“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.
