Booker Prize fever – a bookseller’s experience
Posted on September 28, 2023
It’s countdown time to the 2023 Booker Prize! While we’re reading our way through the shortlist, we want to extend our heartiest congratulations and warmest wishes to the authors on this year’s list.
This year we’ve been reliving the shortlist experience with Graeme Macrae Burnet, as His Bloody Project is the current Booker Foundation’s Book of the Month, drawing attention to the book once more.
We know what a thrilling time this is for authors and publishers, but one side of the fun that’s easy to overlook is how exciting it can also be for bookshops and booksellers. Angie Harms was working as a fiction bookseller at Waterstones in Glasgow when His Bloody Project was shortlisted. We asked her to tell us a bit about her experiences in the shop that year.
A bit of backstory
I grew up in small town America with my nose perpetually stuck in a book, and I’d been an avid follower of the Booker Prize since I was a teenager: to me the Booker was a bigger deal than the Oscars. Until 2016, my contact with famous writers had consisted of standing wobbly-kneed in a signing queue after seeing Salman Rushdie speak at the University of Iowa in 2002. The idea that I might one day have a front row seat to the pomp and adrenaline surrounding the Booker Prize, simply by working in a bookshop, had never occurred to me.
I’d been a bookseller for less than a year when the His Bloody Project buzz started building.
The beginning
The excitement was palpable as soon as I walked into the shop the morning after the longlist announcement: this was a big deal for Waterstones Glasgow. Not only was a local author on the list, he was published by Saraband, one of our favourite independent Scottish presses.
The first order of business was a scramble to request more copies of the book – many more copies – from our supplier. I managed to snag one from the stack we already had in stock, and the rest sold out that same day.
I read my copy over the weekend. It was astonishing. Dark yet playful, stylistically fascinating, atmospheric and deeply immersive, ingeniously plotted and compulsively readable. It was a character study of the highest order that left all the right questions unanswered.
I loved it, and I wasn’t alone. It was rare for so many members of the team, with our exceptionally varied tastes, to all read the same book at the same time and share so fully in the excitement of its success.
We put in a display as soon as more stock arrived, and it immediately became our go-to customer recommendation. One of my favourite things about working as a bookseller in Glasgow was seeing the constant, bubbling enthusiasm this city has for Scottish literature. Sales ticked through steadily as word began to spread.
Meeting the author…
Graeme soon came into the shop to sign stock. The managers, knowing I was an especially gung-ho fan, assigned me to keep him company. The wobbly knees were back – this was an even bigger deal than a signing queue at a book event – but fortunately we were both sitting down, at a table in the shop’s cafe next to several totes filled with fresh copies of his book.
Graeme turned out to be warm, friendly, wonderfully easy to talk to, and he had kind of a silly haircut that immediately put me at ease. He’d been a bookseller himself back in the day. He told me about his journey so far as a writer, and how much of a shock the nomination had been. He encouraged me to pursue my own dream of writing.
The shortlist
As soon as the shortlist was announced, sales went through the roof. No matter how many copies we ordered, we still struggled to keep the book in stock. We dedicated our entire shop window to His Bloody Project, and when Graeme wasn’t tied up out of town with his increasingly packed events schedule, he’d pop in every few days to sign stack after stack of new copies. He and I became pals.
The rest of the Waterstones team and I did everything we could to promote it, of course, but the word of mouth sales for the book were a total phenomenon, too. Customers walked through the door already eager to talk about it; I’ve never seen so many beelines to a table of books. It was the easiest sell of the year.
The big night
The night of the winner announcement, we had a party at the shop and live-streamed the ceremony on a big screen.
Our party was attended by book industry insiders, other local writers, and Graeme’s friends and family. The shop was in the middle of a major refit, and our event space was only half finished, but with plenty of wine and a cake decorated to look exactly like the book cover, that made little difference. The atmosphere was high-spirited and exhilarating, with a sudden silence descending and everyone’s attention riveted to the screen as the announcement drew near.
Of course it was a disappointment that he didn’t win. His Bloody Project was the most talked-about book on the shortlist that year, and not just in Glasgow. But I felt so lucky to see first-hand what the nomination alone can do for book sales and for a writer’s life and career.
Angie Harms is a freelance copywriter, editor and translator, and a former Waterstones bookseller.
