Surrey Group: Booksellers and Bookselling in the 21st Century and Beyond

Join the Surrey Group on Tuesday 8 September from 12pm for their next meeting to hear from Max Gwynne, Area Commercial Expert at Waterstones, on the importance of booksellers and bookselling in the 21st century and beyond.

The talk will cover:

• The current state of global reading and trends, the situation of libraries and wider cultural funding cuts, the rise of online alternatives to bookshops/libraries and the dangers. Bookshops/Booksellers roles in combating these issues.
• How effective bookshops work. The critical role of great, proactive service and a sharing of passions; seeking to further ingrain the love of books into our public culture and future generations.
• Intelligent recommendations and tailoring our suggestions wisely. Waterstones’ efforts to lead the way in carving out new bestselling titles and authors (BOTM, Debut Prize, BOTY etc).
• Current drive to improve bookseller wider knowledge, especially in Non-Fiction – my role as a Commercial Expert in driving that.
• Relationship between booksellers and authors, authors and publishers
• Rise in book sales in general, bookseller’s passions only growing, rise of social media trends and ‘BookTok’ and bookselling in the future

We will meet at The Seahorse, 52-54 The Street, Shalford, Guildford, GU4 8BU. All writerly and bookish guests welcome.

To attend the meeting, click the Going button below and fill out the RSVP form. If you do not receive a confirmation email, or have trouble signing up, please contact localgroups@societyofauthors.org.

Please email member-volunteer Howard Matthews with any questions.