Walking into the newly opened Fitzrovia branch of Persephone Books, a publishing house and bookshop specialising in neglected women writers of the 20th century, is the opposite of entering a chain bookstore.
No brightly coloured book covers or neon fonts scream for the shopper’s attention. No indifferent sales clerk sulks behind a computer. The bookseller compliments one customer’s choice and offers an impassioned recommendation to another.
Barnes & Nobleboasts of having more than one million titles in its warehouses; Persephone Books stocks only 155. They are stacked in tidy piles four or five deep, with brief blurbs printed on floral-patterned backgrounds, and uniformly bound in soft grey – "serious but not sombre and calm but not boring,” says editorial director Francesca Beauman.
"It’s a highly curated list, a very subjective list.” Persephone is not aiming to recruit the masses but to introduce its loyal readers to books that will help them understand "what it felt like to be a suffragette, what it felt like to live through World War II.”
Founded as a mail-order publishing house in 1999, Persephone has since expanded to include a brick-and-mortar bookshop in Bath and, as of Nov 4, in London’s Fitzrovia neighbourhood.
Its minimalist strategy – the company currently publishes only two books per year – has attracted a devoted audience, including over 100,000 followers on Instagram and a "highly engaged”newsletter readership, Beauman says.
"The thing with Persephone Books is people either haven’t heard of it, or are completely obsessed with it.”
The recent growth of Persephone Books is part of a wider flourishing of niche bookstores. The number of independent bookshops in the US has increased 70% since 2020, despite gloomy headlines about the decline of reading; 422 new indie bookstores were opened last year alone.
The number of independent bookstores in the UK and Ireland, meanwhile, rose from 867 in 2016 to 1,086 in 2025. And many of these cater to fans of a specific genre – horror, crime, romantasy, dark academia, forgotten historical women.
As readers become increasingly siloed, with book selection driven by algorithmic recommendations on TikTok and Goodreads, these hyper-specialised bookstores are serving customers frustrated by the limited genre selection at mainstream chains and craving a bespoke in-person experience.
These bookstores are satisfying a profound need for an offline third space – a place for communities that are thriving on social media to gather in real life.
"I only read romance,” says Veena Patel, who founded the Love Potion Library, a romance-only bookstore in San Francisco,in April. (In a 2025 analysis of the digital libraries of over 3,000 Goodreads users, romance fans were the least likely to express an interest in books of other genres.) Patel kept hearing about romance bookstores launching around the US – more than 230 (including mobile stores) have opened in the past three years – "and I was twiddling my thumbs waiting for that to happen” near her home.
When she felt anxious at her tech job, Patel, who’s in her 30s, would sometimes fantasise about starting her own bookshop one day, perhaps after she’d retired.
But when she began to have panic attacks at work –"I was like, ‘I can’t keep going this way’” – she and her husband dug into their savings to open their romance-themed bookstore and cafe in the Castro.
Six months later, they say they’re already breaking even. That’s thanks in part to the events they’ve been hosting: book clubs, craft nights and "book bedazzling” workshops (where customers glue rhinestones and glitter to book jackets).
"In the beginning, we were doing maybe two or three events a month,” Patel says.
"We started to realise those are the days we see the best sales, and so we’ve been doing a lot more,” she continues. "Our regulars are romance readers who also are looking for a space to hang out.”
While online sales (including ebooks and audio) accounted for about US$12.3bil (RM50.3bil)of publishing revenue in the US last year, physical retail still brought in US$6.7bil (RM27.4bil) - up from US$6.2bil (RM25.3bil) in 2024.
"People are fed up with going online,” says Isla Coole, who opened a crime-focused bookstore, Criminally Good Books, in York, England,in 2024.
"They want to see books. They want to talk to booksellers.” To celebrate the launch of her new horror-themed offshoot, Horrifically Good Books, she invited a local actor to recite gothic poems, including Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, and sold tickets for £20 (RM108) on Eventbrite. All six sessions sold out, she says, one within 20 minutes of being posted.
Sisters Books & Nooks, a "dark academia”-inspired bookstore that opened in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in September 2025, devotes half its floor space to seating. (Co-owner Jamie Sharar associates "dark academia” – a Tumblr aesthetic that took off during the pandemic, and which draws inspiration from campus novels like Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History – with "moody colours, leather-bound books, sharp architecture.”)
Sharar and her co-founder Sarah Danielson set out to design a "comfortable, eclectic space” where locals would feel comfortable browsing books or attending a sound bath, author signing or trivia night.
"We just wanted to create a space where people feel like they can come and congregate,” says Sharar.
Niche bookstores have benefited from the explosion of BookTok, where content creators post about their pilgrimages to far-flung specialty bookshops, including photos of their extravagant hauls.
"It’s wild, how far people are willing to travel,” says Starlin Marot, owner of Bad Girl Books, the UK’s first romantasy-only bookshop. Since opening in July, Marot says she’s had customers arrive at her Oxford shopwith suitcases from as far as Italy and the Isle of Wight, off England’s south coast.
"We spent a lot of money on the aesthetics,” says Coole.
"What I wanted was for people to come in and take pictures for Instagram and socials” – of the gold-leaf lettering on the entrance or the floor-to-ceiling Agatha Christie mural. Within its first year, Criminally Good Books was turning a profit; the new horror-focused store is already overwhelmed by demand, she says.
"Every day, we’re reordering, reordering, reordering.” – Bloomberg
