hinter jedem Buch steht eine Geschichte
An interview with Kieron Smith - Digital Director, Blackwell's & Wordery, and Head of Online Operations, Waterstones, Foyles & Hatchards.
I’ve worked in the book trade for thirty years. This has been across a range of businesses from WHSmith retail as a book trainee, through to being Managing Director of The Book Depository (before and after the acquisition by Amazon). I joined Blackwell’s Booksellers in 2015 as Digital Director. I now do that role in addition to heading up online operations for Waterstones, after the business was bought in 2022. I’m very passionate about good bookselling – I believe we act as important intermediaries for art, entertainment and knowledge.
Blackwell’s in Oxford opened its doors to the public on 1 January 1879 and soon became something of an Oxford institution. The chain and subsequent publishing business grew massively – the latter being sold to Wiley in 2007. The bookshop chain grew to a height of around 70 shops in the early 2000s but by 2022 when the company was sold by the Blackwell family to Waterstones Booksellers it had thirteen stores.
Blackwells.co.uk opened online in 2015 and was one of the first booksellers to trade online (the position of first being much contested!). The company also supports many ‘account’ businesses via the website – such as government departments and businesses.
The online proposition is crucial to what Blackwell is able to offer, it includes the ability to offer a huge range of titles – backed up by an extensive data set of live feeds from suppliers around the world. It also is a way for us to showcase the shops and our bookseller’s own title selections – it’s as much, if not more, about the human touch as the technology. It is also a crucial channel to market for us – we sell both in the UK and to around 100 countries worldwide, export sales being an important part of what we offer. This is supported by thirteen currencies and fast global shipping from our own distribution centre in Gloucester.
We’re very proud in Blackwell’s to have been part of the very start of the online sample service. We saw an opportunity to showcase titles to customers more professionally – and this was the perfect opportunity to do so. We launched in March 2021 with in-store codes and a display for debut novelists in the window of the Oxford Broad Street shop – great for readers to dip their toe into a new novel.
In June 2021 we integrated the samples into Blackwells.co.uk and have used them in our online customer emails to support sales there too. We have found customers love the chance to read from the titles they’re looking to buy – both for fiction, but also non-fiction with our academic audience finding contents pages and references particularly helpful prior to purchase.
Good bookselling sites should offer as rich an experience as possible, you would likely look at a book’s back cover and perhaps read the first page or so of a title you were interested in a bookshop – this isn’t any different. It helps increase sales as people are more confident that the book they’re buying meets their needs, but also reduces returns for the same reasons.
I’ve found that over the last 15 years or so that people are happier browsing online for books – it’s not as purely search based as it was in the early days of the web. This is an opportunity to better present titles to be browsed – and samples are a crucial part of this.
Technical integration was straightforward and was flexible in order to meet our own product details page design. We want to develop this further to emphasise the previews more – but we haven’t had the opportunity as yet. We have certainly found that they have made a real difference to selling certain titles.
We started using book previews in our weekly newsletter in 2021 and have since expanded its use also to our Book of the Month newsletter and all other Blackwell’s newsletters. Customers enjoy reading books we’re highlighting, and we definitely get increased engagement as a result.
It’s also been useful for our own online booksellers too for their own sampling to construct our selections for a particular theme or topic. Plus, it’s been great when it comes to featuring particular publishers so we can showcase their titles together – all with samples.
I think the most exciting thing for me is seeing how other booksellers can use this for their own customers – whether for an event, in windows, on their own websites, but also in new ways I haven’t thought of, or particular to their own customer profiles.
There is lots of untapped potential here and I look forward to new innovation!