Small is practical

First of all, thank you to everyone who responded, by e-mail or comment, to last week’s post about the dreaded pulping of old stock. I’m sorry I didn’t respond back; the truth is, I didn’t know what else to say. We really have explored all the options: donating to libraries or charity  and selling at rock-bottom prices were favourite suggestions, but were actually our first thoughts. To donate we have to pay to have them delivered, and in order to sell at any price we first need willing buyers. Neither is a workable option, and I’ve yet to find an option that does work. So I’m just going to have to live with the pain. Though if anyone wants any Creme de la Crime backlist for, say £1 sterling plus £2 postage (£3 outside the UK - sorry) I can be reached through Dead Guy...

In response to popular demand – well, OK, one request – I was planning to address the question of sale or return in the book trade today. But topicality beckons; the trade press is full of doom-stories regarding Borders US. So I think sale or return will have to wait; today’s subject had better be large versus small in the book trade.

It’s more than a year since Borders UK bit the dust, and though it’s performed better than the rest of its group over the festive buying season, our other big book chain, Waterstone’s, is also showing signs of a struggle. (W H Smith I don’t count as a bookshop. Their book sales are so well cushioned by a plethora of other products and also by the crippling discounts they demand from publishers that they don’t occupy the same bit of the universe, much less the book trade.)

The fact is, everyone’s struggling at the moment. Books aren’t high on most people’s lists of priorities when it comes to spending money (more fool most people, say I!), and government funding cutbacks mean libraries are guarding their resources too.

But against the odds, it’s the smaller indie bookshops who are reporting a pretty good holiday season. Not brilliant, maybe, but pretty good. And pretty good is, well, pretty good at the moment.

And at the other end of the supply chain, I keep seeing news snippets about senior people in large publishing houses ‘moving on’, which often means a head has rolled in response to poor results – but also items about smaller indie houses spreading their wings, commissioning exciting new work, generally being positive.

OK, it didn’t work quite like that for us, but despite two years of the worst economic gloom in decades out of the six years we spent publishing books, we still finished up in good enough shape to be of interest to a medium-sized publishing house looking to expand. Which, if you think about it, is two kinds of good news.

Expand or die used to be something of a mantra in the business world. But maybe it’s time to rethink that concept. Maybe a large organisation gets unwieldy, and things run out of control. Seeing the bigger picture becomes less and less easy when that picture spreads in all directions and a large part of it is out of sight.

Maybe the true secret of success is not to be too ambitious. Aim for the stars, perhaps, but be happy if you reach the moon.

Comments

[michael]

Could you explain more of the process. I picture this large warehouse with countless cardboard boxes full of books. Where and how are they destroyed? I understand they are burned but where? At the warehouse? Somewhere else?

I have this naive image of you and your friends loading up your car with boxes of books, driving to the local libraries and giving them the boxes to use or sell for fund raisers. Stop laughing:)

Why can't you work with a bookseller such as AmazonUK to drop prices to blow out your inventory? Over here in the States, e-books selling at cheap prices have helped increase sales of dead catalog titles. Shame there isn't a way to do the same for the print book. And Amazon has "free shipping".

I don't ask these questions thinking I solved your problem, I ask them because reality vs simple logical answers always is an interesting eye-opening subject.

Sadly, after centuries of publisher book burnings and the shared tears of the accountants and book lovers over the waste, if there was an answer to this problem someone would have thought of it by now.

[Pepper Smith]

Is there a list available somewhere of the books you've got left?

[Lynne Patrick]

Michael, I'm afraid you're right - if there was an answer, someone would have thought of it.
The books aren't burned; they go into a chipper, and get recycled into paper for more books. So its not all bad.
Filling the car with boxes to donate to libraries or charities would work if the warehouse wasn't several hours' drive away from our base. We may actually be able to do just that with some of the stock.
And cutting the price to rock bottom? As I said in my post, that only works if people actually buy them, and if there was a way to guarantee that the problem wouldn't exist in the first place.
You want some? If you pay for delivery, you're welcome. Let me know where to send them. (Though I have an awful feeling you're in the US, at least 5000 miles away.)

[Lynne Patrick]

I can create one if you can offer a viable way of disposing of them. But the disposal, by whatever means, of the larger quantities needs to happen quickly, as they're costing us significant money for storage.
Till early March all our titles will remain on sale through the usual channels.

[Pepper Smith]

I had a thought of at least dropping a note on the 4MA reading list, or maybe a post on Crimespace, to let readers know you've got these books and what you're asking for them, but of course they need something to look at to know what's available. It might not clear much stock, but it might clear some.

[Lynne Patrick]

Pepper, please, please do! I'll accept any offer that doesn't cost us money. We still have multiple copies of everything on our list.
I'm going to lose my cremedelacrime e-mail address soon, and I'm reluctant to post my new one on a public forum, but e-mail me and I'll send it to you.

[Pepper Smith]

I'm probably just blind to it, but I have yet to figure out how to email you through this blog, lol! The link to the Creme de la Crime website pulls up a page saying the website is being worked on. If you would like to send me yours, mine is authorpeppersmith at yahoo dot com.