For all those who agree with Neil Gaiman’s maxim in American Gods that “a town isn’t a town without a bookstore”, and who yearn to spend their days amongst the pristine spines and glossy covers of a small bookshop, what might be the perfect holiday retreat has just been listed on AirBnB: the opportunity to become a bookseller for a week or two.

For the sum of £150 a week, guests at The Open Book in Wigtown, Scotland’s national book town, will be expected to sell books for 40 hours a week while living in the flat above the shop. Given training in bookselling from Wigtown’s community of booksellers, they will also have the opportunity to put their “own stamp” on the store while they’re there. “The bookshop residency’s aim is to celebrate bookshops, encourage education in running independent bookshops and welcome people around the world to Scotland’s national book town,” says the AirBnB listing.

The Open Book is leased by the Wigtown book festival from a local family. Organisers have been letting paying volunteers run the shop for a week or two at a time since the start of the year, but opened the experience up to the world at large this week when they launched what they are calling “the first ever bookshop holiday experience” on AirBnB.

“I wouldn’t call it a working holiday,” said Adrian Turpin, director of the Wigtown book festival. “It’s a particular kind of holiday [for people] who don’t feel that running a bookshop is work. It’s not about cheap labour – it’s about offering people an experience … It’s one of those great fantasies.”

The money is “just essentially to cover our costs”, said Turpin, admitting that “it can be a hard life, selling books in a small town, so it’s not a holiday for everybody”.

“I suspect [the shop] would have closed, without this,” he said. “Wigtown is Scotland’s national book town, but it’s quite a long way from anywhere. So part of the idea was to get new people in – people who would hopefully end up having a good time and a long-standing relationship with the town. And also to keep the bookshop afloat. It might otherwise have shut down.”

The initiative comes at a difficult moment for independent booksellers. Fifty-seven independent stores closed in the UK last year, according to the Booksellers Association. In 2005, there were 1,535 independent bookshops in the UK, with the number dropping to 939 by 2014.

So far, The Open Book has been leased around 10 times, with guests ranging from The Bookshop Band, which set up a bookshop bake-off cookery competition as well as putting on daily concerts, to a librarian from Portland, Oregon, a Dutch civil servant, and an 80-year-old couple. The latter pair had always wanted to run a bookshop, and regarded the experience as their honeymoon.

“There is an interest in it, and it’s interesting how much has been weighted to people from North America … It is playing shop to some extent, but they are genuinely selling books,” said Turpin. “Wigtown is only 800 people, but it’s a real community of bookshop owners. The aim is that people come and take part in the community. There’s no arm-twisting if they don’t want to, but it’s an opportunity to feel part of something bigger.”

Ben Please and Beth Porter from The Bookshop Band, which writes and performs songs inspired by books, ran the store in January, and have been asked to return next month to take it on during the festival, from 25 September to 4 October. “We had such a nice time – it was a lovely thing to do. We got into a routine, making the shop look pretty every day and getting enthusiastic about the books,” Please said, adding that the people of Wigtown were very welcoming, “popping in to see how we were doing and bringing us cake”.

“It was really peaceful in January and it’s going to be really different in September,” added Please. “We’ll do a concert every day in the bookshop at lunchtime, and there’ll be a 9.30pm bedtime story, too.”

American couple Lee and Janet Miller, the shop’s most recent residents, are retired, although they owned and ran a bookstore in Sudbury, Massachusetts, around 20 years ago. “Today reminded both of us of why we so loved being booksellers,” they blogged about the experience. “It is of course dealing with books, which we love.

“But it is also the social interaction. As a bookseller, you are available to the world, and people come by for business and also just to connect. There is no division between personal life and business life, it all flows together as one … A couple who had been in the store last week stopped back in to browse but also to chat and see how things are going. We felt a part of the community today. We’re transients here, but we can be a part of it nonetheless for the time we are here.”