Word on The Street is located on The Street in Ashtead, Surrey. We’re in a double fronted red brick building that dates back over 100 years. In its lifetime, number 60 The Street has been a Butchers and a charity shop, before we took it over in November 2021. We have carried out extensive renovations to create the vibrant, welcoming space that we hope will encourage our customers to browse and buy books, as well as a great place to enjoy our events.
It has been a long-held dream of Dawn Brewer and her team to bring a bookshop to the village. We have researched our market, undertaken the relevant courses and joined the Bookseller’s Association. But, more than anything, we are all passionate about reading and embracing our new role as booksellers. We have taken much time in curating our stock and hope we will bring customers an original and diverse selection of books across most genres.
For self-published authors and small publishing presses
We are a small, independent bookshop with limited space and therefore have to ensure that every book we have on our shelves sells and sells quickly. We also only have a small team working in the shop each day whose priority is serving customers, dealing with e-mails, phone lines and re-stocking the shop.
We can only stock a few thousand titles and we have to curate a selection of the many more thousand new titles that are published every year that work best for us as a business and a shop.
For ease, all of our ordering and stock control processes, along with the tills, is managed through one supplier (Gardners). This means that we are unable to stock books that are not indexed to purchase through this main supplier. We will only consider books that have been published within the last three months.
In the short while we have been open, we have been overwhelmed by the number of authors approaching us. While we love the idea of stocking new titles by local authors, we have to be mindful of the tastes of our customers (and booksellers’) when deciding what to put on the shelves.
Having read this, if you feel we might be interested in your book and meet the above criteria, please e-mail hello@wordonthestreetbookshop.co.uk and give us as much detail as possible. We will consider each request and get back to you only if we feel we need more information.
Thank you for your understanding.
WORD ON THE STREET TEAM