Independent Bookshop Week 2025: a Q&A with the Portobello Bookshop

It’s Independent Bookshop Week, and this year we’ve partnered with the Portobello Bookshop in Edinburgh. Independent Bookshop Week is a great opportunity to spotlight the stories of indie bookshops, and so to celebrate we’ve joined with the Portobello team to ask them some questions about the shop, the bookselling trends they’ve noticed this year, their comfort reads, and more. You can visit their brilliant website here.

Could you tell us the story of how The Portobello Bookshop came to be?  

JACK: We’re an indie bookshop based in Edinburgh’s seaside community of Portobello, open since July 2019. The premises previously housed a fishing tackle shop for thirty years and, prior to that, a cooperative. Jack (the shop’s owner) decided to open the shop after having dreamed of opening a bookshop for a long time. Having studied in Edinburgh he moved back after stints in London and Berlin, and opened the shop after working at the Shelter Bookshop in Stockbridge for a year. After looking across Scotland for a good location, but with a hope of finding somewhere in Edinburgh, where he’d spent most of his adult life, Jack kept returning to Portobello as a place that seemed like the ideal spot for a bookshop. It’s a wonderful community with a lot of dedicated readers and people who make a real effort to support local businesses.  

When renovations took place early that year, the aim was to create a warm and modern space that is welcoming, accessible, and a pleasure in which to spend time browsing. We also wanted the layout of the shop to be flexible to enable us to host events. It was during the renovations that we had the joy to discover some of the shop’s beautiful (yet previously hidden) features, such as the columns by our counter and the cornicing around the shop. 

We are a general bookshop; we mostly stock recently published titles in a range of fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children. We want to offer customers what we feel is a unique and diverse selection of books across most genres and put a lot of love and time into curating our stock, arranging book displays and recommending our favourite books. 

Our team has grown since we first opened our doors, from five booksellers to now a team of twelve, plus some event staff working on our larger events. In the past two years, we have expanded our reach, developing our events programme and building a new, more intuitive website that presents millions of titles available to order. We host a mix of intimate and large-scale events and love this variety; we want to support local talent as well as host international authors. 

It’s easy to forget as we walk into a bookshop that there’s a lot of thought and work that goes into filling all those bookshelves. Please tell us more about the process of stocking books. How do you choose what to stock?  

ALICE: With around 200,000 books being published in the UK each year, and space for only 15,000 on our shelves, we certainly can’t stock everything! But one of the joys of independent bookshops is their curated identity and the fact that every one is unique, reflecting the reading tastes of their team and community. When it comes to stocking books, we really value our relationship with publishers’ sales representatives. They meet with us every month to present their upcoming releases. Without them, it would be quite daunting to navigate the publishing landscape and more difficult to find the real gems amongst what is being published. To decide what books to stock, we use information such as an author’s sales history, our knowledge of the type of titles that do well in the bookshop, and the rep’s knowledge of what titles are expected to be popular and may work well for us. We keep abreast of the publishing landscape through the specialised press and read broadsheet reviews, as well as try to keep on top of social media trends. Our decisions are also driven by our individual tastes as booksellers and finally, by our instinct too! We like to support independent publishers and the brilliant books they publish, and make sure to dedicate plenty of display space to their titles. As an indie bookshop, we think it’s important to support fellow indie presses, and many of our customers also really appreciate this! 

What trends are you experiencing in your customer’s reading habits?

MOLLY: Our customers buy a broad range of titles with a clear emphasis on fiction, but it is always interesting to see what they gravitate towards. We have definitely seen an increase in sales of genres like romance, fantasy, and horror, and as a result have increased shelf space for those kinds of titles. At the same time, literary and translated fiction sells consistently for us and books like Butter by Asako Yuzuki (translated by Polly Barton) fly from the shelves, undeniably influenced by online buzz. 

When it comes to non-fiction, we sell a lot of nature, travel, and memoirs in general, and have found that we’ve sold more environmentally and politically-driven books in recent years. In times of upheaval, many people turn to books to try to make sense of the world so we try to respond to what our customers are interested in and what they’re ordering too, and of course feature books we love ourselves.  

Just like us, our customers are keen to support local authors as well with Scottish, Edinburgh and Portobello-based titles making up a significant portion of the books we sell in the bookshop as well as through events and signings, with authors like Val McDermid, Michael Pedersen and many more. 

Of course, our booksellers are avid readers with an eye for something different and it’s always interesting to see where the preferences of customers often overlap with our team in this way  – I’m thinking of books like When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Catalonian author Irene Solà (translated by Mara Faye), a bookseller favourite which continues to sell regularly from our tables since its publication in 2022. 

What makes a book event successful?  

EUAN: I think that there are a range of factors that can make a book event successful. While we’re a bookshop and a business and book sales are important, I feel that the warmth felt in a room where an engaging conversation is taking place with rapport between author and chairperson can be worth everything. One of my favourite things, and something that I think is a sign of “success”, is when there’s a signing queue of enthusiastic attendees waiting on their moment to get their book signed and speak with an author. Writing first names on post-its while having a chat with the signing queue is usually one of my favourite moments of an event and there’s an atmosphere of excitement while surrounded by people about to have a conversation with someone whose writing they admire. 

What is your all-time favourite, or your comfort read? Is this the book that gets hand-sold at every opportunity?  

MOLLY: What a lovely question to answer! I’m going to cheat a little and say that one of the team’s go-to handselling recommendations is any book by Scottish author Ali Smith. Most of us on the team are big fans of her writing and have read at least a couple of her books, from any of the Seasonal Quartet to her form-bending novel Artful. Personally, her books are what I turn to when I need a familiar voice with a different way of thinking. Smith’s writing pushes boundaries in its themes and form through her playful use of language and her unflinching approach to the prescient social issues of our day. In a move that still leaves us speechless to this day, Ali dedicated her most recent book Gliff in part to the bookshop – which also helps significantly with the handselling! 

Which Daunt Books Publishing titles are your bestsellers, both fiction and non-fiction?  

ALICE: Our Daunt Books fiction bestseller is Brandon Taylor’s Booker Prize-shortlisted Real Life (published 2020). Several of the team have read and love it, and Brandon Taylor is a writer whose writing journey we closely follow, every new release being a cause for celebration. Closely following Real Life, another Daunt Books fiction bestseller for us is The Coming Bad Days by Canadian author Sarah Bernstein. It’s a very beautiful and mysterious novel which we love recommended in-store, and Sarah is based in Scotland so also has support locally! Both bestsellers are debut novels, which is interesting to note. 

In non-fiction, our all-time bestseller is In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing. We were delighted to host an online event with several of the book’s contributors. The book came out in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time when it seemed people had a renewed appreciation for their immediate surroundings and the natural world that thrives on their doorstep. Generally, Daunt Books anthologies are very popular amongst our customers – they’re just so beautiful and well curated! 

Do you have any fun anecdote from the bookshop? Could be perhaps something unusual that happened during an event, a surprise visitor, a brilliant conversation you had with a customer, or maybe something you overheard.  

MOLLY: Would you believe that we found this the most difficult question to answer? While that might sound like we’re very boring and don’t have fun (you can decide!), I think it’s more that the day-to-day events of the bookshop are fun in their own very specific way. One of the main suggestions we got from the team when we asked about fun anecdotes in the bookshop was when a pigeon got in and wandered amongst the bookshelves, but we’ve found it tough to convey just how fun that was in this paragraph so here’s a photo: 

On any given day, dogs pull their owners into the bookshop off the street to get a biscuit and a pat, regular customers and authors pop in and chat for a while about books they love, and fire alarms go off (only once!) during events. Every day has its own mundane quirks and no day is ever the same, which is the joy of bookselling. 

The other answer to this question is that last year we had a party in the bookshop for the shop’s anniversary with a disco ball and a dancefloor, which was undeniably pretty fun. 

Could you share with your bestsellers in fiction, non-fiction and children’s this past year? 

ALICE: Taking only into account shop floor sales, our overall bestseller in fiction of the last twelve months is Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which won the 2024 Booker Prize. We love this novel and have been recommending it since it first came out, and were delighted to see it win the Booker Prize and reach a wide audience. In non-fiction, our bestselling title is comedian Fern Brady’s memoir Strong Female Character. The paperback edition of this brilliant, sharp and funny memoir about Brady’s life and experience living with autism has been flying off the shelves for over a year. In children’s books, Edinburgh-based author Nadine Aisha Jassat’s The Hidden Story of Estie Noor took the top spot last year, alongside Elle McNicoll’s Keedie. When it comes to picture books, Julia Donaldson is, of course, a perennial favourite! 

We’re already half way through the year but if you had a crystal ball, which book you think will be the book of the year?

ALICE: On the Calculation of Volume (Volume I) by Solvej Balle (translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland)! The first of seven volumes about a woman’s fall through the cracks of time, waking up every day to the 18th of November, is our preemptive pick for book of the year. Already read and loved by several members of our team, it has been a book we haven’t stopped talking about and a firm bookseller recommendation since its April publication. On the Calculation of Volume is an ambitious project with a memorable hook, but it’s especially a beautifully written, incredible series of novels which seems to quietly reach more and more readers through word of mouth. Volume I of On the Calculation of Volume is currently on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize, which we couldn’t be happier about and has also helped make it reach a wider audience of readers of literary fiction. We think it will be the book of the year!