It's a Tuesday in early September. The phone rings while you're unpacking the wholesaler delivery. A parent needs Of Mice and Men for a Year 10 class by Monday and wants to know if you can get it. You write "Steinbeck, Mice, Sarah?" on the back of a receipt, the shop bell goes, and by the time you look for the note the number's gone. An AI assistant for bookshops takes that call, or that WhatsApp, or that website chat, writes the order down properly with the title, edition, deadline and contact details, and tells the customer when to expect it.
This page is for independent booksellers: general bookshops, children's specialists, second-hand and antiquarian dealers who also sell new, and bookshop-cafés. It covers the calls and messages a bookshop gets, which of them an assistant like Klugon can handle, the honest limits of a hand-entered catalogue when you stock ten thousand titles, the consumer law that applies to ordered and signed books, and what it costs.
The calls a bookshop actually gets
Bookshops are unusual in retail because so many of their phone calls are about books they don't have yet. Most people who ring a bookshop aren't asking about a product on your shelf. They're asking you to find one.
"Have you got...?"
"Have you got the new Richard Osman?" "Do you have anything by Maggie O'Farrell in paperback?" "Is Wolf Hall in?" Sometimes the customer has an exact title, often they half-remember it: "it's got a blue cover and it's about a lighthouse, my book group's reading it". The answer is "yes, two on the shelf", "no, but I can have it by Thursday" or "that's not out in paperback till March".
Customer orders
The bookshop's bread and butter. The customer wants a specific book you don't stock, and you order it from your wholesaler or the publisher. It arrives in a day or a few days, you put it on the customer-orders shelf with a slip, and you ring or message when it's in. Customer orders build loyalty because they're the thing an independent does better than the internet: someone remembers you, and the book's waiting.
The details matter. Hardback or paperback. The 2019 edition or the new translation. The school's specified ISBN for set texts, because the class will be reading from the same page numbers. A deadline ("it's a birthday on the 14th"). Whether they'll collect or want it posted. Whether they've paid.
Events, signings and book clubs
Author events, launch nights, children's storytimes, poetry readings and book group meetings. People ask what's on, whether there are tickets left, what time it starts, whether the ticket includes a copy of the book, whether there's step-free access, and whether they can get a signed copy if they can't come.
Pre-orders and signed copies
For a big autumn hardback, customers ring weeks ahead to make sure they get one, and they ask about signed or special editions. Publisher-exclusive editions and signed stock create a lot of "is it still available?" questions.
School, library and reading-list orders
Teachers ordering class sets, parents with summer reading lists, university students with module lists, and local libraries or care homes with account orders. These often need invoices, purchase-order numbers or delivery to a school office.
The ordinary questions
Opening hours, whether you take National Book Tokens, whether you do gift wrapping, whether you post books, whether you buy second-hand books, whether dogs are allowed, and whether the café is open.
When the phone is busiest
Calls tend to come in the late morning and at lunchtime, and messages arrive in the evening after people have read a review or been to book group. The year has a clear shape for most bookshops: a quieter January and February, a bump around World Book Day in early March, Independent Bookshop Week in June, summer reading and holiday paperbacks, a sharp rise in school and university orders from late August, then the long run-up to Christmas, which in the book trade starts with the big hardback releases in early October and doesn't let up until Christmas Eve.
That autumn period is when the phone matters most. It's also when you have the least time to answer it.
What an AI assistant for bookshops can do
Klugon's assistant answers on the phone, your website chat, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger. It works from what you give it: a product catalogue, a knowledge base of your policies and information, and a booking calendar. It doesn't connect to your stock system or your wholesaler's ordering site, and the rest of this section is built around that fact.
Taking customer orders properly
This is the most useful job an assistant can do for a bookshop. When a customer asks for a book you don't have, the assistant records a customer-order request as a lead. You decide what it must collect. A good list for a bookshop:
- Title and author
- Format (hardback, paperback, large print, audiobook if you sell them)
- ISBN if the customer has one, particularly for set texts and specific translations
- How many copies
- Deadline, if there is one
- Name and a phone number or email
- Collect or post
The lead appears in your Klugon leads list and, if you've connected Slack or Zapier, as a notification. Someone checks availability with your wholesaler, places the order, and changes the lead status to "contacted". When the book arrives, staff ring or message the customer and mark the lead "converted". The insights page lists leads not contacted after two days, which catches orders that slipped through.
What the assistant tells the customer is up to you. Most bookshops have it say something like: "I've passed your order to the team. Most books arrive within two to four working days from our wholesaler. We'll be in touch when it's in, or if there's any problem getting it." Put your real lead times and any exceptions (publisher-direct orders, imports, print-on-demand titles) in the knowledge base so it can say "imports usually take two to three weeks" when it should.
Two honest limits:
- The assistant can't check your wholesaler's availability. It doesn't know whether a title is in print or how long it'll take. If you want it to say "that one's out of print", you need to have told it.
- It doesn't tell the customer when the book arrives. Klugon doesn't send texts, emails or reminders. "Your book is in" is still a call or message from you. If the order came in on WhatsApp, you can reply from the Klugon inbox, but only within Meta's 24-hour window, which a book ordered on Tuesday and arriving on Friday will usually have passed. Plan on the shop phone for that call.
"Is it in stock?" without a full catalogue
You can't sensibly hand-enter ten thousand titles, and products in Klugon are entered by hand, with no import and no sync with your bookshop EPOS. So be selective about what goes in the catalogue:
- Signed and special editions, with a stock count, because these sell out and get asked about.
- Big new releases and pre-orders, while they're hot.
- Event tickets, one product per event, with the number of seats left as stock. The assistant can then say "there are 12 tickets left for the Tuesday event". Update the number as tickets go.
- Staff picks and book-group titles, if customers ask for them by name.
For everything else, the knowledge base carries a general description of the shop ("we stock around 8,000 titles, strongest in fiction, history, nature writing and children's books") and an instruction that any specific title not in the catalogue becomes a customer-order offer. A good answer sounds like "I can't see that one on our system, but the team can check the shelves and order it in if we don't have it. Shall I take your details?" That's more useful than a guess, and it turns a "no" into an order.
If your stock list already lives in a PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB or Supabase database, the Scale tier lets the assistant run read-only lookups you define. Very few independent bookshops are set up that way, and it isn't a direct connection to any bookshop stock system, so don't buy the Scale tier for this unless you already have the database.
Events and book groups
The assistant answers event questions from the knowledge base and the ticket counts from the catalogue: date, time, price, what the ticket includes, accessibility, and where to buy. Put your ticketing link in the links library and the assistant shares it in chat.
If you run something that has a fixed slot and a person attached, such as a children's storytime with limited places or a one-to-one "book prescription" reading recommendation session, that can go in the booking calendar. Bookings use your opening hours, a length for each session and the staff member who runs it, and the assistant checks that the person is free. The booking calendar is built around appointments rather than seat counts, so for a 40-seat author talk, the ticket-as-product approach above works better.
Recommendations
Customers ask for recommendations, and booksellers are good at them. The assistant isn't a bookseller. It can suggest titles from your catalogue and the staff picks you've written into the knowledge base, which is genuinely useful ("our staff pick for fans of The Thursday Murder Club is..."). It shouldn't invent reviews or claim that a book is suitable for a particular child's reading age unless you've written that guidance down. A good instruction: "recommend only from our staff picks list; for anything more specific, offer to pass the question to a bookseller".
Everyday answers
Hours, directions, parking, National Book Tokens, gift cards, gift wrapping, postage costs, whether you buy second-hand books and how, whether the café takes card. Write each once and the assistant gives the same answer on every channel.
What a bookseller should keep
Hand these to a person. When the assistant hands over, Klugon marks the conversation as needing a person, shows it in your inbox with a "Needs a person" banner, and sends a Slack or Zapier notification. It can't transfer a phone call to someone in the shop, and it keeps replying until you step in, so write handover lines that tell the customer what will happen.
- Account and invoice orders. Schools, libraries, colleges and businesses with purchase-order numbers, invoicing terms or VAT questions.
- Second-hand buying. If you buy books, valuations need someone to see them. The assistant can explain how you buy and take details.
- Self-published authors and publishers' reps. "Will you stock my book?" Take contact details and flag it.
- Complaints and damaged or faulty books. Missing pages, binding faults, a book that arrived damaged in the post.
- Rare and antiquarian enquiries. First editions, condition grading, provenance and price. Too specialist to answer from a script.
- Anything about a child's safety or wellbeing. Rare, but school and children's events do bring them. Hand over immediately.
- Event cancellations and refunds. Your ticketing system handles these, and a person should decide.
Three sample conversations
These are samples written for this page. The bookshop is invented, the customers are invented, and none of this comes from a real recording.
Sample: a set text order by phone
A sample phone call. The shop, Larkspur Books, is a made-up independent bookshop. The assistant's voice is AI-generated.
Assistant: Hello, you've reached Larkspur Books. I'm the shop's AI assistant. How can I help?
Caller: Hi, my son needs Of Mice and Men for school. They said it has to be a particular edition.
Assistant: No problem. Do you have the ISBN from the school? It's usually a 13-digit number starting with 978 on the reading list.
Caller: Hang on... (reads out the 13-digit number from the school letter)
Assistant: Thanks. Let me read that back to make sure I have it right. (reads the number back, digit by digit) Is that correct?
Caller: Yes.
Assistant: That edition isn't on our stock list, so the team will order it in. Most orders from our wholesaler arrive within two to four working days. When do you need it by?
Caller: Monday, ideally.
Assistant: If the team places the order today, that should be fine, though I can't guarantee the wholesaler's delivery. Can I take your name and a phone number so the shop can call when it's in?
Caller: Sarah Whitlock, 07700 900789.
Assistant: Thanks, Sarah. I've passed the order to the team: one copy of Of Mice and Men, the school's ISBN as confirmed, needed by Monday, for collection, contact 07700 900789. If there's a problem getting that edition, they'll call you. You can pay when you collect. Is there anything else?
Caller: No, that's brilliant, thanks.
Behind the scenes: a lead with all of those fields, posted to the shop's Slack channel. A bookseller checked the wholesaler, ordered it, and rang Sarah on Friday when the book arrived. Klugon didn't send her anything.
Sample: a website chat about a signing
A sample website chat. The shop and the author event are made up.
Customer: Are there tickets left for the event with the crime writer next week?
Assistant: Yes. There are 9 tickets left for "An Evening with Helen Marsh" on Thursday 23rd at 7pm. Tickets are £12 and include a £5 discount on any of her books on the night. You can book here: [ticket link]. The shop has step-free access to the event space.
Customer: I can't make it. Can I get a signed copy?
Assistant: We'll have signed copies after the event. I can ask the team to put one aside for you and you can pay when you collect, or they can post it. Which would you prefer, and which book?
Customer: Collect, the new one please. Name's Tom.
Assistant: Thanks, Tom. Could you leave a phone number or email so the team can let you know when it's ready?
Customer: tom@example.com
Assistant: Done. I've asked the team to set aside one signed copy of Helen Marsh's new hardback for you to collect, and they'll email you once the event's over. If they sell out before the event, they'll let you know.
The ticket count came from the catalogue, where the event is a product with 9 left in stock. The signed-copy request became a lead.
Sample: a book group order on WhatsApp
A sample WhatsApp conversation. The shop and customer are made up.
Customer: Hi! Our book group has picked The Sea, The Sea for January. Could we order 8 copies? Is there a discount?
Assistant: Hello! Yes, we'd be happy to order 8 copies. We offer book groups 10% off orders of 6 or more copies of the same title. Do you want the paperback?
Customer: Yes paperback. We meet on the 8th of Jan.
Assistant: Great. Over Christmas our wholesaler takes a little longer, so the team will aim to have them in the first week of January. Can I take a name and number for the group?
Customer: Anne Fowler, 07700 900321. Can people pay individually when they pick up?
Assistant: Yes, each member can pay at the till when they collect. I've passed the order to the team: 8 paperback copies of The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, for the Fowler book group, needed by 8 January, 10% book group discount, paid individually on collection. They'll be in touch if anything changes.
The discount, the Christmas wholesaler note and the "pay individually" answer were all in the shop's knowledge base. If they hadn't been, the right answer would have been "I'll check with the team".
Setting up an AI assistant for a bookshop
What to write before you switch anything on
The quality of a bookshop assistant depends almost entirely on how well you describe your shop. Before you open the dashboard, write these down:
- Your customer-order process. Lead times from your wholesaler, from publishers direct, for imports and for print-on-demand. Whether you take payment up front. How long you hold ordered books. What you say about out-of-print titles.
- What you stock, in general terms. Sections you're strong in, roughly how many titles, and whether you sell second-hand.
- Your returns policy. Separately for shop purchases, customer orders, and books sent by post. See the next section.
- Events. The next few months of events, with times, prices, what tickets include and accessibility.
- Book groups, schools and accounts. Any discounts, how invoicing works, and who to hand over to.
- Staff picks. A short list with a sentence each.
- The rest. Hours, closures, gift wrapping, book tokens, postage, parking, café, dogs.
Setup checklist
- Sign up and create an assistant. Set its tone: most bookshops want warm and a little bookish, not salesy.
- Paste or upload the information above into the knowledge base. Text, Word files and PDFs (not scanned ones) all work, up to 20 MB each.
- Add catalogue products for signed stock, pre-orders and event tickets, in GBP, with stock counts.
- Tell the assistant exactly what to collect for a customer order, and test it with ten real requests from your order book.
- Connect Slack or Zapier so orders and handovers reach you. Klugon doesn't email the owner.
- Add your ticketing page, your Bookshop.org shop if you have one, and your returns page to the links library.
- Add the chat widget to your website by pasting one script tag.
- Connect WhatsApp if customers already message you there. You'll need a Meta app and a WhatsApp Business number, and it adds $19 a month.
- After the 7-day trial, add a phone number and forward your shop line to it at busy times or when you're closed. You can't port your number, but you can keep it by forwarding. Write a greeting that says it's an AI assistant, because the default greeting doesn't.
- Print the QR code for your public page and put it on the customer-orders shelf and the till: "order any book, any time".
How to tell if it's working
After a month, look at three things. The leads page shows how many customer orders came in through the assistant and how many you converted. The analytics page shows calls, conversations and the busiest hours, which tells you when the phone was ringing while you were busy. And the insights page shows questions without a good answer, which is your list of things to write down next.
Costs for a typical independent bookshop
Klugon sells three products, priced separately in US dollars: the voice agent for phone calls, the social agent for WhatsApp and Instagram, and the website chatbot. Full details are on the pricing page.
Bookshops tend to lean on the phone more than other shops, because older customers and parents ordering set texts ring rather than message. A worked example, with the assumptions stated:
- You get around 25 calls a day that you'd like answered, of about two minutes each. Over a month of 26 trading days, that's about 1,300 minutes. Some you'll answer yourself, so the assistant takes perhaps 600 minutes.
- Voice agent, Starter: $99 a month with 1,000 minutes, plus $9 a month for the phone number. $108 a month.
- Website chatbot, Starter: $49 a month for 100 conversations, if you want chat as well.
Against staff time: the National Living Wage from April 2026 is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over. Ten hours a week of someone whose job is mostly answering the phone costs about £127 a week, or around £550 a month, before employer's costs. In a bookshop, though, the real cost of a missed call is usually a lost customer order. Say three a week go unanswered and the caller orders online instead, with an average order of £15. That's £45 a week, about £195 a month, plus the loyalty you'd have built.
Against a UK call-answering service: these usually charge per call or per minute, and a person will take a message. They can't check your event ticket count or explain your book group discount, and you'd still be ringing everyone back. For the general question of people against AI on the phone, see AI receptionist compared with a human receptionist.
The trial is 7 days, and a card is required, charged when the trial ends unless you cancel. You can't add a phone number until the trial has ended, but you can test the voice assistant in the browser.
Returns, ordered books and the law
Booksellers get returns questions less often than clothes shops, but the ones they get are awkward: the duplicate birthday present, the customer order the customer no longer wants, the book with 32 pages missing. Here's the legal background the assistant's answers should reflect. It's general information, not legal advice.
Books bought in the shop
The law doesn't oblige you to take back a book bought in person because the customer has changed their mind or received two copies. The government's guidance for businesses on accepting returns and giving refunds confirms this. Many bookshops exchange or give credit with a receipt as a goodwill policy. The assistant should present it as your policy.
Books ordered by phone, chat, WhatsApp or online
This is the case bookshops most often get wrong. When a customer orders a book from you at a distance, for example over the phone, in a website chat or on WhatsApp, and you post it, the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give them 14 days from delivery to cancel without a reason.
A book ordered in for a customer generally isn't "made to the consumer's specifications" just because you ordered it specially, so the cancellation right still applies to an ordered-in book sold at a distance. A signed copy dedicated "To Margaret, happy 80th" is different: regulation 28 excludes goods that are clearly personalised. The regulations also exclude single issues of newspapers and magazines, though not subscriptions.
What about the order taken by the assistant on the phone, which the customer then collects and pays for in the shop? Practices vary and the legal position depends on where the contract was made. Many bookshops avoid the question by not taking payment until collection and not charging for cancelled orders. If that's your approach, say it in the knowledge base: "There's no charge if you change your mind before collecting."
Faulty books
Missing or duplicated pages, a detached binding, a misprint. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, goods must be of satisfactory quality. A customer who rejects a faulty book within 30 days is entitled to a refund, and after that, generally to a replacement or repair first. In practice bookshops replace the copy and return the faulty one to the publisher. The assistant should apologise, explain that you'll replace it, and hand it to the team.
Customer data
Your order book is full of personal data: names, phone numbers, email addresses, sometimes children's names and schools. Klugon is operated by a German company under the GDPR, with transfers to its processors covered by standard contractual clauses as set out in the privacy policy. You remain the controller. The ICO's advice for small organisations covers what you need to do. Only add customers to your events newsletter if they agree; the assistant records marketing consent only when it's given explicitly, and you can send manual email newsletters from Klugon to subscribed contacts.
Where it fits alongside Bookshop.org, Hive and your EPOS
Independent bookshops already use a lot of tools, and it's worth being clear about where an assistant fits.
Online book sales platforms such as Bookshop.org and Hive let customers buy books online while supporting a chosen independent. They're shops. Klugon isn't: it doesn't sell books online or fulfil orders. What it does is answer the conversations that come to your shop, on the phone, WhatsApp, your website and Instagram, and turn them into customer orders your staff fulfil. You can put your Bookshop.org link in the links library so the assistant offers it to customers who'd rather order online.
Your EPOS or stock system knows what's on your shelves. Klugon doesn't connect to it. That's why this page recommends a selective catalogue and a strong customer-order process, rather than pretending the assistant knows your stock.
Your wholesaler's ordering site is where orders are placed. The assistant gathers the information you need to place the order; a bookseller still places it.
An answering machine takes a message without asking for the ISBN or the deadline, and without telling the caller whether the event is sold out. The assistant asks the questions you'd ask.
Why independents in particular
According to the Booksellers Association, there were 1,052 independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland at the end of 2024, down slightly from 1,063 a year earlier, with 45 new shops opening during the year. Most of them are small teams, often one or two people on the floor, and the same person is unpacking deliveries, running the till, planning events and answering the phone.
That's the case for an assistant in a sentence. Not to replace the bookseller, but to stop the phone and the inbox from taking them away from the customers in the shop.
If your shop sells cards, wrapping and gifts alongside books, the page on gift shops covers personalisation lead times and Christmas cut-offs. If you do seasonal flowers or plants, the florists page is worth a look, and booksellers who also stock clothing or literary merchandise can compare notes with clothing boutiques. The retail hub brings all the shop types together, and the AI phone receptionist page explains how the phone side works.
Frequently asked questions
Can the assistant check if a book is on my shelves?
Only for books you've added to the Klugon catalogue. There's no connection to bookshop EPOS or stock systems, and products are entered by hand. Most shops list signed copies, big releases and event tickets, and have the assistant offer to order anything else.
Can it place orders with my wholesaler?
No. It takes the customer order, with title, author, format, ISBN, deadline and contact details, and passes it to your team as a lead. A bookseller places the order.
Will it tell customers when their ordered book arrives?
No. Klugon doesn't send texts, emails or reminders. Staff contact the customer. If the order came in on WhatsApp you can reply from the inbox within Meta's 24-hour window, but for most orders that window will have passed.
Can it read ISBNs over the phone accurately?
It can take an ISBN and read it back for the caller to confirm, which is how you'd do it yourself. Tell it to always read numbers back. Mistakes are still possible, so staff should check the ISBN against the title when ordering.
Can it sell event tickets?
It can tell customers how many tickets are left, if you list each event as a product with seats as stock, and share your ticketing link. Keep selling tickets through the system you use now.
Does it give book recommendations?
From your staff picks and catalogue, if you write them into its knowledge. Tell it not to recommend beyond that list, and to pass more specific requests to a bookseller.
Can customers return a book they ordered by phone?
If you sold it at a distance and posted it, the Consumer Contracts Regulations generally give them 14 days to cancel, even though you ordered it specially. Signed and dedicated copies are an exception as clearly personalised goods. Write your policy into the knowledge base so the assistant gives the right answer.
Can it handle school and library accounts?
It can take the enquiry and hand it to your team. Invoicing, purchase orders and account terms should stay with a person.
What languages does it speak on the phone?
English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese and Arabic. You choose the language for the phone assistant.
How long is the trial?
Seven days, card required, charged when it ends unless you cancel. You can add a phone number after the trial; until then you can test the voice assistant in the browser.
Booksellers who try it usually start with the customer-order script, because that's where a lost call costs a sale. Read how Klugon's AI receptionist works across phone, chat and messaging, or try it on your own order book.