Jamie Fiocco, owner of Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, N.C., reported that the "holiday season was strong," with the store seeing a 5.5% increase in revenue compared to the same period in 2024, as well as increases in units sold and total transactions. Going into the season, the Flyleaf team was "cautiously optimistic" given inflation, price increases, and the potential for issues with the supply chain; they were "pleasantly surprised" with how things turned out.
Asked about major titles, Fiocco said the store's top five books of the season, outside of those sold at community events, were The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, Heart the Lover by Lily King, What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, and Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. She added that Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid, as well as a few other books in the Game Changers series, picked up steam and "dominated" sales in the second half of December. Fiocco also pointed out that although the store went into the season expecting The Correspondent to be popular, they did not expect to sell as many copies as they did.
Commenting on supply-chain issues, Fiocco remarked that they happen every holiday season, but this year they came from "the most unexpected of places." As a result, the first few weeks of December "were dicey," with the store's Cost of Goods Sold suffering as the team scrambled to source titles. Eventually, Flyleaf was able to adjust customer expectations accordingly. Fiocco also wanted to give a "special shout out" to the store's PRH customer service rep, as well as the Ingram Oregon warehouse; the latter was able to get orders "clear across the country to us" in a speedy manner.
Fiocco relayed that she and her team were surprised they didn't see changes in customer behavior. While all categories were up, used books (which account for about 6% of the store's inventory) were up 13% and adult hardcovers up 7%. That might indicate that customers were shopping the used section more, but at the same time, the section "was better maintained than in past years" and the store continued to take used book trades through late December instead of stopping after Thanksgiving. In general, "our sales for the year were up over last year," Fiocco said.
For Astoria Bookshop in Queens, N.Y., the 2025 holiday began with a slower-than-usual start but ended up being great, reported store owner Lexi Beach. It was the strongest December the store has seen since it moved to a new location in 2023, and sales of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! by Dr. Seuss and The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg--a metric Beach looks at every holiday season--were "well up."
Touching on big sellers, Beach said "local interest seemed to be the thing this year." An Almanac of New York City for the Year 2026 by Susan Gail Johnson, Zohran Walks New York by Millie von Platen, All the Queens Gardens: A Botanical Portrait of New York's Largest and Most Diverse Borough edited by Rafael A. Herrin-Ferri, and Rural County, Urban Borough: A History of Queens by Jeffrey A. Kroessler all did very well throughout December. Kiran Desai, Beach noted, is a Jackson Heights resident, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny also proved popular.
For "non-Queens interest," Samin Nosrat's Good Things and Alison Roman's Something from Nothing were in high demand, as was Heart the Lover. Beach noted that had the store been able to get more copies of the Game Changers books, they would have been "topping the list."
Across the board, "delivery times from publishers and distributors were erratic and slow," Beach remarked. By the second week of December, Beach and her team were telling customers that if they didn't already have tracking info for something, it likely would not arrive before Christmas, and it has never been that bad before.
"I've never seen anything like it, and it was almost entirely universal so I don't even want to call out any particular vendor," she said.
Asked about customer behavior, Beach said it was a harder thing to quantify. While she does look at average transaction total during the holidays, the increase in book prices this year made it "harder to see at the end of any given day if customers were going out with big stacks or smaller stacks of more expensive books." All together, Beach didn't see "any noticeable shifts in behavior from our customers."
In Long Beach, Calif., Bel Canto Books saw a slow opening to the season, with a "much weaker" Small Business Saturday, said owner Jhoanna Belfor, but "the rest of December more than made up for that deficit." In fact, the season ended up great, with the main store being up 19% compared to 2024; Belfor attributed much of that increase to being open every day for the two weeks leading up to Christmas Eve.
Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee, Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley, and Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala were the store's top sellers, while Umma by Nam Soon Ahn, Water Moon by Samantha Sotto, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, and the deluxe edition of Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones were among the store's bestselling hardcovers. In general, Belfor said, customers "really seemed to be looking for cozy reads," and there was a lot of interest in books by friends of the store, including Umma, Arsenic and Adobo, and Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe.
The store did not see any major supply-chain problems with either books or sidelines, with Belfor noting that the team "front-loaded" on sidelines in late November and early December. With regard to customer behavior, Belfor said there were some slow mid-week days as well as rainy days, but staying open every day during the lead up to Christmas Eve "really helped." The store's new membership program, along with increased outreach to regular shoppers, also provided a boost. --Alex Mutter