Gimme Shelter
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (MAY 2003)
“Best
of times, worst of times” was the Dickensian scenario
facing representatives from more than 50 publishing
houses who hunkered down at the first Management
Forum for Independent Publishers, hosted April 4-6
by NYU’s Center for Publishing. At the top of
the agenda? “The economy, the economy, the economy,”
chanted Center for Publishing Director Robert Baensch,
who summoned a roster of two dozen industry players
to deliver what amounted to a state-of-the-supply-chain
address for stand-alone publishers. (Division heads
from large houses were barred, Baensch tells PT,
due to their alien fiscal gestalt. “If they need a budget
request, a large publisher fills out a form,” he explains.
“The form that the independent publisher fills out is
a loan application.”) Awhirl in the global economic
death-spiral, participants took tips on shoring up P&Ls
and battened down their balance sheets, while also scanning
for lost sales bobbing in the wake of the industry behemoths.
Unit sales have flatlined, of course, said Workman
Publisher Bruce Harris in his briefing on the
entropic book market, with each title selling fewer
copies than ever before. Vital signs have been perking,
however, in the children’s paperback segment, which
Harris called the biggest growth area in the business
— even keeping the book clubs afloat, due to rising
children’s club sales in schools. Meanwhile, damaged
book returns are becoming a mini-epidemic, provoking
Harris to email customers photos of the carnage, with
a little note saying: “Are you serious?” (For her part,
Sourcebooks Publisher Dominique Raccah
urged the audience to tackle returns head-on by ratcheting
down quantities shipped to accounts, and told of one
customer who had ordered 10,000 copies of a title —
having a track record of selling just one copy. That
account, Raccah said, received zilch.) But you can’t
give everyone the brush-off. Harris said sales calls
to massively powerful retailers have become one-way
conversations. “Can’t I get my fishing book in with
the fishing reels?,” a Wal-Mart buyer is asked.
“No, you can’t,” goes the reply.
Speaking of massive power, Barnes & Noble
VP, Merchandising Patricia Bostelman checked
in with a few retail diagnostics. The mass-market category
seems to be reviving (as consumers’ pockets get ever
emptier, that is), and the teen arena is exploding.
But computer titles are toast, the new-age market has
gone into meditation (although anything on yoga or Pilates
is still selling), and — yep — even brand-name authors
aren’t selling like they used to. Consequently, the
chain is re-energizing its storefront with segments
that do show promise, principally quirky books priced
for impulse grabs. And fully one-third of all transactions
occur at the cafés (books, lattés, whatever), a trend
B&N is actively encouraging. Bostelman underscored
that consolidation among publishers has left market-share
open to independent houses, noting that the greatest
sales increase at the chain has come from those publishers
ranked 21-100 among B&N’s top suppliers. Pointing
to targeted opportunities, she added that only 30% of
B&N’s titles are sold in stores chainwide.
Helpfully for niche marketing, Kelley Maier,
Ingram’s SVP for Product Management and Marketing,
brandished her newest promotional weapon: the precision-guided
electronic flier. Ingram had just completed a study
of these missives with an eye to delivering more immediate,
targeted, and flexible marketing messages, and sales
bounced eight-fold when e-fliers were deployed for on-the-fly
titles such as Good Morning America picks. Elaborating
on the power of e-marketing was Cindy Cunningham,
Amazon’s US Catalog Librarian, who touted the
“Small Vendor Co-Op Merchandising Program,” available
to publishers whose annual sales with Amazon are less
than $1 million. The program includes the supposedly
stellar “Single New Product Emails,” sent to past buyers
of the same author or to buyers who have purchased similar
titles, and then there’s the old “Buy X, Get Y Promotion,”
which Amazon users know as those offers to pop a similar
book in your cart for a combined discount, showering
publishers with “incremental impressions for your titles
on both your detail pages and those of your competitors.”
In any case, Amazon was now accounting for 6% of National
Book Network’s sales, said President Jed Lyons,
who added that the share of sales to B&N had risen
from 14% five years ago to 20% last year, while Borders
was 16% and growing. Lyons noted that however jaded
one might be to the travails of independent publishing,
some epochal shifts in the business can still raise
an eyebrow. Charlie Winton retiring from Publishers
Group West, he said, is like Mick Jagger retiring
from the Rolling Stones.
©2003
Publishing Trends
