Kennington Literary Festival 2010

On Saturday, April 24 we sold books at the first Kennington Literary Festival - organised by the Friends of Kennington Library, and wonderfully supported by the local community. Kennington is, ooh, about 2 miles from Oxford - so you might think that the last thing needed is another literary festival, but compared to the industrial bookselling juggernaut that is the Oxford Literary Festival, this couldn't have been more different, and the better for it. A great speaker list, based around a wonderful community library. Speakers included The Joshua Files' author MG Harris...

...who was interviewed by BBC Oxford's Bill Heine...

...and Helen Rappaport was there talking about her latest book Beautiful Forever, the life of 'Madam Rachel' a notorious Victorian cosmetic fraudster... ...and whilst the adults watched the authors, there was plenty for the kids to do... All in all, a wonderful day, and we were very proud to be invited. It all bodes well for 2011...

Small Is Beautiful: the Oxford Writer's Group

You might be forgiven for thinking that with all our 'big' events we've been doing of late, we might have got a bit too big for our boots (or at least the shop) when it comes to events, but (hopefully) that's not the case. In fact, it was a real treat - now that the miriad of cardboard boxes containing event books have largely disappeared - to shift the old tables around, crack open a few bottles of wine, and host a nice, intimate event in the shop again. On Thursday night, we held a Mostly Booklovers event with the Oxford Writers' Group, a remarkable group of novelists, poets, performers and writers - both published and unpublished - who are the driving force behind two very successful anthologies of short stories: The Sixpenny Debt, and The Lost College. We've wanted to do a writers evening for a long time, and - with OWG member Mary Cavanagh a good friend of the shop, and a member of the Mostly Booklovers herself, we asked her to arrange the evening - which she duly did, inviting fellow members down to the shop and helping us structure the evening. We took the opportunity to invite members of other writing groups along as well, and were delighted to welcome members of the White Horse Scribblers, as well as Robin and Birte of the Turl Street Writers (who have together recently published their own very successful anthology Turl Street Tales). With so many other writers, would-be authors and book-lovers together in such a small venue, there was plenty of networking going on - with one very important outcome (more on that below). The evening format was ostensibly a roundtable discussion on the challenges and opportunities of writing in and around Oxford. We'd dubbed the event "In the Footsteps of Pullman and Tolkien" but once questions started coming in from the audience, the discussion went off in a number of fascinating directions, ranging from the importance of writers' groups generally, essential editing tips, the Oxford Literary Festival and top tips on staging events. It was standing room only - literally. I'd miscalculated on the number of chairs, forgetting that we had nine writers to seat for starters, so even pressing the counter stools into service we were still several short. Apologies to the late arrivers, and thanks to those who nobly gave up their seats when we played musical chairs after half an hour... The OWG are - from left to right: Mary Cavanagh (author of The Crowded Bed and A Man Like Any Other), the redoubtable Radmila May (the editing supremo behind The Sixpenny Debt), Ekaterinburg author Helen Rappaport (who we did a wonderful garden event with almost exactly a year ago), journalist and writer Sylvia Vetta, Proper Family Christmas author Jane Gordon-Cumming, Angela Cecil-Reid, Margaret Pelling, Laura King (aka The Poet Laura-eate) and finally Gina Claye, author of Don't Let Them Tell You How To Grieve (and for a wonderful review of that book, read Dovegreyreader's thoughts here). A very diverse group of writers, but the support they provide each other, and the obvious fun they have in their various endeavours was a massive advert for joining a writers group - or starting one yourself. And several of the audience did just that. As a result of the event on Thursday, I'm proud to be the first person to announce the creation of the (as yet working-titled) Abingdon Writers' Group. Anyone reading this who lives in or around Abingdon, and would like to join - please get in touch and I will pass your name on to the founding members. It's all jolly exciting - and for anyone who has followed this blog for any length of time, you'll know that this is the kind of thing that we love getting involved in - and makes all the incredibly hard work of running our little shop worthwhile. We have a number of extremely talented writers and authors who live in Abingdon, who it's been a privilege to have gotten to know since opening the shop, and this is the first step on a very exciting journey to something big.

Thanks to Mary - and the members of the OWG - for an energising and buzzy evening, and as the lady said "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

P.S. This coming Monday (July 13, 7.30pm) we will be welcoming well-known local food writer and enthusiast of all things country pub + dog, Helen Peacocke, as she talks about her book Paws Under The Table, a collection of 40 dog-friendly pub walks around Oxfordshire...

Birthday the second

Two years ago we opened the doors of mostly books - it was a scorcher, and I was in my shorts. Last year we celebrated our first birthday, and the weather couldn't have been different - it hoiked it down all day.

Today is was nice and sunny for our second birthday. Which was nice.

We had a very low-key day. Our first birthday was an important milestone (and fell on a Saturday) but we had a big celebration recently for the award, and besides, Nicki and I (and everyone else for that matter) have been involved in a lot of events, activities and planning recently - and we're a bit shattered. So as I say, low-key.

Lots of good stuff to tell you about though.

Yesterday I had the very good fortune to meet the wonderful David Fickling (he of David Fickling Books) at his offices in Oxford. The offices are just what you'd expect of one of the country's most dynamic and fun children's book publishers - bookcases everywhere crammed with books, posters everywhere, The whole place - and David himself - oozes a passion and love of reading for kids, I've never quite visited a place like it.

I can't say too much about the meeting at this stage, but I did have the opportunity to find out all about this:
The DFC is now in its fifth week - and as someone who was brought up on The Beano and 2000AD, the comic is a revelation and everything you'd expect from a project which involvs (amongst many others) Philip Pullman and Nick Sharratt. Imagine being a kid and getting this through your letterbox once a week. Fab. Having had to 'dispose' of various cheaply-printed, nasty-plastic-toy-mounted rubbish which has, from time-to-time, been bought for Alex from supermarkets, etc, having a comic printed on quality paper, with literate stories from exciting new artists - utterly brilliant. Its sales deserve to go ballistic...

Anyway, that was yesterday. For our birthday proper we welcomed Helen Rappaport to the shop for an utterly compelling evening event which (given the fine weather) we did in the garden.

For those who don't know, Helen Rappaport is an extremely talented historian, Russianist (and Russian speaker) and a very fine writer. Her previously book on women serving in the Crimea was critically acclaimed, but tonight she spoke about her latest book: Ekaterinburg - the last days of the Romanovs.

I'd finished this on the bus back from Oxford the day before - and (genuinely) missed my stop, so engrossed was I in the final part of the book. Even though you know what's going to happen, Helen does such a good job of making you intimate with the Romanov family, that you feel compelled to read about their brutal (and it is exceptionally, and unflinchingly, horrific) assassination.
The book focuses on the final 14 days of the Tsar and his family, a period which becomes increasingly desperate and claustrophobic as the Romanovs - incarcerated in a city under siege - increasingly become not just a political problem, but a threat to the whole Bolshevik revolution - a problem that eventually can have only one solution.


For me, there's lots of parts that I found fascinating - particularly the entreaties made to the then US president Woodrow Wilson to interceed on Russia's behalf. The feeling was that the arrival of US troops would mean a people rising spontaneously up and toppling the Bolshevik dictators. Mmm, sound familiar?

And what of the role of our own Royal Family (and George V) in refusing asylum to their cousin? Here, Helen explains the complicated situation that existed in this country at that time:



Helen (as befits an ex-actor) is a wonderful and passionate speaker, but this evening you got a sense of the emotional attachment she has to the Russian people and to how the almost-cult of the Romanovs is closely wrapped up in Russian identity and post-communist culture (the entire family are now saints and have been canonised in the Orthodox Church). It's a moot point about just how much of paradigm shift the assassination of The Romanovs represented in terms of the bloodshed of the 20th century, but with Russia a resurgent - and increasingly assertive - nation once again, it does us well to remind ourselves about this particular bloody episode in its history. Helen's book is an excellent place to start, and I really thank her for coming along and making it such a memorable evening

On Events

A few months after we opened (two years at the end of June – zowie!) we had a call from an author who wanted to do an event in our shop. I almost dropped the phone with excitement. When we opened Mostly Books, holding great evsents was #2 on our list of shop USPs – but with the rush to open the shop, with the learning curve we found ourselves on, our focus on the bookgroups, coffee, etc. we hadn't spent a great deal of time inviting authors (or at least, any author that anyone had heard of). Anyway – I said ‘yes’ to him immediately over the phone, and our fledgling publicity machine swung into gear (i.e. a mailshot to our small but growing mailing list, and a PR piece to the local paper). We also put up posters in the shop, posted a piece on the blog, handed out fliers, etc. And then we waited. And waited. Not a sausage. It didn’t help that no-one had heard of the author, but then – we had no track record either so enticing big names to Abingdon was proving difficult. But we’d canvassed opinion about events when we first opened, and we knew that our customers were overwhelmingly in favour of them. One week before the event we’d sold two tickets. We were frankly in a bit of a panic. At this point the second (and thus far unused) part of our publicity machine got going: cajoling and outright bribery. We evangelised to anyone who came into the shop about the event, we offered free tickets, we walked around and handed leaflets to people, we even engaged in a publicity-raising prank aimed at the local mayor which backfired spectacularly. On the day of the event the author himself phoned up to say that he was bringing some people with him (thank goodness) and even my Mum drove the two hours down from Cambridgeshire (and brought a friend). The guy who lived above the shop was suddenly available and he came down with his girlfriend. Eventually, by the time the event started we had 15 people – which became our baseline for an event that isn’t classified as a total disaster. What we discovered was that although people generally liked the idea of events, when it came to buying a ticket there was always a reason why they weren’t able to make it to that particular event. Slowly, over the next few months, we discovered a few home truths about book events in independent bookshops. At one point last year we sat down and looked critically at our track record on events and these were the fairly grim realities:

1. They take a lot of effort – especially to do them well
2. They don’t make any money (more on that later)
3. Unless the author is famous, no-one comes
4. Unless you have a track record, it’s difficult to get anyone famous (see 3 above)
5. The kinds of people who are most likely to come to events are those people who already have packed diaries – or they are stretched with busy lives, families, long working hours.
6. Lots of people are intimidated by ‘literary events’ and that puts them off

This last point was a real surprise to us. We discovered this when we accidentally talked to one of our customers at the start of last year, and realised that they weren’t sure what a book event actually was. Based on this, and for an event last February, we sent out a very low-key email to our list inviting people to a meet-the-author event, and explaining a little bit about what they might expect. We had one of biggest turnouts. Slap! Anyway, having sat down and reviewed the situation (cue song) we started to do things a bit differently with our events. And that has made all the difference (cue poem). So here’s how we do events now:

• We’ve discovered that running events in a regular ‘slot’ (where possible) really helps attendance.
• We have started to get our customers involved in the authors that we approach – we will be doing an event in July with Sarah Stovell and in August with Jane Brocket: both of these events have come about in part from talking to customers and canvassing their opinion.
• As time has gone on, as our mailing list has grown, as we’ve gotten to know the best ways to promote events, this has also helped grow our catchment and attendance - also we now have a small group of regulars who look forward to our events.
• Ticket sales tend to be in a 'u' curve - we sell some when the event is announced initially - and then we have last minute sales from people who are either a) unexpectedly free, or b) only hear about it when we're doing our last-minute push.
• The most important point – we have got to know the idiosyncracies of Abingdon in terms of what works (and doesn't work) for events. For example, we’ve started to hold events at alternative venues in Abingdon (churches, schools, retreat centres, open-air stalls – we’re doing one in a pub in August!). We also do a lot more events for children during the day - this is much more convenient for busy Mums and Dads.

This isn’t just about helping us – it’s about making the events worthwhile for authors as well, who sometimes travel a fair few miles to be with us. I think all authors have horror stories concerning at least one event they were involved in - hopefully there hasn't been a Mostly Books horror story so far... So, the big question, are our events profitable? Some definitely are. For many, however, if you take the extra staff costs, time, promotional costs, costs of ordering in (and sometimes returning) stock – on a strict bottom-line analysis: probably not. But that – to use a colloquial phrase - is so not the point. Doing events is critical to the future of the shop, because of a number of intangibles that are not easy to measure but we know are there. Many of our customers – even those who have never made it to an event – support the shop, and enjoy being part of the shop community because they know we are doing events. It’s an important part of ‘buying into’ what we are trying to do. Events also create buzz – which, let's face it, is a nebulous concept much used in marketing jargon, but one I think everyone knows the meaning of intuitively. When there’s lots of things happening, you create a special kind of energy in and around the shop, and this definitely lifts the numbers of people visiting and buying books generally. When we are doing events, we sell more books even if they don't occur at the same time. (Saying that, a few weeks ago we did five events in 8 days which was a bit extreme even for us). And then there are those special events which just come together perfectly and remind you why you opened a bookshop in the first place. Recently, a customer of ours who has supported the shop since we opened, who we’ve got to know very well as a friend, made it to her first event. We know how difficult it is for her to get to events, and she has tried several times before. She was just so thrilled to have made it, had a great evening, and we were so happy she was able to come. We have some cracking events coming up over the next few months – more details on our events pages - but we're particularly excited that on Tuesday, July 1st we welcome Helen Rappaport to the shop to discuss her book Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs. Having appeared at the Oxford Literary festival, and Hay-on-Wye, you can read more about the book when Helen recently guest-blogged about her book on dovegreyreader. The book is a gripping, shocking account of what you might think is a familiar story - the death of the Russian royal family after the Revolution. We expect Helen - as a former actor - to spellbind the audience when she comes. A week later we welcome Nicola Beauman – founder and head of Persephone Books – which will be a very special evening for a number of reasons, maily because Persephone Books are one of our signature ranges that we have had in the shop since opening. We have already sold plenty of tickets, and I'm now worried we may need to move to a bigger venue... So – if you’ve never been to an event at Mostly Books before: can we tempt you over the next next few weeks? Over a glass of wine, in a very relaxed environment - let us know if we can reserve you a ticket...