still lacking about a third of my planned opening-day inventory,” co-owner Brad Johnson told PW. For the holidays, he’s “banking on James,” and “sold a little stack of Colm Tóibín’s On James Baldwin.”
On a long weekend that extended into Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday, Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter reported online results that mirrored in-person sales. Bookshop.org browsers clicked to purchase The Serviceberry, James, Orbital, and On Tyranny in healthy quantities.
“Bookshop.org's sales have been up significantly since the election, and that trend carried through to Black Friday, which was up 24% over 2023,” Hunter told PW. “We offered free shipping and $10 gift cards for customers who spent more than $100, but ultimately we think our customers were motivated by the desire to support local businesses instead of billionaires.”
