A clarion call from Exclusive Books

Managing Director of Exclusive Books, Benjamin Trisk was a guest speaker at the SA Booksellers AGM in KwaZulu Natal. We reproduce here a small excerpt of his highly engaging and encouraging speech. He has put the support of Exclusive Books firmly behind the SA Booksellers Association and the future of the book in South Africa.

.”..We are summoned by all books to a moveable feast. It was this reason, primus inter pares, that drew me back to books and bookselling. All the while, during the long, arduous months of due diligence, we were told that the book represented an old technology, that sales of the physical were in decline (which they were), that the digital world offered immediacy, mobility, pricing benefits, convenience, storage, technical conversion and text-interaction: all true.

We were told that linear modes of absorbing information were outdated, that the book no longer appealed to a digital generation, that mobility and choice of platform supplanted place: we differed. We were confident that we could rise to the challenges and revive a business cruelly treated. We took charge of the economics of our business on 1 December 2013. From then until now Exclusive’s trading has been good and many of our stores show excellent growth.

For me, personally, Exclusive Books has been a homecoming. However, I have only been able to treat it as familiar because my shareholders and our staff have been so extraordinarily supportive about the vision and the business.

And what is the vision? It adheres to a standard that bookshops can be places of experience and theatre. A place alive with discussion and debate. I urge you all to visit our new Rosebank store and see the vision made live.

But if, South Africa’s publishers, are to prosper; if they are to grow their businesses, find new markets, improve efficiencies, invent, design and reimagine publishing – and if they are going to have the necessary confidence to make the investment in personnel and capital to do these things, then the Gorilla in the cage, Exclusive Books, needs to fold them in its warm embrace and whisper tenderly in their ear and we will not be able to do that unless we have a strong, thriving independent phalanx of booksellers around us..

Publishers must endorse our journey and travel the road because they are seduced by the vision – not held hostage by it. All of us together should be smitten in love and believe in the idea that we can sew books so seamlessly into the fabric of South Africa’s thinking life, that our customers will buy books for their children and themselves as naturally as they might purchase a cinema ticket or a double brandy and coke.

From the moment I arrived at Exclusive Books I have been told that we should reduce the space we give to mass-market paperback fiction and allocate it elsewhere. If we do, we will surely confront a self-fulfilling prophecy. But, further, I want again to increase the space. And if we cannot increase space then we must curate smarter or find larger sites.

…And how do we make ourselves relevant to a new South African middle-class; a growing, substantial and influential population who never grew up with books? We compete with other diversions, easier to absorb and more immediate. This new demographic is aspirant, ambitious and capable – and at Exclusive we learn from them everyday. They are equally concerned by a public education system that threatens at any moment to fall apart. They are as heavily invested in their children’s future as we are. They understand the need to master and absorb information from an early age. We need to make the bookshop accessible; a place that welcomes not repels.

When JK Rowling gave the commencement speech at Harvard in June 2008 she titled it: The fringe benfits of poverty and the power of the imagination. In our own stores a changing demographic is unafraid to spend money on children. However, their focus is on information. We, on the contrary, need to show our faith in the imagination – because it is the imagination that drives invention and innovation, not the ability to assemble or manipulate data. Earlier this year in all our stores we ran simultaneous public readings of stories. We have to do this regularly so that we build adherents and remove the austerity and unfamiliarity that bookshops may present to some of our customers.

And what of our shops? If all we provide is staff to take your money then the customer can just as easily stay at home, click away and buy cheaper. We need to turn the store into theatre, to make it an invisible and visible place of interest, our spaces must extend the shopper. We have to compete for the consumer’s rand – and the competition is daily tougher and more aggressive. We have heeded the call; and new and refurbished stores will reflect a new energy. We are also in the early stages of discussion with one of the national landlords to almost double the footprint of a flagship store to create a retail presence that will address customers in a new vernacular.

Bookshops need to take us to the same place as great restaurants. There has to be (ultimately) a magnificent arrangement of different skills through the faultless management of a creative team to provide the customer with nourishment and comfort: a comfort that ultimately comes from the cultural matrix that sustains us all. In other words, at worst great bookshops have to understand your interests – and at best they should do so before you do.

We are focussed on all the standard measures that one would expect from the grey hair assembled around our boardroom table. Some of these measures are more immediate than others. We moved into a new head office at the end of June; we are evaluating a total overhaul of computer systems. We are building our brand and re-imagining our stores in a myriad ways. We will develop online, we will create new channels of distribution, we want to take control of our coffee offering wherever we can, and much else beside.”

Benjamin Trisk,
Chief Executive Officer – Exclusive Books Group (Pty) Ltd