"Welcome to Hyunam-dong Bookshop," a novel by Hwang Bo-reum published in 2022, has surpassed 1 million copies in cumulative worldwide sales. It is an exceptional result for a debut novel by a first-time author released through a one-person publishing house.
At a press briefing held on Oct. 2 at a restaurant in Seoul's Jung district, Hwang said the entire sequence of events was beyond imagination when she first began writing. "A novel I never thought would even be published came out into the world, readers took to it, and it went on to be published overseas," she said. "When I first started writing fiction, I couldn't even have imagined any of this."
Hwang worked as a software developer at LG Electronics before leaving the company in her early 30s to pursue writing. After publishing three essay collections, she turned to fiction for the first time with "Welcome to Hyunam-dong Bookshop." "I wrote the story I wanted to read, the story I wanted to tell myself, and I spent three to four months completely absorbed in it and enjoying it enormously," she said. "After finishing it, I left the draft on my laptop for about a year, then printed three copies at a print shop. This is a novel that started with just three readers — family and acquaintances." She later submitted it to a writing contest by chance, and it was released first as an e-book before appearing in print.
The book has been published in more than 50 countries in 35 languages, selling 1.108 million copies to date. The Korean and English editions have each sold more than 300,000 copies, while the Turkish edition has sold 200,000 and the Brazilian Portuguese edition 100,000. "I wrote the novel believing that life continues even when you step off the prescribed path to success, and that you can find enjoyment and happiness on a different path," Hwang said. She added that overseas readers send her their impressions of the book without missing a single day. "They say things like 'I was comforted' and 'I gained strength and courage,' which is not very different from how Korean readers responded. I found that both interesting and surprising."
She expressed mixed feelings about the book being categorized as a "healing novel." "Some readers misunderstand it as a novel that offers easy comfort, vaguely telling them everything will be fine," Hwang said. "But I think of it positively in the sense that it has had the chance to become the first novel that readers seeking comfort and empathy pick up."
