Bookselling: Chains And Independents

Bookselling is dominated by the big chains. On the UK high street, Waterstones dominates; online, Amazon is king in sales of both new and second-hand books following its 2008 acquisition of Abe Books, the brilliant second-hand bookselling website which lists sellers from all over the world.

Because of their huge buying power, not only do the big chains command higher discounts from publishers than are available to the smaller, independent booksellsers: they also directly influence publishers’ decisions. If buyers for the chains don’t like book covers, the covers will be redesigned; if they don’t like blurbs, they’ll be rewritten; and if, ultimately, they don’t like certain writers, then those writers are unlikely to be commissioned again.

Bookselling chains don’t make their income purely from book sales: they also get paid to run promotions. Consider all those books on the three-for-two tables: each one is there because their publishers have paid for their inclusion. And this subsidiary source of income doesn’t stop there: a few years ago there was an outcry when the public discovered that positions on Waterstones’ “bestsellers” chart were all bought and paid for by the publishers concerned. Since then, little has changed: the chart is still money-driven but at least the fuss has died down now. I’d love to know what sort of proportion of the chains’ income is provided directly from bookselling, and indirectly from paid-for promotions, but I don’t suppose they’ll volunteer the information.

There’s a cost for all this, of course: chain bookstores all seem to offer the same chart-led stock, and don’t often carry the quirkier, more risky books: the self-published titles with the limited markets; the poetry, small-press titles or anthologies. Which is, for me, where the real gold lies. So next time you visit an independent bookseller and wonder why it doesn’t offer cut-price books, or run many promotions, don’t think harshly of it. Have a good poke around and discover those odd little books that you won’t find anywhere else. Buy a big bag full of them, and be grateful the shop is still open. Because the independent bookshop is at risk, and needs our full support.

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You don't see Random House sending letters like this to the writers they publish. That's because Random House is a commercial, mainstream publisher which sells its books to readers, and not to the people who wrote them.

Special author promotions like this are a sure sign that you're dealing with a vanity publisher, and not with a mainstream publisher.

If you get a letter like this from your publisher, take a moment to consider that few self-published or vanity-published books ever sell as many as 100 copies before you take advantage of their offer. Because if you don't, you're likely to end up with some very expensive boxes stacked up in your hallway for the next couple of years.

YouWriteOn's "Free Publishing Offer": Who Will Pay?

Clause 8 of the contract for YouWriteOn’s latest publishing scheme states,

“The Author shall receive a 60% net royalty on all sales of printed copies of the Work that the Publisher receives. The net royalty for each book sold is after printing costs. YouWriteOn will set the retail price. Author royalties are not paid on copies of the book bought by the Authors themselves.”

So, the authors won’t earn any royalties on copies they buy for themselves. That wouldn’t be too bad if they got a nice big discount on those copies: but the contract makes no provision for any author discounts at all, despite such discounts being a standard requirement in most publishing contracts.

This probably won’t concern the writers who only want to sell the odd copy to friends and family members: they can just direct everyone to YouWriteOn’s website, where they can order the books for themselves.

The people who should be most worried are the writers who want to sell more than just a handful of their books, and especially those who want to sell them through bookshops—which is where the majority of all books sold are sold.

When those writers make their sales visits to bookshops, they’ll need to have copies of their books on hand to show to the buyers. If the buyers want to buy copies there and then, the writer will have to supply them with those full-price, undiscounted, royalty-free books—but the bookshops will demand a discount, which means that the writers will lose money on every single copy that they sell.

They could ask the buyers to order the books direct from the wholesalers (Waterstones will only order self-published titles from Gardners, others may vary): but there’s a problem there, too. While it’s sometimes possible to get smaller bookshops to accept smaller discounts they’re rarely able to take anything below 40% off the retail price, while Waterstones usually requires a minimum discount of 57.5%. And there just isn’t that much money left in the pot after those nebulous “printing costs”, and the writers’ 60% royalties, have been paid.

Which leaves online sales. But again, online booksellers demand discounts, and where is that going to come from? Once you take away those “printing costs”, the writers’ 60%, and YouWriteOn’s 40%, there’s not enough left to cover the book sellers’ discounts. Not even if YouWriteOn gives up all of its 40% share.

Which means that these books are only really going to sell through YouWriteOn’s own website. And the last time I heard, that wasn’t very high up on the list of places that most readers go to when they’re looking for a good read.