Sunday 11 March 2018

Spotted at an Airport near you...


Where were you when you last bought a physical book? A high street bookstore? A small, specialist independent?
Chances are it may have been at the airport!
While many of us have moved to reading on digital platforms, we all love to browse while waiting for a plane. And we can't resist picking up a new book that we might have heard of but not yet got around to buying online.

In reaction to this, it turns out that sales of print books at transport hubs have bounded ahead of sales at high street stores. Indeed, airports are now prime commercial property, selling everything from jewellery to umbrellas to shoes to... books. It's a captive market: all those passengers waiting for their flights, ripe for a little light shopping. In 2014, global travel retail was apparently worth about $60 billion. By 2020, it's estimated to reach $85 billion.

UK bookseller WHSmith has seen its book sales increase substantially at its airport, train and motorway service station outlets. I was a beneficiary of this shift when the group decided to offer my latest novel, The Girl from Simon's Bay, on a special promotion over the Christmas holidays.

I always go back to the heroine of my first novel, The Housemaid's Daughter, when I think about how reading lets us travel to another place in our minds...
TomorrowIsailforAfrica.
Then, after many times of struggling, I began to separate the words in Madam's diary.
Tomorrow I sail for Africa...


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