The Mainstreet Trading Company
This month we talk to Rosamund, co-owner of the award-winning Mainstreet Trading Company. The shop was opened in 2008 as a bookshop and café and, a few years later, the Deli and Home sections were launched. We ask how Rosamund picks the books that line the shelves, about a typical day at the shop and what her vision was when she first opened it. Read on to find out more…
1. Tell us about why you opened the Mainstreet Trading Company – what was your vision?
Before launching Mainstreet along with my husband, Bill, in 2008, I worked at Bloomsbury Children’s Books for many years, looking after sales, marketing and publicity for the list. Latterly, I felt a real need to sell a book to the person who was the end reader, rather than simply battle for our books in the bull pit of retail head offices (as they were then). This urge to handsell a book remains the driving force of why we exist as an indie.
However, given our very rural location (in a village of fewer than a thousand residents), we knew from the start that Mainstreet needed to be a destination shop. Books have always been at the heart of it, but we also have a very busy café, plus a deli and home shop in a separate building. We also run a carefully curated events programme with speakers ranging from Lyse Doucet and Bendor Grosvenor to Margaret Atwood and Michael Morpurgo.
2. How do you pick the books that line your shelves – in your opinion what merits a book being chosen?
It’s hard to distil what makes a book right for Mainstreet. Yes, it links to our booksellers’ taste, but we are also mindful of the breadth of our customer base. We have brilliant support locally but also benefit from a strong tourism market – being in the Scottish Borders, it’s especially noticeable during October when half term lasts about 3.5 weeks (Scottish and English school holidays).
We look for quality of content of course, but also production values (never underestimate the importance of good cover design). Our strongest sections are children’s, fiction, cookery, general non-fiction and, for the right book, art. Over the years, some memorable bestselling favourites include Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart and Educated by Tara Westover, plus anything by Micheal Morpurgo. More recently, we have done very well with Craftland by James Fox and Raising Hare by Chloe.
3. Are you seeing any particular trends at the moment, things that your customers are most interested in or buying more of?
Like many shops, we have added a section for Romantasy in the past year, reflecting its new power as a sub-genre, we’re also finding more customers asking for horror and sci-fi – perhaps a sign of the times?
4. What’s your typical day at the shop, what do you like best about bookselling?
There’s no such thing as a typical day of course, but it ranges from unpacking boxes, talking to customers, restocking and tidying the shelves, battling tech, organising events, working with schools, researching customer orders and cleaning the windows for our next display.
5. And finally, do you have any exciting plans for the shop in the coming months that you would like to share with us?
We are working towards our 20th birthday in 2028 with lots of brainstorming to bring together some big plans. All still under wraps for now.
In the meantime, we’re having fun working with various companies on our audiobook offering – focusing on developing our in-store experience with a listening station (for Bookshop.org subscriptions), POS for Spiracle’s Audiobook in a Card™ range, plus playing our VoxBlock audiobooks for children in our Book Burrow (a beautifully designed Wind in the Willows-themed den for children to listen).