Anthony Forbes-Watson is the Managing Director of Pan Macmillan (UK).
Grimly bookended by the collapses of Woolworths and Borders, 2009 was suffused with the smell of crisis and peppered with job loss announcements, but ended up being merely bad rather than catastrophic, with sales forecast to be only a little down on the year before. It was the mix that made the year tough: Fiction brands hit their targeted chart spots only to be knocked off the top quickly by the next blockbuster, their sell-on curtailed by anxious consumers, and with the demise of Richard and Judy, no mid-market surprises to compensate. In broad terms, the big houses suffered while the smaller ones flourished, and the end of Borders, with its support for the unusual voice or quirky angle, only made more selective the already Darwinian bottleneck in our channels to market. Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown sucked much of the oxygen out of the rest of the fiction market and in the run up to the holiday season, out of the nonfiction celebrity market too, leaving the industry with a fresh legacy of unearned advances. The polarizing effect of risk aversion increased and in general, advances reduced for all but the most surefire bestselling brands.
I heard some marketing guy once opine that Price = Cost + Emotion, and the 70% discounts offered by some retailers this Christmas suggest they’re not all that confident about the Emotion bit. What Emotion there was came in the shape of Immortals, Angels and Zombies, the familiar roar of the biggest brands and the promise of substantial sales at last from digital publishing. In a year full of new devices, price wars around those devices, all sorts of new apps and enhanced editions, Kindle was finally launched, while Google and Apple came closer to doing so, and an intensified focus on piracy hinted at the promise of real business to come, and soon. We can hope that what we lose in bricks and mortar we may more than gain in digital sales, the overwhelming majority of which are made so far to those over 35 years old: Now all we need to do is get people to pay a reasonable price for them.
