Of publishing matters
Robert McCrum caused a storm in SportsBook Towers at the end of last year. The Observer’s associate editor, once their literary editor, said in a column about the 50 things he knew about publishing that ‘small publishers were small for a reason’.
It seemed to me from the view point of more than 30 years as a journalist to be one of those lazy columns you dash off when you have something more important to do, like Christmas shopping.
And comment number 39, the one about small publishers, seemed both pompous and patrionising to me. So I sent a letter to the Observer, my favourite Sunday paper, and someone suggested I tell BookBrunch, the online publishing site, about it. I did and Liz Thomson, who runs it, asked if I wanted to write an article. I did.
I stressed I didn’t know Robert McCrum, which I don’t. I know of him and I love his name. But I suggested that literary editors and pages were of little importance to small publishers because they didn’t support us, being too busy reviewing each other’s books etc.
He was suggesting, of course, that we small publishers are small because we are not very good. Well, that’s for others to judge but I did not go into publishing to produce blockbusters. Maybe fiction publishers do but I know that the books I publish are unlikely to sell huge numbers and that we are not likely to become a large company.
McCrum’s ill-advised comments didn’t really bother me. Life’s too short to get upset by that sort of thing. And I forgot to check whether the Observer had printed the letter, but I doubt they had.
Of much more interest to us at SportsBooks were comments made by Anton Rippon on the Sports Journalists Association website – http://www.sportsjournalists.co.uk/books-and-reviews/without-books-on-history-wheres-the-future-for-publishing/
Anton was the founder of Breedon Books and he made a great success of it until he sold the company in 2003. So he knows what he is talking about. He was bemoaning the fact that he could not get a publisher to take on a biography of four times Derby winning jockey Charlie Smirke, ‘the greatest flat jockey never to be crowned champion’.
He wondered if there was a publisher who was brave enough to take it on. Sounds just like the sort of book that would interest us at SportsBooks and it certainly would have a couple of years ago. But times are different now.
I’m now turning down books that I would have eagerly published three years ago and the reason isn’t entirely down to David Cameron and George Osborne and the other clowns ruining the economy.
The biggest reason is the way books are being bought and sold these days. Waterstone’s has been rescued but havs not gone back to the way they bought books a few years ago, WH Smith’s is a sad reflection on what it used to be and the big bullies at Amazon are trying to take over the world, squeezing the profit margins of publishers and putting independent bookshops out of business.
Look at the economic model of contemporary bookselling. If Waterstone’s decidedto take one of our books they buy it on sale or return from our distributors. We get paid minus Waterstone’s large discount and the percentage taken by our distributor and if the book is returned (often in a condition in which it cannot be resold) an adjustment is made. That happens with Smiths, any independents and any of the wholesalers who deal with bookshops.
But not with Amazon. They take our books at a discount of 55 per cent (I’m not kidding) but they don’t pay for them until they sell them. I can hear people saying that there can’t be much wrong with that and there wouldn’t be if Amazon didn’t often order too many and hang onto them. They are supposed to be sale or return but they never get sent back. That means they get ordered but not paid for and can sit in Amazon’s warehouse.
That can cause us big problems. For instance we have 562 of one title supposedly in stock which means we will soon be looking at a reprint. But we haven’t really because Amazon have got 243 of them. That means we really have only 319. If someone else orders a lot we are scuppered because Amazon won’t give them back even though they have not paid for them.
The Christmas before last we had 500 of a title left at the end of October. But suddenly Amazon took 451 of them which meant we were unable to fulfill an order from Waterstone’s. The printer we asked to do a quick reprint messed up and the Waterstone’s order disappeared. We asked Amazon to return some but they said no because they thought they’d sell them all in the run up to Christmas. They didn’t.
The solution, of course, would be to tell Amazon that we supply at firm sale only. In other words what they order they pay for. This year will see how brave we are at SportsBooks Towers!
