Notes from a Children's Bookstore

A day in my life selling books to kids

It is not actually Meg Ryan’s job in You’ve Got Mail, but sometimes it feels pretty close. We do really have a Big Rival Bookstore round the corner. And I did use to read the children picture books, just like Meg. When this book was about anything whimsical - say, a bear that’s lost its balloon, or a shy pigeon - this was great, but I am squeamish about toilet humour, so my biggest challenge was reading anything about poo while trying not to look upset. If you are a parent, you will know there are many children’s books about poo, most of which also contain graphic images. But, anything for the audience - that’s showbiz, baby.

Nowadays I work at the shop on Thursdays, which isn’t a story-time day, so I don’t do my dramatic readings anymore. Thursday is the day we have a gig for mothers and babies. This is brilliant, although not conducive to working: I get distracted by acoustic covers of Taylor Swift drifting down from the event space, along with the sound of babies gurgling happily. The next generation of Swifties; you can’t start them too young. During these gigs, everyone leaves their prams downstairs, which is how I’ve noticed there are so many more twins nowadays. In the two and a half years I’ve worked at the children’s bookstore, the number of double prams has absolutely skyrocketed.

But I’ve jumped ahead - the gig doesn’t start until two and I promised to take you through a day in the life. Of course, it starts with coffee from the little pink cafe next door, where I always feel worldly claiming my ‘trader’s discount’. (Well, not always. Sometimes I feel embarrassed instead. Recently the young barista who makes notable amounts of eye contact was doing small talk and afterwards he said, ‘You’re Emma, right?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name,’ thinking he’d remembered me from literally three weeks ago, because, why wouldn’t he?, and then he said ‘No, it says on the cup’ and I realised he was just calling me for my drink. On Thursdays I am pretending to be in You’ve Got Mail so I’m quick to assume innocent bystanders are flirting.) Anyway, if I am feeling indulgent I get a marmite cruffin, the Queen of pastries. If I am feeling abstemious I get a salted pretzel, the most abstemious offering at a store that serves exclusively bread.

Then I unlock the shop, put our chalk-boards out on the street (above sign painted by yours truly) and get the lights going. Normally the post-woman comes early and so one of my first tasks will be scanning stock in and putting it on the shelves. There is a growing trend in picture books and middle-grade fiction (Brits: novels for 9-12s) toward a very AI-generated style of cover illustration, which obviously all booksellers hate, so I was delighted to unpack this properly illustrated beauty on Thursday:

A dog-detective solving a mystery in a greenhouse! Paddington meets Poirot, what’s not to like? I had a flick through and it’s very lovely, you can buy it here.

(By the way, I don’t mean publishers are actually using AI for book illustrations - I just mean someone has decided kids want books that look like movie-tie ins, so they’re going for those high-contrast, super-smooth, computery-feeling pictures on the front. Personally I prefer pictures that clearly look drawn by a human hand.)

By this point a customer or two will have come in and so I’ll be helping them find a book. This Thursday my first customer was a mother and her two-year-old son, and we had a classic children’s bookshop interaction:

Mother: What book would you like, honey?

Toddler: (points at book they have at home) This one!

Mother: We’re picking a new book today, baby. We already have that one. Can you pick a different one?

Todller: This one!

Mother: That’s a Christmas book and we already have it too. (points to new book) What about this?

Toddler: (cries) No! This one! This one!

Basically, if you are under three you think a bookshop is your house, and so of course you want to be read a book that you already know. This happens at least five times a day. Eventually I help this particular mother and baby pick a Peter Rabbit book: familiar enough not to feel like a betrayal, new enough to justify the purchase.

Later on a mum comes in with her brand new, oven-fresh two-week-old baby, and asks if I can take a picture of them because it’s their first time out of the house together alone. ‘Just for the memories’, she says, and of course I agree because it’s cute and heartwarming. I take a few but when she sees them she says the lighting isn’t right, so she fiddles with the settings and I go again. Now the background isn’t working so we head to a different part of the store. In our third location it is seeming increasingly unlikely these are for just for the memories. Eventually she balances her sleeping baby on top of a waist-high, quite narrow table of books, and I’m freaking because babies are so wriggly, trying to hold the kid’s foot just out of shot so I can catch him if anything happens. But to be fair, those last pictures were adorable.

Five life lessons from classic children's books

At some point I go for lunch, probably for shakshuka at the Turkish cafe a few doors down. If I’m feeling particularly indulgent I also get an oat milk white chocolate mocha, or else I’ll bring two regular coffees back for me and my lovely colleague R.

R and I run the bookshop’s school events programme together. What this means is we bring authors into schools to talk to children. We supply the stock - the author gets to sell a bunch of books - the kids get to meet a real life writer - everybody’s happy. So in the afternoon I’ll do admin for that or else I’ll go in person to a school event, which is what I did this week. I love going to school events. Hearing an author talk about their work means you get to know it in depth, and children are reliably funny. Their questions are always very practical (‘How is a book made? How did the books get here today? How did you get here?’) or else just standard funny - ‘what’s it like being famous?’. Ah kids, you have yet to learn that writers aren’t really famous anymore. My main responsibility is to make sure that every kid who ordered a book gets their book, so this means I’ve had a bird’s eye view of child name trends for the past two years. You couldn’t go to a primary school without meeting a dozen Lyras in 2023, but that’s died away a bit (and I have to admit that my sample size, artsy liberal North London, is probably not representative, with a higher percentage of Philip Pullman readers than the average population). I met a brother and sister who were called Prince and Princess a couple of weeks ago, which I thought was exceptional work from the parents. What a bold way to upend the teacher student power dynamic.

If you hate children this day probably sounds nightmarish. But obviously, I love kids, it would be a weird job to have if I didn’t. I loved it when a little boy zoomed into the shop last week and ran right up to the till and shouted: ‘HELLO!’ like today was the greatest day in the history of time. I loved the three-year-old who was obsessed with finding ‘something spooky’ to read. He’d take any book that was vaguely ghosty looking, even just one that had a dark cover, and then ask his mum, ‘Is it sumfin spooky?’ It had just been Halloween, so hauntings were in the air. I love how kids always want to tap the credit card. I get it, that little beeping noise is so satisfying.

Hello, can I sell you a book?

And I love meeting parents too. I am endlessly impressed by their capacity to be out buying birthday presents for some random kid in their daughter’s class they don’t even know. The birthday present purchase is another classic, five-times-a-day interaction, and it makes me realise how hard it is to fight dumb gender stereotypes. When a parent comes in, and they want a book for a nine-year-old boy they’ve never met, it feels tricky to recommend the story about magic ponies and ballet school. What if the boy thinks it’s lame and then I’ve ruined the birthday interaction by trying to be woke? But am I the problem for guiding them toward the book about a robot train? Hmm. One good way to counter this is through our personalised book subscription service: running this is another one of my jobs. Normally kids get two books a month, so I can play it safe with one choice, and then use their interests as a jumping off point for a less gender normative second pick - say it’s a boy who likes birds, well, I can give him an animal book with a female protagonist.

And that’s pretty much it! At five thirty, I register all the money made, bring the chalk boards in again, turn off the lights and go home. Adios shop until next week.

It is a very good job for lots of reasons. Firstly, in the era of the freelance drifter, there is something incredibly satisfying about working one day a week in a place where your physical presence is absolutely necessary. Being a digital nomad has its upsides, but it is also untethering to have no concrete connection to a place of work. The shop, on the other hand, is material: if I don’t unlock it then it will stay shut, and that is weirdly comforting to me. But, far more importantly, I love children’s books, as I’ve talked about on this Substack before. Many of my strongest reading memories are from between the ages of eight and twelve, so it is absolutely joyous to help children that age find books they love. It is a tough time for kid’s books: screen-time competition has decimated the market, and so publishers are focusing all their attention on a few, big-name (celebrity) authors, leading to a decline in quality/variety IMO (although there are still plenty of incredible books published! They just don’t get much press). But if you are in England, this year is the National Year of Reading - so if you have a kid in your life, why not take them to an IRL bookshop today, and help them find something they love? Fingers crossed our little shop weathers the storm. <3

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Looking for children’s book recommendations? Ask me in the comments, I know lots!

Before you go… are you a romance reader, or an author looking for help with social media, marketing and newsletter strategy? I can highly recommend the excellent Melissa Makarewicz who runs The Literary Assistant. Not only is it stuffed with juicy romance & historical fiction recs, she is also a brilliant media strategist who really understands the emotional heart of storytelling as well as the path to growth creation. You won’t regret working with her!

And, are you looking for more bookshop content? Run don’t walk to Katie Clapham’s Substack Receipts from the Bookshop! Katie writes about her life running an award-winning independent bookshop by the sea: each post lists her customer’s purchases for the day almost in real-time, which allows me to fulfil my great fantasy of getting to stand at the bookshop door and ask everyone what they picked. Plus, she’s very funny.