Bookselling in turbulent times

It is a bit of a conundrum that bookselling has never been more topical whilst at the same time the industry has never been faced with such huge threats to the status quo.
“It has become fashionable recently to take booksellers out of the bookselling equation, to argue that publishers need to treat consumers, not booksellers, as their customer,” says Philip Jones on the Bookseller.com.
But this kind of linear logic is not as straightforward as it sounds. Even online, despite a decade of talk, the consumer-facing trade publisher website remains all but illusory. The trade is too diverse for simple solutions.

“Publishers might no longer call booksellers “customers” and their marketing might reflect that, but good publishers know that if they treat booksellers supportively, they gain an ally, not a barrier,” continues Jones.
“However you choose to define that relationship, it ought to be a positive one. Digital is no longer the threat it was once perceived to be. Customers have shown that they are format flexible. As diverse and nuanced, in fact, as the supply chain that services them, and the products they buy. Digital will continue to radically reshape this business, and continue to offer opportunities that are outside of the traditional loop, but complexity is written into this market in indelible ink.”

Conferences
Conferences are still the place to go and meet with peers and get the latest on industry matters. The UK Booksellers Association’s annual conference took place at the University of Warwick in September. The profile of their industry is different to ours, they are slightly ahead in terms of digital adoption and the association is focusing a lot of their effort and marketing spend on independent booksellers (fondly referred to as “indies”).
One thing that comes across in all reports on the event is that there was positive energy coming from the 200 (mostly indie) attendees – and that is good news.
On his Blog, Philip Jones’ comment on the conference in a piece titled Run, Bookseller, Run was that this year’s BA conference was a far cry from the days when publishers, authors and booksellers would gather in hotels and spend boozy hours talking books in a world that was both appreciative and supportive. “The trade is much more hard-worn now. Amazon is variously mentioned at the conference, but rarely positively. If the original BA conferences were flavoured by the fact that they existed in a world Before Amazon, today’s BA conference is AA (After Amazon). The Seattle giant has shaped this business in a way that would have seemed unimaginable 20 years ago.”

Bookselling after Amazon
So what is Bookselling AA like? It is certainly less profitable, says Jones. Many of the indies in the UK just about cover their costs, but few draw a salary.
South African independents are in the same position. “It’s not a hobby,” said Mervyn Sloman from the Book Lounge at the Open Book Festival. “We do make some money, but no one is ever going to get rich selling books.”
Verne Kopytoff writes on the Fortune.com blog, “Amazon may have the bargains, but independent booksellers are trading in the importance of real-life community and are seeing an uptick in business.”
“To survive in the age of Amazon, many bookstores are emphasizing what e-commerce has a tougher time delivering: community and a personal touch. It’s not exactly a new strategy. But it has gotten far more attention in recent years. Amazon’s automated recommendations, couched on its site as “customers who bought this item also bought …” aren’t quite the same as getting advice from knowledgeable bookstore staff. Nor is Goodreads, the Amazon-owned book recommendation and community site, a substitute for attending an in-store reading by a prize-winning author.
Clever bookshops are centering their strategies on emphasizing what they can offer and Amazon can’t, including author events, personal recommendations, book clubs and books as gifts.

Combating ‘Showrooming’
‘Showrooming’ is a digital age phenomenon where customers use physical bookshops to browse for ideas and information, then order the books online. Amazon has capitalised on the trend, creating an iPhone app that allows you to buy items online without leaving the bookshop, simply by scanning the barcode on your phone.
Corrie Perkin’s My Bookshop in Australia has addressed such practices subtly, with a line of bookmarks and cards promoting books and bookshops. One includes a quote from Ann Patchett’s The Bookshop Strikes Back: ‘If a bookstore matters to you, then shop at a bookstore’.

Destination stores
Indeed, many booksellers are trying to create a sort of community centre amid their shelves. We attended a session titled The Future of Literature: Indie Bookstores at Open Book, where Audrey Rademeyer of Kalk Bay Books, Kerry-Leigh Snel of Book Boutique in Amanzimtoti and of course Mervyn Sloman of the Book Lounge in Cape Town made up the panel and much of interest was discussed. Indie booksellers are a powerful force and something very close to the hearts of many writers. A successful Indie bookshop should be a space of engagement, a cultural venue, a social space where people can discuss and debate their own ideas through the medium of books.
“Events are an extension of this space,” said Mervyn. “Not only the fact of their being but also how they are done.” Most important is the access they give readers to writers and vice versa. “Any book related activity is good for all of us whether it is events or festivals, whatever form it takes, we have to build a love of reading.”
“Our book store is a cultural venue,” said Kerry-Leigh. “It does become a community thing, it is about more than just selling books, it is about selling stories and news. Customers want to know what’s going on in the industry and a good bookstore is the central hub.”

Diversification
Kopytoff reports that Paul Jaffe, co-owner of Copperfield’s Books, an independent chain with six stores in Northern California, is opening a new 650 square metre store in San Rafael, north of San Francisco. The store will be downtown, which lost its last bookseller, a Borders store, years ago. It left a void in the community, which Jaffe is hoping to fill.
Like many bookstore owners, Jaffe has branched out from selling just new books to other items like greeting cards and candles. The new store will also have a cafe. “It’s very true that our new book sales have declined and will probably continue to decline, but we’re not just about new books anymore,” Jaffe said. These ancillary items account for about 30% of Copperfield’s total sales.

Awareness campaigns
Andrea Hanke, editor of industry magazine Books and Publishing, is enthusiastic about industry-wide campaigns designed to increase community awareness of the role bookshops play.
More than 20,000 people voted in the Australia’s Favourite Bookshop poll as part of this year’s National Bookshop Day (run by the Australian Booksellers’ Association). Andrea believes that the initiative has been ‘really useful in getting positive stories about local bookshops into the mainstream media.’
The most successful campaign lately has been the Books Are My Bag (BAMB) campaign in the UK.
Booksellers across the UK handed out thousands of branded tote bags on the 14th September, the launch day of the Books Are My Bag campaign and displayed posters of celebrities including model Lily Cole, actor Amanda Holden and author Neil Gaiman backing the campaign in their bookshops. The campaign was a success, and bookshops involved in the campaign saw an average 18% year-on-year sales rise on the day.
However, from here the feeling is that it is really up to the booksellers to take the campaign and run with it.

Technology
As far as technology goes, some bookstores are beginning to take online orders – it seems to be the norm in places like Europe and the UK. Many also sell e-books on their websites with the help of partners. Stores collect a commission on every digital book sold. For most stores, however, e-books account for only a small percentage of overall revenue.
In Eason’s chain of bookstores in Ireland, staff members guide e-reader buyers through the process of downloading their first e-book from the shop’s online store, meaning they are more likely to purchase from the chain’s digital arm in the future. At Blackwell’s in the UK, staff are armed with tablets for ordering books they do not have in stock.
Social networking
Many bookshops are now active online, both selling books and communicating with their customers through social media. “We’re trying to create an online space that reflects our shops,” says Emily Harms, marketing manager of Readings, a thriving Australian bookseller. “We ‘handsell’ books through our blog posts and social media recommendations.” Regarding e-books, she says that “selling e-books is very much part of Readings’ future. It’s about being a ‘one-stop shop for all things books’ for our customers.”

Get bolshy or die
“Most importantly,” says Jones, “Bookshops need to get more bolshy.”
Patrick Neale, President of the BA, spoke about booksellers as a key-stone species at the annual conference, because their eradication would mean a fundamental heart attack for the eco-structure that exists to serve authors and readers.
“It never fails to amaze me how blithe some pundits are about this. As if the disappearance of all those windows displaying books, and all those knowledgeable enthusiasts for the book, its content and the people who write and read them, all those environments where authors and readers meet, would be only a minor disruption to the landscape. As Lowther said, Amazon is a warehouse and an algorithm: there’s no world we know where the latter is an adequate replacement for the former.”
“A sense of community is great but it will not save bookshops,” says Jon Page, managing director of Boomerang Books in New South Wales. “What bookshops are facing at the moment is a battle over relevancy in the changing retail environment. The bookshop needs to be the primary place readers seek out books, whatever the format, otherwise only a handful are going to survive.”
This is not ground breaking news. But it is becoming apparent that the entire value chain is more dependent upon the existence of successful bookstores than ever. They are a key player in the vanguard standing against Amazon.