'Don't give up on your dreams, even if you've ignored them for a while...'

Katie Clapham talks about running her own bookshop, writing her first book for adults, and the threats and opportunities that AI might bring to publishing...

Hi everyone,

I am delighted to welcome Katie Clapham to the Honest Editor today! Some of you may know Katie from her always-excellent Substack, Receipt from the Bookshop, and she is a wearer of many publishing hats. Today she talks about owning her bookshop, writing her first adult book after years of writing for children, and what she thinks the threats and opportunities facing the publishing industry are. Katie is so generous with her time and insights, and I hope you all enjoy.

Katie Clapham owns the independent bookshop, Storytellers, Inc., with her mother in the UK seaside town of Lytham St. Annes. She has been named a Bookseller Rising Star and Young Bookseller of the Year at the Bookseller Awards, and her bookshop has previously been named the Bookshop of the Year for the North, and the Vintage Independent Bookshop of the Year. Katie is also the author of several books for children, including the Three Girls, The Missing Bookshop, and The Tour at School. Most Fridays, Katie writes a live dispatch from her bookshop on Substack and a book of those diaries, Receipts from the Bookshop, publishes next month with Phoenix Books.

Hi Katie, welcome to the Honest Editor.

Thanks for having me Phoebe, I am such a fan of your Substack – I think it’s such a useful and generous thing to help make sense of the publishing world, which can be so opaque and confusing for people trying to understand it from outside. When people in my shop ask me about publishing now, it’s so great to be able to direct them here.

You are a wearer of multiple hats in the publishing world, all of them fascinating! Firstly, I’d love to ask you about your award-winning independent bookshop. Tell us more about it.

We opened our bookshop in December 2010 as a children’s bookshop. It was SO much fun, but we were trying to do so many events and in-shop activities that our messaging ended up being quite confusing, and lots of our good-faith endeavours did not translate into sales. That said, we had a lot more energy and time to dedicate to the shop, so it was all completely thrilling and I don’t regret anything we did. We won quite a few awards during that period and it felt like we’re really arrived in the industry.

In 2015 we had a bit of a reinvention, moving all the children’s stock into one room, losing the activity space and making the main shop floor a space for adult stock. Our book club for adults was much more popular and reliable than our children’s clubs, and when our personal lives became more complicated (puppy, baby, elderly parents, illness, etc.) that’s what we chose to prioritise. Now we run very few events, but we’re selling a lot more books the old-fashioned way, i.e. just having them in the shop and letting people discover them, plus the lowest-tech way a person can sell books online; through an affiliate on Bookshop.org. We try not to expend a lot of effort on things we don’t need, and our own website is something we decided we could live without. Honestly, some days the bookshop isn’t our main priority so we’re just grateful and delighted to sell enough books to stay open.

You also write books for children, but your first book for adults is coming out soon. How have you found it switching from one to the other?

It was always my intention to do both at some point, but I didn’t expect that the bookshop diaries I was writing on Substack would become a book. That was my eagle-eyed agent’s suggestion. I was working on new material for children and she asked if I wanted to turn Receipts from the Bookshop into a submission for a non-fiction book proposal. This was still very early on into Receipts, but I was happy to try it. We sold it in a three-way auction when the Substack had less than 3K subscribers, so it wasn’t that I had a huge audience to offer at that point. I am still working on my books for children - picture books are my favourite thing to write – but Substack is the first place I’d ever really written with adult readers in mind. It is fun being able to make references and jumps that I couldn’t make in my writing for children, but I would hope I bring the same overall voice and energy in my writing to both audiences.

What is your writing process like, and how do you find the time whilst running the bookshop?

Even though I’d still struggle to say it aloud if someone asked me, being a writer is now my main job. The bookshop is much easier to point to as an occupation, but I generally only spend one day a week there, plus running the book clubs. I am mainly working from home, both because I have school runs and dog walks to accommodate, but because as well as processing a few orders, selecting books for club and prepping for the odd author event, I’m writing. My mum (and business partner, Business Mum) does absolutely everything else regarding running the business, and she’s in the shop four days a week, but we’re in almost constant contact and the shop is only five minutes’ walk from my house, so it’s still all very close.

I’m lucky to have those days at home, but the actual working hours can feel quite elusive during the surprisingly brief school day, but I won’t complain too much about that – I know how lucky I am to have the time that I have. My main obstacle at the moment is spending too much time on my Substack (which does earn me a decent income now, but that of course requires more work as a result) and not leaving myself much time to write books, which is still my heart’s main priority.

Do you think one influences the other – do you look at your bookshop customers and think about the trends in terms of what they are picking up and reading?

No. I might feel the odd wave of creative frustration when something seems to be popular without merit, but I am thinking more of picture books here than books for adults - it’s very difficult to write a picture book text, and it’s even more difficult to get one published, so when something that’s a bit lacklustre gets through it feels disheartening.

When it comes to adult fiction, which is something I do want to try more seriously soon, I certainly wouldn’t be writing to a trend – it’s hard enough trying to write something good, I don’t need the added complication of trying to write something that sounds like someone else, or is concerned with something that isn’t naturally inspiring to me, to add to the mix.

If the Substack-Receipts-Book journey has shown me anything, it’s that I am most successful when I write wholeheartedly as myself. My own voice has proved to be good enough, and I know in the past there were times I was trying to disguise it.

Also, to me personally, as a reader, trends are not how I read - I’ve never read one book and then thought I’d like to read something very similar to that! I am always searching for something to take me in a completely new direction from one book to the next, and I suppose that might also be how I approach writing projects.

What challenges do you think the book industry faces at the moment?

AI is the scary monster under the bed coming to steal all our jobs in the night, but it’s the long-term repercussions of an AI-generated literary landscape that I fear will be the most devastating. If plagues of badly written and heinously illustrated books swamp retailers, people-based publishing will have to become prestige in response. If human publishing becomes the exception, rather than the rule, then we’re really in trouble, but it seems inevitable considering how quickly and cheaply AI-generated work can be produced in comparison to traditional publishing.

I don’t worry about AI slop finding its way into my stock because I hand select everything, but I am concerned about the overall quality of what’s available more widely, and to whom, as LLMs and AI-generated illustration becomes more prevalent.

With libraries closing in towns and schools’ books budgets being slashed, access to good quality books is becoming a luxury, and that’s a dystopian nightmare.

Currently, too many good books are being published to market effectively anyway; the last thing we need is more competition from soulless entities disguised as books with more appealing price tags.

And what opportunities do you see on the horizon?

If you can be the honest editor, I should be the honest bookseller and admit that I can see a world where bookshops like mine might actually benefit from the assault of AI on the book industry. Books that can claim to be AI-free will be what people come to independent bookshops for, and only real authors can be available for events. We already sell our books at the RRP, so we’re the retailers who have always been used to paying more for our stock. It’s never about piling anything high or offering bargain prices, so the option of cheap AI stock won’t be as tempting to us as to the huge retailers who will saves thousands or millions by embracing it.

In fact, we’re seeing a rise in sales of higher spec production – books that have the glam sprayed edges or ribbon bookmarks; exclusive jackets or limited editions are sometimes where we can offer something that online retailers can’t.

If people-publishing leans into this further, indie bookshops could prosper, but it’s a bleak trade if it’s at the cost of accessibility to good quality writing for all. As a writer, I see the opportunity to remain entirely unassisted by AI. I can’t believe that’s even something I’d have to acknowledge, but here we are.

You are also an ambassador for Independent Bookshop Week (IBW) – can you explain a little more about what this entails?

IBW is a week-long celebration of independent bookshops in the UK, and this year it runs from 13^th-20^th June. This means independent bookshops across the country will be doing their best to raise awareness of how completely wonderful it is to have bookshops on the high street. Some will have special offers, or author events on to celebrate, some might have cake and giveaways, plenty of them will have bunting. Some will be quietly celebrating by performing the radical act of still being open in this day and age. Hopefully there’ll also be lots of bookshops appearing in the media – in newspapers, radio or television interviews - it’s about all coming together to joyfully celebrate bookshops, and remind everyone who hasn’t been to one in a while that we’re still here! As an ambassador I’ve got several events in other bookshops, in fact my week is so busy I’ll barely be in my own bookshop at all, but it’s my job that week to highlight the profile of independent bookshops generally, rather than just promote my own. It’s a beautifully-timed honour as my book, Receipts from the Bookshop, comes out the week before, and although my book is about things that happen in my shop, it’s really about getting readers to think about the bookshops that are local to them, and how valuable even the smallest support can be.

You strike me as someone who follows their dreams – would you say that is true? And if so, what advice would you give to others who perhaps want to do that but haven’t been able to yet?

It was not a life-long dream of mine to have a bookshop. The writing thing was inevitable, and perhaps because I started in poetry, I always assumed it couldn’t be my main source of income. I had an editorial job at a medical research journal while I was doing my poetry MA, and when I finished my studies, I knew it was time to make a move. It felt like a choice between staying in London and choosing a career that I could fall in love with, possibly at the cost of my own creative writing, or leaping off the career ladder and taking a risk on writing. I chose the latter while it was still available to me (i.e. I had no dependents and my parents said I could live with them again if I needed to). I left my job, my flat, and London and (via a few writing months on the Isle of Skye by myself in the depths of winter) I went back home to St. Annes. I was working as a receptionist when mum and I started talking about opening a shop together (she wanted kitchenware, but I was only interested in staying if it would be books) and a few months later, we were doing it.

Writing is the dream that I am still following and the bookshop is the thing that allows me to do that. Even that distracted me for a while – for the first six years of being a bookseller, I barely wrote anything! So, I guess my advice is don’t give up on your dreams, even if you’ve ignored them for a while. You can be working towards your dreams with sideways steps.

It was actually a dream of mine to be published by Francesca Main, and next month that’s coming true, but it’s with a book that I never envisioned writing at all. A book that wouldn’t even exist if I had never started a Substack. Dreams don’t expire, you just have to be open to all of the routes that can lead you there (except AI, don’t take the AI route).

Thank you so much, Katie, for such an inspiring read, and congratulations on your upcoming book! You can preorder it here.

Thanks for reading, everyone, and if you’re writing today, good luck with it! You can do it! If you found this interview helpful, please consider subscribing below and sharing it with your networks.

Phoebe x