Welcome to Gumshoe Books

Gumshoe Books is your independent mystery and crime fiction specialist

We started selling books to customers in the UK in October 2024. It has been an exciting time so far, cataloguing, building the shopfront, receiving stock and bookmarks, sorting out the logistics, shipping the first orders...

And there are some questions, such as:

What about e-books?

Some people prefer physical books and some prefer digital books - I am definitely in the first camp, and the reasons for that are maybe for another blogpost. I know there are a lot of people who still prefer "real" books to digital: just look into any bookshop on the high street, and it's very likely that you are finding it busier than any of the other shops nearby. The UK market for physical books is healthy, and in no danger of collapsing any time soon, and publishers are bringing new books out at a prodigious rate.

Could Gumshoe be selling e-books as well? Not easily - e-books are tied to specific platforms, and don't have great margins for retailers. Unless Gumshoe could build a whole new platform or app, then persuade authors and publishers to allow selling on that platform at reasonable cost... Gumshoe recommends using the public library for your digital borrowing, with services like Libby or Borrowbox.

 

Why online? Why not a "real" shop?

Online specialist shops are rare. They have to compete with Amazon, Bookshop.org and Waterstones, and that's hard. Especially when it comes to negotiating discounts, marketing spend and achieving good Google rankings.

On the other hand, how do you use any of those sites for a satisfying browsing experience? It's impossible to find something interesting unless it's brand-new. That's where you want to visit a physical bookshop. Browsing becomes more effective and pleasant when the shop is curated by lovely booksellers and not built by algorithms. 

And now the online specialists come into it: like your favourite high-street bookseller, online specialists know and learn their genre and what their customers like, and they are not constrained by the physical limitations of bookshops with their sadly fixed shelf-meters and opening hours.

Gumshoe Books is therefore aiming to bridge the gap between the non-browsability of online megasellers, and the curation magic of your friendly booksellers who don't quite have enough space for all the mysteries you want to read.

Gumshoe Books wants to make it easy to browse the books you might like. And it wants to make it easy to buy those books.

Gumshoe Books wants to help authors who write great books, and readers who love discovering new favourites, and indeed anybody who has a stake in crime fiction, to push past the algorithms and the AI, by taking it back to the basics.

Never say never: just maybe Gumshoe Books will be a bricks-and-mortar shop too one day, but that's a long, long way away.

 

Where will Gumshoe go in the future?

First, Gumshoe will expand the catalogue to cover many more authors, sub-genres and backlists, and improve the browsing experience.

Then, let's expand to global destinations. We currently ship to UK addresses only.

After that - who knows?