The Women’s Bookshop: small but very influential

The Women’s Bookshop in Ponsonby Road, Auckland, is only your average size rectangular suburban retail store, but The Read can’t think of another Kiwi bookshop with a bigger community outreach.

Just this year, owner Carole Beu has put on a Summer Series of International Women Writers events – Andrea Levy, Marina Lewycka, Xinran, Elizabeth Kostova, Sarah Dunant and Sarah Walters – over February and March at Epsom Girls Grammar’s Raye Freedman Arts Centre.

Book club meetings and author events are regular instore promotions – just this week The Women’s Bookshop hosted Juliet Batten’s Dancing with the Seasons book launch on Tuesday, and it is a rare week there’s not a book club meeting scheduled. Beu herself caters for most of these events – her guacamole is legendary.

Beu reviews books each week on Easymix FM station in Auckland and once a month on Nine to Noon.

The Women’s Bookshop is setting up book selling tables with specialist titles for two conferences this week: a SAFE Network Working with Sexual Abuse symposium at the Crowne Plaza for Thursday and Friday (set up at 7am) and the Professional Supervision conference at an airport hotel on Friday and Saturday.

Beu welcomes the revenue that the book stalls at conferences bring: “They are a boost to cash flow and definitely worthwhile.” But like everything else Beu tackles, they are a lot of work – stock has to be ordered in specially for each event, priced, taken to the venue, set up and displayed. Then what’s not sold is packed and returned to the store. Later there are the SOR stock returns to be done.

(L-R: Tricia Reade, Carole Beu, Tanya Gribben, Virginia Dale, Michalia Arathimos and Spiro the cat.)

And when things are frenetic, Beu’s hard working team of Tricia Reade, Tanya Gribben, Virginia Dale and Michalia Arathimos come to the rescue. “Especially Tanya Gribben, who is great at design, all the ‘techo’ stuff, special orders, as well as customer service. She is a warm, calm foil to all my rushing around!” says Beu.
But if you think the current week is busy, there’s another major yearly event just ahead: the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, May 12-16, where the bookshop for the five day event is a joint venture of the Women’s Bookshop with Unity Books Auckland.

So it is just as well Beu took a short holiday break in the Marlborough Sounds last week. “It was idyllic. We walked half of the Queen Charlotte track, kayaked on water that looked like a mirror and pulled up our own mussels for the night’s meal.”

Beu and Unity’s Carolyn Alexander have done all the major preparation for AWRF: books have been ordered and are priced as they arrived, jam packed in the tiny office at the rear of the store and are now occupying half the Beu living room… with more to come. They’ve addressed the panic of which visiting author’s titles they may have undercooked and are about to roster the sales team.

But that is not all – Beu and team celebrated the store’s 21st birthday this year, with a party, naturally. But why not also a Top Women Writers of the last year 50 years survey - named Fifty/Fifty Women - to be announced at the event? Beu got the co-operation of New Zealand Listener to request entries, and a dedicated computer at the store was used for the 6,000 plus poll results as they flooded in. So that was the high point of the celebrations of Friday, April 9.

The poll (pictured left), topped by Margaret Atwood,  included three New Zealand women writers in the top ten. The list was the subject of a double page feature in the Listener, which quoted Beu.

After AWRF, the promotional calendar slows down a bit, but the Ladies Litera-Tea is scheduled for October as usual. And did we mention there is also a full colour 4 page quarterly of new stock and reviews sent out to customers?

Beu is philosophical about the rewards of even a successful book store. “The whole thing is difficult financially. I work incredibly long hours and incredibly hard for very little money.

“If I was still teaching I’d have a better income, fewer hours and fewer responsibilities.

“But I love what I do. For me the events are like theatre, an outlet for my drama teacher and actor background.

“I’ll always be poor, but I live a very rich life,” Beu sums up.

It was at one of her events that Carole Beu reckons the most memorable part of her bookselling career occurred. “I’d asked Kim Hill to interview Margaret Atwood for one of our lecture series, but she was uncertain. Then after her exceptional evening with Fay Weldon at a Women’s Bookshop event, I went on stage to thank them and quietly asked Kim if she would do the Atwood interview. On a high, she said yes and I was immediately able to announce to the audience the next event, Atwood with Kim Hill and the date!”

Beu loves talking about books “I’ve just talked to 90 women at Probus, and I’ve been invited to dinner with a book group who want me to talk to them about books.” (But even she admits to sometimes being “talked out" by the end of the day.)

However, her main advice for other booksellers who want to follow in her publicity raising footsteps: “Read your books and talk about them all the time.”