Many stores have also seen an increase in profits. In a survey of booksellers earlier this year, the association found that about 80 percent of respondents said they saw higher sales in 2021 than in 2020, and nearly 70 percent said their sales were higher last year than in 2019, Ms. Hill said. .
At Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, sales rose 20 percent in 2021 and the store earned more last year than in 2019, according to owner Valerie Koehler. Mitchell Kaplan, the founder of Books & Books, a South Florida independent chain, said sales were up more than 60 percent by 2021 compared to 2020.
Many of the new stores opened during the pandemic are run by non-white booksellers, including The Salt Eaters Bookshop in Inglewood, California, which specializes in books by and about black women, girls, and non-binary people; the Libros Bookmobile, a Latina-owned mobile bookstore in a converted school bus in Taylor, Texas, featuring fiction in Spanish and English, and Reader’s Block, a Black-owned bookstore in Stratford, Conn.
Terri Hamm decided to open Kindred Stories in Houston when her daughter, who is now 14 years old, said she was bored with the books her mother took her home to read. She is an avid reader and is drawn to books about black girlhood.
“It dawned on me that in Houston she didn’t have the space to discover and explore all the amazing works on the market that were written by black voices,” said Ms. Hamm. “There was no space that was put together with her in mind.”
The rapid growth of brick-and-mortar bookstores is especially surprising at a time when brick-and-mortar stores face crushing competition from Amazon and other online retailers. Many bookstore owners are also facing new uncertainty from the bleak outlook for the general economy – labor shortages, supply chain snafus, rising rents and interest rates, higher cost of goods and a looming recession that could weigh on consumer spending.
