Once upon a time I used to take a free weekend afternoon and do a grand circuit of Manhattan bookstores, up 2nd Ave. maybe stopping at Black Orchid mystery store if it was open, two Barnes & Nobles on E. 86th St., thru Central Park, 2 B&Ns on Broadway on the Upper West Side, then the Borders on Columbus Circle and the Borders on Park Ave.
That was a long time ago!
Now, it's been months and months and months since I've been to the mega-B&N on E. 86th that replaced two smaller and inadequate locations. But I needed to buy three books by a couple published authors who are talking to us, I decided to buy them the old-fashioned way, the B&N was supposed to have all three.
So up 2nd Avenue I went, for the first time in ages.
Sadly, the United Artists Gemini at 2nd Ave. and 64th St. closed quietly in the fall, there's a "for lease" sign touting the "unique footprint" for retail. According to Cinema Treasures, the theatre opened as the Columbia in 1971, doesn't say exactly when it got the name of the Gemini, which is much more appropriate for a twin theatre. It had two auditoriums, an upstairs with stadium seating in the rear section and a downstairs, both with around 400 seats and pretty good-size screens. More important, unlike some other theatres of that vintage like the Coronet, which had stiff high-back seats and no leg room and was torture to sit in, the Gemini had luxurious seating rich with leg room. It was a very comfortable place to see a movie.
I first went to the Gemini in February 1986. Looking at the release date of the movie FX and thinking on the timing, I think there's a very good chance that I went there following one of my interviews at Scott Meredith during my job hunt after college, I don't think it was a stop after work in my early days on the job. So there's some sentimentality just on that account. But it wasn't the only movie I saw at the Gemini over the years. Dirty Dancing was probably the favorite movie that I saw there, others include The End of the Affair, Total Recall, The End of the Affair, Adaptation, Closer, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and more.
The theatre was in a stand-alone building. The air rights were sold, and as part of the deal for building atop of the theatre, a small 3rd screen was added upstairs. The Gemini wasn't a good name for a three-screen theatre, but shall we say that going from The Gemini to the UA 64th and 2nd is not change for the better? What an awful name for a movie theatre.
With changing times, this neighborhood house that often had sell-out shows became very quiet, even though the Upper East Side is horribly underscreened. I hardly went to the theatre at all in recent years, even though it was close by. There was almost always a nicer place to go to see a movie in Manhattan, even though the Gemini was nice, there were nicer. Also, Regal charges a Manhattan surcharge when using their discount tickets, AMC does not, so it would cost more to go to the Gemini.
The last movie I saw at the Gemini was Rock of Ages.
I keep track in my head of movie screens that remain intact from when I moved to NYC in 1986, with the loss of the 2 original screens at the Gemini, we're down 2. (I think the others are 84th St. 6; Ziegfeld, original 3 at Lincoln Plaza, the Quad, IFC Ctr/Waverly #1, Cinema Village #1, the DW Griffith/Big Cinemas, Cinema 2, the Paris, the NY Twin/Beekman, the 57th St. Playhouse/DGA, or 22 in all.)
Moving onward, 2nd Avenue is a mess. As they build the 2nd Ave. subway, around half the blocks from 60th St. to 86th St. have pits for building the tunnel and stations. Businesses have closed in abundance where the construction blocks them from view. Progress!
I went in to the Upper East Side Fairway for the first time. This is where one of the two B&Ns used to be, in shared retail space with a Circuit City. Fairway has taken over both spaces, is using the ground floor and basement, and the upstairs space that the B&N used to fill is backroom space for the grocery store.
The B&N, well of course it had only two of the three books it was supposed to have, 2 copies of the 3rd book supposedly came in back in July but are nowhere to be found. It was very retro, checking a variety of wrong sections that the book might have been mis-shelved in before giving up on the idea of finding it. In the early days of JABberwocky when I visited bookstores often and it was truer than now that I make my money a nickel or quarter at a time when people buy a book, I used to fixate on missing copies like these a lot more than I do now. The joy of going to a Borders on Opening Day, and finding the two books of 70 of mine that were put in the horror or mystery section when they were supposed to be in SF. Sadly, I may end up having to buy an e-book for book #3.
They had a book group event in the store with 10 people, yet B&N won't offer Manhattan signings for major sf/f authors like Peter Brett because they claim they won't get crowds. I'm reasonably sure Peter Brett could get way more than 10 people to an event on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
It's interesting to ponder how the me of 10 years will think back on the me of today, the way the me of today thinks back on those Sunday afternoon bookstore tours of the Upper East and West Sides, and if in 20 years the movie theatres I go to all the time now will have fallen out of fashion the way the Gemini did.
Showing posts with label retailing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label retailing. Show all posts
Friday, January 11, 2013
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Irony at the Cash Register
So it's not all that long ago that we were told what a big mistake it was for Borders not to have invested more in the e-book reader business.
Now, after a confused holiday season where Publishers Weekly was running articles right after Black Friday telling us how wonderful the indies were doing with the Kobo and now runs an article to say "oops never mind" and where Barnes & Noble was touting its Black Friday success with the Nook and now blaming a drop in holiday sales on a huge drop in sales for the Nook, can we still say that the problem at Borders was failure to invest in an e-reader? Barnes & Noble doesn't have much to show yet but a lot of red ink or maybe saying that things would even be worse for the retail stores if it wasn't for the Nook, and it's hard to know if there's any way to monetize the business. Maybe e-readers aren't dead, but tablets are so much better and are now available at prices comparable to the earliest e-readers, not so much for the iPad but certainly tablets by other players that have a lot more resources to pour into the business than Barnes & Noble. Are e-readers any good these days? When I had a Kindle, it was better in the principle than in the actual experience. I've never looked back since getting an iPad. If the e-reader business becomes a commodity business of selling below $50 in order to compete with tablets, it's not a great business to be in.
I don't know if there's a direct connection between this and the investments in the Nook, but when it comes to physical books Barnes & Noble is now plagued by the same inconsistent selection as Borders was, even in its prime. Will a store have a partial selection of Nightside, Secret Histories and Ghost Finders books by Simon Green, or will it have all the Nightside, all the Secret Histories, all the Ghost Finders, a few of the Deathstalker books?? Will it have a core title like Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion that is in its third decade and outselling a lot of today's hot young things? Three Tanya Huff books or eight of them? It beats the hell out of me. It doesn't encourage people to go and buy books at their local Barnes & Noble instead of buying electronically. I don't buy the argument that since the physical bookstore chain can never compete with the wide selection of e-books it shouldn't even bother to try.
It was also a big mistake for Borders to have so many stores with such long leases, but that was always a bit deceptive. If Borders were doing better, having long leases on good locations would be a good thing. Barnes & Noble now has a different problem. By keeping a tighter leash on its real estate portfolio, it has a risk of losing too many of its best locations and not having a good way to replace them. Plenty of stores like the one in Union Station in DC or by Lincoln Center in Manhattan or in Reston VA or in University Village in Seattle that I'm reasonably sure were good locations and profitable ones that B&N would prefer to be in. But you can't pay top-line rents selling books.
For all of these reasons, I'm not bullish on Barnes & Noble right now. It's not going away tomorrow, or even in five years, I don't think. But it just seems to be on that path.
However, my biggest concern about the business is that the infrastructure for selling physical books will evaporate way sooner than the actual demand for physical books, and that this is by far the biggest threat to traditional publishing than the change to buying e-books.
I wrote this post on Sunday for later scheduling, and then Monday we saw a retweet from Tobias Buckell to this post by the co-publisher of Melville House, similar in theme but a little more passionate, I get hurt indirectly when the big chains screw up, he feels it first degree.
Now, after a confused holiday season where Publishers Weekly was running articles right after Black Friday telling us how wonderful the indies were doing with the Kobo and now runs an article to say "oops never mind" and where Barnes & Noble was touting its Black Friday success with the Nook and now blaming a drop in holiday sales on a huge drop in sales for the Nook, can we still say that the problem at Borders was failure to invest in an e-reader? Barnes & Noble doesn't have much to show yet but a lot of red ink or maybe saying that things would even be worse for the retail stores if it wasn't for the Nook, and it's hard to know if there's any way to monetize the business. Maybe e-readers aren't dead, but tablets are so much better and are now available at prices comparable to the earliest e-readers, not so much for the iPad but certainly tablets by other players that have a lot more resources to pour into the business than Barnes & Noble. Are e-readers any good these days? When I had a Kindle, it was better in the principle than in the actual experience. I've never looked back since getting an iPad. If the e-reader business becomes a commodity business of selling below $50 in order to compete with tablets, it's not a great business to be in.
I don't know if there's a direct connection between this and the investments in the Nook, but when it comes to physical books Barnes & Noble is now plagued by the same inconsistent selection as Borders was, even in its prime. Will a store have a partial selection of Nightside, Secret Histories and Ghost Finders books by Simon Green, or will it have all the Nightside, all the Secret Histories, all the Ghost Finders, a few of the Deathstalker books?? Will it have a core title like Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion that is in its third decade and outselling a lot of today's hot young things? Three Tanya Huff books or eight of them? It beats the hell out of me. It doesn't encourage people to go and buy books at their local Barnes & Noble instead of buying electronically. I don't buy the argument that since the physical bookstore chain can never compete with the wide selection of e-books it shouldn't even bother to try.
It was also a big mistake for Borders to have so many stores with such long leases, but that was always a bit deceptive. If Borders were doing better, having long leases on good locations would be a good thing. Barnes & Noble now has a different problem. By keeping a tighter leash on its real estate portfolio, it has a risk of losing too many of its best locations and not having a good way to replace them. Plenty of stores like the one in Union Station in DC or by Lincoln Center in Manhattan or in Reston VA or in University Village in Seattle that I'm reasonably sure were good locations and profitable ones that B&N would prefer to be in. But you can't pay top-line rents selling books.
For all of these reasons, I'm not bullish on Barnes & Noble right now. It's not going away tomorrow, or even in five years, I don't think. But it just seems to be on that path.
However, my biggest concern about the business is that the infrastructure for selling physical books will evaporate way sooner than the actual demand for physical books, and that this is by far the biggest threat to traditional publishing than the change to buying e-books.
I wrote this post on Sunday for later scheduling, and then Monday we saw a retweet from Tobias Buckell to this post by the co-publisher of Melville House, similar in theme but a little more passionate, I get hurt indirectly when the big chains screw up, he feels it first degree.
Monday, January 7, 2013
The World From Here
One topic which I covered in my 2012 review which I think deserves a little more attention is that of the global market for English language books.
As a quick primer, there are three basic kinds of publishing deals, most all deals fall into one or the three categories:
North American. You give the publisher the right to publish the book in English in the US and Canada. You keep rights to the British Commonwealth (Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, different definitions after that which can range from a couple dozen to several dozen countries). The world outside of North America and the British Commonwealth is something called the "Open Market" where everyone can distribute a book on a non-exclusive basis, mostly countries where English isn't a first language, like continental Europe or Brazil or Russia.
World English: You give the publisher the right to sell the book everywhere throughout the world in English, the publisher can either license Commonwealth rights to a British publisher or distribute its own edition. You keep the right to sell the book in translation.
World: Your publisher can sell the book everywhere in any language, either in its own editions or in licensed editions.
This post talks about World English and North American deals.
To put things into historical perspective, some of today's largest publishing companies have roots that go back well before the first flight by the Wright Brothers. If we look at HarperCollins, the earliest ancestor company founded by the Harper Bros. in the US was founded in 1817, and William Collins was founded in 1819. Bertelsmann was founded in 1835, the main Random House it owns in the US was founded in 1925, around the same time as Simon & Schuster. If you go back all that way, it is easy to understand the clear business rational for having separate publishers. Books had to go by boat. The British still had extensive colonies with preferred trading arrangements.
As the years have gone by, the world has become smaller.
And certainly, for many decades, the distinctive US and UK markets have been a bit leaky. Under legal concepts like the "first sale doctrine," if I buy something I get to do with it as I please, so there's always been a so-called gray market, not just for books but for everything from toothpaste to high tech gizmos, where I can buy a product in the US or UK or Kenya or Thailand and then re-sell it where I please. Many companies may have contracts with their distributors that limit these rights under first sale doctrine, governments may put some restrictions on, but things will leak. In Australia, a British publisher can't claim the market exclusively if it fails to make its edition available in Australia within a couple months of first publication, and that takes precedence over a pubishing agreement. In publishing as in most copyright businesses, the trade is one way, the US sends a lot more of its books into the UK than the UK sends to us.
Because there was, is and always will be leakage. publishers in the US and UK on both ends of a split rights situation, publishers have always had to have a certain realpolitik in approaching violations of territorial exclusivity. Other than for really really big books we generally look the other way. I don't come back from a trip to London with a long list of US editions that are on sale at Forbidden Planet in London even though the US publisher doesn't have rights to sell in the UK.
But the world keeps getting smaller, and every so often, tension flares up between publishers that feel that the best solution to the shrinking world is to obtain World English rights at minimum and sell their books globally, and between authors and agents who would still prefer to have the ability to do separate licenses. Several years ago, there was a short-lived kerfuffle that didn't amount to much, as most of these things don't usually amount to much, when the European trading market became an open one, so someone could buy the US edition legally in Germany and not have legal restrictions on sending that US edition into the UK.
The world continues to shrink. The e-book as an example isn't as easily respectful of national borders.
And there is an interplay between all of these things.
As an example, once upon a time if a British publisher wanted to protect its British market, it could ask local British booksellers not to import the US edition and expect to have this respected. Now, Amazon is a bit more likely to push back on the idea that it can buy a US book for its subsidiary in Luxembourg where it hides all its European profits for lower tax rates, and that is is perfectly able to sell that book in the UK thanks to the European free trade zone.
And readers with their e-gadgets can have this expectation that they should be able to buy an e-book whenever and wherever they please, and can quickly e-mail their displeasure when they are kept from their zen.
And most of the major publishers are divisions of UK, German or French publishing conglomerates that have major operations in many parts of the English speaking world.
So once again there is this sense that the global imperative is to buy World English rights to things.
I'm still not fond of the idea. I've kicked the tires on it, and I still don't think it's the best thing for the author.
The publishers are right about one thing, that there are lost sales in the global e-book market when the US publisher doesn't have rights to sell an e-book in however many dozens of countries its contract defines as the British Commonwealth. And it's much easier for readers to go on the internet and e-mail publishers and authors and do blog posts and tweet and etc. etc. their immense dissatisfaction that they are not able to buy some book they would very much like to buy.
Of course if the author is able to also sell the book to a UK publisher, then there' s somebody pretty much everywhere to sell an English language e-book. But the UK market is much smaller than the US market, there's never a place or way that every book published in the US can find a UK publisher.
And even without a UK publisher, the author now has the ability to publish an e-book edition, it's just a question of uploading a file and checking off the right country boxes. However, you can't use the US cover art, necessarily. You need to have the final copy-edited file. There are obstacles like that, and since the UK market is so much smaller, if you aren't pretty certain you'll actually sell your book in quantity outside of North America, it might not be worthwhile. Your US publisher has the electronic file, has rights to the cover art, it can sell the e-book globally more easily.
But...
To the extent that there will be "gray market" distribution or leakage of your book, most of that will happen whether or not you've sold anyone British rights. i.e., even if you don't sell UK rights to your US publisher, Forbidden Planet and Amazon and Waterstones will still all import your book if they are inclined to do so, actively distributing US books into the UK isn't usually something that the US publishers work on, you aren't likely to lose many print sales because you've chosen not to sell World English rights and haven't then found a UK publisher. E-book sales yes, print no, you might hear from some people who feel they have a constitutional right to buy and e-book instead of a print sale but won't from the people who just quietly go and buy the print edition which is easy enough to buy when they see it's not available as an e-book.
In the UK, major retail outlets like WH Smiths, which operates in almost every airplane and train station and also has larger stores on the "High Street" in local towns, doesn't really carry US editions, the mass marketers like the supermarkets don't, Waterstones carries fewer imports than it once did. If you want to really cover the UK market you kind of still need a UK publisher to places sales calls on all of these UK accounts.
It's the same in Australia, even when there's no legal restriction on importing the US edition the major retailers still take their lead from what the British publishers can supply.
And even in this day and age of the internet, a lot of sales are still driven by local promotion and publicity. Yes, there are websites and blogs that can sell lots and lots of copies, more than the NY Times Book Review ever could do, but not everyone in the world reads every website. So a book like Myke Cole's CONTROL POINT has a lot more reviews in the UK because it has a UK publisher Headline behind it, and sold a lot more copies in part because Headline arranged for the book to have decent carriage at WH Smiths. On balance, I believe there is still enough of an upside to Myke Cole to have an actual UK publisher that it makes up for some other client we have who is losing some UK e-book sales because there isn't a UK publisher.
(The above may come as a surprise to some UK publishers, who are often resistant to buying books for the UK after their US publication because they are so entirely sure that all of the UK readers who might want will have purchased the imported edition from the US. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of imported copies have sold, the UK publishers can for most books squeeze out far more sales than that if they apply themselves to it.)
The example above might suggest that an author is better off not risking that they will be the author who loses e-book sales so that Myke Cole can sell extra copies. This is a conflict that agents like to ignore but which is very real, sometimes agents have to ask clients to "take one for the team," and do things that may hurt them but which are of overall benefit to published authors as a class.
However, in this case there are other factors that an author has to consider. As an example, if you sell World English rights, is the publisher offering a higher copies sold or dollars earned threshold for determining if a book is in print than when it buys just North American rights? Will you have a more difficult time ever getting a reversion of rights in either territory or both because you have sold World English? Do you have an assurance that you will get a full UK royalty on copies sold in the UK market, or will the publisher claim a UK publication by an affiliated company is a license? If the UK copies sold are to be sold under an export royalty that is generally less than full royalty, will there be any sleight of hand in the price paid from the UK publisher to the US publisher?
And what about packaging and marketing and promotion and publicity, where there are still differences (Myke Cole has different covers) and still some benefit to the local touch in the local markets.
Considering that many US books will sell only several hundred copies in the UK, you have to be convinced that the UK e-book market is a lot more significant than it often will be in order to justify the risks inherent in doing World English rights against the rewards.
To take this one step further, if we are agreed that it is still important to have separate publishers in the US and the UK, the question becomes "will I, my agent, or my US publisher have the best chance of finding a UK publisher for my book." If you believe that the US publisher has the best chance of doing this, then by all means, sell the publisher World English or even World rights. An agent that isn't trying very hard to sell these rights isn't helping anyone by keeping those rights for you/the agent to sell.
It may not surprise you to know that I think, in general, that I will be more dedicated over time in campaigning to sell UK rights than the publisher will be.
I have tried my best to consider in an objective manner if it's time to reconsider my reluctance to do World English deals because of the ways the world has changed. I'm not unaware of those changes, not unaware of the difficulty in separating out the UK and US markets as the world gets smaller and the e-book market develops. But I don't think the world has changed, at least not yet. to where we'd all be better off selling World English rights to things.
As a quick primer, there are three basic kinds of publishing deals, most all deals fall into one or the three categories:
North American. You give the publisher the right to publish the book in English in the US and Canada. You keep rights to the British Commonwealth (Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, different definitions after that which can range from a couple dozen to several dozen countries). The world outside of North America and the British Commonwealth is something called the "Open Market" where everyone can distribute a book on a non-exclusive basis, mostly countries where English isn't a first language, like continental Europe or Brazil or Russia.
World English: You give the publisher the right to sell the book everywhere throughout the world in English, the publisher can either license Commonwealth rights to a British publisher or distribute its own edition. You keep the right to sell the book in translation.
World: Your publisher can sell the book everywhere in any language, either in its own editions or in licensed editions.
This post talks about World English and North American deals.
To put things into historical perspective, some of today's largest publishing companies have roots that go back well before the first flight by the Wright Brothers. If we look at HarperCollins, the earliest ancestor company founded by the Harper Bros. in the US was founded in 1817, and William Collins was founded in 1819. Bertelsmann was founded in 1835, the main Random House it owns in the US was founded in 1925, around the same time as Simon & Schuster. If you go back all that way, it is easy to understand the clear business rational for having separate publishers. Books had to go by boat. The British still had extensive colonies with preferred trading arrangements.
As the years have gone by, the world has become smaller.
And certainly, for many decades, the distinctive US and UK markets have been a bit leaky. Under legal concepts like the "first sale doctrine," if I buy something I get to do with it as I please, so there's always been a so-called gray market, not just for books but for everything from toothpaste to high tech gizmos, where I can buy a product in the US or UK or Kenya or Thailand and then re-sell it where I please. Many companies may have contracts with their distributors that limit these rights under first sale doctrine, governments may put some restrictions on, but things will leak. In Australia, a British publisher can't claim the market exclusively if it fails to make its edition available in Australia within a couple months of first publication, and that takes precedence over a pubishing agreement. In publishing as in most copyright businesses, the trade is one way, the US sends a lot more of its books into the UK than the UK sends to us.
Because there was, is and always will be leakage. publishers in the US and UK on both ends of a split rights situation, publishers have always had to have a certain realpolitik in approaching violations of territorial exclusivity. Other than for really really big books we generally look the other way. I don't come back from a trip to London with a long list of US editions that are on sale at Forbidden Planet in London even though the US publisher doesn't have rights to sell in the UK.
But the world keeps getting smaller, and every so often, tension flares up between publishers that feel that the best solution to the shrinking world is to obtain World English rights at minimum and sell their books globally, and between authors and agents who would still prefer to have the ability to do separate licenses. Several years ago, there was a short-lived kerfuffle that didn't amount to much, as most of these things don't usually amount to much, when the European trading market became an open one, so someone could buy the US edition legally in Germany and not have legal restrictions on sending that US edition into the UK.
The world continues to shrink. The e-book as an example isn't as easily respectful of national borders.
And there is an interplay between all of these things.
As an example, once upon a time if a British publisher wanted to protect its British market, it could ask local British booksellers not to import the US edition and expect to have this respected. Now, Amazon is a bit more likely to push back on the idea that it can buy a US book for its subsidiary in Luxembourg where it hides all its European profits for lower tax rates, and that is is perfectly able to sell that book in the UK thanks to the European free trade zone.
And readers with their e-gadgets can have this expectation that they should be able to buy an e-book whenever and wherever they please, and can quickly e-mail their displeasure when they are kept from their zen.
And most of the major publishers are divisions of UK, German or French publishing conglomerates that have major operations in many parts of the English speaking world.
So once again there is this sense that the global imperative is to buy World English rights to things.
I'm still not fond of the idea. I've kicked the tires on it, and I still don't think it's the best thing for the author.
The publishers are right about one thing, that there are lost sales in the global e-book market when the US publisher doesn't have rights to sell an e-book in however many dozens of countries its contract defines as the British Commonwealth. And it's much easier for readers to go on the internet and e-mail publishers and authors and do blog posts and tweet and etc. etc. their immense dissatisfaction that they are not able to buy some book they would very much like to buy.
Of course if the author is able to also sell the book to a UK publisher, then there' s somebody pretty much everywhere to sell an English language e-book. But the UK market is much smaller than the US market, there's never a place or way that every book published in the US can find a UK publisher.
And even without a UK publisher, the author now has the ability to publish an e-book edition, it's just a question of uploading a file and checking off the right country boxes. However, you can't use the US cover art, necessarily. You need to have the final copy-edited file. There are obstacles like that, and since the UK market is so much smaller, if you aren't pretty certain you'll actually sell your book in quantity outside of North America, it might not be worthwhile. Your US publisher has the electronic file, has rights to the cover art, it can sell the e-book globally more easily.
But...
To the extent that there will be "gray market" distribution or leakage of your book, most of that will happen whether or not you've sold anyone British rights. i.e., even if you don't sell UK rights to your US publisher, Forbidden Planet and Amazon and Waterstones will still all import your book if they are inclined to do so, actively distributing US books into the UK isn't usually something that the US publishers work on, you aren't likely to lose many print sales because you've chosen not to sell World English rights and haven't then found a UK publisher. E-book sales yes, print no, you might hear from some people who feel they have a constitutional right to buy and e-book instead of a print sale but won't from the people who just quietly go and buy the print edition which is easy enough to buy when they see it's not available as an e-book.
In the UK, major retail outlets like WH Smiths, which operates in almost every airplane and train station and also has larger stores on the "High Street" in local towns, doesn't really carry US editions, the mass marketers like the supermarkets don't, Waterstones carries fewer imports than it once did. If you want to really cover the UK market you kind of still need a UK publisher to places sales calls on all of these UK accounts.
It's the same in Australia, even when there's no legal restriction on importing the US edition the major retailers still take their lead from what the British publishers can supply.
And even in this day and age of the internet, a lot of sales are still driven by local promotion and publicity. Yes, there are websites and blogs that can sell lots and lots of copies, more than the NY Times Book Review ever could do, but not everyone in the world reads every website. So a book like Myke Cole's CONTROL POINT has a lot more reviews in the UK because it has a UK publisher Headline behind it, and sold a lot more copies in part because Headline arranged for the book to have decent carriage at WH Smiths. On balance, I believe there is still enough of an upside to Myke Cole to have an actual UK publisher that it makes up for some other client we have who is losing some UK e-book sales because there isn't a UK publisher.
(The above may come as a surprise to some UK publishers, who are often resistant to buying books for the UK after their US publication because they are so entirely sure that all of the UK readers who might want will have purchased the imported edition from the US. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of imported copies have sold, the UK publishers can for most books squeeze out far more sales than that if they apply themselves to it.)
The example above might suggest that an author is better off not risking that they will be the author who loses e-book sales so that Myke Cole can sell extra copies. This is a conflict that agents like to ignore but which is very real, sometimes agents have to ask clients to "take one for the team," and do things that may hurt them but which are of overall benefit to published authors as a class.
However, in this case there are other factors that an author has to consider. As an example, if you sell World English rights, is the publisher offering a higher copies sold or dollars earned threshold for determining if a book is in print than when it buys just North American rights? Will you have a more difficult time ever getting a reversion of rights in either territory or both because you have sold World English? Do you have an assurance that you will get a full UK royalty on copies sold in the UK market, or will the publisher claim a UK publication by an affiliated company is a license? If the UK copies sold are to be sold under an export royalty that is generally less than full royalty, will there be any sleight of hand in the price paid from the UK publisher to the US publisher?
And what about packaging and marketing and promotion and publicity, where there are still differences (Myke Cole has different covers) and still some benefit to the local touch in the local markets.
Considering that many US books will sell only several hundred copies in the UK, you have to be convinced that the UK e-book market is a lot more significant than it often will be in order to justify the risks inherent in doing World English rights against the rewards.
To take this one step further, if we are agreed that it is still important to have separate publishers in the US and the UK, the question becomes "will I, my agent, or my US publisher have the best chance of finding a UK publisher for my book." If you believe that the US publisher has the best chance of doing this, then by all means, sell the publisher World English or even World rights. An agent that isn't trying very hard to sell these rights isn't helping anyone by keeping those rights for you/the agent to sell.
It may not surprise you to know that I think, in general, that I will be more dedicated over time in campaigning to sell UK rights than the publisher will be.
I have tried my best to consider in an objective manner if it's time to reconsider my reluctance to do World English deals because of the ways the world has changed. I'm not unaware of those changes, not unaware of the difficulty in separating out the UK and US markets as the world gets smaller and the e-book market develops. But I don't think the world has changed, at least not yet. to where we'd all be better off selling World English rights to things.
Friday, October 5, 2012
Bragging Rights
Some time back I did a blog post about the controversial and eventually overturned settlement between Google, the Authors Guild, the major publishers and others about the Google project to scan zillions of books and make them available.
Read that post here. http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-settlement.html
This week, the major publishers settled their case with Google, you can read the Google press release about that settlement here. http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2012/10/publishers-and-google-reach-agreement.html
Just to say, I called this one.
The main part of the settlement here is that the publishers get Google's file for their use.
Which is exactly what I said was missing from the larger agreement.
If they had done that same thing three years ago for the broad settlement, our ebook program would have long ago had a lot more books, our clients would have been making a lot more money all along the way. Instead, the Authors Guikd is still spending how much money on who knows what in the case, while the publishers and Google have now recognized where the fairness is. Let Google do what it wants in search, so long as it lets you do what you want to sell your book.
Read that post here. http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-settlement.html
This week, the major publishers settled their case with Google, you can read the Google press release about that settlement here. http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2012/10/publishers-and-google-reach-agreement.html
Just to say, I called this one.
The main part of the settlement here is that the publishers get Google's file for their use.
Which is exactly what I said was missing from the larger agreement.
If they had done that same thing three years ago for the broad settlement, our ebook program would have long ago had a lot more books, our clients would have been making a lot more money all along the way. Instead, the Authors Guikd is still spending how much money on who knows what in the case, while the publishers and Google have now recognized where the fairness is. Let Google do what it wants in search, so long as it lets you do what you want to sell your book.
Monday, July 16, 2012
One of the anniversaries of the many deaths of Borders
I should be reading a manuscript but it's late and I'm tired and it's not the right conditions for work reading.
So instead, let's reflect on one year of life after Borders. Technically I could do in September, but this week marks the real end, the week when the liquidation became official, when the theory of the Borders bookstore gave way to the going out of business sale.
And it still sucks.
To tackle some good news first, the end of Borders wasn't the end of publishing as we know it. I don't know of any publishing company that went under because they were left holding a bag with a hole in the bottom of it. At least not yet. I'm also not aware of any publisher with cash flow issues where our receivables get kind of long in the tooth that's had its circumstances improve over the past year.
But that's about the extent of the good news, that the Borders bankruptcy wasn't the start of some fancy game of dominoes where we could watch them all merrily go falling one after the other after the other.
So I should be happy, right. The business I'm in took one of the biggest hits it's faced in my quarter century in publishing and it's muddling along without disaster in its wake.
But...
The same store sales figures at B&N have increased by a very small amount, considering the number of customers and book sales that were up for grab after the demise of Borders. There hasn't been any rush of bookstores to fill the vacuums or the bookselling deserts left behind in Borders' wake. Some of this is because a lot of the sales could move to e-books, which are much more opaque to track still than print book sales, so it could be that the sales haven't gone so much as gone behind a curtain. But I still don't think of this as good news. One of my biggest worries is that the outlets for selling print books will disappear faster than the appetite for print books.
I can't go to bookstores any more. I used to spend a huge chunk of my life visiting bookstores, and I loved doing it. I felt a little empty when Borders was around that life and business had gotten busier to where I wasn't able to spend as much time visiting bookstores as I'd liked. But it turns out that was because I could visit Borders. Even in its diminished struggling state, even after all the management missteps and the remodels and everything else Borders did to make their stores less enticing places to shop, Borders had better bookstores. A better curated selection. When I could go to a Barnes & Noble and play compare & contrast I could tolerate going to Barnes & Noble. When the only bookstore option I had was to go to a Barnes & Noble, I couldn't bare to do it. Especially because B&N hasn't even been B&N any more. Once upon a time it used to be that Borders were the more interesting and sometimes better and sometimes worse stores while B&N was the boring consistent chain that you could count on to have a core selection from store to store. Now, the difference between the good and the bad B&N is as extravagantly bad as it used to be at Borders, with bad stores having half the JABberwocky title count of good ones and not having core selections like the complete Lost Fleet series or the complete Nightside series. By and large, I just get depressed.
I still drag myself into a B&N every once in a while, maybe tomorrow I'll drag myself in to the one on 46th and 5th since I have to meet a friend a couple blocks away. But there isn't any joy to me in visiting bookstores. It's all just work now.
And there aren't choices. Most indies have crappy sf/fantasy sections and don't give me much joy. The only place where people can go and buy a book in an old fashioned bookstore is a depressing boring chain that doesn't even offer the benefits of consistency the way it once did.
I still think of Borders when I think of the world. When the Silver Line on the Washington Metro starts running in very late 2013, that will be the line that was going to allow me get to the Borders in Tysons Corner more often. If they ever build a streetcar line down Columbia Pike in suburban DC, that will be the streetcar line that would have made visits to the Borders in Baileys Crossroads much easier. When I head to Chicago for WorldCon, this will be the WorldCon that won't finally give me a chance to get down to the Borders on Beverly in the far South of Chicago. I don't see dead people, I see the ghostly apparitions of the Borders that were.
Based on the timing of the first round of liquidation sales, I knew that the most likely last week for Borders would be the week I was in St. Louis for Bouchercon, and that this would make it very difficult to be the last person, turning off the lights, in a Borders somewhere. This proved to be correct. The only Borders accessible by transit from St. Louis was already closed, the signs already taken down by the landlord. The idea of taking a car service out to the suburbs was a theoretical one, the actual closing time for a store on the last day of business was a moving target. One thing to take the car if you knew you could get there at 8pm and hang around until 9, another when nobody could really say if the store would close at 2pm or 5pm or 8pm.
This still depresses me.
Part of me says it's just as well. It would have been horribly depressing going to a Borders and seeing the closed off sections of the store, the last dregs of the liquidation sale, the people scrounging around the dregs for some final bargain at 90% off. It would have been awful and sad.
But when a loved one dies, by and large you still feel that urge to be at the bedside to give your loved one a proper send-off.
And like a loved one that died after a long illness, the best memories I have of Borders don't date back to the days closest to its death. They date back to the mid and late 1990s, the earliest years of this century. The Borders that was still good enough that I could spend a day in 2002 traipsing by BART and bus and foot to the Borders in San Ramon and the Borders in Pleasanton and the Borders in Fremont and the Borders in Emeryville and feel like that was a really really wonderful way to spend a day and see the world one Borders at a time. By 2011, if I did a day like that it was because that was the kind of thing I did, because it connected me to that day in 2002.
But yes, on balance, I wish I had been at the bedside when the lights went out.
As it was, though I hoped maybe it wouldn't be, I kind of knew that my last visit to a Borders the week before the very very end had all of the depressing aspects of being at the bedside without actually being there. It was a struggle to find in the depleted selection that book that might be the last book I actually purchased for pleasure at a Borders. The one good thing was that it was the closest bookstore to my hometown, at the successor mall to the one that once had a Book & Record store, and later a B. Dalton.
But it sucks, it totally totally sucks.
It's a year now since we knew there'd be no Borders, since it became apparent that the white knight to try and save some semblance of the chain wasn't going to materialize.
And it sucks.
There are two other posts that I could do some day. One is the optimistic one, where I can talk about how recent months are showing how e-books and the internet really can help people find an author in a better and nicer way than the old-fashioned bookstore and the old-fashioned review outlets. Take that, NY Times Book Review! Who needs to worry about all the newspaper book review sections that don't exist any more when we have iO9.
Then there's the depressing post, about the total market failure of indie bookstores that don't care, publishers that don't help them, and which I'm supposed to love because why? and love the publishers because why?
Maybe some day.
So instead, let's reflect on one year of life after Borders. Technically I could do in September, but this week marks the real end, the week when the liquidation became official, when the theory of the Borders bookstore gave way to the going out of business sale.
And it still sucks.
To tackle some good news first, the end of Borders wasn't the end of publishing as we know it. I don't know of any publishing company that went under because they were left holding a bag with a hole in the bottom of it. At least not yet. I'm also not aware of any publisher with cash flow issues where our receivables get kind of long in the tooth that's had its circumstances improve over the past year.
But that's about the extent of the good news, that the Borders bankruptcy wasn't the start of some fancy game of dominoes where we could watch them all merrily go falling one after the other after the other.
So I should be happy, right. The business I'm in took one of the biggest hits it's faced in my quarter century in publishing and it's muddling along without disaster in its wake.
But...
The same store sales figures at B&N have increased by a very small amount, considering the number of customers and book sales that were up for grab after the demise of Borders. There hasn't been any rush of bookstores to fill the vacuums or the bookselling deserts left behind in Borders' wake. Some of this is because a lot of the sales could move to e-books, which are much more opaque to track still than print book sales, so it could be that the sales haven't gone so much as gone behind a curtain. But I still don't think of this as good news. One of my biggest worries is that the outlets for selling print books will disappear faster than the appetite for print books.
I can't go to bookstores any more. I used to spend a huge chunk of my life visiting bookstores, and I loved doing it. I felt a little empty when Borders was around that life and business had gotten busier to where I wasn't able to spend as much time visiting bookstores as I'd liked. But it turns out that was because I could visit Borders. Even in its diminished struggling state, even after all the management missteps and the remodels and everything else Borders did to make their stores less enticing places to shop, Borders had better bookstores. A better curated selection. When I could go to a Barnes & Noble and play compare & contrast I could tolerate going to Barnes & Noble. When the only bookstore option I had was to go to a Barnes & Noble, I couldn't bare to do it. Especially because B&N hasn't even been B&N any more. Once upon a time it used to be that Borders were the more interesting and sometimes better and sometimes worse stores while B&N was the boring consistent chain that you could count on to have a core selection from store to store. Now, the difference between the good and the bad B&N is as extravagantly bad as it used to be at Borders, with bad stores having half the JABberwocky title count of good ones and not having core selections like the complete Lost Fleet series or the complete Nightside series. By and large, I just get depressed.
I still drag myself into a B&N every once in a while, maybe tomorrow I'll drag myself in to the one on 46th and 5th since I have to meet a friend a couple blocks away. But there isn't any joy to me in visiting bookstores. It's all just work now.
And there aren't choices. Most indies have crappy sf/fantasy sections and don't give me much joy. The only place where people can go and buy a book in an old fashioned bookstore is a depressing boring chain that doesn't even offer the benefits of consistency the way it once did.
I still think of Borders when I think of the world. When the Silver Line on the Washington Metro starts running in very late 2013, that will be the line that was going to allow me get to the Borders in Tysons Corner more often. If they ever build a streetcar line down Columbia Pike in suburban DC, that will be the streetcar line that would have made visits to the Borders in Baileys Crossroads much easier. When I head to Chicago for WorldCon, this will be the WorldCon that won't finally give me a chance to get down to the Borders on Beverly in the far South of Chicago. I don't see dead people, I see the ghostly apparitions of the Borders that were.
Based on the timing of the first round of liquidation sales, I knew that the most likely last week for Borders would be the week I was in St. Louis for Bouchercon, and that this would make it very difficult to be the last person, turning off the lights, in a Borders somewhere. This proved to be correct. The only Borders accessible by transit from St. Louis was already closed, the signs already taken down by the landlord. The idea of taking a car service out to the suburbs was a theoretical one, the actual closing time for a store on the last day of business was a moving target. One thing to take the car if you knew you could get there at 8pm and hang around until 9, another when nobody could really say if the store would close at 2pm or 5pm or 8pm.
This still depresses me.
Part of me says it's just as well. It would have been horribly depressing going to a Borders and seeing the closed off sections of the store, the last dregs of the liquidation sale, the people scrounging around the dregs for some final bargain at 90% off. It would have been awful and sad.
But when a loved one dies, by and large you still feel that urge to be at the bedside to give your loved one a proper send-off.
And like a loved one that died after a long illness, the best memories I have of Borders don't date back to the days closest to its death. They date back to the mid and late 1990s, the earliest years of this century. The Borders that was still good enough that I could spend a day in 2002 traipsing by BART and bus and foot to the Borders in San Ramon and the Borders in Pleasanton and the Borders in Fremont and the Borders in Emeryville and feel like that was a really really wonderful way to spend a day and see the world one Borders at a time. By 2011, if I did a day like that it was because that was the kind of thing I did, because it connected me to that day in 2002.
But yes, on balance, I wish I had been at the bedside when the lights went out.
As it was, though I hoped maybe it wouldn't be, I kind of knew that my last visit to a Borders the week before the very very end had all of the depressing aspects of being at the bedside without actually being there. It was a struggle to find in the depleted selection that book that might be the last book I actually purchased for pleasure at a Borders. The one good thing was that it was the closest bookstore to my hometown, at the successor mall to the one that once had a Book & Record store, and later a B. Dalton.
But it sucks, it totally totally sucks.
It's a year now since we knew there'd be no Borders, since it became apparent that the white knight to try and save some semblance of the chain wasn't going to materialize.
And it sucks.
There are two other posts that I could do some day. One is the optimistic one, where I can talk about how recent months are showing how e-books and the internet really can help people find an author in a better and nicer way than the old-fashioned bookstore and the old-fashioned review outlets. Take that, NY Times Book Review! Who needs to worry about all the newspaper book review sections that don't exist any more when we have iO9.
Then there's the depressing post, about the total market failure of indie bookstores that don't care, publishers that don't help them, and which I'm supposed to love because why? and love the publishers because why?
Maybe some day.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Do The Math
So what do e-books mean for John Taylor and his bride, Suzie?
Penguin is selling an e-book of The Bride Wore Black Leather for $12.99, and the hardcover cover price is $25.95. These prices are not unusual.
The typical royalty rate from a major publisher on an e-book is 25% of net receipts, and the typical publisher share of the e-book price is 70%. So 70% of $12.99 means around $9 going to the publisher, and around $2.25 going to the author.
The typical author royalty rate for a hardcover with a big publisher is between 10 and 15%, we take the middle tier on that at 12.5%, and the author gets around $3.25.
Hence, every time somebody trades from buying a hardcover of Bride Wore Black Leather to buying an e-book, the income to Simon Green drops from $3.25 to $2.25.
This isn't good news, if you are Simon Green!
HOWEVER...
For A Hard Day's Knight, now in mass market, both the e-book and the paperback are $7.99.
Let's do some more more math.
Typical royalty of 8% on the paperback, around $.64 on each paperback sale.
Same math formula for the e-book, list price x .7 to the publisher x .25 to the author. That's $1.40.
Every time an e-book is sold instead of a mass market, the author gains $.75.
I'm using the Nightside books as the example here, but the math would be similar for pretty much any set of hardback and paperback books coming from every major publisher. For a very successful author, the hardcover math is much worse, you're probably trading down from a 15% royalty and a higher hardcover cover price, and losing closer to $2 every time out. And gaining less on mass market sales, where many top bestselling authors might get a higher royalty rate. For a less successful author, the hardcover royalty might be only 10%, and the loss on the e-book trade is reduced. But maybe you're getting only a 6% royalty on your paperback, so your gain as readers trade from e-book to paperback may be even bigger.
Interestingly enough, then, at current industry standard royalty rates, the less successful authors might be better off -- way better off, even, than the most successful authors. You can't say for sure, that's for sure, you have to start doing fancy calculations at all different kinds of permutations of trade-offs to figure out 100% for sure if a given author is better off or worse off, but the math certainly shows that an author with huge hardcover sales to be turned into e-book sales has a lot more lost royalty potential than the author who's being published only in mass market.
Hmmm.
From the publisher standpoint...
You take a $26 hardcover, the publisher may get around $12.50 in revenue back from that. Has to pay the author $3.25, and the gross revenue after royalty expense is $9.25. For the e-book the gross revenue is $12.99 x .7 x .75, or around $6.80 if the e-book is priced at $12.99, $5.25 if the e-book is priced at $9.99. The publisher's gross revenue after royalty expense is clearly way less -- way way way way less -- for the e-book.
Hmmm, we're all sitting around thinking that the publisher is getting rich off of e-books.
That said, we must keep in mind that the hardcover book has more hard cash expenses to it. The unit cost might be $2. I'm going to assume that two-thirds of the books that are printed actually end up selling. So that's $18.50 in revenue after royalty expense for two books, less maybe $6 for the actual physical manufacturing costs of three books, less a little bit more for the freight and the warehouse expenses and other hard costs of a physical book. So that ends up being maybe $6 per book. So for a $12.99 e-book, it's kind of looking like the e-book is $12.99 instead of $9.99 for a reason, the $11.99-12.99 price point is about where the publisher can make as much money per book as on the hardcover, before all the overhead and other costs associated with the book itself -- the cover artist, the copy-editor, the office rent, the salaries for the editors and everyone else hanging around the office. At $9.99, the publisher is taking a real revenue hit from people buying e-books instead of hardcovers, even after taking account of the hard cash expenses that go along with the physical book, but not the e-book.
Bottom line here, on hardcover books, the move to e-books isn't helping publishers very much, if at all.
But on mass markets, the publisher may get $3.50 on a $7.99 paperback, have a royalty expense of $.65, and hard cash expenses for the physical book of $.80 or $1. Let's again assume three books printed for every two sold, that's $7.20 in revenue for selling two books less $1.30 royalty expense less, let's say, $2.70 in hard cash costs. That's around $1.60 per book before overhead. For the e-book at $7.99, it's $7.99 x .7 x .75 = $4.20 !!!
So unless my math is wrong, publishers are doing rather nicely when people trade from mass market to e-book sales, and the author is doing a little bit better off but nowhere near as better off here as the publisher is doing.
Again, there are myriad other factors that can go into this, this is just rough sketching, the unit costs for a mass market book from a 100,000 copy first printing will be vastly less than for a mass market with a 15,000 copy first printing, and that all by itself can make this math look a lot different from book to book.
To be honest, I'm so astonished at how much the math favors the publishers on trading from mass market to e-book that I'm thinking I've got to be getting something entirely wrong, the publishers can't really be doing that well on the mass market, can they?
Now, if you are an author with a track record, the most important lesson in all of this is that you can't determine the appropriate advance for your book by looking at your royalty statement. You might be losing royalties big time on your hardcover sales, but the publisher isn't losing per-unit profit the same way you're losing royalties. You might be gaining royalties on the paperback vs e-book side, but the publisher is probably gaining even more.
So it's like the title of this post says -- Do The Math. You or your agent need to try and grope your way toward looking at the P&L (profit and loss) statement for your book, not the royalty statement. Your numbers for that will never be like the publisher's, because all the publishers have different ways of allocating overhead and other unique factors they won't share with you, but you can rough something out by looking at your previous royalty statements and looking not at royalties earned but at copies shipped vs. sold and e-book copies sold and the expenses that go along with each.
The second thing to ponder here ... what do these numbers suggest regarding the legitimacy of 25% of net proceeds as an appropriate industry standard royalty rate for e-book sales.
Hard to say. If the publisher's trading more hardcover sales for e-book, then 25% of net seems to be kind of the right rate for keeping publisher unit profit at about the same level regardless of format. But 25% of net doesn't seem right when the publisher is trading more mass market sales. The other factor here, authors can easily self publish and get the full 70% of e-book cover price for themselves. Publishers have to justify what they're doing to be keeping three e-book dollars for every one that goes to the author when the authors can easily keep all of them. Because of that, and because of the revenue potential trading from mass market to e-book, I think the 25% has to move up some. Some.
Final quick thing, let's look at a trade paperback. $15-16 paperback, $12.99 e-book. So again $6.80 in gross revenue to the publisher on the e-book, after royalties. On the print side, two books bring in $14.50 or $15 in revenue, less $4.00 for hard physical costs for three books, less $2.40 royalties. That's $4 in gross revenue. Here, it looks like there's more revenue for both the author and the publisher, more equitably split between the two than on the mass market.
Penguin is selling an e-book of The Bride Wore Black Leather for $12.99, and the hardcover cover price is $25.95. These prices are not unusual.
The typical royalty rate from a major publisher on an e-book is 25% of net receipts, and the typical publisher share of the e-book price is 70%. So 70% of $12.99 means around $9 going to the publisher, and around $2.25 going to the author.
The typical author royalty rate for a hardcover with a big publisher is between 10 and 15%, we take the middle tier on that at 12.5%, and the author gets around $3.25.
Hence, every time somebody trades from buying a hardcover of Bride Wore Black Leather to buying an e-book, the income to Simon Green drops from $3.25 to $2.25.
This isn't good news, if you are Simon Green!
HOWEVER...
For A Hard Day's Knight, now in mass market, both the e-book and the paperback are $7.99.
Let's do some more more math.
Typical royalty of 8% on the paperback, around $.64 on each paperback sale.
Same math formula for the e-book, list price x .7 to the publisher x .25 to the author. That's $1.40.
Every time an e-book is sold instead of a mass market, the author gains $.75.
I'm using the Nightside books as the example here, but the math would be similar for pretty much any set of hardback and paperback books coming from every major publisher. For a very successful author, the hardcover math is much worse, you're probably trading down from a 15% royalty and a higher hardcover cover price, and losing closer to $2 every time out. And gaining less on mass market sales, where many top bestselling authors might get a higher royalty rate. For a less successful author, the hardcover royalty might be only 10%, and the loss on the e-book trade is reduced. But maybe you're getting only a 6% royalty on your paperback, so your gain as readers trade from e-book to paperback may be even bigger.
Interestingly enough, then, at current industry standard royalty rates, the less successful authors might be better off -- way better off, even, than the most successful authors. You can't say for sure, that's for sure, you have to start doing fancy calculations at all different kinds of permutations of trade-offs to figure out 100% for sure if a given author is better off or worse off, but the math certainly shows that an author with huge hardcover sales to be turned into e-book sales has a lot more lost royalty potential than the author who's being published only in mass market.
Hmmm.
From the publisher standpoint...
You take a $26 hardcover, the publisher may get around $12.50 in revenue back from that. Has to pay the author $3.25, and the gross revenue after royalty expense is $9.25. For the e-book the gross revenue is $12.99 x .7 x .75, or around $6.80 if the e-book is priced at $12.99, $5.25 if the e-book is priced at $9.99. The publisher's gross revenue after royalty expense is clearly way less -- way way way way less -- for the e-book.
Hmmm, we're all sitting around thinking that the publisher is getting rich off of e-books.
That said, we must keep in mind that the hardcover book has more hard cash expenses to it. The unit cost might be $2. I'm going to assume that two-thirds of the books that are printed actually end up selling. So that's $18.50 in revenue after royalty expense for two books, less maybe $6 for the actual physical manufacturing costs of three books, less a little bit more for the freight and the warehouse expenses and other hard costs of a physical book. So that ends up being maybe $6 per book. So for a $12.99 e-book, it's kind of looking like the e-book is $12.99 instead of $9.99 for a reason, the $11.99-12.99 price point is about where the publisher can make as much money per book as on the hardcover, before all the overhead and other costs associated with the book itself -- the cover artist, the copy-editor, the office rent, the salaries for the editors and everyone else hanging around the office. At $9.99, the publisher is taking a real revenue hit from people buying e-books instead of hardcovers, even after taking account of the hard cash expenses that go along with the physical book, but not the e-book.
Bottom line here, on hardcover books, the move to e-books isn't helping publishers very much, if at all.
But on mass markets, the publisher may get $3.50 on a $7.99 paperback, have a royalty expense of $.65, and hard cash expenses for the physical book of $.80 or $1. Let's again assume three books printed for every two sold, that's $7.20 in revenue for selling two books less $1.30 royalty expense less, let's say, $2.70 in hard cash costs. That's around $1.60 per book before overhead. For the e-book at $7.99, it's $7.99 x .7 x .75 = $4.20 !!!
So unless my math is wrong, publishers are doing rather nicely when people trade from mass market to e-book sales, and the author is doing a little bit better off but nowhere near as better off here as the publisher is doing.
Again, there are myriad other factors that can go into this, this is just rough sketching, the unit costs for a mass market book from a 100,000 copy first printing will be vastly less than for a mass market with a 15,000 copy first printing, and that all by itself can make this math look a lot different from book to book.
To be honest, I'm so astonished at how much the math favors the publishers on trading from mass market to e-book that I'm thinking I've got to be getting something entirely wrong, the publishers can't really be doing that well on the mass market, can they?
Now, if you are an author with a track record, the most important lesson in all of this is that you can't determine the appropriate advance for your book by looking at your royalty statement. You might be losing royalties big time on your hardcover sales, but the publisher isn't losing per-unit profit the same way you're losing royalties. You might be gaining royalties on the paperback vs e-book side, but the publisher is probably gaining even more.
So it's like the title of this post says -- Do The Math. You or your agent need to try and grope your way toward looking at the P&L (profit and loss) statement for your book, not the royalty statement. Your numbers for that will never be like the publisher's, because all the publishers have different ways of allocating overhead and other unique factors they won't share with you, but you can rough something out by looking at your previous royalty statements and looking not at royalties earned but at copies shipped vs. sold and e-book copies sold and the expenses that go along with each.
The second thing to ponder here ... what do these numbers suggest regarding the legitimacy of 25% of net proceeds as an appropriate industry standard royalty rate for e-book sales.
Hard to say. If the publisher's trading more hardcover sales for e-book, then 25% of net seems to be kind of the right rate for keeping publisher unit profit at about the same level regardless of format. But 25% of net doesn't seem right when the publisher is trading more mass market sales. The other factor here, authors can easily self publish and get the full 70% of e-book cover price for themselves. Publishers have to justify what they're doing to be keeping three e-book dollars for every one that goes to the author when the authors can easily keep all of them. Because of that, and because of the revenue potential trading from mass market to e-book, I think the 25% has to move up some. Some.
Final quick thing, let's look at a trade paperback. $15-16 paperback, $12.99 e-book. So again $6.80 in gross revenue to the publisher on the e-book, after royalties. On the print side, two books bring in $14.50 or $15 in revenue, less $4.00 for hard physical costs for three books, less $2.40 royalties. That's $4 in gross revenue. Here, it looks like there's more revenue for both the author and the publisher, more equitably split between the two than on the mass market.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Barnes & Borders
Publishers Lunch Daily has a list of Barnes & Noble locations that have quietly closed at the end of 2011.
The demise of their big and busy store in the University Village mall just down the hill from the University of Washington and its University Bookstore had been known to me earlier. But also of interest is that their store in Washington DC's Georgetown neighborhood has also shuttered.
Going back fifteen years ago in the earliest days of B&N's nationwide superstore expansion, they would take out ads in places like The New Republic to ballyhoo their wonderful selection, including of academic, scholarly U Press type books. Those two stores, University Village and Georgetown, were two of the half dozen or so locations that would be specifically included in those posts. So to see those two stores closing at pretty much the same time kind of brings down the curtain on a small part of the book superstore era.
The University Village store is one that I'll certainly miss as a literary agent for sf/fantasy. Not so much the one in Georgetown, which sold very little in the genre though it was overall still considered a kind of flagship store for the company and had a depth of inventory that went beyond what was justified by its sales. That store gave me "Evanston moments."
Because it was visiting Evanston, IL, I'd guess when I was over for WorldCon in 2000, that I first came across a Borders with a really really godawful surprisingly bad sf/fantasy section, which theretofore I'd never known such a thing existed, and then popped across the street to the B&N which had a much better selection, but you could tell by looking at the yellowed books and how they would have the 5th printing of a Deathstalker novel that was several months into a 6th printing that they weren't actually selling sf/fantasy but at least deserved credit for having the selection.
That was a strength of B&N for many years, to have a more consistent core title selection across their entire range of stores, and that was the Georgetown store, to go in and be grateful they were carrying a lot of JABberwocky titles but to be deeply depressed by the deeply yellowed tops of the books.
But to get to the actual two points of the post...
1. B&N is getting very Borders like in their selection now. They're no longer bothering with a core stock across the full range of their stores. It used to be, and I felt this lack of brand identity was a very big problem for Borders that did not serve them well, that I could go to the Borders in Commack and find half the selection of the Stony Brook store a few miles away, while the B&N gap was more like 2/3 or 3/4 of the title count in a bad store vs. a good one. Now, the Tribeca B&N carries fewer than half the titles in Union Square. The B&N in Bayside Queens carries only two of the six "Lost Fleet" paperbacks, and these are up there with the Nightside books as the top-selling JABberwocky titles after Charlaine Harris, Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett.
Now, B&N doesn't have to worry about physical competition the way Borders had to worry about competition from B&N. But there is competition from Amazon. There's a school of thought that says it doesn't make any sense for B&N to compete with the long tail of Amazon because there's no way to do it so why even try, as a B&N you're selling something other than whether the store carries two Lost Fleet paperbacks or six. I'm not there. Cost of inventory in mass market is not a huge factor in the success or failure of your business, I still think if you're a B&N and you want to give people an excuse to get in their car and visit your store that you can't nickle and dime. B&N knew this once, and it saddens me that they no longer do. That said, times have changed, and maybe it doesn't matter the way it did six or eight years ago that your stores had full runs of the key series while the other guys did not.
2. I used to visit DC for a four day weekend in no small part because I loved to take the temperature of a very big bookselling market. I could easily visit 6 B&N, 8 Borders, a handful of Waldenbooks, a few Daltons, a handful of Olsson's, some Books a Million. I could easily visit a very very impressive 30-35 bookstores over a long weekend. Now there's nothing left to visit. The mall stores slowly disappeared. Then Olsson's went bankrupt. Then Borders started to close the underperformers before now closing entirely. And the Books a Million in Old Town Alexandria is gone as well.
So let's see, now on a DC visit I can go around and visit the Dalton/now B&N in Union Station, B&N on E St., Clarendon, Rockville, Springfield, Potomac Yard and Bethesda. KramerBooks and Books a Million in Dupont Circle. Politics & Prose. Whatever's before security at National Airport. So that trip's gone from 32 bookstores to 10. And really, not even that. Traipsing out to Rockville or Springfield made sense when I could visit both a Borders and B&N, not just to visit another B&N. Potomac Yard is a pain to get to without a car, I'm not up for that any more. Politics & Prose is a pain to get to and doesn't really have much of an sf/f section so what's the point. I used to think about dragging in some of these just to make the list of stores visited look very very impressive for claiming the trips as business. Now, I can go to DC and actually justify visiting all of seven bookstores that might offer a reasonable return on the schlepping.
Am I right to find this depressing?
Because that's one way to look at it, with each new bookstore that closes more and more of us can now choose to drive several more miles than before to visit a boring B&N that maybe doesn't even bother to carry the entire Lost Fleet series in mass market. [Another of the B&N that's said to have closed is their Westside Pavilion store just south of Westwood in LA; with the Borders having closed a year prior to the bankruptcy, this introduces yet another urban book-buying desert, with the closest stores now requiring a schlep several miles west to Santa Monica or east to the Grove.]
Intellectually, I know that we can also all now sit in our easy chairs and buy pretty much whatever book we want in a minute or two on our iPads or our Nooks, our Kindles or our phones.
But you know, even that kind of depresses me in a way.
The demise of their big and busy store in the University Village mall just down the hill from the University of Washington and its University Bookstore had been known to me earlier. But also of interest is that their store in Washington DC's Georgetown neighborhood has also shuttered.
Going back fifteen years ago in the earliest days of B&N's nationwide superstore expansion, they would take out ads in places like The New Republic to ballyhoo their wonderful selection, including of academic, scholarly U Press type books. Those two stores, University Village and Georgetown, were two of the half dozen or so locations that would be specifically included in those posts. So to see those two stores closing at pretty much the same time kind of brings down the curtain on a small part of the book superstore era.
The University Village store is one that I'll certainly miss as a literary agent for sf/fantasy. Not so much the one in Georgetown, which sold very little in the genre though it was overall still considered a kind of flagship store for the company and had a depth of inventory that went beyond what was justified by its sales. That store gave me "Evanston moments."
Because it was visiting Evanston, IL, I'd guess when I was over for WorldCon in 2000, that I first came across a Borders with a really really godawful surprisingly bad sf/fantasy section, which theretofore I'd never known such a thing existed, and then popped across the street to the B&N which had a much better selection, but you could tell by looking at the yellowed books and how they would have the 5th printing of a Deathstalker novel that was several months into a 6th printing that they weren't actually selling sf/fantasy but at least deserved credit for having the selection.
That was a strength of B&N for many years, to have a more consistent core title selection across their entire range of stores, and that was the Georgetown store, to go in and be grateful they were carrying a lot of JABberwocky titles but to be deeply depressed by the deeply yellowed tops of the books.
But to get to the actual two points of the post...
1. B&N is getting very Borders like in their selection now. They're no longer bothering with a core stock across the full range of their stores. It used to be, and I felt this lack of brand identity was a very big problem for Borders that did not serve them well, that I could go to the Borders in Commack and find half the selection of the Stony Brook store a few miles away, while the B&N gap was more like 2/3 or 3/4 of the title count in a bad store vs. a good one. Now, the Tribeca B&N carries fewer than half the titles in Union Square. The B&N in Bayside Queens carries only two of the six "Lost Fleet" paperbacks, and these are up there with the Nightside books as the top-selling JABberwocky titles after Charlaine Harris, Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett.
Now, B&N doesn't have to worry about physical competition the way Borders had to worry about competition from B&N. But there is competition from Amazon. There's a school of thought that says it doesn't make any sense for B&N to compete with the long tail of Amazon because there's no way to do it so why even try, as a B&N you're selling something other than whether the store carries two Lost Fleet paperbacks or six. I'm not there. Cost of inventory in mass market is not a huge factor in the success or failure of your business, I still think if you're a B&N and you want to give people an excuse to get in their car and visit your store that you can't nickle and dime. B&N knew this once, and it saddens me that they no longer do. That said, times have changed, and maybe it doesn't matter the way it did six or eight years ago that your stores had full runs of the key series while the other guys did not.
2. I used to visit DC for a four day weekend in no small part because I loved to take the temperature of a very big bookselling market. I could easily visit 6 B&N, 8 Borders, a handful of Waldenbooks, a few Daltons, a handful of Olsson's, some Books a Million. I could easily visit a very very impressive 30-35 bookstores over a long weekend. Now there's nothing left to visit. The mall stores slowly disappeared. Then Olsson's went bankrupt. Then Borders started to close the underperformers before now closing entirely. And the Books a Million in Old Town Alexandria is gone as well.
So let's see, now on a DC visit I can go around and visit the Dalton/now B&N in Union Station, B&N on E St., Clarendon, Rockville, Springfield, Potomac Yard and Bethesda. KramerBooks and Books a Million in Dupont Circle. Politics & Prose. Whatever's before security at National Airport. So that trip's gone from 32 bookstores to 10. And really, not even that. Traipsing out to Rockville or Springfield made sense when I could visit both a Borders and B&N, not just to visit another B&N. Potomac Yard is a pain to get to without a car, I'm not up for that any more. Politics & Prose is a pain to get to and doesn't really have much of an sf/f section so what's the point. I used to think about dragging in some of these just to make the list of stores visited look very very impressive for claiming the trips as business. Now, I can go to DC and actually justify visiting all of seven bookstores that might offer a reasonable return on the schlepping.
Am I right to find this depressing?
Because that's one way to look at it, with each new bookstore that closes more and more of us can now choose to drive several more miles than before to visit a boring B&N that maybe doesn't even bother to carry the entire Lost Fleet series in mass market. [Another of the B&N that's said to have closed is their Westside Pavilion store just south of Westwood in LA; with the Borders having closed a year prior to the bankruptcy, this introduces yet another urban book-buying desert, with the closest stores now requiring a schlep several miles west to Santa Monica or east to the Grove.]
Intellectually, I know that we can also all now sit in our easy chairs and buy pretty much whatever book we want in a minute or two on our iPads or our Nooks, our Kindles or our phones.
But you know, even that kind of depresses me in a way.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Change
I often tell people that the publishing industry has been dying for as long as I’ve been in the industry, on toward 25 years now. Hence, the fact that it isn’t yet dead suggests that the impressions on any given day are not in fact correct.
Today, lots of people are saying that the industry is dying on account of the e-book. My own impression as we are most of the way through “royalty season,” is that the industry is clearly changing, and almost certainly not dying of e-book.
There are incredible amounts of e-books selling right now, incredible. The growth over just a few short years is truly stunning. Simon Green’s Nightside books are now selling about as many copies in e-book as in print. Charlaine Harris’ Harper Connelly books are selling more in e-book. E-books now represent around 10% of her lifetime US sales of 20 million units even though they’ve only been around for a few years in her 30 year career. This is a good business to be in.
For both authors and publishers. Authors make more money from e-books. I’m making this bold unqualified assertion to make up for all of the people making the other assertion, that authors lose money on every e-book. In truth, you can make both. Authors can lose $2 every time somebody buys an e-book instead of a hardcover, but they can just as easily make $2 for every four mass market paperback sales that turn into e-books. Charlaine Harris has huge-selling hardcovers, there’s a hit to her income as those sales move to e-book. Jack Campbell has six Lost Fleet books never published in mass market, there’s a gain every time those sales move to e-book. So I shouldn’t say that authors make more money from e-books, but nor should anyone claim the opposite, that the e-book is the end of authors, of writing, of culture as we know it.
[You can look at 2010 hardbacks reported sold in PW. Pick any reasonable guess for how many of those sales migrated to e-book from 2010 to 2011, multiply by $2, and you're looking at a big chunk of change in lost royalties. Actually, I have no idea in the macro sense if the much larger # of authors who don't have those hardcover sales and are gaining on the mass market end. But what fun is a blog if you can't make blanket statements that can't be substantiated as firm hard fact that everyone should quote on the internet for sixteen years to come.]
To sum up: royalty statements come in, huge amounts of e-book sales, publishers doing well and many though by now means all authors doing better, too.
This is not the death of publishing.
With two caveats.
1. A situation where an Amazon can set the price level for e-books as a loss leader, they have the ability to bring the entire publishing industry to its heels. They can kill publishing in the blink of an eye no matter how much of it they decide to do for themselves. So, for that matter, could a court decision that declares the agency model an illegal restraint of trade.
2. People will lose places to buy print books faster than their actual desire to buy them. One thing’s for sure, the migration to e-book sales isn’t good for businesses that revolve around the sale of printed books. I think I worry more than anything about this. We could look back five years from now and view 2011 as the final flowering of a dual print/e-book marketplace that will dry up like a three-week-old bouquet into a shriveled e-only marketplace in which vastly fewer total numbers of books are being sold.
Putting aside those worst case scenarios, if the publishing industry isn’t dying of e-book, it’s certainly changing, and changing by the day. Tobias Buckell just kickstarted his 4th Xenowealth novel. Jim Hines has self-published electronically an earlier novel and some short story collections. Things like this leave a reduced role JABberwocky.
I worry and publishers worry about how we remain relevant in this changing marketplace. It’s one reason why we have a limited but growing e-book program at JABberwocky, helping our clients monetize their work in ways that weren’t possible a few years ago. But it isn’t “dying” that I use as the adjective there, it’s “changing.”
Today, lots of people are saying that the industry is dying on account of the e-book. My own impression as we are most of the way through “royalty season,” is that the industry is clearly changing, and almost certainly not dying of e-book.
There are incredible amounts of e-books selling right now, incredible. The growth over just a few short years is truly stunning. Simon Green’s Nightside books are now selling about as many copies in e-book as in print. Charlaine Harris’ Harper Connelly books are selling more in e-book. E-books now represent around 10% of her lifetime US sales of 20 million units even though they’ve only been around for a few years in her 30 year career. This is a good business to be in.
For both authors and publishers. Authors make more money from e-books. I’m making this bold unqualified assertion to make up for all of the people making the other assertion, that authors lose money on every e-book. In truth, you can make both. Authors can lose $2 every time somebody buys an e-book instead of a hardcover, but they can just as easily make $2 for every four mass market paperback sales that turn into e-books. Charlaine Harris has huge-selling hardcovers, there’s a hit to her income as those sales move to e-book. Jack Campbell has six Lost Fleet books never published in mass market, there’s a gain every time those sales move to e-book. So I shouldn’t say that authors make more money from e-books, but nor should anyone claim the opposite, that the e-book is the end of authors, of writing, of culture as we know it.
[You can look at 2010 hardbacks reported sold in PW. Pick any reasonable guess for how many of those sales migrated to e-book from 2010 to 2011, multiply by $2, and you're looking at a big chunk of change in lost royalties. Actually, I have no idea in the macro sense if the much larger # of authors who don't have those hardcover sales and are gaining on the mass market end. But what fun is a blog if you can't make blanket statements that can't be substantiated as firm hard fact that everyone should quote on the internet for sixteen years to come.]
To sum up: royalty statements come in, huge amounts of e-book sales, publishers doing well and many though by now means all authors doing better, too.
This is not the death of publishing.
With two caveats.
1. A situation where an Amazon can set the price level for e-books as a loss leader, they have the ability to bring the entire publishing industry to its heels. They can kill publishing in the blink of an eye no matter how much of it they decide to do for themselves. So, for that matter, could a court decision that declares the agency model an illegal restraint of trade.
2. People will lose places to buy print books faster than their actual desire to buy them. One thing’s for sure, the migration to e-book sales isn’t good for businesses that revolve around the sale of printed books. I think I worry more than anything about this. We could look back five years from now and view 2011 as the final flowering of a dual print/e-book marketplace that will dry up like a three-week-old bouquet into a shriveled e-only marketplace in which vastly fewer total numbers of books are being sold.
Putting aside those worst case scenarios, if the publishing industry isn’t dying of e-book, it’s certainly changing, and changing by the day. Tobias Buckell just kickstarted his 4th Xenowealth novel. Jim Hines has self-published electronically an earlier novel and some short story collections. Things like this leave a reduced role JABberwocky.
I worry and publishers worry about how we remain relevant in this changing marketplace. It’s one reason why we have a limited but growing e-book program at JABberwocky, helping our clients monetize their work in ways that weren’t possible a few years ago. But it isn’t “dying” that I use as the adjective there, it’s “changing.”
Friday, September 16, 2011
the mournful dirge
Wrote this email to someone I know who worked at a Florida Borders...
Sorry didn't return your call, at a weekend long wedding with two days in office and to catch up on sleep before heading to St. Louis for Bouchercon where I am now.
Very sad. My last Borders visit last Sunday to Middletown NY between the wedding and the town I grew up in. I really wanted to be the last customer St a Borders as I was at 1003, but no way for it to happen, Four of the StL stores already closed, two were going to close on Thursday but one shut a day early and the other as I kind of expected said "we may close in 15 minutes, we may close in 45," and i couldn't hire a car to take me ten miles into Illinois, wait around for who knows how long and in the process blow off the stuff I and to do at the convention.
Even though there was nothing to be done about it, I will feel like a loved one passed away without me getting to the bedside.
Then I go to the downtown Left Bank Books, it has one non-Charlaine JABberwocky book on shelves, typically indie it isn't Way of Kings or Warded Man or some other book someone may want to read but an obscure book that will be selling 7 copies a week on Bookscan if that once the liquidations are over. There is no other trade bookstore for some four miles, the closest with any selection, i.e., a big BN, is further away than that. Walked by Subterranean Books, the other major StL indie last night after it had closed, looked in and realized it wouldn't be worth another special trip to that neighborhood to actually walk into the store because it would be depressingly similar to the Left Bank experience downtown.
And speaking of Barnes & Noble, I can barely bring myself to walk in to one any longer. I go in, the first thing I see are the Nook covers. The boring BN corporateness, their strangely curated selection where they have long had the poorer selection of books/authors of mine not being carried by both chains, their ugly octagons with books buried on a shelf eight inches up from the floor, all of these things I could happily endure when I knew there was something better somewhere and that the BN I was just passing through.
But I will have a job, you leave the Dolphin with an uncertain destination, and I hope there will be some better next step ahead. For you, for the other people gutting it out to the end for the hourly paycheck, while the bankruptcy court OKs $125K bonuses for Mike and the gang.
My stock certificate is being framed, I overpaid for the store directory from base of escalator at #582, and purchased for $15 a "borders is 150k books, magazines, CDs, videos" framed poster with a big B on it from #592. Once upon a time it was what the poster said, in another day or two it will be a memory. If you find your way to NYC someday, we will have a cold something or other and reflect in front of my shrine.
Will give a ring when I am back home, and in the meantime you know my thoughts and wishes are with you.
oh, the entire sf/ f section at the downtown Left Bank is 96-ish titles n
Sorry didn't return your call, at a weekend long wedding with two days in office and to catch up on sleep before heading to St. Louis for Bouchercon where I am now.
Very sad. My last Borders visit last Sunday to Middletown NY between the wedding and the town I grew up in. I really wanted to be the last customer St a Borders as I was at 1003, but no way for it to happen, Four of the StL stores already closed, two were going to close on Thursday but one shut a day early and the other as I kind of expected said "we may close in 15 minutes, we may close in 45," and i couldn't hire a car to take me ten miles into Illinois, wait around for who knows how long and in the process blow off the stuff I and to do at the convention.
Even though there was nothing to be done about it, I will feel like a loved one passed away without me getting to the bedside.
Then I go to the downtown Left Bank Books, it has one non-Charlaine JABberwocky book on shelves, typically indie it isn't Way of Kings or Warded Man or some other book someone may want to read but an obscure book that will be selling 7 copies a week on Bookscan if that once the liquidations are over. There is no other trade bookstore for some four miles, the closest with any selection, i.e., a big BN, is further away than that. Walked by Subterranean Books, the other major StL indie last night after it had closed, looked in and realized it wouldn't be worth another special trip to that neighborhood to actually walk into the store because it would be depressingly similar to the Left Bank experience downtown.
And speaking of Barnes & Noble, I can barely bring myself to walk in to one any longer. I go in, the first thing I see are the Nook covers. The boring BN corporateness, their strangely curated selection where they have long had the poorer selection of books/authors of mine not being carried by both chains, their ugly octagons with books buried on a shelf eight inches up from the floor, all of these things I could happily endure when I knew there was something better somewhere and that the BN I was just passing through.
But I will have a job, you leave the Dolphin with an uncertain destination, and I hope there will be some better next step ahead. For you, for the other people gutting it out to the end for the hourly paycheck, while the bankruptcy court OKs $125K bonuses for Mike and the gang.
My stock certificate is being framed, I overpaid for the store directory from base of escalator at #582, and purchased for $15 a "borders is 150k books, magazines, CDs, videos" framed poster with a big B on it from #592. Once upon a time it was what the poster said, in another day or two it will be a memory. If you find your way to NYC someday, we will have a cold something or other and reflect in front of my shrine.
Will give a ring when I am back home, and in the meantime you know my thoughts and wishes are with you.
oh, the entire sf/ f section at the downtown Left Bank is 96-ish titles n
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
The Noon Report
So on the tennis-related front, the #6 seed Robin Soderling withdrew from the US Open with an undisclosed illness, and his spot in the draw was taken as a "lucky loser" by Rogerio Dutra Da Silva. This would appear to be good news for Soderling's opponent, qualifer Louk Sorensen from Ireland, who goes from playing a top 10 player in his first round match to playing essentially another qualifying round match. However, Sorensen lost the first set 6-0 and has just taken a game to start the 2nd set, he couldn't be doing any worse against Soderling. Sorensen looked pleasant enough in the qualifying, but Da Silva is clearly the better player of these two. That said, I would expect the match will tighten up a little. It's a great opportunity for either player since the second round match will be winnable at least. The 3rd round match with Isner or Baghdatis less so, but one of these players has a good shot to be in the 3rd round of the Open.
And Vasek Pospisil is just demolishing Lukas Rosol, that match is at 6-1, 5-1, the first set took all of 19 minutes and the second set will likely be under 25 as well.
To interrupt this tennis post with some actual business news, we are told via publisherslunch.com that Waterstone's in the UK is ending the "3 for 2" book promos that have been a fixture of UK bookselling for years and years. Here in the office, Eddie's first reaction is that this is an awful decision being made by the new owners, since this has been such a fixture of the trade. I'm not so sure. I've found UK bookselling to be generally in a very boring state in recent years, with the plethora of endless 3-for-2 tables all stocking all the same books at all the same stores to just be deathly dull In any event doing the same thing for years and years can get boring and should sometimes be changed for the sake of it. But then again, if they'll just be replacing endless tables of 3-for-2 with endless boring same-everywhere tables of books being promoted in some different way, it ends up making no real difference. I guess we'll see how it shakes out.
For those not so good at math a 3-for-2 discount is the same as Buy 1-Get 1 50% Off promo that we've had on a lot of trade paperbacks in the US, and which in fact Borders might have imported as a variation from their UK stores.
As I typed those last two paragraphs, Pospisil took the 2nd set 6-2 and Sorensen and Da Silva are on serve after three games of their second set.
And here is a post from the NY Times Straight Sets blog about Malek Jaziri, the Tunisian qualifier who is facing top-rated American Mardy Fish in a 2nd round match tomorrow.
And Vasek Pospisil is just demolishing Lukas Rosol, that match is at 6-1, 5-1, the first set took all of 19 minutes and the second set will likely be under 25 as well.
To interrupt this tennis post with some actual business news, we are told via publisherslunch.com that Waterstone's in the UK is ending the "3 for 2" book promos that have been a fixture of UK bookselling for years and years. Here in the office, Eddie's first reaction is that this is an awful decision being made by the new owners, since this has been such a fixture of the trade. I'm not so sure. I've found UK bookselling to be generally in a very boring state in recent years, with the plethora of endless 3-for-2 tables all stocking all the same books at all the same stores to just be deathly dull In any event doing the same thing for years and years can get boring and should sometimes be changed for the sake of it. But then again, if they'll just be replacing endless tables of 3-for-2 with endless boring same-everywhere tables of books being promoted in some different way, it ends up making no real difference. I guess we'll see how it shakes out.
For those not so good at math a 3-for-2 discount is the same as Buy 1-Get 1 50% Off promo that we've had on a lot of trade paperbacks in the US, and which in fact Borders might have imported as a variation from their UK stores.
As I typed those last two paragraphs, Pospisil took the 2nd set 6-2 and Sorensen and Da Silva are on serve after three games of their second set.
And here is a post from the NY Times Straight Sets blog about Malek Jaziri, the Tunisian qualifier who is facing top-rated American Mardy Fish in a 2nd round match tomorrow.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
B&N cuts back
So it's possible you've heard from different places, a blog somewhere or your editor trying to explain why your new offer is so low, that Barnes & Noble has cut back their orders.
Boy, are they!
B&N has long had a fixture called the New Mass Market Tower. It's the square thing that usually sits in the central aisle of the stores that's around six feet tall, four rows across and maybe eight or so down, with new mass market books.
A publisher pays to put your new mass market on the new mass market tower, of course B&N also has to agree they'd like it there because there are only so many books that can go on it over the course of the month and way more to choose from than that. But your publisher has to want it there.
And for all those years, it used to be that being on this fixture meant that pretty much every Barnes & Noble was going to get 8 copies of your new sf/fantasy book, other than for the really most awful stores for sf/fantasy where they would put in an initial order of 6 copies.
Those are nice numbers. You could certainly fill one pocket on the tower, maybe even fill two pockets, and maybe even have a copy or two left over to go back into the section.
Well, not any more.
Now a publisher is paying to get a book on to the New Mass Market Tower, and B&N is ordering 3 copies for the bad stores, 5 copies for somewhat better stores, dramatically fewer copies.
So, big picture, where once B&N might routinely have ordered 6000 copies in exchange for a New Mass Market Tower placement to cover store stock and a ready reserve for the warehouse, now it could be more like 4250 or 4500.
Little picture, let's look at those bad-in-genre stores that had gotten 6 copies and are now getting 3. Well, 3 isn't going to fill 2 pockets, so maybe you'll only get one. For thinner books, 3 copies might not even fill a pocket. Either way, there's no extra copy to go in section, so some dedicated genre fans who bee-line to the section might not notice your new book on the Tower. If one copy sells, all of a sudden there are only 2 copies in a pocket that can fit 3 or 4 so it's harder to see the book on the Tower, the display looks forlorn and lonely. B&N has a great supply chain and can get more copies of a new book from warehouse to store in a couple of days, but if demands at any of these stores is way stronger than expected you're still looking at maybe having only one copy for a day or two or maybe even going clean before the 72 hours it might take to get a box opened. To have this happening now... I can think of some B&Ns where demand might uptick because a nearby Borders has closed, it's a bad time to decide to be less robust in your ordering.
Will these things cost sales? Of course! If the initial order is down by 25%, if some stores are getting 50% fewer copies -- well, it doesn't matter if you have the same placement, this is going to have an effect.
But not to worry, you'll still find plenty of ways to accessorize your Nook.
Boy, are they!
B&N has long had a fixture called the New Mass Market Tower. It's the square thing that usually sits in the central aisle of the stores that's around six feet tall, four rows across and maybe eight or so down, with new mass market books.
A publisher pays to put your new mass market on the new mass market tower, of course B&N also has to agree they'd like it there because there are only so many books that can go on it over the course of the month and way more to choose from than that. But your publisher has to want it there.
And for all those years, it used to be that being on this fixture meant that pretty much every Barnes & Noble was going to get 8 copies of your new sf/fantasy book, other than for the really most awful stores for sf/fantasy where they would put in an initial order of 6 copies.
Those are nice numbers. You could certainly fill one pocket on the tower, maybe even fill two pockets, and maybe even have a copy or two left over to go back into the section.
Well, not any more.
Now a publisher is paying to get a book on to the New Mass Market Tower, and B&N is ordering 3 copies for the bad stores, 5 copies for somewhat better stores, dramatically fewer copies.
So, big picture, where once B&N might routinely have ordered 6000 copies in exchange for a New Mass Market Tower placement to cover store stock and a ready reserve for the warehouse, now it could be more like 4250 or 4500.
Little picture, let's look at those bad-in-genre stores that had gotten 6 copies and are now getting 3. Well, 3 isn't going to fill 2 pockets, so maybe you'll only get one. For thinner books, 3 copies might not even fill a pocket. Either way, there's no extra copy to go in section, so some dedicated genre fans who bee-line to the section might not notice your new book on the Tower. If one copy sells, all of a sudden there are only 2 copies in a pocket that can fit 3 or 4 so it's harder to see the book on the Tower, the display looks forlorn and lonely. B&N has a great supply chain and can get more copies of a new book from warehouse to store in a couple of days, but if demands at any of these stores is way stronger than expected you're still looking at maybe having only one copy for a day or two or maybe even going clean before the 72 hours it might take to get a box opened. To have this happening now... I can think of some B&Ns where demand might uptick because a nearby Borders has closed, it's a bad time to decide to be less robust in your ordering.
Will these things cost sales? Of course! If the initial order is down by 25%, if some stores are getting 50% fewer copies -- well, it doesn't matter if you have the same placement, this is going to have an effect.
But not to worry, you'll still find plenty of ways to accessorize your Nook.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Separation Anxiety
There just isn't much in my life so far that's leaving a hole in my existence the way the Borders bankruptcy is. Several years ago it would have been exciting on so many levels to see that Bouchercon is in Cleveland in 2012, and Albany in 2013. Never been to Cleveland, could have added at least a few Borders to my count, now I'm just looking at the date in early October and realizing I'd be going to Cleveland without even the chance of seeing a game at Jacobs Field, or whatever it is they're calling it these days. I need a new hobby, or something. And I can't see myself delighting in conquesting new art museums, or new Starbucks.
I wish B&N were any kind of a substitute, but it's not. And B&N is just getting more boring, less interesting, to me with each passing day. I've never liked their basic Front of Store fixturing as much, I hate those damned octagons. And they're reducing orders, reducing title counts. Their strength against Borders was that they did a better, more consistent job of stocking core series across a full range of their stores, they'd be the place that would have all the Deathstalker books and all the Blood books when Borders would be the place that had the weird gaps of not carrying books #1 and book #4 at various stores. Now I can't count on every B&N to have the entire Nightside series by Simon Green. Maybe I'm being old in my thinking, because Charlaine Harris and Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett have stormed past my other clients, but I don't see Tanya Huff or Elizabeth Moon or Simon Green as doing appreciably worse now, not at all. They've been leapfrogged over, but I'm still reasonably certain that a typical B&N should have better selections on all three than they are. And even with Charlaine, B&N stopped carrying her Wolfsbane & Mistletoe anthology, which has been selling several dozen copies on Bookscan week-in and week-out without B&N, which means it should be at B&N.
So, no, I don't want to spend my life traveling around visiting B&Ns. With Borders, I could kind of afford to have the thrill of the hunt with walking into a bad one with a bad selection because at least I knew there was another chain with a more consistent selection, or maybe even a better Borders in the area. Now, if I visit a bad B&N, it'll just be depressing.
I wish B&N were any kind of a substitute, but it's not. And B&N is just getting more boring, less interesting, to me with each passing day. I've never liked their basic Front of Store fixturing as much, I hate those damned octagons. And they're reducing orders, reducing title counts. Their strength against Borders was that they did a better, more consistent job of stocking core series across a full range of their stores, they'd be the place that would have all the Deathstalker books and all the Blood books when Borders would be the place that had the weird gaps of not carrying books #1 and book #4 at various stores. Now I can't count on every B&N to have the entire Nightside series by Simon Green. Maybe I'm being old in my thinking, because Charlaine Harris and Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett have stormed past my other clients, but I don't see Tanya Huff or Elizabeth Moon or Simon Green as doing appreciably worse now, not at all. They've been leapfrogged over, but I'm still reasonably certain that a typical B&N should have better selections on all three than they are. And even with Charlaine, B&N stopped carrying her Wolfsbane & Mistletoe anthology, which has been selling several dozen copies on Bookscan week-in and week-out without B&N, which means it should be at B&N.
So, no, I don't want to spend my life traveling around visiting B&Ns. With Borders, I could kind of afford to have the thrill of the hunt with walking into a bad one with a bad selection because at least I knew there was another chain with a more consistent selection, or maybe even a better Borders in the area. Now, if I visit a bad B&N, it'll just be depressing.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Running on empty
There's a custom in Jewish prayer to recite something called the "Mourner's Kaddish" at the end of every worship service. When I'm leading a service, there's an introductory reading I do to this. It's the last paragraph of John Crowley's Little, Big; my favorite non-client fantasy and in part because it leads up to this wonderful passage of loss, of feeling for better days and different times. And there aren't better words to provide as I begin what will perhaps be my final post about the Borders business, for today all of us who love books have to be in mourning:
From LITTLE BIG by John Crowley
And let me make very clear, you can love Borders or hate it, you can rue the day they came in to your neighborhood in 1994 and helped to kill some local independent store, you can say you liked Barnes & Noble better, or that the staff at your local Borders were rude, or they never seemed very nice when you wanted to arrange a signing. You can do all of that. But if you love books, if you care about the power of the written word, of the ability for a writer to tell stories, and for those stories to move people and give meaning to the lives of others, if you care about any of that you can't be happy today. This is the saddest day for the book business that any of us have ever seen, and let us only hope that we can still say the same 25 years from today.
There are millions of people who now don't have a good, convenient, physical place to buy and explore books, unless you think a computer screen counts. And I mean that. I don't agree with everyone Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith say about agents, I don't remotely like they'll have an extra hour to drive to visit a good bookstore. There are millions of people living in Manhattan, many millions more working there on a weekday, and we're about to revert back to before Sept. 5 1995 when Borders opened at the World Trade Center -- only worse because before then there were at least a handful of indies on the island with decent and wide selections co-existing with B&N, and now you can't look at the sf section of Posman Books in Grand Central and think this is a place you want to go for your book shopping needs. So for all the rest of us, our book selection is now only and solely what Barnes & Noble decrees it to be. And I've got news for you, if you think publishers have been spending the past several months doing detailed analysis of their Borders sales and finding the 1% or 2% of their titles that were selling well at Borders alone and are now going to give those the extra TLC to get B&N to share the love -- well, the idea's good for a laugh. There are authors who no longer have a store to sell some or all of their books.
And yet I can't be as sad as I feel I should be.
I tried awfully hard when I visited the Peabody MA store in February. It was that brief window between the bankruptcy filing and the start of the liquidation sales for the first round of 200 closures, the sun that day was still shining even as the dark clouds gathered and the storm approached. It was a Borders store that time forgot, still with the old-fashioned woody shelving with the sf/f hardbacks and trades separate from the mass markets. I knew at one level that I could have shopped those same shelves twelve or fifteen years before. But I couldn't really get "up" for that experience.
That's the thing, once upon a time it had been fun to enter a Borders, good or bad not to know what you'd find selection wise on the shelves, to roam some weird diagonal aisles, to look at the different things that store had up at the front that other stores wouldn't, to peek into the mass market overstock shelves and find some singleton copy of a book that I could rescue and put out where customers could see and buy it and have some real sense of accomplishment, or climb the ladder if nobody was looking to rescue something from the overstock there.
But the stores didn't have personality any more. If they did, it was the personality of a ghost town, of walking in to the Plano TX stores or Preston Road stores in April 2010 and feeling the cobwebs rolling along down the aisles of these large empty boxes without merchandise enough or customers enough to sustain.
And on the other side of the ledger, there's supposed to be some comfort in finally reaching the end of a death that was long in coming. None of that here. Around 11,000 people that will be out of work. The authors who don't have an outlet for their books. The readers who don't have a bookstore to explore. There's pain, there's sadness, there's misery, all around. There's no sense of relief.
But for a few minutes, let me find a tear or two for the pensieve, and let me try and find those good memories of times gone by:
First walking into the original Ann Arbor Borders some twenty years ago, looking at more books than I'd ever looked at before in amazing and wide and stunningly broad profusion, that first purchase of Ben Bova's Exiles Trilogy. And then the hours spent exploring those shelves during my college years.
That happy moment when I "broke the code" and realized what the numbers on the buff inventory punchcards meant and knew I could now browse the shelves with entire new layers of meaning.
All those visits to DC, visiting Borders by Ride-On and Metro and by foot, doing all those things I mentioned above that I'd love to do at Borders, in an area where almost all the bookstores really were above average. The hustle and bustle of 18th and L during lunch hour, of White Flint on a Saturday night, of watching Germantown sprout from the corn fields to become a hugely important location for my clients.
Walking in the first time to the store in Columbia, MD or Gresham, OR or Milpitas, Mission Viejo, Torrance CA or State St. or Fairview Heights IL or South Bay and Mission Viejo or Fairfax and Bailey's Crossroads, VA, Redmond WA, and realizing you'd just walked in to one of the best bookstores around, the places that were getting in 24 copies of some new paperback that you'd have sworn there wasn't a store getting more than 12 of them, and that would sell through all two dozen in no time flat.
The first visit to the first Borders that was actually close to where I was living as an adult on Park Ave., finding a bookstore for the first time that had 100ish books I'd sold on its shelves.
The birthdays I'd spend taking the train out to Long Island. Really. There were many many years I'd quite happily spend doing the great Long Island bookstore tour.
Professionally, going to Newark DE or to Bailey's Crossroads VA to see clients signing at those big special stores for dozens and later hundreds of people.
The thing is, in a way I wish Borders had died unexpectedly, that these happy memories were fresh in my mind and not dependent on tears in the pensieve, but it's all so interconnected, so related, so entirely unaccidental that these stores will soon be no more.
The bulbs will burn out, or be turned off by Hilco and Gordon Brothers, on some Sunday in mid September.
The end was expected.
The stories, now only stories.
The borders open, and many crossing. That time is not now.
As once upon a time, they were.
From LITTLE BIG by John Crowley
One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house, made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer; but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.
And let me make very clear, you can love Borders or hate it, you can rue the day they came in to your neighborhood in 1994 and helped to kill some local independent store, you can say you liked Barnes & Noble better, or that the staff at your local Borders were rude, or they never seemed very nice when you wanted to arrange a signing. You can do all of that. But if you love books, if you care about the power of the written word, of the ability for a writer to tell stories, and for those stories to move people and give meaning to the lives of others, if you care about any of that you can't be happy today. This is the saddest day for the book business that any of us have ever seen, and let us only hope that we can still say the same 25 years from today.
There are millions of people who now don't have a good, convenient, physical place to buy and explore books, unless you think a computer screen counts. And I mean that. I don't agree with everyone Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith say about agents, I don't remotely like they'll have an extra hour to drive to visit a good bookstore. There are millions of people living in Manhattan, many millions more working there on a weekday, and we're about to revert back to before Sept. 5 1995 when Borders opened at the World Trade Center -- only worse because before then there were at least a handful of indies on the island with decent and wide selections co-existing with B&N, and now you can't look at the sf section of Posman Books in Grand Central and think this is a place you want to go for your book shopping needs. So for all the rest of us, our book selection is now only and solely what Barnes & Noble decrees it to be. And I've got news for you, if you think publishers have been spending the past several months doing detailed analysis of their Borders sales and finding the 1% or 2% of their titles that were selling well at Borders alone and are now going to give those the extra TLC to get B&N to share the love -- well, the idea's good for a laugh. There are authors who no longer have a store to sell some or all of their books.
And yet I can't be as sad as I feel I should be.
I tried awfully hard when I visited the Peabody MA store in February. It was that brief window between the bankruptcy filing and the start of the liquidation sales for the first round of 200 closures, the sun that day was still shining even as the dark clouds gathered and the storm approached. It was a Borders store that time forgot, still with the old-fashioned woody shelving with the sf/f hardbacks and trades separate from the mass markets. I knew at one level that I could have shopped those same shelves twelve or fifteen years before. But I couldn't really get "up" for that experience.
That's the thing, once upon a time it had been fun to enter a Borders, good or bad not to know what you'd find selection wise on the shelves, to roam some weird diagonal aisles, to look at the different things that store had up at the front that other stores wouldn't, to peek into the mass market overstock shelves and find some singleton copy of a book that I could rescue and put out where customers could see and buy it and have some real sense of accomplishment, or climb the ladder if nobody was looking to rescue something from the overstock there.
But the stores didn't have personality any more. If they did, it was the personality of a ghost town, of walking in to the Plano TX stores or Preston Road stores in April 2010 and feeling the cobwebs rolling along down the aisles of these large empty boxes without merchandise enough or customers enough to sustain.
And on the other side of the ledger, there's supposed to be some comfort in finally reaching the end of a death that was long in coming. None of that here. Around 11,000 people that will be out of work. The authors who don't have an outlet for their books. The readers who don't have a bookstore to explore. There's pain, there's sadness, there's misery, all around. There's no sense of relief.
But for a few minutes, let me find a tear or two for the pensieve, and let me try and find those good memories of times gone by:
First walking into the original Ann Arbor Borders some twenty years ago, looking at more books than I'd ever looked at before in amazing and wide and stunningly broad profusion, that first purchase of Ben Bova's Exiles Trilogy. And then the hours spent exploring those shelves during my college years.
That happy moment when I "broke the code" and realized what the numbers on the buff inventory punchcards meant and knew I could now browse the shelves with entire new layers of meaning.
All those visits to DC, visiting Borders by Ride-On and Metro and by foot, doing all those things I mentioned above that I'd love to do at Borders, in an area where almost all the bookstores really were above average. The hustle and bustle of 18th and L during lunch hour, of White Flint on a Saturday night, of watching Germantown sprout from the corn fields to become a hugely important location for my clients.
Walking in the first time to the store in Columbia, MD or Gresham, OR or Milpitas, Mission Viejo, Torrance CA or State St. or Fairview Heights IL or South Bay and Mission Viejo or Fairfax and Bailey's Crossroads, VA, Redmond WA, and realizing you'd just walked in to one of the best bookstores around, the places that were getting in 24 copies of some new paperback that you'd have sworn there wasn't a store getting more than 12 of them, and that would sell through all two dozen in no time flat.
The first visit to the first Borders that was actually close to where I was living as an adult on Park Ave., finding a bookstore for the first time that had 100ish books I'd sold on its shelves.
The birthdays I'd spend taking the train out to Long Island. Really. There were many many years I'd quite happily spend doing the great Long Island bookstore tour.
Professionally, going to Newark DE or to Bailey's Crossroads VA to see clients signing at those big special stores for dozens and later hundreds of people.
The thing is, in a way I wish Borders had died unexpectedly, that these happy memories were fresh in my mind and not dependent on tears in the pensieve, but it's all so interconnected, so related, so entirely unaccidental that these stores will soon be no more.
The bulbs will burn out, or be turned off by Hilco and Gordon Brothers, on some Sunday in mid September.
The end was expected.
The stories, now only stories.
The borders open, and many crossing. That time is not now.
As once upon a time, they were.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
The Agent as Publisher
In the evolving world of publishing, the roles of the author, agent and publisher are all having to evolve.
What should our role as agents be?
There's one school of thought I know I don't agree with, which says that an agent should never be a publisher. One statement of that position from a British agent can be found here, and in the US one prominent agent who's expressed his firm opposition to melding the roles is Robert Gottlieb, the head of the prestigious Trident Media Group. That's some of what he discusses in this guest blog post on the Publishers Weekly site.
My VP, Eddie Schneider, reacted very strongly to a news article in Publishers Lunch Daily this week (also the source for the above link) about a literary agency that wants to go into e-book packaging. I thought I'd invite him to guest on my blog, and italicized are his comments below:
I'm sure many of you involved in book publishing in some fashion (agent, editor, aspiring author) heard the news Monday that Dystel & Goderich (DGLM) have decided to become an e-book packager.
Here's their announcement: link
This bothers me enough that I decided to do my first ever guest post on Brillig to comment.
I think the decision to help an author self-publish a book, after failing to place it with a real publisher, is rooted in hubris. Yes, we agents hopefully have good taste, and there are client projects we all feel should have sold but didn't, but to turn around and put them out into the marketplace anyway, shows disrespect toward the editors who should be among our closest colleagues, takes up time and energy best spent elsewhere, and detaches us from reality, which can't be good.
It's really disappointing to see such a high-profile agency go this route. DGLM seems to have the support of their clients, if the comments on their site are any indication. They also seem to be trying to do their best to be forthright about everything.While it's possible that an agency, especially a larger one, could successfully keep these concerns separate (and good luck keeping it that way), it is a conflict of interest for most.
I'm not a member of the AAR, but if I were, I would move to make an active effort to kick out any member agency who serves as first publisher to their clients' books.
Good luck to everyone at DGLM. Many of you have been doing this for much longer, and with greater financial success, than I have. Maybe the rest of us will be shown the error of our ways.
If anyone reads this post, and thinks I'm the one in error (or agrees...), feel free to comment via rock with note attached, or in the comments section.
Eddie
I don't disagree with Eddie on this. There are times I've rolled about in my own mind on this question. There's a book we absolutely love, we can't find a publisher, we're sure they're all wrong... And yet I haven't actually gone ahead and flipped that switch and said "darnit, nobody else wants to publish this fine book we're going to go do it ourselves."
And yet we at JABberwocky are in fact e-book publishers, with a growing list of authors and titles. Albeit all reverted backlist titles first published by major publishers and now back in the author's hands, some of the books in fact published, reverted, resold, published again, and then back a second time. We're trying to occupy some kind of middle ground that may or may not actually exist between being full-fledged publishers of electronic books and saying we can't and shan't be publishers at all. I dealt with some of our thinking on the whole e-book program in this blog post when we had our first e-book go live.
Is there a distinction, or is it a distinction without a difference, to object as Eddie and I do, to an agent who "serves as first publisher to their clients' books"??? I see in my mind a very real difference between what we are doing, what Robert Gottlieb says we should/shouldn't do, and what Dystel and Goderich have decided to do. But even if I'm right to see that different today, will it still exist tomorrow?
As Eddie says, let us know what you think. I'm not sure the rock with attached note is such a good idea, but otherwise...
What should our role as agents be?
There's one school of thought I know I don't agree with, which says that an agent should never be a publisher. One statement of that position from a British agent can be found here, and in the US one prominent agent who's expressed his firm opposition to melding the roles is Robert Gottlieb, the head of the prestigious Trident Media Group. That's some of what he discusses in this guest blog post on the Publishers Weekly site.
My VP, Eddie Schneider, reacted very strongly to a news article in Publishers Lunch Daily this week (also the source for the above link) about a literary agency that wants to go into e-book packaging. I thought I'd invite him to guest on my blog, and italicized are his comments below:
I'm sure many of you involved in book publishing in some fashion (agent, editor, aspiring author) heard the news Monday that Dystel & Goderich (DGLM) have decided to become an e-book packager.
Here's their announcement: link
This bothers me enough that I decided to do my first ever guest post on Brillig to comment.
I think the decision to help an author self-publish a book, after failing to place it with a real publisher, is rooted in hubris. Yes, we agents hopefully have good taste, and there are client projects we all feel should have sold but didn't, but to turn around and put them out into the marketplace anyway, shows disrespect toward the editors who should be among our closest colleagues, takes up time and energy best spent elsewhere, and detaches us from reality, which can't be good.
It's really disappointing to see such a high-profile agency go this route. DGLM seems to have the support of their clients, if the comments on their site are any indication. They also seem to be trying to do their best to be forthright about everything.While it's possible that an agency, especially a larger one, could successfully keep these concerns separate (and good luck keeping it that way), it is a conflict of interest for most.
I'm not a member of the AAR, but if I were, I would move to make an active effort to kick out any member agency who serves as first publisher to their clients' books.
Good luck to everyone at DGLM. Many of you have been doing this for much longer, and with greater financial success, than I have. Maybe the rest of us will be shown the error of our ways.
If anyone reads this post, and thinks I'm the one in error (or agrees...), feel free to comment via rock with note attached, or in the comments section.
Eddie
I don't disagree with Eddie on this. There are times I've rolled about in my own mind on this question. There's a book we absolutely love, we can't find a publisher, we're sure they're all wrong... And yet I haven't actually gone ahead and flipped that switch and said "darnit, nobody else wants to publish this fine book we're going to go do it ourselves."
And yet we at JABberwocky are in fact e-book publishers, with a growing list of authors and titles. Albeit all reverted backlist titles first published by major publishers and now back in the author's hands, some of the books in fact published, reverted, resold, published again, and then back a second time. We're trying to occupy some kind of middle ground that may or may not actually exist between being full-fledged publishers of electronic books and saying we can't and shan't be publishers at all. I dealt with some of our thinking on the whole e-book program in this blog post when we had our first e-book go live.
Is there a distinction, or is it a distinction without a difference, to object as Eddie and I do, to an agent who "serves as first publisher to their clients' books"??? I see in my mind a very real difference between what we are doing, what Robert Gottlieb says we should/shouldn't do, and what Dystel and Goderich have decided to do. But even if I'm right to see that different today, will it still exist tomorrow?
As Eddie says, let us know what you think. I'm not sure the rock with attached note is such a good idea, but otherwise...
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Doomed to Repeat It
So as Borders makes its way through the bankruptcy process, they've gotten the OK to terminate their relationship with Starbucks to have Seattle's Best Cafes. The filings to get out from under say how the royalty rates are too high and make it difficult for Borders to make money on the cafe operations, so it would be better for Borders to take back the operation.
Hmmm. If you substituted the Borders website and Amazon for cafes and Seattle's Best, you'd be getting a strong sense of deja vu.
Borders went with Seattle's Best because they had, over time, a very big problem that they just weren't running their cafes very well. B&N had that relationship selling Starbucks coffee and desserts from Cheesecake Factory from cafes with attractive menus and bright fixtures with everyone in their very nice and consistent uniforms. Borders kind of slowly scraped over time toward having some vague degree of consistency in their wares, but overall the cafes just never looked as nice. Borders would sell Kim & Scott's pretzels at all of their stores but they wouldn't be branded as Kim & Scott's pretzels. Since Borders couldn't run the cafes well, farming out the business to Seattle's Best and having some degree of consistency and a recognizable brand and all that sort of thing seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Just like, since Borders was late to the internet and a distant third and not running things very well, farming Borders.com off to Amazon was kind of a good idea at the time.
In both cases, however, the better solution would have been to run things better within Borders.
But even after the Seattle's Best conversions and the money spent fixing up the cafes, the cafes were better but still not as good. There was still less variety than at a B&N cafe, still not as attractively presented, and some stores were never converted, and even those that were it dragged on over several years. And of course those conversions were one part of the endless rounds of store remodels, and ultimately even this seeming good thing in the remodel process was maybe not so good after all.
Smooth move.
There may also be another few dozen Borders locations closing, as many as 20 superstores and 30 mall and/or airport stores.
And these, Borders would actually like to keep open.
The problem here is that these are stores that are very profitable and well trafficked in very good locations or stores that have really really good leases. Under the calendar that's in effect for the bankruptcy, Borders had x months to decide if it wants to keep or reject store leases, clock will be up in September. While there are some buyers circling around a substantial portion of the business, there's no way a sale can close in time for the new buyer to take over the leases before that September deadline.
And Borders is still a little tight on cash until a buyer is found. In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding, a company has to find a lendor who will float cash for the company to operate during the reorganization. This is called "debtor in possession" or DIP, and the company that's giving the DIP money is first in line to get paid back ahead of everyone else. For Borders, the DIP financing was on the low side because of the challenging circumstances facing the company, and this is exacerbated because Borders lost a lot of money in March and April, maybe somewhat less in May, but they've burned through a lot of their DIP money.
And because these are good stores, like the Penn Plaza location in Manhattan or downtown Boston, in good rentable locations, the landlords aren't rushing to compromise with Borders and extend the deadline for rejecting leases. All the other locations, there's a signed piece of paper that in most instances is pushing the September 2011 deadline into the opening weeks of 2012. Not these.
So there are these 50 stores with millions of dollars in inventory in them, that Borders might have to vacate in September, like it or not, on account of the interaction of these various factors. If you are going to vacate the stores by September, you need to start liquidating the inventory by the end of June, to allow July and August for the going out of business sales and a couple of weeks in September to clear out. And in order to do that, you need the court to approve the sales and the liquidators to put in their bids for the honor of running the sales right about now.
With its back to the wall, Borders is struggling to get the DIP lendors to give them more time, or to find some way of getting the extension papers signed by the landlords, but with no certainty of getting anywhere with either, they have to put in their filings and motions to approve the sales. They think maybe it will end up being closer to 15 stores than 50 that end up having to shutter, but who knows.
The manager of the Borders store in downtown Boston has said it's 100% certain his store will close. The closest major bookstore would then be the Barnes & Noble in the Prudential Center, around two miles away. That's practically like having it another city. If you're wondering if there's any effect on the ability of people to buy books as a result of losing these stores, I can't think of any better example.
Hmmm. If you substituted the Borders website and Amazon for cafes and Seattle's Best, you'd be getting a strong sense of deja vu.
Borders went with Seattle's Best because they had, over time, a very big problem that they just weren't running their cafes very well. B&N had that relationship selling Starbucks coffee and desserts from Cheesecake Factory from cafes with attractive menus and bright fixtures with everyone in their very nice and consistent uniforms. Borders kind of slowly scraped over time toward having some vague degree of consistency in their wares, but overall the cafes just never looked as nice. Borders would sell Kim & Scott's pretzels at all of their stores but they wouldn't be branded as Kim & Scott's pretzels. Since Borders couldn't run the cafes well, farming out the business to Seattle's Best and having some degree of consistency and a recognizable brand and all that sort of thing seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Just like, since Borders was late to the internet and a distant third and not running things very well, farming Borders.com off to Amazon was kind of a good idea at the time.
In both cases, however, the better solution would have been to run things better within Borders.
But even after the Seattle's Best conversions and the money spent fixing up the cafes, the cafes were better but still not as good. There was still less variety than at a B&N cafe, still not as attractively presented, and some stores were never converted, and even those that were it dragged on over several years. And of course those conversions were one part of the endless rounds of store remodels, and ultimately even this seeming good thing in the remodel process was maybe not so good after all.
Smooth move.
There may also be another few dozen Borders locations closing, as many as 20 superstores and 30 mall and/or airport stores.
And these, Borders would actually like to keep open.
The problem here is that these are stores that are very profitable and well trafficked in very good locations or stores that have really really good leases. Under the calendar that's in effect for the bankruptcy, Borders had x months to decide if it wants to keep or reject store leases, clock will be up in September. While there are some buyers circling around a substantial portion of the business, there's no way a sale can close in time for the new buyer to take over the leases before that September deadline.
And Borders is still a little tight on cash until a buyer is found. In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding, a company has to find a lendor who will float cash for the company to operate during the reorganization. This is called "debtor in possession" or DIP, and the company that's giving the DIP money is first in line to get paid back ahead of everyone else. For Borders, the DIP financing was on the low side because of the challenging circumstances facing the company, and this is exacerbated because Borders lost a lot of money in March and April, maybe somewhat less in May, but they've burned through a lot of their DIP money.
And because these are good stores, like the Penn Plaza location in Manhattan or downtown Boston, in good rentable locations, the landlords aren't rushing to compromise with Borders and extend the deadline for rejecting leases. All the other locations, there's a signed piece of paper that in most instances is pushing the September 2011 deadline into the opening weeks of 2012. Not these.
So there are these 50 stores with millions of dollars in inventory in them, that Borders might have to vacate in September, like it or not, on account of the interaction of these various factors. If you are going to vacate the stores by September, you need to start liquidating the inventory by the end of June, to allow July and August for the going out of business sales and a couple of weeks in September to clear out. And in order to do that, you need the court to approve the sales and the liquidators to put in their bids for the honor of running the sales right about now.
With its back to the wall, Borders is struggling to get the DIP lendors to give them more time, or to find some way of getting the extension papers signed by the landlords, but with no certainty of getting anywhere with either, they have to put in their filings and motions to approve the sales. They think maybe it will end up being closer to 15 stores than 50 that end up having to shutter, but who knows.
The manager of the Borders store in downtown Boston has said it's 100% certain his store will close. The closest major bookstore would then be the Barnes & Noble in the Prudential Center, around two miles away. That's practically like having it another city. If you're wondering if there's any effect on the ability of people to buy books as a result of losing these stores, I can't think of any better example.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
evolution in action
So I think it's safe to say that the main beneficiary of the ongoing disappearing act at Borders has been Amazon or other internet outlets for buying books (and probably not borders.com as one of those!).
Nielsen Bookscan gives breakdowns on sales in retail/brick and mortar channels as against sales in discount & other which includes primarily Amazon and bn.com. (Target and K-Mart are also in that line but for the typical new release sf/f hardcover these outlets aren't a factor.)
So we can look at the breakdown on launch week for those two lines and see where books are being sold. This also separates out e-book sales. Whatever people are doing there, wherever they're buying e-books, we are able from this to look solely at market share for new books in print format.
January 2010, launch week for Simon Green's Good, Bad & The Uncanny
Retail market share 54%
March 2010, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Oath of Fealty:
Retail market share 44%
April 2010, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead & Gone paperback
Retail market share 43%
May 2010, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead in the Familly
Retail market share 39%
[and this is a book that would have been competing with mass merchandisers like Target and K-Mart as well]
January 2011, launch week for Simon Green's Hard Day's Knight
Retail market share 54%
these are all books that came out before the Borders implosion, a January 2011 release like Simon's would have been the last one for
March 2011, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Kings of the North
Retail market share 32%
April 2011, launch week for Jack Campbell's Dreadnaught
Retail market share 32%
April 2011, launch week for Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family paperback
Retail market share 40%
OK, if you want to you can poke holes left and right in the argument I'm making. The only direct year-over-year 450-Borders-operating-normally vs. 200-Borders-in-bankruptcy comparison I'm making is with Elizabeth Moon, and one comparison is a point, not even a line and hardly a definitive trend. It's an anecdote. I don't know exactly how many of the copies that sold a year ago sold at the 250 Borders that disappeared over the year following.
But I've been in the business for 25 years, and I consider the year-over-year drop in retail market share for Elizabeth Moon to be jaw-dropping. It's not like people couldn't buy cheaper hardcovers on Amazon a year ago. It's not like the economy's in dramatically different shape now than a year ago, it's pretty shitty in both instances. And somehow or other, brick-and-mortar booksellers are losing huge market share to internet, and I'd suspect that it's the biggest such drop in percentage terms since Amazon arrived in business fifteen years ago, almost has to be since if you lose 10% of your market share every year for fifteen years you don't have any business left to lose. And the one big difference between brick-and-mortar and Amazon now vs. last year is those 250 Borders that went up and vanished, and it just seems to me to be abundantly clear that most of those shoppers haven't decided to drive an extra mile to find a B&N.
Let's just say I'll keep an eye on this!
And if you're looking at this and wondering if/how Borders can come up with a plan to reorganize, I don't think you'd feel encouraged.
Nielsen Bookscan gives breakdowns on sales in retail/brick and mortar channels as against sales in discount & other which includes primarily Amazon and bn.com. (Target and K-Mart are also in that line but for the typical new release sf/f hardcover these outlets aren't a factor.)
So we can look at the breakdown on launch week for those two lines and see where books are being sold. This also separates out e-book sales. Whatever people are doing there, wherever they're buying e-books, we are able from this to look solely at market share for new books in print format.
January 2010, launch week for Simon Green's Good, Bad & The Uncanny
Retail market share 54%
March 2010, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Oath of Fealty:
Retail market share 44%
April 2010, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead & Gone paperback
Retail market share 43%
May 2010, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead in the Familly
Retail market share 39%
[and this is a book that would have been competing with mass merchandisers like Target and K-Mart as well]
January 2011, launch week for Simon Green's Hard Day's Knight
Retail market share 54%
these are all books that came out before the Borders implosion, a January 2011 release like Simon's would have been the last one for
March 2011, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Kings of the North
Retail market share 32%
April 2011, launch week for Jack Campbell's Dreadnaught
Retail market share 32%
April 2011, launch week for Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family paperback
Retail market share 40%
OK, if you want to you can poke holes left and right in the argument I'm making. The only direct year-over-year 450-Borders-operating-normally vs. 200-Borders-in-bankruptcy comparison I'm making is with Elizabeth Moon, and one comparison is a point, not even a line and hardly a definitive trend. It's an anecdote. I don't know exactly how many of the copies that sold a year ago sold at the 250 Borders that disappeared over the year following.
But I've been in the business for 25 years, and I consider the year-over-year drop in retail market share for Elizabeth Moon to be jaw-dropping. It's not like people couldn't buy cheaper hardcovers on Amazon a year ago. It's not like the economy's in dramatically different shape now than a year ago, it's pretty shitty in both instances. And somehow or other, brick-and-mortar booksellers are losing huge market share to internet, and I'd suspect that it's the biggest such drop in percentage terms since Amazon arrived in business fifteen years ago, almost has to be since if you lose 10% of your market share every year for fifteen years you don't have any business left to lose. And the one big difference between brick-and-mortar and Amazon now vs. last year is those 250 Borders that went up and vanished, and it just seems to me to be abundantly clear that most of those shoppers haven't decided to drive an extra mile to find a B&N.
Let's just say I'll keep an eye on this!
And if you're looking at this and wondering if/how Borders can come up with a plan to reorganize, I don't think you'd feel encouraged.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
selective reading
The Wall St. Journal had an article this week about the slow return of guns to the shelves at Wal-Mart. (no link, since hides behind their pay wall.)
Ordinarily an article like this would meet with my scorn and approbation. I am not a gun person.
But there was a sentence in the article that I enjoyed very much reading. It said that Wal-Mart -- and for all its power Wal-Mart has struggled a bit in the US in recent years, trying to broaden its appear without particular success and then struggling along with its customers during the economic difficulties of the last two years -- was starting to return things like guns and sewing cloth to its stores because it came to realize that these slow-moving items were more important to generating customer traffic with its core customers than they had appreciated.
And this made me feel better about one of my passionately held beliefs about Borders, that the major blow to the chain came in spring 2008 when the company reduced title counts at its stores. How can I possibly think that dropping titles that might have sold so few copies would be the killing blow? But I did, I do, I always will, and it's that sentence in that WSJ article this week that sums it up. No, the books hardly sold worth a damn, but the customers who did buy deep into the catalog were important customers.
Some differences which I think made this effect even more important to Borders. I think the customers who didn't buy the books still kind of noticed them, and that their presence enhanced the overall impression of the brand, more than is the case for these items Wal-Mart is returning to the shelves. And more important, there are still guns and sewing cloth to sell so Wal-Mart can turn back the clock and stop selling them. The deep catalog advantage at the best Borders was built up over a fifteen or twenty year period, and many of the books Borders stopped selling went out of print and bye-bye without Borders to sell them, making it harder to just put them back on the shelf after a year or two away. It's also one thing for books that don't sell a lot of copies to justify continuing to sell them here or there as a matter of happy inertia, and another thing to decide to get back in the business of selling books that don't really sell all that well.
Bottom line is that when George Jones was saying on conference calls in the quarters following the reduction in title count that he ordered that same store book sales were down by 13% and we think a few points of it is from overdoing the drops in title count, I think he was underestimating the real impact of what he had done.
Ordinarily an article like this would meet with my scorn and approbation. I am not a gun person.
But there was a sentence in the article that I enjoyed very much reading. It said that Wal-Mart -- and for all its power Wal-Mart has struggled a bit in the US in recent years, trying to broaden its appear without particular success and then struggling along with its customers during the economic difficulties of the last two years -- was starting to return things like guns and sewing cloth to its stores because it came to realize that these slow-moving items were more important to generating customer traffic with its core customers than they had appreciated.
And this made me feel better about one of my passionately held beliefs about Borders, that the major blow to the chain came in spring 2008 when the company reduced title counts at its stores. How can I possibly think that dropping titles that might have sold so few copies would be the killing blow? But I did, I do, I always will, and it's that sentence in that WSJ article this week that sums it up. No, the books hardly sold worth a damn, but the customers who did buy deep into the catalog were important customers.
Some differences which I think made this effect even more important to Borders. I think the customers who didn't buy the books still kind of noticed them, and that their presence enhanced the overall impression of the brand, more than is the case for these items Wal-Mart is returning to the shelves. And more important, there are still guns and sewing cloth to sell so Wal-Mart can turn back the clock and stop selling them. The deep catalog advantage at the best Borders was built up over a fifteen or twenty year period, and many of the books Borders stopped selling went out of print and bye-bye without Borders to sell them, making it harder to just put them back on the shelf after a year or two away. It's also one thing for books that don't sell a lot of copies to justify continuing to sell them here or there as a matter of happy inertia, and another thing to decide to get back in the business of selling books that don't really sell all that well.
Bottom line is that when George Jones was saying on conference calls in the quarters following the reduction in title count that he ordered that same store book sales were down by 13% and we think a few points of it is from overdoing the drops in title count, I think he was underestimating the real impact of what he had done.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Things from England retailing
One of the problems with modern agriculture is that of monoculture. A particular type of corn or banana or tomato might be wonderful but if everyone grows only that one wonderful thing and that one wonderful thing meets but one determined enemy then there goes your entire crop.
Sitting back after London Book Fair, I worry that the biggest threat from the ebook isn't so much that it in and of itself will wipe out the print book but rather that it will lead to a monoculture for the retailing of the print book, and that it will be the monoculture that kills. And the UK may be leading the way.
Waterstones is the print book retailer in the UK. There are supermarkets with a couple of hundred titles or HMVs or WH Smiths that have book departments of varying size. But if you want to find a few thousand books to choose from instead of a few hundred, there is only Waterstones.
So at this point in time, virtually the only books selling at bookstores in the UK are the ones being carried at Waterstones and Waterstones is ailing.
It is currently owned by HMV, the music/video chain that is ailing. It is for sale, maybe to some Russian tycoon, maybe with participation of someone from the Waterstones family. Will it be sold? Will the new owners have the cash and ideas to bring the company forward?
If not them, who? A few Foyles stores in central London, a Blackwells, not much else left.
Even now, the merchandising at Waterstones is hideously boring, every store filled with the same pastel-signed mix-and-match 3-for-2 tables and bays. No sign of the theme tables selected by local stores that were there a year ago. Barnes and Noble can be boring in the same way but at least doesn't have blaring pastel signs that suggest the only reason to buy a book is because it is 3-for-2 and books aren't subject to VAT.
Two years ago Borders was still around with a broader range of US imports, which Waterstones now has in lesser quantity. Bad that "illegal" US imports are less likely to introduce an author to the UK, good that prospective sales to UK publishers less likely to be dampened by loss of sales to imports, bad that Amazon still does "illegal" imports on anything it can so if no print book chain is providing a range of in demand US titles it drives more sales to the Internet and away from physical stores. And Borders/Books Etc. had sufficient mass to maybe give a book a physical presence without Waterstones including a much wider assortment of imports from the US.
Happily for my business we have Charlaine Harris who is carried to a degree at HMV, Smiths, other places that sell a small range of books. And the Brandon Sanderson and Jack Campbell books are very big business at Waterstones as is Peter V Brett with a smaller # of books out. Three years ago Elizabeth Moon was our top seller, and she sells as well as she ever did and has a presence at every Waterstones while our overall business in the UK is much bigger.
But there is a cost. Overall I think the typical UK store may carry fewer of our non-Charlaine titles than a few years ago. The rich are getting richer but if in 2008 I could say it was a publisher excise to say they could only buy things they could afford to promote now it seems genuinely the case that a smaller book will have a hard time fighting is way to the fore. The retail environment is boring, not much reason to get excited about entering any one store and no other store to go to for some variety.
And I fear it may only get worse. And if this one kind of boring chain to stop isn't there, the market is dead. Dead. It will be Amazon. And Amazon. And Amazon some more.
There is a cautionary lesson for publishers in the US. Publishers don't want to resume trading with Borders on standard trade terms and understandably so, but they should want a Barnes and Noble monoculture even less.
I do not know if the Kindle has any big box retail partners in the UK. In bookstores, the Sony eReader is much more prominent than in the US which makes it more annoying that Sony doesn't seem to be very open to a range of content providers the way that other eVendors are. There are other readers like the iRiver and Elonex that we are unfamiliar with in the US that also have substantial UK bookstore presence. We need to get Sony to return our calls and explore some of these obscure vendors if we are to have the penetration in the UK market for the JABberwocky ebook program that we have in the US.
Quantity wise the biggest title counts non-Charlaine for our clients were around two dozen books, the worst stores more like 12 or 15. Forbidden Planet, which imports with abandon, had around 100.
I stopped by two old Borders in outer London that were still empty 15 months after closing, the one on Charing Cross at the Borders HQ is a TK Max store, the Oxford St flagship had been sold to a fashion retailer to raise cash ahead of the company going under and the Oxford store now a Tesco Metro grocery store.
In Australia, 16 Borders are closing (9 will remain open) as part of the REDGroup bankruptcy along with dozens of small format Angus and Robertson stores. There are dueling lawsuits between REDGroup and A&R franchise stores that want to break away. Like unhappy families each Borders chain has gone bankrupt in it's own unhappy way.
Here in the US would you go to work for Borders right now? Since most sane people would say no, the need for the bankruptcy court to approve some kind of bonus and retention plan for Borders execs is real. I hate to say so, don't like these plans at all as a rule, but here it does seem necessary.
Bottom line here is that I'm not encouraged by what I see in the UK, and have deep fears that we're heading in the same direction in the US.
Sitting back after London Book Fair, I worry that the biggest threat from the ebook isn't so much that it in and of itself will wipe out the print book but rather that it will lead to a monoculture for the retailing of the print book, and that it will be the monoculture that kills. And the UK may be leading the way.
Waterstones is the print book retailer in the UK. There are supermarkets with a couple of hundred titles or HMVs or WH Smiths that have book departments of varying size. But if you want to find a few thousand books to choose from instead of a few hundred, there is only Waterstones.
So at this point in time, virtually the only books selling at bookstores in the UK are the ones being carried at Waterstones and Waterstones is ailing.
It is currently owned by HMV, the music/video chain that is ailing. It is for sale, maybe to some Russian tycoon, maybe with participation of someone from the Waterstones family. Will it be sold? Will the new owners have the cash and ideas to bring the company forward?
If not them, who? A few Foyles stores in central London, a Blackwells, not much else left.
Even now, the merchandising at Waterstones is hideously boring, every store filled with the same pastel-signed mix-and-match 3-for-2 tables and bays. No sign of the theme tables selected by local stores that were there a year ago. Barnes and Noble can be boring in the same way but at least doesn't have blaring pastel signs that suggest the only reason to buy a book is because it is 3-for-2 and books aren't subject to VAT.
Two years ago Borders was still around with a broader range of US imports, which Waterstones now has in lesser quantity. Bad that "illegal" US imports are less likely to introduce an author to the UK, good that prospective sales to UK publishers less likely to be dampened by loss of sales to imports, bad that Amazon still does "illegal" imports on anything it can so if no print book chain is providing a range of in demand US titles it drives more sales to the Internet and away from physical stores. And Borders/Books Etc. had sufficient mass to maybe give a book a physical presence without Waterstones including a much wider assortment of imports from the US.
Happily for my business we have Charlaine Harris who is carried to a degree at HMV, Smiths, other places that sell a small range of books. And the Brandon Sanderson and Jack Campbell books are very big business at Waterstones as is Peter V Brett with a smaller # of books out. Three years ago Elizabeth Moon was our top seller, and she sells as well as she ever did and has a presence at every Waterstones while our overall business in the UK is much bigger.
But there is a cost. Overall I think the typical UK store may carry fewer of our non-Charlaine titles than a few years ago. The rich are getting richer but if in 2008 I could say it was a publisher excise to say they could only buy things they could afford to promote now it seems genuinely the case that a smaller book will have a hard time fighting is way to the fore. The retail environment is boring, not much reason to get excited about entering any one store and no other store to go to for some variety.
And I fear it may only get worse. And if this one kind of boring chain to stop isn't there, the market is dead. Dead. It will be Amazon. And Amazon. And Amazon some more.
There is a cautionary lesson for publishers in the US. Publishers don't want to resume trading with Borders on standard trade terms and understandably so, but they should want a Barnes and Noble monoculture even less.
I do not know if the Kindle has any big box retail partners in the UK. In bookstores, the Sony eReader is much more prominent than in the US which makes it more annoying that Sony doesn't seem to be very open to a range of content providers the way that other eVendors are. There are other readers like the iRiver and Elonex that we are unfamiliar with in the US that also have substantial UK bookstore presence. We need to get Sony to return our calls and explore some of these obscure vendors if we are to have the penetration in the UK market for the JABberwocky ebook program that we have in the US.
Quantity wise the biggest title counts non-Charlaine for our clients were around two dozen books, the worst stores more like 12 or 15. Forbidden Planet, which imports with abandon, had around 100.
I stopped by two old Borders in outer London that were still empty 15 months after closing, the one on Charing Cross at the Borders HQ is a TK Max store, the Oxford St flagship had been sold to a fashion retailer to raise cash ahead of the company going under and the Oxford store now a Tesco Metro grocery store.
In Australia, 16 Borders are closing (9 will remain open) as part of the REDGroup bankruptcy along with dozens of small format Angus and Robertson stores. There are dueling lawsuits between REDGroup and A&R franchise stores that want to break away. Like unhappy families each Borders chain has gone bankrupt in it's own unhappy way.
Here in the US would you go to work for Borders right now? Since most sane people would say no, the need for the bankruptcy court to approve some kind of bonus and retention plan for Borders execs is real. I hate to say so, don't like these plans at all as a rule, but here it does seem necessary.
Bottom line here is that I'm not encouraged by what I see in the UK, and have deep fears that we're heading in the same direction in the US.
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