BA Mentoring is a free and confidential service offering one-to-one business mentoring for bookshop owners, allowing them to discuss their plans, queries and concerns with an experienced mentor. There are five metors, each of them a highly experienced and award-winning bookseller in their own right; and each of them with their own particular strengths and areas of expertise. Since its inception in 2017, the mentoring programme has helped well over 150 booksellers from across the UK and Ireland.
Meet the Mentors Sheila O’Reilly Sheila has been in bookselling for over 25 years. Under her ownership, Dulwich Books was voted best independent bookshop in the UK & Ireland. A former BA Council member, Sheila is now the Project Manager for the BA Learning Skills Hub. She sits on the Bookselling Ireland committee and is a board member of the European and International Booksellers Federation. She has been a bookshop mentor since 2017. Patrick Neale Patrick has worked for Sainsbury’s and Waterstones as a store manager and became an independent bookseller in 2001. He is the tutor on the BA's Introduction to Bookselling Course; co-author of the BA's guide How to Start and Run a Bookshop; an award-winning bookseller; and a former BA President. He continues to fight the cause for independent bookselling, knowing just how much independent bookshops enrich every community that has one. Nicki Thornton Nicki has worked with over 30 independent bookshops since becoming a mentor in 2017. She helped establish Mostly Books in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 2006. The shop quickly attracted a loyal following in the community through a mixture of expert advice, an imaginative events programme, innovation, and a commitment to growing a reading for pleasure culture in local schools. Building up an enviable schools business from scratch and working to foster reading with so many young people led to Nicki becoming a children's author herself. She combines her bookselling business background and schools knowledge as well as insights from the publishing world and marketing in her mentoring work.