The New Old-Fashioned
Way
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (MARCH 2002)
Mike
Shatzkin of the
Idea Logical Company took a retro tack at the
Seybold Seminars last month (see article)
as he rolled out “a brand new opportunity to get more
sales and lower the returns of physical books.” We offer
a brief excerpt of his remarks.
Here’s the fact most publishers and chain booksellers
seem to ignore: the only effective way to control book
inventory is title-by-title, store-by-store. All of
the various shortcuts, like saying “this title is ‘like’
that one” or “we’ll buy six for the A stores,” which
have become increasingly common over the past 20 years
as computers and central offices served by national
account managers replaced reps visiting retail locations,
have served to block sales and increase returns.
This is not to fault the skill level, dedication, or
work ethic of the people doing either the buying or
the selling. This is the inevitable result of more and
more aggregated decisions. But when a company like Borders
or Barnes & Noble is managing in excess of
100 million retail stock levels with all decisions being
made by humans, it is hard to see how else to do it
except by aggregating and averaging.
Now, in the old days, the successful publishers that
grew over time (the two best examples were Doubleday
and Random House) did so by building large sales
forces that took inventory in store after store so that
informed backlist buying recommendations were based
on the real sales and inventory information in that
store. Today, publishers have the opportunity to go
back to that work ethic, without getting on their knees
to count books on the bottom shelf. Point-of-sale data
exists for almost every retail outlet in the country
that matters. A substantial business called Bookscan
has been built assembling and selling that data. New
businesses are being organized to help the titans in
the marketplace analyze that data. But not a single
publisher that I know of is routinely assembling and
manipulating that data at the granular level — the store
level — to manage inventory title-by-title, location-by-location.
It is not easy to do that. There are both political
barriers and systems barriers to getting that data,
even through Bookscan. Indeed, Bookscan and its sister
company in Britain, BookTrack, have focused on
selling aggregated data and seem unaware of the critical
value of granularity. But as the trade book business
seems daily to become ever more unprofitable for publishers,
it is now possible to use data to solve inventory problems,
title-by-title and store-by-store, if there is the will
to learn the way.
©2002
Publishing Trends
