Felicity Hayes-McCoy on the important role booksellers play in the life and career of an author . . .
I had a lot of advice from the late, great Irish novelist Maeve Binchy. It began when she taught me at school and continued when, many years later, we became colleagues and remained friends till her death, aged seventy-three, in 2012. Back then, she used to joke that, to her, I was still a young one who needed all the wisdom her age and experience could pass on.
Maeve was an author who spread her wisdom liberally, and made friends wherever she went. She was fascinated by people in all their contradictory complexity and could fillet human nature with the shrewdest of eyes in the sharpest of sentences. By the time we reencountered each other in London as adults, she was a towering best-selling author and I was an actress who’d just begun to write scripts. When, in time, I was lucky enough to dramatize her writing, she taught me how, without losing control of what had made it a bestseller, an author can empower a dramatist to rework a book. (It requires grace, sensitivity, iron determination and a kick-ass contract, which few authors could emulate, and was an amazing experience for the dramatist.)
And when I came to write books myself, she gave me an evil, sideways glance, announced that I’d now become her “competition”, and proceeded to teach me about a world that was strange to me after nearly thirty years of broadcast media and theatre. I remember glasses of white wine, smoked salmon sandwiches, scurrilous stories, and what amounted to master classes in marketing; how to handle a signing; or how, like the English royal family, authors on tour should never miss out on a chance to sit down for a minute or have a pee.
Whenever something went right or wrong, she’d scrawl a half-illegible postcard, cheering me on or bucking me up. She never bothered to commiserate, which she saw as a waste of time, and her advice never failed to hit the nail on the head. Now that I’m seventy myself, I can see that throughout her life she drew energy from her love of people, and that she shared her hard-won wisdom because passing it on meant that, like her books, it would still be here for the rest of us when she was gone.
This year, I’ve been invited to be an ambassador for Irish Book Week when, from October 19th-26th, Ireland celebrates books, writing, writers in every genre, and the publishers, booksellers, librarians and others who bring our work to readers. So, when I sat down to write this piece, I recalled something Maeve told me when I first ventured into print. We were eating smoked salmon sandwiches with horseradish cream, and drinking white wine in her house in Dalkey. She’d been talking about social media, which had just begun to take off, and saying she wasn’t sure it was for her. I’d just begun to engage with it myself, and could see her point. Maeve took her inspiration from the communities she lived in, the people she met at bus stops or happened to chat to in shops. She loved bookshop browsing, being an agony aunt to strangers, and picking up responses directly from people who read her books. It’s easy for authors to get sucked into online promotion and think Instagram reels and TikTok, where we talk to and see readers, are the same as meeting people face to face. But they’re not. Equally, there’s a danger that booklovers, eager for more to read, will become so accustomed to tapping a screen and buying a book from their sofas that bookshops and local libraries in real-life communities won’t survive. And that would be tragic.
Bookshops and libraries are hubs in the communities they serve. They’re friendly spaces where people can gain access to information, advice and facilities, as well as books. They host book groups; kids’ storytelling sessions; stitch and bitch evenings; local society meetings; art and photography exhibitions; talks; films; music-making; and adult literacy and other classes. Irish librarians are part of a nationwide network that allows you to borrow any book within the system and return it to your nearest library. Booksellers give brilliant book recommendations, because they read the books they sell and know local customers as neighbours. And every bookseller I’ve ever encountered welcomes authors with open arms. Two years ago, on a book tour for a novel, I visited eighty bookshops across the four provinces, and the energy, entrepreneurism and friendship I encountered was staggering. I know Maeve would have approved of that slog up motorways and down bog roads, because one of the things she told me when I sat at her table in Dalkey was this: Wherever you go in the world, be sure to make friends with booksellers. They’re lovely people and they love books.’ That was true then, it’s just as true now, and perhaps even more important: Amazon, which is soon coming to Ireland, has a wide online reach, can boost authors’ sales and provides a service to many readers, but it’s vital to remember that in Ireland, unlike so many other countries, we retain a wealth of local and independent bookshops, many of which have built brilliant websites, and all of which have influence in real-life communities in ways that purely online retailers will never manage to match.
Incidentally, my latest novel The Bookseller’s Gift, set in Christmas week in a rural Irish bookshop, was directly inspired by those visits I made to bookshops. As an author, I’ve grown to love and use social media all the time, but face-to-face chats often provide more creative stimulus than Facebook, and real-life contacts can prove a lot more valuable than racking up numbers of Insta followers.
(c) Felicity Hayes-McCoy Oct 2024
Read more from Felicity Hayes-McCoy on Writing.ie here.
Author photograph (c) Paul Sherwood
About The Bookseller’s Gift:
Dreams are for living…
Ever since Catherine and her mother Ann opened the doors of their bookshop in a small town on Ireland’s west coast, they have been living their dream. And this festive season promises to be their biggest ever, with a celebrity chef booked for an exclusive book signing. But when some building work leads to disaster, the future of Lissbeg Books is in real jeopardy.
Desperate to hide from her customers how bad things are, Catherine struggles to cope. And as Christmas draws nearer, she realises that dedication to following her dream has meant other parts of her life have been neglected – what will she have left if she loses the bookshop?
Is it too late for her to become a real part of Finfarran’s tightknit community, and possibly find love along the way? As Catherine summons the courage to ask for help from those around her, she begins to hope that maybe more than just one of her dreams will come true before Christmas arrives…
Order your copy online here.
