Hey There, Blimpy Boy!
Sam Cooney republished an article he wrote for Bookseller+Publisher about, well, the relationship between booksellers and publishers – and how this relationship is changing as publishers embark on direct-sales ventures, which, I guess, have the potential to undermine the traditional business models of booksellers. On the surface it seems like a superfluous debate, when compared to whether eBookstores will overrun this model, but it remains relevant, and the article got me thinking, which I like, obviously.
I hadn’t quite got to wondering about how booksellers might feel threatened by publishers’ online sales, perhaps because I never really buy from physical bookstores, and because I currently work in production, which often leaves me feeling quite removed from the whole extra set of steps that are involved in getting books to readers.
I’m becoming increasingly interested in sales though, and Sam’s article tapped me on the noggin and said, ‘Dear naive and idealistic editor, booksellers are very important to you and your job, and your interest in disseminating ideas with literature.’ So I started riffing on how this shifting relationship might weather the rapid market changes that are being pushed along by this here internet thing.
Perhaps an organised partnership between booksellers and publishers could be established to develop a website that aggregates all of their separate marketing and direct-sales efforts. For these purposes (compared to blogging, say) one big website is surely better than many small ones. Australia Council should fund something like this – just as they’ve recently funded the establishment of Literary Magazines Australia.
Another idea that sprouted was whether booksellers could borrow from the idea of subscription publishing. McSweeney’s do this at their online store. You can sign up to their Book Release Club and receive every book they publish over a twelve month period. Maybe booksellers could offer something similar: I’d like to sign up for a package of ’seller picks’, a bunch of random books from various publishers, delivered to my letter box once a month.1
The other thing that struck me in Sam’s article was the comment from Don Grover, CEO of Dymocks and aspiring booktrade despot slash self-described benevolent despot: suggesting that ‘a healthy industry occurs when everyone focuses on their own area, their niche in the market’ seems like a typically neo-con thing to say, but my understanding of economic ideology is pretty patchy. Am I right or wrong?
My idea of a healthy industry is one that is not dominated by small groups of large, domineering companies controlling those niches, but one where individuals determine what is produced and how they get it. From this perspective, the suppliers are the ones who need to adapt, rather than trying to restrict trade to a traditional structure of publisher through bookseller to consumer. I guess that’s an irresolvable ideological difference, though.
Or not.
Because then Sam speculated that ‘the coin can also be flipped, the spotlight shifted. Will booksellers be forced to become publishers?’ This must be happening, somewhere.2 Curiously (considering my aversion to Grover’s suggestion), this got my hackles up, with its suggestion that booksellers could just whip up the infrastructure required to produce quality books, as if it’s just a matter of pressing the go button on the the Espresso Book Machine.
Thinking about infrastructure, resources and expertise made me realise a more convincing reason publishers should be wary of ‘wading into booksellers’ waters’ (Don Grover’s defensive phrase), and it’s not because they’re not ‘customer-centric’ (also Don’s words). This suggestion denigrates the motives of publishers: does he think we make these books because they look pretty on our shelves? That’s only a secondary reason.
Okay, back to trying to be objective: I’d say a more convincing reason book publishers should be (and, sometimes, are) wary of prolapsing their resources on marketing and direct sales is that they operate in an ailing sector of the economy (especially small-press, literary publishers), within which they have barely enough resources to get their books to print, let alone invest in a serious marketing, sales and publicity strategy.
It’s also possibly true that such print aficionados feel drastically uncomfortable in the online world, and speaking into what seems like an echo chamber a lot of the time. If anything needs to change, I would suggest that booksellers, who will go down the eBookstore path or perish, are in a much better position to drive the development of a collaborative business model that focuses their own, and book publishers’ marketing, sales and publicity efforts. Booksellers and publishers need to share their resources, infrastructure and expertise, so that each is free to work on what they are proficient at, either bookmaking or bookselling.
It’s not as cut and dry as Dan Grover implies, but then, neither is parallel importation, and that didn’t stop him from pushing that wheelbarrow around in the dark.
The rest of the comments in Sam’s article, from all sorts of industry figures, are spectacularly reasonable, and well presented by Sam. A great spectrum of ideas, and all strung together with such clarity and concision. Check it out!
Meanwhile, do you know of examples of this type of bookseller/publisher collaboration? It would be great to keep this dialogue underway about how this changing relationship might morph into something weird, like an Imprints blimp parachuting books to customers in response to sign language made visible by wearing those massive foam-rubber hands.
------ NB: By googling ‘Book a Month Club’, which I thought was the name of McSweeney’s book-subscription service, I found this, The Book of the Month Club, and then I realised that this idea, which I thought was quite novel, is not novel at all, and then I remembered how much I used to bug Mum to join these, but she was savvy to their swindling ways, with which I now sympathise. And anyway, it’s still a better than Don Grover’s idea, which I’m getting to. [↩]
- *googles ‘booksellers turn to publishing’, finds this, is not surprised* [↩]
I haven’t read Sam’s article yet (I will get right on that), but given the domination of Amazon and supermarkets, who are willing to sell novels at below cost price, it seems the only way for publishers to make any money back is by selling directly to readers through their websites. I think you’re dead on when you talk about resources for publishing being spent on production and there being little left for marketing and publicity. High street retailers don’t seem to be making things easier for them, either, when they should be worried about Amazon. Here in the UK, there’s a weird Waterstones thing going down at the moment which undermines the distribution of independently published books on a national level. This is a good article on how discounting is screwing the industry: http://www.thebookseller.com/in-depth/feature/78066-discount-dash.html
These things all put publishers at loggerheads with the people who they expect support from. The most economically viable option is to sell directly to readers and funnel whatever funds into digital marketing. If high-street retailers are not going to team up with publishers to sell books at a fair price across the board, they’ll go to the dogs at the hands of either Amazon or supermarkets or independent sales. The suppliers DO need to adapt, but that’s not all of it.
The real issue for me is this massive discounting. What really needs to happen to give both publishers and booksellers a decent shot at life is for there to be a price benchmark for new books that supermarkets and Amazon are not allowed to undercut. There used to be something like this operating – some legal thing under the advice of the Publisher’s Association.
Readers and publishers both want a good deal, and direct sales can provide them with that. But there has to be a point where you say ‘a book is worth at least this much, no less’, regardless of who is doing the selling.
This makes me do the thing where I swim in circles wondering whether I’m left or right wing, because the sort of regulation you’re proposing is pretty heavy, and would be a bureaucratic nightmare, and would cop a lot of flak, with authors and publishers getting pissed off left, right and centre that the benchmark is too low. Because it’s always going to be too low, right – so few authors make enough from their work, and so many publishers are always scrapping the barrel.
But I like the idea, especially when I consider that eBooks are going out there at under AU$2, which, yeah, drastically denigrates the actual commercial worth of just the object, let alone the cultural worth of the ideas it contains. But remainder prices are not a new phenomenon, and I suspect that’s what a lot of these books are – books that would otherwise get pulped.
It seems that people are generally running out eBooks at approximately a third of the price of a pBook, presumably because printing costs are lower. But this devalues the worth of the writer’s time, in the first place, then all of the people involved in its production, marketing and publicity.
So at the moment I’d say that I agree with you, especially in the realm of eBooks at the moment: there needs to be a bottom line, and if there is no centralised bureaucracy that can enforce this, then it’s up to publishers. Otherwise, if readers get
The costs are not just about printing, though. I mean, the materials are relatively low cost anyway. Most of the production costs are carried over to ebooks, as long as you replace the cost of raw materials with that of DRM. They’re not as inexpensive to produce as people seem to think. It’s more than just a matter of converting a word file into an epub document using adobe or something.
In terms of a bottom line, what do you know about the agency model? This is something that has been causing a lot of controversy in the UK at the moment with the release of the iPad, and I imagine it’s the same in Aus…
I don’t think that’s quite true, is it, that materials are relatively low cost? I’d hazard a guess that printing is at least a third of the cost of producing a book. I’ll find out. Whatever it is, it’s unlikely that ePub conversion costs will ever exceed traditional print costs. Places are charging like twenty five bucks per book.
And the trouble with DRM seems to be that it’s introduced by the seller, at the point of sale – the technology is not controlled by publishers, and it concerns me that we just have to trust the myriad new eDistros will do the right thing and not email the file to all their buddies for mates rates. And it’s not like you can limit this by sending a controlled number of copies, as with pBooks. It may grow difficult to hold sellers to account …
You might have read these:
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/ebooks/amazons_999_ebook_price_point_attacked_as_predatory_pricing_146225.asp
http://gizmodo.com/5464742/the-999-ebook-is-dead-third-major-publisher-hachette-dumps-on-amazon
I caught their headlines the other day, and just noticed a bit in there about the agency model, which is new to me. I’ll check it out. My gut reaction is that this is a win – that someone has to make a stand, lest literature be crippled by unsympathetic market forces.
This makes me do the thing where I swim in circles wondering whether I’m left or right wing, because the sort of regulation you’re proposing is pretty heavy, and would be a bureaucratic nightmare, and would cop a lot of flak, with authors and publishers getting pissed off left, right and centre that the benchmark is too low. Because it’s always going to be too low, right – so few authors make enough from their work, and so many publishers are always scrapping the barrel.
But I like the idea, especially when I consider that eBooks are going out there at under AU$2, which, yeah, drastically denigrates the actual commercial worth of just the object, let alone the cultural worth of the ideas it contains. But remainder prices are not a new phenomenon, and I suspect that’s what a lot of these books are – books that would otherwise get pulped.
It seems that people are generally running out eBooks at approximately a third of the price of a pBook, presumably because printing costs are lower. But this devalues the worth of the writer’s time, in the first place, then all of the people involved in its production, marketing and publicity.
So at the moment I’d say that I agree with you, especially in the realm of eBooks at the moment: there needs to be a bottom line, and if there is no centralised bureaucracy that can enforce this, then it’s up to publishers. Otherwise, if readers get
@Amy, I don’t know who/what you are, but your spamming method is intriguing. *waves* Thanks for inadvertently bringing my attention to the fact I trailed off in my own comment, without so much as an ellipsis. Well done!
For what it’s worth, Amy, my loving spam bot, I think I was going to say something like ‘if readers get used to buying books for under two dollars, things are gonna get hairy for everyone involved in their production and distribution’.
You’re a robot, go in there and jack up all the prices!