Austin Texas Book Trail 2025: The Official Recap!
On April 12-13, we celebrated year two of the Austin Texas Book Trail, a citywide literary event taking place across 29 independent bookshops and two neighborhood cafes. This year’s celebration saw visitors from 27 unique cities making 2600+ bookstore stops during the two-day event. (Learn more about the participating bookstores here.)
Keep scrolling for a recap of the weekend’s events, our biggest takeaways, and photos and videos from each day.
Day One: Saturday, April 12
See all the photos from the Saturday kickoff here.
Like last year’s inaugural celebration, we started the Book Trail with a morning kickoff at Seaholm coffeeshop Mañana Dos. We handed out more than 400 trail maps (!!) and collected 102 book donations for Inside Books Project. Our 2025 partner CapMetro joined us at the event as well to hand out free daily bus passes and bikeshare coupons for participants.
We also tried something new this year and printed a limited run of totes designed by this year’s poster artist Strawberry Milkweed in addition to our commemorative posters — and sold out of both by the end of the breakfast. Thank you for supporting our community initiative!
Day Two: Sunday, April 13
See all the photos from the Sunday afterparty here.
At the end of the weekend, we capped off the Book Trail with an evening afterparty at East Austin wine bar Community Garden. We celebrated with drink specials, gourmet hot dogs, and book stack sketches going all night by local artist Sonia Margolin — a lovely, communal way to bookend an exciting city-hopping weekend.
Coming out of our second Austin Texas Book Trail, these were our biggest notes and takeaways:
1.) The total number of bookstore visits increased by 600+ this year.
According to our post-event survey, the average number of bookstores visited was 9 over the course of the weekend. The most? All 29 bookshops — a feat undertaken by not one, not two, but eight booktrailers this year. Incredible stamina, y’all!
We were also excited to meet out-of-city and even out-of-state visitors: our furthest visitor came all the way from New Hampshire (that’s nearly 2000 miles!), and we even had a bachelorette party from Michigan who re-routed their weekend to hop on the trail and do some bookstore shopping as a group.
2.) Stores reported anywhere from a 20% to 800% sales bump compared to an average weekend.
We made some key changes with the event timing this year, spanning a full weekend instead of just one day and moving it away from Independent Bookstore Day — so we’re happy to report that most bookstores still saw a noticeable bump in visitors and sales, along with the added boost they got later in the month from IBD.
3.) 77% of participants were first-timers.
Whether you discovered us through your local bookstore; our press features in the Austin Chronicle, Alcalde, Daily Texan, or CBS Austin; or just scrolling on your Instagram feed, thanks for being part of our two-woman community project. <3