Our 2025 Bookselling Year

As December draws to a close we're taking a moment to look back over the past year and reflect on some of our team highlights. Days here in the bookshop are never quiet and we're always busying ourselves with various projects, but even we have to admit it's been a rather bumper year! 

Here's some of the headlines from 2025: 

Events
This year we've hosted...

• 24 adult events, including a variety of fiction and non-fiction authors from Elly Griffiths and Robert Goddard, through to Robin Ince, Nicholas Jubber and Ash Bhardwaj. We even had live music again here in the bookshop with Things Found in Books, a foodie event with chef Diana Henry, a sports writing season with Ben Youngs and Martin O'Neil, and an epic celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth - complete with bonnets, an escape room puzzle and Regency cocktails! 
• 6 bookclubs featuring Orbital, The Last Murder at the End of the World, Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books, The Ministry of Time, You Are Here and The Honey Witch 
• 26 children's events including appearances at schools from Cariad Lloyd, Louie Stowell and Gregg Stobbs, Book and a Biscuit storytime sessions here in the bookshop, school bookfairs, in-store celebration of World Book Day and Empathy Festival and a Wellbeing Event focused on reading for mental health at a local secondary school. We've also worked with a local primary school to rebuild their library which was in need of a refresh and re-stock. 
• 22 pop-up bookstalls at events including Literary Leicester, events with Leicester Libraries for Black History Month, an event at Leicester Cathedral and events at the Y Theatre
• Independent Bookshop Week and Bookshop Day, both with promotions and celebrations in-store, and enjoyed window installations from illustrators such as Pippa Curnick, Jamie Hammond and Tom Tinn-Disbury.

Awards
We were delighted to pick up some accolades at this year's British Book Awards, known in the trade as 'The Nibbies'...

• Regional finalist for Independent Bookshop of the Year
  
• Shortlistee for Children's Bookseller of the Year 
• Shortlistee for Individual Bookseller of the Year (Kirsty Woods, Children's Specialist) 

Pay It Forward & Baby Basics Partnership 
Our Pay It Forward scheme has gone from strength to strength this year.

Launched in November 2024 with our first Community Secret Santa campaign, customer donations raised £1,400.00 which was not only used to purchase 60 gifts for individuals and families in the local area, but also helped to contirbute to some of our charitable giving throughout 2025. Continuing the scheme in 2025 has meant we've also been able to gift books and book related items to a variety of individuals and organisations including £400.00 worth of fiction and colouring books to Leicester Hospitals Charity Volunteer Service, board books for the LRI Neo-Natal Ward, plus multiple books and crafting materials for a local primary school and various individuals and families who were facing hardship. We were also able to offer funding to schools to purchase Empathy Read titles for their school libraries, and a local school affected by flooding. 

Our partnership with Baby Basics, set up in January 2025 has also allowed us to donate around 100 board books to the charity to gift to the families they support. 

We relaunched the Community Secret Santa campaign again in September 2025 and are delighted to share that the grand total raised as of 19th December stood at £1,054.64. Working with our great friends at the award-winning charity The Well, we were able to use these funds to provide gifts to 54 individuals, including referrals from the Food Bank, St Wilfrid's Church, Kibworth Primary School and Kibworth Mead Aacdemy.  Our general Pay It Forward scheme has, in addition, raised a whopping £1,304.27 across the year. 

Pay It Forward will continue throughout 2025 as our ambitions for the scheme continue to grow. To find out more and donate, please visit HERE. 

The Brilliant Bookshop Experience 
We were honoured and very excited this year to take part in an amazing project in partnership with National Book Tokens and the literacy charity Read for Good. A UK pilot focusing on supporting reading for pleasure in secondary schools, we worked together to deliver bespoke 'book-shopping experiences' for Year 8 and Year 9 students. We worked with 4 schools across the county, identified as schools with a high proportion of students receiving Pupil Premium funding, to take a pop-up bookshop to their school and gift students a FREE £10 National Book Token to use to purchase a book. 

Over 13 sessions across 9 days visiting 4 schools, we were able to meet with 1333 students, gifting National Book Tokens worth £13,330.00 and ensuring that every student was able to select a book to take home with them and enjoy. It's been the most joyous project to work on and we're so grateful to the teams at Read for Good, National Book Tokens, and the participating schools for making this such a highlight of our year.

Sustainability
Debbie continues in her role as the Booksellers Association (BA) Sustainability Champion and as such sits on the their Sustainable Booksellers Group, which aims to address what bookshops can do to be environmentally responsible and what efficiencies can be brought to supply chains to reduce waste. This year, she was also asked to join the UK's Sustainable Industry Forum and the Book Industry Communication's (BIC) Green Bookselling Task Force. As well as working with the wider industry on sustainability issues, Debbie has implemented various policies at bookshop level. As part of this, she undertook a course on Carbon Literacy Training with Greener Futures at Leicester University and, as a result, we are proud to share that Kibworth Books is now officially a carbon literate bookshop. 

Advocacy & Conferences
In her role as BA Vice-President, Debbie has delivered several speeches this year including

• Westminster Book Awards - on the dangers of book-banning and the importance of Freedom of Speech
• Future Book Conference - on sustainability in the book trade

Kirsty has continued in her role as Chair of the BA's Children's Bookselling Group. She was also delighted to be invited to speak at this year's Raising Generation Empathy Conference with Empathy Lab and the University of Sussex, speaking on the role bookshops can play in supporting schools to develop a strong culture around reading and empathy development. 

Press 
We've loved contributing regularly this year to the brilliant MaHa Magazine with our regular book review columns, plus Kirsty was thrilled to offer additional Children's book reviews to Shelf Magazine and the I Newspaper. Kirsty also wrote a piece this summer for I Newspaper entitled How to turn your child into a bookworm this summer (even if they're a teenager and ended the year with an opinion piece in The Bookseller about the crucial role of Indie Bookshops all year round. 

Our customers 
Needless to say, in addition to all of the above, we have loved being kept busy and energised by you - our customers. We wouldn't be here without your support, and it's our customers and community we hope to serve best through all of our endeavours. 

So to every single person who has supported us this year, whether that's buying a card from The Nook, purchasing books, tokens or gifts, or donating to our Pay It Forward schemes, we want to say a big THANK YOU. We appreciate you all. 

Here's to a fabulous 2026, filled with even more book-y excitement and much time for reading! 

With love, 

Debbie, Kirsty and Aidan