The king is dead... long live the king

There used to be a tradition here in the monarchy-headed UK that when the king breathed his last and his son and heir moved up to take his place, some liveried official would announce, ‘The king is dead. Long live the king.’ (OK, I know last time it happened the second king was queen, but that would spoil the analogy.)

Today I feel I should don my red, black and white livery and announce, ‘Crème de la Crime is dead. Long live Crème de la Crime.’

Six months ago it seemed aeons away. But six months fly by remarkably fast, and the day has finally arrived. The books are mostly gone *; the distribution contracts have ended; all rights revert to the authors. If you google the name now, you’ll be directed to Severn House’s shiny new (if rather smaller than the original) website.

So what happens now? There’s not a great deal left to happen, except the paperwork and admin involved in winding up a company. And before we can finalise all that, we have to wait three months to see how many books already out there are returned.

I somehow don’t think this is a problem most businesses have to face when they come to the end of the line. The book trade is maybe not unique, but certainly unusual these days, in that it operates on a sale or return basis. The retailer buys the stock, pays for it, puts it on the shelves – then if it hasn’t sold after a certain length of time, it goes back to the supply source and the retailer gets a full refund. 

I feel a rant coming on.

I’ve never really understood how sale or return is justifiable at all in a marketplace that is supposed to thrive on competition. But the way the book trade has moved in the past ten years, at least in the UK, it seems to me to have become a destructive force.

At least when the cover price of a book was fixed and bookshops all sold it at the same price, the playing field was reasonably level. (I think this is still the case in the US, at least for the first few months of a book’s life.) But as soon as retailers began to discount, and sometimes sell at prices which didn’t even cover a small publisher’s costs, the world seemed to tilt, and running a small indie felt like scrabbling for a foothold on a steep, precarious mountain whose summit kept moving further away.

Along with the discounted prices in the shops came demands for ever larger discounts to the shops. Instead of buying at thirty-five or forty percent of cover price as they used to, suddenly bookshop chains (and supermarkets and online booksellers) seemed to think they were entitled to anything up to sixty percent, and sometimes even more. Publishers’ costs didn’t come down at all, but their income dropped like a stone. Even the big guys felt the pinch – and the consequences of that are a whole different rant.

They called it bringing the book trade into the modern world. Maybe it was – but a large chunk of the old world, the sale or return system, tagged along, making it harder still to keep that foothold. We’d receive pre-publication orders from wholesalers and large bookshop chains; a couple of times our distributors even negotiated front-table promotion deals for us, which meant those orders were a lot bigger. The orders would go out, and the payments would come in, and we’d be happy bunnies for a while. Then three or four months down the line, especially when we'd had one of those promotion deals, the returns – sometimes as much as three-quarters of the original order – would deliver a huge reality check.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that the bookshops should be obliged to keep huge quantities of unsold stock. What I am suggesting is that because they know they can send it back if it doesn’t sell, they give scant thought to how many they actually think they can sell. And what kind of way is that to run a retail business?

There, I’ve had my rant. Maybe a low-key sort of rant, but I’m feeling a little low-key today. It’s that kind of day.

 * for one last day the special offer at http://speedbump.peppersmithbooks.com/ still stands – but you’ll need to be quick.

Comments

[michael]

I love your rants. I feel your pain.

I was a book buyer for one of the largest Tower Records and Books stores in the chain. We were very successful for a Tower Record store finishing in the top 3 in sales every month and often outselling many of the Tower Bookstores.

Corporate did most of the buying so to get discounts for larger orders. I did the fill in stuff. Earlier, in my career there, it was the opposite with me doing most of the buying.

But returns were a huge nightmare for us. Publishers would not accept any shopworn books for refund. As soon as our customers looked at it, it was often shopworn. I often dreamed of sitting in my book section with a gun making sure everyone put on gloves before touching a book, but it was not customer friendly like we liked to be.

Tower had over a hundred stores. Imagine, one hundred returns a month done by minimum wage music freaks. I was a good boy, but I was the exception. Few returns in the chain went out on time or in a condition the publisher would accept.

The company tried everything. Less buying did not work because less cost us more than more with the discount.

My success was to discount every book I could not sell and did not believe the publisher would take back. I drop the price to five to ten percent above cost. Sales went up, returns went down. But our profit, while better than our lost, was not enough to please corporate.

The evils of returns are something the publisher and bookseller should share a rant and give each other a little hug.

[Lynne Patrick]

Michael, it's good to know it can hurt on the other side of the fence too. (Not that I want you to hurt, but you know what I mean.) I think between us we've made a case for dumping the sale or return system except in special circumstances.