Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company took a retro tack at the Seybold Seminars last month 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.
