How I kept alive a new children's bookshop during the COVID-19 lockdown

For the UK Independent Bookshop Week 2021 we asked bookshop owner Jo Boyles to give us an insight into bookselling in one of the strangest years of our lives.

After 15 years as a bookseller at Waterstones, eventually becoming an expert children’s bookseller, I began plans for an independent bookshop specialising in children’s books. The shop itself, at No. 5 Bridge Street in Salisbury, was once home to the much loved Everyman Bookshop in the '80s and '90s. Restoring the shop back to a bookshop after many years as a bar was six months’ worth of very hard but rewarding work.

My hopes for the future of the shop were to create a community centred space for families to spend time, with lots of free or affordable events. I also wanted to have a large range of books in each category, so I worked hard to have stock that focused on new talent, positive representation and books that might not appear on algorithms. It was important to create a space that focused on children taking control of, and looking forward to, their future. Which is why I chose the name The Rocketship Bookshop: a forward looking, hopeful name that relied less on the heritage of children’s literature and more on what is to come.

The Rocketship Bookshop opened on the 19^th February 2020 and I was blown away by the support the shop received. Customer service, particularly when talking to children about books and taking them seriously as customers, was always going to be the key factor to the shop’s success and in the first month it was a real joy to deliver that. So, within our first month we established ourselves as an exciting, new, community-based bookshop offering a family friendly experience with potential for a whole host of events… And then Covid happened.

We closed the shop on the 22^nd March, and in order to survive the shop had to have a drastic turnaround. We added e-commerce onto our website to create a more dynamic, user friendly browsing experience than we had originally anticipated needing, with all of our stock now available online. So many of my hopes for the shop had been about creating a strong community-based experience, but it soon became very clear that the shop now needed to create another community online. We achieved that by championing new authors and offering a personal touch to each order and recommendation request. Tailored and considered recommendation lists via email and social media became a large part of my working day, as did making connections with readers, families, authors, teachers and publishers via social media.

I began gift wrapping a few orders and it became a very popular part of our service. I now do it, for free, with every order and the shop has a reputation for beautifully wrapped packages and fast delivery. I believe it’s because, right now, children and customers welcome the tangibility of gift-wrapped books and the care we take with them. I also wanted to find ways to keep our links with the local community. During the first lockdown, I devoted time to working with Salisbury Food Bank, donating gift wrapped picture books for distribution to vulnerable children. I also worked with local schools to donate books to the children of key workers and vulnerable children, often with hand written notes and books chosen for individual children and their interests.

Usborne titles have been a big part of the shop since we opened. Two of our favourite titles last year were The Haunting of Aveline Jones and The Super Miraculous Journey of Freddie Yates. A big hit with our customers and a book I really adore, The Haunting of Aveline Jones formed the centrepiece of our spooky Halloween display, and we created special, exclusive ‘Lieberman’s Second Hand Books’ bookmarks to go with our pre-orders.

Pre-order copies of The Haunting of Aveline Jones

Born and raised in Salisbury, author Jenny Pearson and her family have all been big supporters of the shop, Jenny’s mother and grandmother visited us before we opened, and Jenny herself visited with her children during the promotion of the hilarious and heart-warming The Super Miraculous Journey of Freddie Yates to sign copies. We bought 20 copies of the novel to give to Year 6 leavers at a local primary school, which Jenny also kindly signed.

Jenny Pearson with her book The Super Miraculous Journey of Freddie Yates

For the launch of one of my favourite fantasy YA novels in recent years, The Gilded Ones, we held an online Twitter competition to win a Tote bag and limited edition print, and more recently we have included Tote bags and bookmarks with pre-orders of one of the biggest new releases of the summer, Ace of Spades.

We were very excited by the reissue of the The World of the Unknown: Ghosts and The World of the Unknown: UFOs books and featured both prominently in our new release section. It was wonderful to see adults revisiting their youth with these titles and introducing the books to their own children.

Opening the shop during a global pandemic has been quite the learning experience for someone who has never run a business before! It’s been sixteen months of trial and error, blind panic tempered by resilience and determination, always maintaining that what the shop offers is important to children and young people and their futures. What an amazing job to have!