Bookselling now and in the future

The trick is to be agile…
“Spring is the time of plans and projects” – so wrote Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina in the 1870s. In the Spring of 2014, this certainly holds true.
Both the local publishing and bookselling sectors have experienced a major sea change in 2013/14. This has been brought on by the first meaningful levels of demand and interest in digital alternatives to print-based products, changing consumer behaviours, and increased disruption to traditional business models from new technology-orientated players.

Strong signals that this would occur sooner rather than later have been apparent for the last few years – sustained double-digit growth in internet penetration (particularly mobile), the advent of affordable, very powerful smart phones and tablets, access to reliable, high speed 3G and 4G mobile networks, the availability of cheaper data, and the astonishing rise of social media.
Even if growth rates start to slow, these factors have started a process that is irreversibly transforming the way most of our populace acquires, consumes and distributes information, how people’s buying decisions are made, where, how and when they shop, and changing their perceptions of what should be free and what should be paid for.
According to the 2012 Internet Matters report produced by World Wide Worx, annual growth in the local e-commerce market was around 30%, with strong expectations that this would accelerate in 2013 and continue to do so for the foreseeable future, driven by an increasingly confident and growing cohort of experienced internet users. At the time of writing this article their 2013 report is still to be released – I’m willing to bet that the 2013 e-commerce growth rate would have comfortably exceeded 30%. My own experience indicates that younger internet users (regardless of background) are quite keen to transact online, and do not require anything near the same length of time needed by previous generations in order to gain the necessary confidence to transact.
Unfortunately, the number of sales concluded online will likely remain disappointing without the widespread adoption of mobile payment solutions that also interface with online payment gateways. Numerous smaller transactions are either abandoned because of this shortcoming, or rendered entirely unprofitable by the punitive fees charged by banks when applying the remedy of cash deposits. When this barrier to online trade has been resolved, bricks-and-mortar bookshops will face stiffer competition than before from both local and international online retail competitors, and also from the host of Business to Consumer direct solutions that are emerging.
Publishers must adapt to this rapidly changing environment by both adopting and developing new products, skills, processes and technologies – even perhaps by fundamentally rethinking their business and income models. In much the same vein, so too must booksellers. The environmental changes taking place go far beyond the question of how to adapt to selling both print and e-book titles.
So looking forward to planning for 2015, what do local booksellers need to do? This is a question that independent booksellers based in the UK could not resolve in similar debates that I followed online in 2012. That they continue to debate these same issues in 2014 is in itself promising – most of them are still there – despite some rather pessimistic ‘the end is nigh’ type of predictions made those two years before! From a digital perspective, I offer the following considerations:

Get a mobile-friendly website
• A mobile friendly (responsive) website is now a business necessity.
• If you plan to establish a fully fledged e-commerce enabled catalogue site that features hundreds (usually thousands) of titles, you should seek expert advice from professional web developers who have a proven track record in building these.
• Speak to all your suppliers (publishers) – can they supply product data and images? How do they supply these? What format is the data in? How is this data updated and accessed?
• Website developers are not the same as website administrators. Who is going to create, administer and update your website’s content?
• Consider taking on someone who can project manage the site development, and ultimately be employed to administer it as well as related digital marketing
Investigate affiliate options
• Major online retail sites offer different affiliate marketing options that may be worth investigating, and can generate referral income
• You can become an authorised seller on many of these same sites too. In the case of new books however, you may be in competition with the online retailer, and may not be able at match their own prices
Learn how to advertise online
• The days of businesses obtaining free marketing via search engines and social media channels are probably numbered, both appear to be changing their parameters in order to get you to pay for improved visibility, traffic and interactions.
Upgrade you and your team’s digital ‘savvy’
• Become fully conversant in e-books and other digital content offerings
• Attend workshops and chats on social media, e-commerce – many are free
• Sign up for an online course – at least subscribe to key newsletters
• Consider a skills exchange programme
Become more agile
• Keep your digital projects lean and simple, get to market quickly
• Being agile is about managing an acceptable level of imperfection
• Build incrementally, adapt and improve on the fly
Stay optimistic and entrepreneurial – I foresee an exciting, expanded future ahead for booksellers as independent content brokers.

Alan Vesty, Digital Marketing Manager for the African Branch of Cambridge University Press.