The end of 2024 marked the completion of the fifth full year that Barnes & Noble has been led by James Daunt. The Waterstones CEO took the helm at B&N, the largest bricks-and-mortar bookstore chain in the U.S., following its acquisition by Elliott Management in September 2019. Daunt’s ambitious plans to revive the ailing retailer were quickly derailed by the onset of the pandemic the next March, which forced B&N and other retailers to close their bricks-and-mortar outlets.
In an interview with PW, Daunt divided his time at B&N into three parts: landing, which he said was a bit “discombobulating”; the pandemic, during which “we focused on surviving and finding our feet”; and now, “changing. We’re confident now and marching at a quicker pace. We have a lot more to do and have a pretty clear idea about how to do it.”
Upgrading the look of B&N stores, and improving the quality of its workforce, are among the reasons Daunt cited as contributing to the bookseller’s resurgence: “We want to have good teams inside nice-looking stores.”
Daunt believes it takes at least two years for someone to become a good bookseller and understand the sweep of what each store offers. He said that the company has invested heavily in training the staff, noting that more employees now work fulltime, with benefits and a path to grow in their jobs. He noted that when he took over, most B&N managers had come from outside the company, but now nearly all have risen through the company ranks.
Still, progress has not come without turbulence. Last week, B&N suffered a major departure, when chief merchandizing officer Jackie De Leo, one of Daunt’s first hires, left the company. A number of unions have formed at individual stores during Daunt’s tenure as well. While negotiations are ongoing, no agreements have been signed. “We want to get it done,” he said, “but these types of things take time.”
While Daunt wants all B&N outlets to have an open, clean, and inviting look, he stressed that he is not interested in opening cookie-cutter stores. Each store is developed to meet the needs of individual communities, he noted, adding that a store set to open in Naples, Fla., on January 29 will be one of the chain’s largest, at 35,000 sq. ft. Stores in Colorado, California, and Texas will also open on the 29th.
Sales in 2024 rose enough to absorb the higher costs associated with a larger payroll and the store rollout, Daunt said. He told PW that, while overall B&N had a “fantastic” year—with such departments as gifts and paper, media, and toys and games posting healthy gains—book sales were “average” or “fine.” He somewhat sheepishly lamented the lack of a major hit in 2024 akin to 2023’s Spare by Prince Harry, but quickly added that it was nice to see a number of titles sell well. He was particularly pleased to see the sales success of James by Percival Everett, which was named B&N’s 2024 Book or the Year (and one of PW’s top 10 books of 2024) and won the National Book Award for Fiction.
Fiction continued to be the big sales driver on the books side for B&N, helped in no small part by the publicity given to books backed by BookTok influencers. But Daunt was not overly concerned about what a looming ban on TikTok might mean for sales: “It's not like BookTok invented great books, though it does provide a great platform to find them.”
While Daunt would love for BookTok to continue, he is confident that another social media platform would come along to fill any BookTok-sized hole. He noted that, throughout his bookselling career, young people have always been a core buying group, pointing to the reading hysteria after Harry Potter was first released in the U.K. in 1997 and the enthusiasm for reading that occurred during the pandemic.
As for the present, Daunt won't need to worry about a breakout hit in 2025. First-day sales of Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros, released on January 21, are expected to surpass the record numbers posted by Spare in 2023. “The numbers,” Daunt said, “are huge.”
Indeed they are. The book sold more than 50,000 copies tied just to the in-store parties B&N held at 633 outlets the evening before the book’s official release on Tuesday. Parties were held at B&N’s flagship New York City store, for which the 650 available tickets quickly sold out, while the Barnes & Noble at the Grove in Los Angeles hosted the kickoff to Yarros’s seven-city tour. B&N expected to sell about 250,000 copies when the first day sales are all tallied.
Daunt was one of the first in the industry to get behind the “books-as-objects” trend that has resulted in an explosion of sales of deluxe editions. “As with any good bookseller, I am obsessed with the book as a physical object,” he said. “We intend to make our stores places that enhance the beauty of physical books. Give me a Sarah J. Maas book that has a nice new cover and we will light it up.”
Barnes & Noble finished a busy 2024 by selling its Union Square and Co. publishing division to Hachette Book Group. The publisher, especially after the huge success of picture book author-illustrator Mo Willems, simply became too big for B&N to properly manage, Daunt said: “We’re a bookseller, not a publisher.” B&N maintains a good relationship with Union Square, which will do some proprietary publishing for the company. Still, Daunt maintained that proprietary publishing, which gives booksellers a better margin, is far from a priority. “I am not going to sell one type of book because I can make more money on it,” he said. “I am going to sell the best book.”
Proceeds from the Union Square sale, Daunt said, will be pushed right back into opening new stores. At present, he expects to open about 60 new outlets, following the 57 stores B&N opened last year and the four stores added through B&N’s acquisition of Denver’s storied Tattered Cover. Including the number of outlets that closed last year and in early January, B&N now has about 650 stores. But simply building more stores, Daunt said, isn’t the end goal; it’s equally important, he explained, that the chain continues to improve them.
“If I visit 10 stores, five I am happy with, three are okay, and two are horrible,” Daunt said. “We are by no means done.”
