Black-owned bookshops in the UK are calling for better representation of black authors in the long-term after reporting a surge in interest following the protests over the summer sparked by the killing of George Floyd and by Black History Month.
“We want people to see reading books by black authors as a habit, as opposed to something you pick up in October”, said Carolynn Bain, who set up an online shop stocking books of black origin in July after she became frustrated by the lack of black literature available in the UK.
She expected her venture, Afrori Books, to be a side-hustle at most but interest in black writers skyrocketed as a result of the Black Lives Matter protests, and business is booming.
“We’ve grown massively,” she said. “We have quite a lot of returning customers, so we’re getting something right. My little side-hustle is actually now about 10 hours a day.”
Jacaranda, a publisher and bookseller that specialises in promoting diverse writers, also saw an increase in sales after the BLM protests. “It’s so bittersweet; on the one hand it’s good that people are paying attention and are learning and they want to educate themselves,” said sales manager Jazzmine Breary. “Our only hope is that it continues, it should not take the death and suffering of black people for it to happen. Let it continue. Let it not be the only moment.”
Bernardine Evaristo and Reni Eddo-Lodge became the first black British women to top the UK’s fiction and nonfiction paperback charts in June on the back of soaring book sales, with Eddo-Lodge describing it “a horrible indictment of the publishing industry” that it had taken so long.
The veteran bookseller New Beacon Books in north London, the UK’s first black publisher and specialist bookshop, has also benefited from the surging demand for black literature. It has lived through dozens of mass movements, but the events of this year have sparked something different, according to its director, Michael La Rose.
“The consciousness-raising of the global BLM movement has made every country question what is going on in their societies – people want to know what has happened in the past, to get books, to get information, to get facts,” said La Rose, the son of John La Rose, who founded the business with his partner, Sarah White, in 1966. “That led to more business on our website and people walking into the bookshop.”
Like most retailers, the bookshop has taken a hit this year because of lockdown, and La Rose said a “sustained movement” was needed to ensure the longevity of specialist black bookshops in the future.
Initiatives such as black pound day, in which consumers are encouraged to shop at black-owned businesses once a month, have helped the retailer in the face of online competition from Amazon, he said, but momentum needs to be maintained.
Renewed focus on the lack of diversity in publishing and literature has prompted new initiatives, such as Penguin’s recently announced project to boost diversity in GCSE reading lists, and the newly formed Black Writers’ Guild has been pushing for action from the big publishing houses.
But bookshop owners say there’s a long way to go before the publishing industry and mainstream bookshops fully reflect the diversity of black talent in the UK.
“In the long term, my aim and my hope is that we will stop being a bookshop that stocks black authors and just be a bookshop, because we won’t need to be highlighting this stuff, but we’re a long, long way from that,” said Bain.
“But what we’re doing is actually changing the world, because if you read a book by a black author, it changes the way you see things, it changes the way you see black people. And that can only be positive.”
