One week after Sant Jordi: "We return as many books as we sold"

BarcelonaI imagined that bookstores after Sant Jordi would be an oasis of peace and literature, and I find them to be a whirlwind of boxes and delivery notes. "For us, Sant Jordi ends in June," Xevi Cortacans, owner of La Muntanya de Llibres in Vic, tells me, a name that has a literal meaning these days. Sendak bookstore also has a pile of boxes ready to return to distributors, with the invented books from the festival. "We return as many books as we sold for Sant Jordi," says Èric del Arco, partner of Documenta and president of the Booksellers' Guild. He opens the spreadsheets. "We sold 3,251 books during the week and returned 3,200. We had to buy 6,400 books to sell half of them." Of course, they didn't just dispatch new releases, but mainly sold books from their backlist, which he estimates to be 13,000 copies. Of the three thousand books sold, two thousand were different titles. Only of 22 titles did they sell more than ten copies, so 95% are titles that do not appear in the rankings.

Figures that at Sendak they confirm: "At the stall, we had 25,000 euros worth of books, and we made 10,000." They also don't identify with the bestseller lists. "And I'm not worried. If you only offer what people ask for, you'll be Casa del Libro, and we have a different approach, we have to go against the grain. We are a combative bookstore, and the Sant Jordi stall is consistent with who we are," explains Aitor Martos.

That's why booksellers agree that they never feel they make a mistake for Sant Jordi, even though at Documenta they ran out of Roger Bastida's "Passeig de Gràcia" and in Vic they were short of Gil Pratsobrerroca's "El joc del silenci" from Osona. "If you run out of a book, you buy another one," says Del Arco. "And there are usually no very unexpected surprises. Publishers and distributors already ensure that their big bets reach you. You order 100 and 150 arrive," according to Cortacans. 80% of La Muntanya de Llibres' sales were also from backlist. Therefore, in parallel with returns, stores have to refill their shelves, and they have to do it before the end of April, when they can still get the discount from the Sant Jordi campaign.

The wheel that never stops

Above, news continues to arrive for the summer campaign and also Spanish launches thinking about the Madrid Book Fair at the end of May. "The publishing world is a wheel: books constantly come in and go out. Today's book is paid for by yesterday's sales. That's why so much is published and no one is willing to slow down, because you have to occupy the new releases table. When they send me resumes, I tell aspiring booksellers: I hope you like opening and closing boxes!", says Cortacans, ironically. One new release pushes the next: at Documenta, if a book doesn't move from the table for a month, it's out. "You can't have thousands of euros tied up on the walls. In three months we would have closed," states Cortacans. That's why orders are surgical.

In addition to restocks and returns, at Llibreria Sendak they take advantage of Sant Jordi to "clean out the shelves" and return backlist titles that haven't moved for a year or more, explains Martos. "Everyone thinks we make a fortune on Sant Jordi day and it's perverse, because it's a very seasonal sector and I know that in the following months I'll sell much less, until August, when I'll be in the red and will have to rely on credit lines. That's why returns are so important, to reduce invoices and avoid cash flow tensions," says the bookseller. On Sant Jordi days, Sendak went from 4 employees to 14, who ended up exhausted, as they posted in a photo on Instagram. A week later they have recovered from their "catatonic state", the bookstore once again seems like a beautiful and tidy paradise of colors, and I confirm that clients who continue to read enter bookstores.