Waterstones to open 10 new stores a year amid BookTok craze

Waterstones has revealed that it is opening 10 new stores a year as it looks to capitalise on social media trends such as BookTok leading to more young people reading.

The retailer which owns the Waterstones, Foyles, Hatchards and Blackwell’s brands told The Guardian that its sales were up 5% this year.

The company’s CEO James Daunt has put this down to a rise in younger shoppers driven by social media trends and a rise in in-person book clubs.

There has also been an increase in interest in romance, ‘romantasy’ and fantasy with UK fiction sales up 12.2% last year, according to the Publishers Association.

That growth offset a 2.8% fall in children’s books and a decline in non-fiction, leaving the overall print book market down 1%. Digital sales, however, rose 17%.

Daunt believes that the younger generations are embracing reading as it is a less expensive hobby compared with other leisure activities and can easily become a habit.

Waterstones has also been investing in making its stores more attractive places to visit by adding cafés and staff-curated recommendations.

It is also trialling new formats, from concessions inside department stores to locations in parts of the UK where it is less well known, such as Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Daunt said: “People have come back to reading and buying books in bookshops as we have made a place which is an enjoyable and effective way to buy books,” Daunt told the Guardian. BookTok is an easy label to put on it, but this is about people wanting to read and talk about books.

“They [young people] want to do something not staring at a screen and relatively inexpensive, and once people start collecting books they just buy more.”