Chapter 9: Holiday Bookselling for the Win

...and my recommendations for books to give

Happy holidays from Ithaca, where we’ve woken up two mornings in a row to a new dusting of snow. I’m sitting by a roaring fire and a sleeping dog—it doesn’t get cozier than this. But if you work in retail this time of year, the name of the season is not cozy but—what?—hectic, full-throttle, heart-in-throat.

The indie bookselling calendar is like a basketball game—it all comes down to what happens just before the buzzer. November may look much like April, but December is the outlier, and sales in that month can help determine if a bookstore is up for the year or not. At Buffalo Street Books, December usually accounts for about 20% of annual taxable sales. Last year, overall sales were down 15% from 2021, and that number was dragged down by the fact that December sales were down 26% (constituting only 18% of annual taxable sales that year).

The forecast is good for this year.

BSB had a strong November, with a 23% increase over 2022. And the industry as a whole is feeling optimistic; as Publishers Weekly reported, “Sales data from Circana BookScan showed that, in a year in which overall unit sales of print books are down 3.3%, sales were up 1.4% for the Thanksgiving week ended November 25 over the comparable week in 2022.”

So you know what to do! Shop at indie bookstores for all your recipients—every teacher, every friend, every family member. And think outside of the box—or the rectangle. Pair a book with another item from the store, like a cookbook and recipe cards. You can never go wrong with Blackwing pencils and a bullet journal. Give gift cards to an indie bookstore or to Bookshop.org. Gift an ownership share in BSB or your closest cooperative. Buffalo Street Books offers monthly subscriptions for literary fiction, picture books, middle grade, and young adult. Sign your recipient up for a Patreon membership to support indie bookselling and get monthly perks that will gladden a reader’s heart. BSB even offers specially curated boxes of books if you fill out a survey about your recipient’s tastes. Give a gift card to Libro.fm for audiobooks galore.

The internet is awash with Best of 2023 booklists, and though no one is asking for my thoughts on , here are a few titles that haven’t gotten mentioned as much as they should (with the exception of this first category). I’m a bit sleepy as I type here by the fire, so no links. You know where to go.

Best Books of 2023 to Give

These are the books published this year that I think live up to their hype and will please a broad array of readers. These are all story-forward literary fiction titles.

The Postcard by Anne Berest

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

Endpapers by Jennifer Savran Kelly

Books to Give to Someone Unafraid of Violence and Menace

The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

Brooklyn Crime Scene by Jonathan Lethem

Books to Give the Fierce Woman in Your Life

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

The English Understand Wool by Helen Dewitt (or anything by Dewitt)

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

Books to Give the Writer in Your Life

Also a Poet by Ada Calhoun

Erasure by Percival Everett (or anything by Everett)

Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney

Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson

Nonfiction Books to Make Something Click in Your Recipient’s Mind

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux

Stay Cool: Why Dark Comedy Matters in the Fight Against Climate Change by Aaron Sachs

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber (or anything by Graeber)

The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World by Lewis Hyde

Books to Draw Someone into Your Love of Books and Bookselling

The Art of Libromancy by Josh Cook

On Browsing by Jason Guriel

How to Protect Bookstores and Why by Danny Caine

Happy reading, happy giving, happy unwrapping!