04/10/2026
If you have an interest in the book industry, this is a really good read. We were one of the lucky ones that got their copies on time but many fellow indies lost out.
Threshing Day by Rebecca Yarros. In stock now. And whilst you're here, I'm going to comment on the absolute omnishambles that Little Brown and their parent company and distributor Hachette made of it. Strap in.
As an indie bookshop, I placed my pre-order for Threshing Day months ago and signed an extremely strict embargo (meaning I couldn't stock, display or even take photos of the books before the official publication date on Tuesday 29th September on pain of very significant consequences). I, along with every other indie bookshop, took this seriously and started taking pre-orders. The week before publication, a few massive corporations including Amazon, Tesco and Asda broke this extremely strict embargo and started selling Threshing Day. AT HALF PRICE.
Luckily, I'm a tiny shop in a tiny town so didn't have crazy numbers of pre-orders, and the customers that had pre-ordered with me very loyally did not cancel their pre-orders and rush off to buy it half price elsewhere; but plenty of indies did have this happen. They lost sales before the book was even meant to have hit shelves, and before we had even received our stock. Which brings me to the second part of this whole situation.
Embargoed stock usually arrives a few days before publication date, with a repetition of the strict rules of the embargo included in the delivery. This is so that shops can have the book out on display first thing in the morning on publication day, pre-orders can be packed and readied, and midnight openings can be held for particularly exciting releases. The majority of indies, including me, did not get their stock until sometime on the day of publication. We lost walk-in sales, shops had to cancel their midnight opening events, and we had to explain to customers that their months-old pre-order for one of the most highly-anticipated books of the year had not appeared - despite it having been available on Amazon for a week.
How can this possibly all happen, I hear you ask? Aren't Hachette one of the major four publishers and distributors? Why, yes. Unfortunately, every time there is an embargo on a book, a major corporation breaks it and we lose sales. EVERY TIME. And all they get is a slap on the wrist and possibly a fine (which they can well afford to pay). Why can they sell these books at half price immediately? Two reasons: they get far better wholesale rates than indies do, and they often use books as "loss leaders" - operating at a loss on the books themselves to encourage customers into the shop/on to the website to make a profit more widely. They do not care about books, writing, authors and literature generally; they just want to corner the market. This book was a guaranteed seller from which they would have made money without even trying, but they still felt the need to undercut indies and as such some of us have made major losses this week. This is not something any independent retailer can just brush off.
Why am I bothering to rant about this on a lovely Saturday morning? Because I think it's important to make it clear to my customers and anyone else who's interested how this industry works so that they can make informed decisions about where to spend their hard-earned money. Hopefully it goes some way to explaining why we cannot match these sorts of prices (a question I get asked regularly). The kind of behaviour displayed by Amazon, Tesco, Asda and others with Threshing Day is exactly why I would encourage people to support independent shops - they simply don't care, and we do.
Shout out to Rebecca Yarros - Author herself, who has shown enormous sympathy and support to independent bookshops in the UK this week and has used her clout with her publisher to open up the conversation about these issues. Thank you!
