Physical Bookstores Are Your Secret Weapon (Again)

James Daunt, Barnes and Noble, CEO, Interviewed
by Mary Rasenberger, Authors Guild, CEO

For years, the narrative was clear: physical bookstores were dying, Amazon had won, and authors needed to focus their energy on algorithms, online marketing, and digital discoverability. The future of bookselling, we were told, was ones and zeros. Except something funny happened on the way to that funeral.

Barnes & Noble—that once-flailing behemoth that closed 130 stores between 2010 and 2020—opened approximately 60 new locations in 2024 alone. Waterstones is thriving, and independent bookstores continue to open and expand. Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger wanted to understand what this resurgence means for writers, so she sat down with the person orchestrating this remarkable resurrection: James Daunt, CEO of both B&N and Waterstones.

What Daunt revealed should change how authors think about discoverability. He oversees more than 21,000 booksellers across the English-speaking world, and here’s what makes his approach revolutionary: he’s given those booksellers real power. Local teams choose their own stock. They create their own displays. They champion books they genuinely love. The result? Physical bookstores are creating bestsellers—Katherine Rundell, Mona’s Eyes, breakthrough debut authors—in ways that algorithms and online retailers simply cannot replicate.

“We excel at serendipitous discovery and browsing,” Daunt tells Rasenberger. “Human curation beats algorithmic recommendations.” For authors, this represents a massive opportunity hiding in plain sight. While everyone obsesses over BookTok and Amazon rankings, thousands of passionate, professional booksellers are actively looking for books to hand-sell to their communities. They’re the advocacy engine many authors are overlooking.

In this conversation, Daunt reveals how his empowered bookstores actually work, why the “death of reading” narrative is wrong (kids’ sections are “bursting”), how physical stores create discovery that online retail can’t match, and what authors need to understand about where books really sell in 2025. The reports of physical retail’s death? Greatly exaggerated. And for authors willing to understand how these stores work, that’s very good news indeed.

Mary Rasenberger: Good afternoon, James. To start, can you tell us a little about your background and how you got into the bookselling business?

James Daunt: I opened a bookstore back in 1990—you know, shortly after the dinosaurs left the world. By 2011, it had become six small independent shops, Daunt Books, all in London and Woodston. By strange coincidence, I took over Waterstones in 2019.

MR: What got you interested in the book business to begin with?

JD: I got a job at a bank for a very short time. I left it, not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because it didn’t square with everything else. My main interests then were reading and traveling. And remain reading and traveling.

MR: What did you learn at Daunt Books that helped you rebuild Waterstones?

JD: That if you run a really good bookstore, the fundamentals are universal. If you can run a good independent bookshop, customers and readers and the community will value it, and you also can run a perfectly sensible business. What had gone wrong with chain bookselling was something altogether separate; they had effectively become agents of their own decline.

MR: What were they doing that led to their own decline?

JD: There’s a contradiction between the disciplines of chain retailing and bookselling. Chain retailing is about uniformity and consistency and imposing the operational skills and controls necessary to achieve that. That works in most branches of retail, whether you’re selling clothes or shoes or sneakers. Unfortunately, if you apply that to books, you’ll end up with a pretty dull
bookstore. You’re running identical bookstores that don’t please anybody. There is a consistency to them, but there’s a cold efficiency that doesn’t resonate with the book buyer. Ultimately, you’ll end up deteriorating as a physical experience, and then you’re in trouble.

MR: That makes a lot of sense. You came to Barnes & Noble in 2019, correct?

JD: The fall of 2019, in time to get us through the holidays. Bookselling is highly seasonal, so that was about getting through Christmas. Then in February and March 2020, I busied myself closing stores, because the COVID pandemic hit.

MR: That was a real challenge. Later in the pandemic, we started seeing new stores appear, which was invigorating. How did you build it back up?

JD: I inherited a business in decline. In London, we stopped opening stores in 2008 or 2009. We knew that if we were going to build our bookselling teams, they had to be confident in their careers and jobs. That’s when you get commitment and retention. For that, we needed to start opening up stores again, particularly to replace those we were closing.

The pandemic was difficult, but once we came out of the pandemic, we had done quite a lot of work while the stores were closed. We reorganized them, we went through the inventory, and we had cleaner, nicer-looking stores. Our sales started going up. That gave us the means to start opening up stores.

We’ve got ourselves now in a virtuous cycle, in which the better we make our stores, the better our sales are, and the more we can invest in them. In 2024, we opened close to 60 new stores. We will do so again this year.

MR: How many stores do you have now?

JD: It changes every day, certainly every week. I think we’re at about 640.

MR: You completely turned Barnes & Noble around. Tell us your secret sauce.

JD: The secret sauce is to empower and support the store teams to run better bookstores, each within their own building. That means far less central direction. We repurposed the home office from being primarily intended to support uniformity amongst the stores to primarily supporting the teams to run the best possible bookstore for themselves.

What stores want is money. They want investment in their HVAC and escalators and new carpets and better lighting. Simple things. They want better furniture. They hadn’t had any investment for a long time, so it’s not a trivial thing. They want the IT and infrastructure, which allows them to curate their stores efficiently and effectively. That’s distribution, logistics, and merchandising systems.

After that, they just want to be left alone. And we do predominantly leave them alone, which is: use common sense, put the best books in front of your customers, and don’t sell bad books. Make your store friendly and inviting, make it look nice, and here are ideas about how to do so. To put that in summary, the secret sauce is to get out of the way.

MR: As you mentioned, books are not a commodity the way that shoes and clothing are. They’re highly personal. Does that factor into the way that books are sold?

JD: A physical bookshop is all about curation. It’s about selecting a small proportion of all the books that are published and assembling and displaying them in as attractive, intelligent, and interesting—and hopefully inspiring a way as possible.

From the perspective of the publisher, let alone the author, there are some conflicting things in that. We all think our own children are wonderful. As booksellers, one of our roles, and key skills,
is to choose from amongst and only have the best. That’s our job, running Barnes & Noble: to put the tools in place so the bookseller within each store can do that as effectively as possible.

The key criterion of any good bookstore is the ability to do the personal curation that goes on within each building. The smaller you get, the more intense the curation has to be.

MR: One thing you’ve done is take away the decision of what is going to be in bookstores from the central office and given it to the individual bookstores.

JD: We allocate the initial orders centrally because that’s more efficient. But all of the reordering is done at the local level. We will have considerable consistency around the bestsellers and major books, as we should. When, say, Sally Rooney publishes a book, it’s going to be in every single one of our stores.

But in the old days, we’d say it has to be on the front table in position four, because the publisher has paid X for it to be in that position. If the publisher doesn’t want to cough up the money to keep it in that position, swap it out and put another book there.

We now put in a much smaller number and leave it up to the store to put it wherever it likes, and reorder any quantity that it wishes to do. They have complete autonomy over reordering and
pricing. We seed the books from the initial stage, but leave it to the stores after.

We don’t take any co-op or promotional payments now. Then you have to do whatever you’re paid to do, which requires compliance, and that unwinds the autonomy of the individual stores.

MR: It’s changed the business for publishers. They used to pay to get books on the front tables. Has that had an impact on what’s published?

JD: Publishers can still do it with other retailers. With us, it means the barriers to entry for publishers and authors have changed completely. The merits of an individual book are more likely to determine its success, rather than the promotional payments behind it. That puts a different emphasis on what matters. The quality of the book, the design. Social media becomes important. We, as booksellers, will be highly responsive to that. Individual stores are attuned to their customers and communities and respond immediately, in a way that centrally it’s difficult to do.

The other absolutely crucial thing is that, now, we sell what we order. We don’t have returns, and we don’t have our stores clogged up with books that haven’t sold. If you have all these books, before they’re returned, they’re just sitting there occupying space within stores. Our stores became quite boring, because they were full of books that nobody wanted to buy.

MR: At the Authors Guild, we’re working on the problem of what happens to all those books that get returned. A lot of them end up in the second-hand seller market on Amazon, sold at a massive discount, and steer sales away from royalty-bearing copies. The author doesn’t get paid anything for books remaindered by publishers at heavy discounts or when sold by a secondhand seller. We are grateful that you’re addressing the problem with returns.

JD: It improves the profitability for everybody. We don’t have waste attached to the movement of books, let alone the ecological implications of so many things not finding end users.

I think also the creation of major authors and new voices has become easier. When I joined Waterstones, the bestseller lists were dominated by the same names. Year after year, the same people, again and again. A bestseller list that’s dominated by a very small coterie of authors who’ve been writing books for seemingly forever—and even a few under trademarks, because they’ve long since hung up their quills. That stultified the emergence of new voices. We’re far from perfect, but there’s much more ability for new voices to come through.

MR: Is it fair to say that what’s being sold at Barnes & Noble today is more reader-driven than publisher-driven?

JD: Yes. We are, perhaps, behaving analogously to independent bookstores, which always got behind different authors.

MR: Do you provide training to your bookstore employees?

JD: I will always be talking about teams, because running a good bookstore is an assembly of skills, and many of those skills are distinct and seldom encompassed within any one individual. It’s much more important to build up skill sets. We need somebody who’s very good at operational things. Unpack cartons of books, sort them, arrange them. We need somebody good at visual merchandising, somebody good at kids’ books, somebody good at fiction, somebody good at manga, somebody good at social media, somebody good at running events, somebody good at customer service. You can see there’s quite a lot of roles. We run training on each of those responsibilities and roles.

Because we’re a large business, we organize our stores into what we call clusters, six or seven stores, and within each of those, there will be somebody responsible for the standards around each of these skill sets. That’s much more effective if you can recruit and retain motivated and interested people. Bookselling is vocational. How do you create a structure that can afford to employ people for long-term careers with this vocational mindset?

MR: Barnes & Noble stores tend to be bigger than independent stores, but they’re welcoming. Even though they’re big spaces, they feel cozy. Do you have a format for the stores? How do you make them inviting?

JD: Most independents—and I’d include my own in this—are narrowly focused on a smaller demographic. They are narrower in the social group from which they pull. More elitist. Whereas the
big bookstore can be much more democratic, more open in who it appeals to. Everybody comes in. They’re less intimidating than the independent store.

We’re not as important as public libraries. We’re different to that, but we are important, and probably important amongst parts of the community who would not otherwise go into bookstores. It’s a place to hang out. They’re not all there to buy books.

MR: Do you have any advice to authors? Do you see any general trends? What books are readers buying?

JD: At the moment, a lot of romantasy and speculative fiction, many starting in the self-published space and driving dramatic sales through social media. Generally speaking, if ever you’re reading about the decline of some part of the reading of books, you can pretty much guarantee that it’s going to take off, or is in the process of taking off. At the moment, you read a lot about how nobody’s reading or buying or interested in nonfiction. I think that probably heralds a huge boom in nonfiction.

My own view is that things don’t really change. Good books will sell well. With every passing year, we sell a few more books than we did in the preceding one—with a few bumps, but the overall trend is upwards. Publishers are tremendously good at what they do, and more and more books are sold.

Some of the edges of our world are troubling at the moment. Public libraries are not always as well-funded as they should be. There are obviously a lot of political currents attached to that. The way in which books are adopted by schools and bought by schools is being influenced by that. Book banning at its most extreme seems undesirable. But you know, if one steps away from these trends and difficulties, more books are being bought by more people, and that’s tremendously positive.

MR: You hear so much about people’s attention being diverted to streaming, television, and gaming. But you’re seeing that people are still buying books and reading.

JD: I remember my grandparents despairing, because television had gone from black and white to color. I was accused of having square eyes because I watched television. Social media is driving book sales and ideas. Podcasts are often attached to ideas and intellectual curiosity, and ultimately, those trends end up with people in bookstores looking at books, thinking about books, and buying books. I think the value of reading, the enjoyment of reading, the distraction and comfort of reading, becomes more obvious in this world of so many other alternatives.

MR: There have been interesting studies about young people reading print books more than ebooks. Some people imagined a future where humans would be reading more and more e-books as a percentage of their reading. Do you see that holding steady or changing?

JD: There was huge excitement around e-books when Kindle was launched, and through the first generation of Paperwhite. Since then, we’ve settled into a phase in which e-books have a percentile. I have seen complete consistency for 35 years, in which there is a steady increase, bounced at various times when you get big, bestselling phenomena.

I’ve been told, literally for 35 years, some form of doom and gloom. Nobody’s reading fiction, nobody’s reading, it’s all audio. I have remained relentlessly positive throughout that, because I’ve
been working in a physical book shop in which, every day, loads of people come in and buy more books than they did the year before.

MR: That’s very good news for everybody in the business. Do you see variety in what sells around the country?

JD: There are some regional quirks. But I see much more consistency—albeit I think you should be walking into a store in any place and think, this is the store I would expect to find here. You’re not going to have the same store in a small town in Minnesota to the other West Side of Manhattan.

MR: Do you see author events as beneficial for stores and writers?

JD: Good bookstores should be running author events, and one of the roles of bookstores is to bring readers and authors together. Author events should be curated and invested in, and supported by social media, to have proper attendance and be thought through from an intellectual perspective. We tend to know that this is a box that needs to be ticked and then tick it in a way that is, frankly, lazy. For example, an author with a book sitting at a table for a signing, that’s not an event. The bookstore has to be behind the book; it has to believe in the book. Again, we’re coming back to the difficult process by which booksellers exercise taste. That becomes even more important when holding events.

MR: I’ve heard that you started the practice of displaying books face out, instead of just spines. Do you have advice for authors on what they can do to help sell their books?

JD: Customers do judge books by their cover. It’s not just the cover, it’s the font and paper and design and weight and feel and texture, all of those magical things. There’s a lot of innovation going on. I would strongly suggest that authors engage with their publishers to ensure that those are done to the best effect.

MR: We are involved in six lawsuits fighting book banning. It’s an issue of great concern for many authors. A lot of your stores have banned book sections. Can you talk about why and whether those books are selling?

JD: Booksellers have a vocational role to play. We are supporting engagement with ideas. This is intrinsic to what we do. Public libraries and libraries within schools are vastly more important in the promotion of reading, but we do this work in support of them. We have to collectively exercise our own curation, which does go as far as banning. I would not stock antisemitic nor pornographic works. At the same time, it’s extremely important that books across the political spectrum are made available. A lot of the basis on which books have been banned recently have no validity or sense. We will resist that. Publishers, authors, booksellers, all of us engaged in this world, need to be sensible and resolute in our attitudes toward censorship. Let us not be complacent.

Booksellers rely ultimately on authors, so they’re hugely important. The support of authors is extraordinarily important. The enjoyment of being a bookseller is so much entwined to what happens when authors are in your store. They are the rock stars of our world.