O-Books Author's Blog

“Just an idea for a future Hunt Blog And Ponder: what DOES make O Books sell?

You have written endlessly about what DOESN’T make O Books sell. Reviews don’t. Agents don’t. Free copies don’t (they’re counterproductive).
Getting books into bookshops doesn’t (an expensive waste of time, they just come back). My extensive websites don’t, if you were wondering, at least not through clicks direct from there to Amazon.

And yet Head versus Heart is a steady, plodding seller, somehow. So is God without God, in the UK at least.

How do they sell? Is it through Amazon? Is it through independent shops?
Is it through multiples? Is it through shops having them in stock? Is it through people going into shops and asking for them?

We know all about what DOESN’T sell books, and what increasingly WON’T sell books in the future. But who are these mysterious people who DO buy O Books (in the thousands) month by month? Who are they? You never seem to blog about them (or I missed it). How much do you know about them?”

That’s a good question Michael.

You’ld be surprised by how little I know (actually, you probably wouldn’t).

As far as the channels go, it’s through all those you mention. Amazon accounts for about 25% of our sales, increasing. Multiples for about 30% – but then it varies hugely per title, and when we get them in, in quantity, they mostly come back. Most shops order through wholesalers rather than direct from our distributors, so we can’t say which shops have which titles, whether they have them regularly in stock or whether they’re responding to people asking for them.

In theory, our knowledge of which books go where should be exponentially greater than in previous decades. Every single copy is tracked, everything is electronic, happens at the speed of light etc…..in practice it’s more like trying to figure out the new instructions on a complicated new TV/DVD/video thingmyjig. They’re designed to do so much stuff, so well, that for technophobes like me – it’s years since I’ve even tried to record a TV program. I could tell you where each single copy sale of yours has been over the last month, to which buyer, and how many they’ve bought before, and when, and probably what color shirt they were wearing at the time, but it would take me an hour to do it, if I’ve kept track of which passwords have changed for which distributors over the last month, which I probably haven’t, so I don’t. I felt closer to the market 30 years ago than I do today.

The same with our mysterious book buyers. I know they’re out there, because sales happen, I see proposals from new authors coming in saying “I’ve read a number of your books etc…”, and once in a blue moon I bump into people socially who are interested in the subject/have read books. So it’s not just selling to other authors. But I can’t say I know them. I don’t know the authors, let alone readers……

I see occasional signs, tracks in the wilderness of my ignorance- was coming back on the plane from the US a week or two back (very rare business travel, but we’re starting a new imprint based in the US) and reading a magazine I hadn’t come across before, New Writer’s Magazine, and there was a bit in the editorial;
“If it hadn’t been for indulging in a bit of serous market research one wet Irish afternoon, none of my three non-fiction books would have been under contract. The first publisher in the MBS genre was recommended by a friend who runs one of the more interesting bookshops in London. “Who’s the most popular publisher for my sort of stuff these days?” I asked. She gave me two names. One was O-Books, and despite the rather uninspiring entry in The Writer’s Handbook, I went to their website….and 48 hours later I had the emailed contract in my possession. Two months later I had the contract for the second book. The other publisher never even bothered to respond to either book proposal.”

I don’t know which bookshop is being referred to. But word seems to be getting out somewhere.

The key phrase for me in your question is “plodding seller”. I don’t know enough about maths or marketing to describe this in the right way, but most books I guess have traditionally followed a lopsided bell curve, where they within a few months they reach a peak, decline (increasingly) rapidly and reach a point in a year or two when the cost of warehousing/servicing them is higher than the income (depending on the scale of the publisher’s fixed costs), and they go out of print.

The heart of our business is more a “straight-line” kind of pattern. It’s books that sell pretty much the same every month, might be a few dozen or a few hundred, rarely more, year in, year out. We have one title that’s done it for decades, barely shifting more than 20% either way in any one month or year.

They’re not necessarily books that would appeal to Random house or Harper Collins, or get stocked regularly at B&N or Waterstones. There doesn’t seem to be any direct correlation with marketing, or with quality. I know we have to do all the stuff we do – getting good sales sheets, endorsements, selling to the multiples and independents and so on – but which bits of this work best, which we should do more of and which less – we play variations on it all the time and I’m no wiser.

But this steady business is the kind I want to develop. Most good books have a fairly small, widely-scattered audience. A discerning one, but hard to find. And hard to reach – the smaller and more international it is, the less traditional marketing is going to work. And social networking/blogs/websites/twitter etc… – it’s all very well, but so vast now that it’s just duplicating the real world. It’s no easier to catch the attention of someone on the internet than it is to find a stranger.

Similarly with the formats – I see a dozen or so good articles/posts a day about all the new digital formats/channels, the ipads and apps, the one million or whatever it is new titles coming out this year (OK, about half are re-issues etc…, and they’re mostly going to sell about 3 copies, but then next year or two it’s probably going to be two million….). Amazon is astonishingly effective at making them all available, as are a number of new competitors coming up the track, but; quite literally; there are going to be more books to read than readers to read them.

So all the fuss and agonizing over digital, amazon, social networking etc seems to me misplaced. In that, sure, it’s the future, we have to be there, but it moves the conundrum along, rather than answers it. How do you still find the readers? It used to be through the “trickle down” effect. The bigger you were, the more clout you had with the few main buyers, the more books you pour into the funnel, which cascade down to the shops in different set quantities, where people go to make their selection, and hopefully enjoy what they buy so that it continues to spread through word of mouth. You work “nationally”, or even “regionally”, and if you want that duplicated in a different country, you have to sell the rights to someone like yourself.

But that “boom and/or bust” era of publishing is essentially over. It will always be there for big bestselling frontlist, for people obsessed with rankings and wanting to read what everyone else is reading, who read a few books a year, but most people are going to be buying books recommended by others they trust rather than how much has been spent on marketing them into this narrow retail funnel.

Shops are always going to play a part. The way I see it, shops that just put books onto shelves are going to fade away, however big they are, and are going to be too expensive to service for small publishers like us. Those that survive are going to be active in the community, talks/workshops etc., know their market, and be able to talk to customers. They’re the ones I’ld like to support, like the one mentioned above. We could get a section on the website headed “Retailers; 50% discount”. Explain it there to shops. Button for them to click if they want to take part. Buttons to press for which monthly newsletter they want. Boxes to tick on the newsletter if they want to order, or for them to do it from their regular distributor. Box to tick for one free review copy, whatever. Could have an “authors in your area” box, just a question of automating it from the address list, using authors who’ve ticked a box to say they’re available- “tick this if you would like any of these authors xyz to discuss a launch”. If you have one or two authors in a county, it’s not enough to make it of interest. If you have a couple of dozen, with a new title coming out locally every few months, it might be. We’ll have 1000+ authors soon, a lot of them are active, I’ld like to get it past 10,000 while I’m still here.

But the main route has to be letting potential readers worldwide know your book is available. At various points/times some of them will congregate in places, like conferences/workshops/events. Others will be looking at specialist magazines, regional or national. Or they’ll be working in associated areas, so it’s contacting university departments or organizations. How much of it works? I don’t know. Others here are much more clued up than me, and would say I’m talking twaddle, but I operate on the principle of Invincible Ignorance, “try everything, just in case”. One way or other, we do end up selling books.

To contact these people you need the information, have it regularly updated, and have enough volume of good quality titles coming through to persuade them to subscribe to getting information. I’ld guess there are about 100,000 such contacts we should have on the database, and we have about 10% of them. It’s an impossible task for one publisher, which is why the database revolves around author input (about two thirds of it comes from authors, one third from us). Which is why the more authors we have, the stronger it gets, which is why we work a lot on the systems to enable us to bring out a lot of new titles efficiently.

We’ll be making it easier to use, with all the results sorted in priority order – so for your book’s subject area, you can press a button and see, for example, which are the major magazines by circulation numbers anywhere in the world, and which are the ones we’ve had most success with (whether articles, or reviews, etc). You’ll be able to see which shops in your locality we mostly deal with, whether you live in Sydney or Vancouver, who’s had signing sessions there before, comments by previous authors on what worked and didn’t, who to contact, advice on parking, , etc. Hopefully we’ll have it in place later this year, though we’ve been working towards it for years now and a reverse form of Pareto’s law seems to operate with computer software – the 20% of stuff you really want to get done doesn’t get done because you can never finish off the 80% left over from the last time you did anything.

So to get back to your point, at last – “how much do I know about the readers?” Nothing. It’s a presumption I can’t begin to make. I can see a fair bit about the markets we’ve involved with, which review copies went out to who, which resulted in reviews, and so on through every aspect of marketing. I can see whether it had any impact on sales. In this respect, you can see and know as much as me.

Getting to know the readers, and helping them to know you, has got to be the next step for us, when we can get there…..

John

Mike Shatzkin (www.idealog.com/blog) is a publishing consultant/strategist whose blog I follow. Interesting series of articles he’s posted over the last couple of weeks on (What I Would Have Said in London (at the London Book Fair, if the Icelandic volcano hadn’t neatly spread the ashes of the country’s economy over Europe).

Ii think what he says boils down, as far as we’re concerned, to;
Bookstores as they are now, prime locations for delivering wide ranges of new titles, disappearing in 20 years (with smaller, more focused ones surviving)
“Books” being primarily digital files rather than “printed”
The price for the content that books represent will be coming down
Successful publishers will be the ones who can connect with and deliver to authors an online community rather than those who rely on selling books into shops (““the idea of a “General Trade Publisher” will have no meaning””)
Territorial rights will disappear, and publishing worldwide is not only possible but the most profitable and author-friendly way to publish

I think he’s right. And it might happen faster – it doesn’t seem more than a few years ago since I celebrated 25 years of going to the Frankfurt Book Fair by deciding that was enough; back then we still had to follow up by fax, emails hadn’t taken over. Hard to believe now. Though it seems ironic that he intended to deliver his speech in the most old-fashioned, expensive, limiting kind of way – flying across the Atlantic to speak to a relatively small group of people at an industry jamboree. And was then prevented from doing so by a good old-fashioned earthly belch.

And it might be more extreme than he suggests. I don’t find infinite choice particularly helpful – it gets bewildering. The more TV channels there are, the less TV I watch. The wider the range of religions I know about, the harder it is to settle into any one of them. The more bombarded with supermarket offers or new credit cards, the more inclined I get to shop locally or pay with cash. And the wider the choice of books, the more I rely on personal recommendation.

Perhaps that’s just starting to get crotchety. But meetings and book fairs – giving those up was one of the better decisions in my life.

John Hunt

We’ve sent out thousands of review copies over the last couple of years. Not blindly – every one has been asked for, in response to an email from us asking if the media contact wants to see it. We’ve had hundreds of reviews.
It seems a positive side of the business. I don’t know how many review copies other publishers would send out on our kind of titles. My guess would be nowhere near as many. The number we send varies hugely, anywhere from a handful to a thousand, depending on who the author has also been in touch with on the database to see if a copy is requested.
But it has its disadvantages. I (and the authors) can see the sales of the book each month, compare to it when the review(s) appeared – I’ve never really seen a discernible difference in the sales pattern. Maybe a handful of copies, a dozen, it’s obviously hard to tell, but it’s not like there are huge spikes.
And what happens to the review copies themselves? I suspect a good proportion go to the secondary user markets on amazon. A couple of authors have complained about their books being pirated, because as soon as they’re available there are used/brand new copies for sale on amazon marketplace (or earlier still on eBay and others). There are more copies around than can be accounted for by our initial print quantities and sales.
I tell them they’re not being pirated. It’s only worth pirating printed copies and going to that degree of risk, trouble and expense if you know it’s an author you’re going to sell loads of. It’s got to be review copies getting out there.
One answer is to stamp the books with “review copy, not for resale” or similar, or only send out proof copies before publication, or galleys, but all these add a lot to the cost (and binding up galleys/proofs and posting them is out of the question for any but potential bestsellers). And you still have the problem of later review copies. And there’s always the muddle of “is this for review or is it a complimentary copy to someone who has endorsed the book” etc…which then needs to be sorted.
And when it comes to the cost – that’s between £5 and £10 if you include the warehouse cost, cost of the book, postage, time spent. So, conservatively, 100 review copies sent will cost you £500+. When you only have about £0.50 per book to cover marketing, overheads and profit, you need to generate 1000 sales to cover it. I’ve never seen that happen. 100 would be more realistic, on the grounds that on 100 review copies you might get 10 reviews. But then 50 of those review copies might be resold, losing you 50 of your own sales.
Which puts the sales impact as nil, or negligible, and the impact on profitability of books that are likely to sell in hundreds or thousands rather than tens of thousands as catastrophic.
We’ll have to look at this in more detail, get more actual examples. But it’s why at the moment our policy is to send out PDFs rather than hard copies, with a note saying we’ll send a hard copy if requested. Many magazine editors prefer it, ebcause they can forward that rather than have to wait for a hard copy by post and then post it on. But roll along the time when all this is redundant and we’ll just be downloading books to reviewers’ ereaders instead.

John Hunt

If you’re Jesus Christ, I’d suggest you stop reading now.

If you aspire to be Mohandas Gandhi or the Buddha, likewise I suggest you stop reading. Humanity for humanity is a philosophy for human beings not saints.

If you are a martyr, forget about Humanity for humanity. If you are stupid, naive, joyless … or psychotic, stop reading. Humanity for humanity is for those who want happiness in their life, even joy and glee, but who are bright and sophisticated enough to understand that, actually, my happiness is affected by yours, that the happier you are the happier I am going to be. It is for those bright and sophisticated enough to understand that the best guarantee of my life being considered sacred is by ensuring that your life is considered sacred, that the best protection of my liberty is yours.

The economics polluting our world today, the social and political policies tainting that world are not only immoral but also insane. The iceberg which was hit by the ‘Titanic’ did not distinguish between those in first-class and those in third, between the captain and the cabin-boy.

In fact, all these ‘disciplines’ (economics, politics, sociology and many others) are academic cloaks with which a quite staggering institutional greed seeks to disguise itself. There is a tiny, tiny handful of people making untold hordes of money from this pollution. I suspect such people think of themselves as winners. I wonder, however, how winner-like their successors will think them.

Before the consequences of their pollution become inescapable, the polluters themselves will probably have died. But their children won’t. And their grandchildren certainly won’t. Their successors, the successors of these self-designated ‘winners’, they will suffer quite as much as anyone, as much as your successors will suffer, and mine will.

Humanity for humanity can see the iceberg. It is passionate in its desire to avoid colliding with it. A lone shout of: “Iceberg ahead” can be dismissed as the ranting of a lunatic. We need enough of us to be shouting that those on the bridge cannot pretend not to hear us. If the helmsmen are intent on committing suicide, that (in my opinion) is entirely their prerogative. They do not have the right to kill the rest of us along with them. They therefore do not have the right not to see the iceberg nor to not hear our shouts.

Humanity for humanity does not believe it is by accident that the word ‘humanity’ has two meanings. It believes, finally, they are indivisible; that if one of its meanings is imperilled, so is its other meaning. We live in an epoch when humanity, in both senses, is threatened with annihilation.

The world is no longer ruled by capitalism. This has ceded to what I have elsewhere called ‘rapacism’: a rapacity, a monster greed which is quite unchecked and, as far as we have thus far seen, incapable of being satisfied. This ‘rapacism’ demands human sacrifice on a scale which would have made the Aztecs squirm, and for which even the word ‘holocaust’ is inadequate. Those of us in the West who think these atrocities will only be perpetrated in the so-called ‘developing’ world are simply not paying enough attention to what is happening all around us.

Greed is only a synonym for hatred. If greed is unchecked, so is hatred. We live in a world therefore dominated by unchecked hatred. No wonder it’s in a mess.

This hatred is nothing so human as human hatred. Within humankind – amazingly – there is still (despite all this hatred) infinitely more love than there is hatred … infinitely more good than there is evil. It is an enormous tribute to humankind that this should be so. And provides irrefutable evidence that humanity hankers after humanity, that humanity strives for humanity, that humanity is imbued with humanity.

We’re all greedy. Of course we are. Greed is a human failing. But human greed against institutional greed is the pike against the shark, is the wasp against the mamba. And the greediest of the institutions are often precisely those institutions, like government and industry, which seek to convince us all that they only have humanity’s best interest at heart. Unfortunately for them (and for us), the evidence is abundant of how specious such claims are.

We are at war today. But the ‘War on Terror’ is only a tiny part of that war. The ‘War on Terror’ has, without doubt, claimed the lives, limbs and emotional balance of innocent victims. And I don’t therefore make light of it.

Read more at www.humanityforhumanity.eu

Humanity for Humanity

A Message from Archangel Gabriel

Dear Ones,

The significance of life is to know God with every fiber of your being. You are here to allow the nectar from the Divine spark of life to sweeten you and open your heart to Love. You are here to open your mind to the empowering presence of Divine Light, bringing you the clarity you need in order to bridge heaven and earth so you can live in greater awareness.

The significance of any life is to bring Divine Wisdom into your daily world, relentlessly letting go and releasing all that holds back this flow. With every breath you become the tuning fork that resonates to Divine Purpose working through you. With every thought you receive empowering wholeness into your being. Know that the quality of your future is dependent upon the nurturing of your spirit, and your belief in the significance of a life well lived in loving-kindness.

The significance of this time you live in is found in the global awakening, an evolution of consciousness all over the world. The belief systems that kept people mental hostages are breaking down. The old ways of reacting and behaving are no longer appropriate and the confusion resulting from the scrambling to replace the outdated forms is now rampant. The future is clearly unknown, though acceptance of the present with clear intentions for positive outcomes is a way to plant seeds for optimum life.

Signs of Awakening

As the acceleration of energy on the earth continues, people are seeking out new ways to deal with old issues, and a crack in the closed door of their minds can result.  Even a small of amount of light shining through this doorway dissipates the darkness within and hopelessness is lifted. These small actions and shifts in belief attract more and more of the same vibratory energy of hope, and an empowering sense of liberation results. Even if there is not an immediate obvious change in the outward circumstances of your life, a shift has occurred. As the envelope stretches it can never go back to its original shape. When one tries to go back, there is a sense of discomfort, an inner restlessness. This is a clear sign of an awakening within you.

Sometimes this restlessness causes fear. Coupled with thought forms arising from an unknown future, the fear may become so great, it can be all consuming. For many this discomfort is interpreted as a possible disease, which may indeed be created by repetitive thoughts of anxious despair and disempowering action.

Moving through the fear caused by disheveled lifestyles can be a journey requiring faith and a focus of attention, with perhaps the assistance from counselors and therapists trained to help bring the light of awareness into darkness and confusion.

Finding balance in the physical and emotional bodies through lifestyle changes in nutrition and exercise, and taking time to balance the mind can be very helpful. Nature is a great balancer of energy and offers a bounty of beauty in every season that can even be found in a city park, a botanical garden or your own back yard.

Allow Yourself to be Supported

For inner peace to prevail it often requires your intention to heal the fear behind the restless feelings and anxious thoughts. It also requires a new level of receptivity and a loosening of the fierce independence that will not allow you to ask for help.  During these changing times, giving your self permission to receive a new level of support is paramount. People need each other, and they need to know they are loved and cared for. Just giving a smile and a pat on the back can change a disheartened mind, and set forth a chain reaction of loving-kindness. In this way your life is transformed, and you are helping to create peace within you and on the planet Earth.

When you make a choice to love one another by accepting each person’s unique and individual differences, the world begins to transform. The old tenets remain true: “Do no harm,” and “love one another as yourself.” In fact, practicing loving-kindness toward your self is sometimes the most difficult, but this one act can have a profound effect on your capacity for happiness. It is often easier to offer kindness to a stranger than to give it to yourself. Loving acceptance of those parts of your self that are different from others may allow you to express your inherent gifts and talents in a new way. This creative expression can help you to find new resources that will assist you in living a more meaningful life. When you feel more loving toward yourself, your world looks brighter and more hopeful. Loving-kindness begins with your self.  If it is easier, however, to smile at a stranger than into a mirror, this action will still affect your inner self in a beneficial way. These feelings, thoughts and deeds all lead to increasing the vibratory rate of your being so you attract more Divine energy and goodness into your life. As synchronicities begin to occur, you will feel a new level of support from the Universe.

If you were to ask for assistance from the Higher Power working in your life, you would be surprised at the changes that begin to show up around you. New thoughts, new ideas, helpful strangers, and perhaps even clear Divine Intervention occurs, with creative solutions you never imagined possible. It begins when you open a small corner of your mind to possibilities, and let go of outdated beliefs about your self and about the way your world operates.  Since the old manner of doing most things will not work well anymore, your life becomes easier if you are willing to ask for help.

By taking these small steps to create positive change, your life will feel more significant. You become aware that you are adding value to the world, that a benevolent Universe is supporting you, and above all, you will feel profoundly loved.

And so it is.

Shanta Gabriel

For Archangel Gabriel

www.thegabrielmessages.com

Copyright: February 25, 2010

The number of books I’ve bought in my life must be at least 5,000. I suspect it’s twice that, but thinking about the cumulative total spent then makes me feel slightly ill, so I’ll take the conservative figure.
My wife’s number is not far off that. Then there are the times our parents have downsized to smaller houses, then flats, and we’ve added theirs. Add to that Christmas and birthday presents. Books given as presents by others to the children. 20,000?
If the first 20 years were mostly collecting, the last 20 years have been more “redistribution”. Because we don’t have 1000 feet or so of shelf space. There’s a spring clean every few years, weeding out a number for charity shops. There’s a continual migration of books in boxes to the attic, because how can you bear to give these ones away, you’re bound to want to reread them sometime.
But now the attic is full. And there’s all the other stuff that needs to go up there. The kids possessions/sports equipment/toys that surely must be needed by another generation sometime. There’s that baby chair that takes up a disproportionate amount of space, and the sledges, but they’ve come down through three generations….
And there’s the disturbing thought, given what a nightmare it’s been moving my mother over the last couple of weeks, having to fit everything (she really didn’t want to give anything up) into one quarter of the size, is this something you want to inflict on your own kids in decades to come? Shouldn’t we start sitting a bit more lightly on the earth now, rather than weighing it down?
If only someone could invent a way of getting all the books of the world into one, some kind of tablet where you could click on a button to find anything and read it. Never mind Gutenberg, it would be the biggest step forward since Moses bought the commandments down from Sinai.

John Hunt

Still getting the hang of this blog thing. Had a couple of comments from bookshops after the 29th January blog, my own comment in return got filed under a different name – so will restate things up here.

I see posts every day with comments like this one by Andrew Zack 4th Feb in the Huffington Post;
“I wouldn’t recommend anyone more than a decade from retirement invest in starting a bookstore. We are experiencing the beginning of the end of paper books right now. The brick-and-mortar store and the paper book will disappear faster than you might imagine.”

And it’s obvious that things are going to get tougher. But the end of the brick-and-mortar store and printed books completely? I just don’t believe it.

A lot will go, sure. Maybe the big chains will go – the shareholders will want somewhere more exciting to put their money. For independents not overburdened with debt, who happen to be in the business because they love books rather than retail, it could be different. People want to congregate, to browse, to talk to someone who knows their subject area, or them personally. They want to meet and listen to authors. Authors want to meet readers. Annual festivals aren’t going to take over this role.

Maybe we’ll be right back down to the number of shops and amount of shelf space that I referred to in the first blog. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just means that bookselling gets back to being more intimate again, as the norm rather than the exception.

We publish a lot of authors, and encourage them to set up signing sessions in their local shops (too many of them happen for us to be the intermediaries in that). We want those bookshops there. They may evolve into something a little different, like libraries are. But whatever, they’re going to be part of the landscape, and we need to support them. Put our money (??) where our mouth is (got enough of the latter, not so much of the former). Just doesn’t seem right that shops are better off ordering stock from their main competitor. And what isn’t right we should at least have a try at changing.

So if any other independent in the UK (can’t work it in North America yet) is interested in taking up an offer of 50% discount on firm sale only, just contact Catherine.harris@o-books.net, and she’ll arrange it.

John Hunt

“One of the most exciting publishing events of 2009 was the emergence of the new imprint Zero Books. It publishes short, intelligent polemics on politics and culture, packing a lot of punch into about 80 pages and they are masterclasses in how supposedly tough theory can be made accessible and help us to understand society. The latest of these is Capitalist Realism by leading radical blogger Mark Fisher who has been blogging under the name k-punk for the past few years. It’s a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, Fisher spits, and his book takes in film, Baudrillard, Kurt Cobain, science fiction, mental health, bureacracy and economics. Zero Books are sadly absent from bookshops, but they are must reads.” Rowan Wilson, Verso Publishing and ReadySteadyBook blogger

This lovely and very gracious comment in “The Bookseller” (here’s hoping that lots of booksellers are reading it) on our new sister imprint, Zero books, prompted this second blog on the subject of bookshop sales.

Being sales manager (I think, have had no direct contact) of Verso, the leading political publisher from a left-wing perspective in the UK/USA, Rowan Wilson knows vastly more about bookshops than I do.

The books are never going to be in all bookshops though. And I do try and pin stuff down to what we can realistically do where. There are 20,000 bookshop accounts in the USA/UK etc. If we had one in each shop, and each copy sold through, being replaced by one more, our sales reports would show 40,000 of each sold, and Nielsen, which tracks bookshop sales, would show 20,000 of each.

But that’s quite unrealistic. From the info in “Our publishing process” on the website; Looking at the latest Bookseller analysis of sales in 2008; in the kind of non-fiction specialist areas that we mostly publish in, a sale of 3,000 copies in, for example, “popular philosophy” (rather than academic philosophy, where good sales are in the hundreds), would easily get you into the top 20 titles in the UK in 2008, into the company of authors like Julian Baggini, Alain de Botton and Bertrand Russell (yes, he still sells).

In comparison to this, the sales on the first two titles on Zero books (published late last Spring) are in the 1000-1500 bracket. Keep selling steadily. The more recent ones, more in the 500-1000 level.

Which is not all through bookshops in the UK. Roughly one third in the US, and amazon account for nearly half, on average.
Which is not getting them up into the top 20 in the UK, but then the authors aren’t writing to be popular, they’re not for everyone, and it doesn’t seem to me to be completely out of line with expectations for that kind of book. In fact, seems to be going well, given that it’s a new list.

The wholesalers have been kept in stock; the bookshops have had the info; which is not to say we shouldn’t be doing better – looking back, we seemed to have loosened up on Foyles, Blackwells, and not kept those sales going. On the other hand, they’re mostly in the Waterstones core stock list, or on their way there, and we’ve started to do more in the USA, and we haven’t had too many returns. The more recent “One Dimensional Woman” has sold more in the US than the UK, for some reason.

The more troubling questions are the broader ones. There are always going to be no more than 20 authors in the top 20, in any particular subject area. But if the sales in one major market like the UK are going to bring a few thousand copies at best, the vast majority are going to be in the hundreds, or dozens. So how do you publish good books in this area without pricing them at the academic £30-£100 range? And how many shops can you afford to ring/visit?

What more should we have done? There have been two major launches. Hundreds, thousands of emails/phone calls. Over 200 review copies sent so far. These have been in response to requests, rather than just blanket mailings of review copies, and the results have been;
Militant Modernist; 62 review copies sent, 4 reviews
Fear of Music; 74 review copies sent, 4 reviews
One Dimensional Woman; 33 review copies sent, 4 reviews
Cold World; 20 review copies sent, nil reviews
Capitalist Realism; 36 copies sent, 2 reviews
The reviews have all been great. But it’s an expensive way of getting them, about £10 a time by the time you add in warehouse charge, packing, post, paperwork, cost of book, arranging it.

We do need to strengthen ties with the most suitable bookshops, who specialise in political/literary/cultural theory, no doubt about that. But then, for that to work for both parties, you need a regular stream of good titles. So it’s pushing uphill on the sales while the cash is running downhill, with the investment in new, first time authors.

And the one thing I know, is that there is no necessary correlation between good books and sales. Doesn’t matter how hard you try you on the marketing, and on getting them into shops. Was just looking at our figures on a fiction title of last summer – good book, glowing endorsements from credible people, four articles related to the book on publication and one magazine extract, half a dozen book signings, two magazine reader competitions, twelve radio interviews, two TV ones, and we’ve sold 250 copies, with 155 extra going out as free for review
Squaring the circle of effort/time/cash/return with wanting to do the best for the author is what we wrestle with every day. On the first zero books, I’ld guess we’ve got the balance about right, though clearly can’t sustain quite the same level of effort across all new titles. But I post this up here in case anyone has any better answers.
John Hunt

Back in the 1930s Depression publishers started to put books into shops on sale or return, as the shops didn’t have the cash to buy stock to sell to customers. This time around, seems to me that the publishers are going to run out of cash to put the books into the shops.

It’s tough for the shops, I know. We stopped using a freelance sales team in the UK this time last year. They were running out of accounts they could call on and sell to. We publish a lot of titles in the religion/spirituality area; most of the few dozen SPCK shops in the UK closed down a couple of years ago. The more evangelical Wesley Owen shops were never quite our market, but they’ve mostly gone as well over the last couple of months. Borders closed down before Christmas, though we always found it difficult to get a foot in the door there anyway. So we visit Waterstones (the equivalent of B&N), some independents, wholesalers like Bertrams, Gardners (equivalents of Ingram, B&T etc), – for a dozen accounts you don’t need a sales team taking 15% of the margin. Our sales haven’t noticeably dipped in the UK as a result. Would they have done better with the sales team? Doubtful.

There hasn’t been the same relative level of closures in the USA. Maybe they’re better run, maybe book sales are holding up better – but I suspect it’s mostly a question of scale. With 600 or so superstores you have more room to cut and manoeuvre than you do with 60 or 6. In this case, perhaps what’s been happening in the UK is in front of the US.

More worrying though are the tactics used to stay afloat. Buying space is one thing, but you can take that or leave it. What is hard to affect is the rate of returns. And here, the hurt is probably headed more from the US to the UK.

From what I hear returns in the US average well over 30%, significantly higher than in the UK, and have done for years. With some accounts often running at 60% or more. When the returns come back to the warehouse, the big publishers tend to just put them to one side for pulping. Others give options, you can choose to send them for pulping, at about 15 cents per book. Or you can have them returned to stock, which is 45 cents per book, or 60 cents, or more. Some have a minimum charge of $3 to $4 to put a book back into stock. The books are inspected individually to see if they’re OK to go back into stock, and some are “improved” to get them back to their original condition – a smear touched up, a bit of glue added.

All books can be returned, often after a few weeks, even bestsellers, if that month’s stock levels in relation to sales need to be hit. It doesn’t hurt the bestsellers too much, because there’s enough “pull through” on the sales for the returns rate to be relatively low. For new authors, it’s different. People buy names they know.

I don’t blame the shops here, there are too many books for them to stock, the sales have to turnover fast enough to cover their costs. It’s just that the system seems unworkable.

It’s a downward spiral. The less likely a customer is to see the book they want in the shop, the more likely they are to order it online. Unless they want to browse a relatively small selection of fiction and feel the books by hand (and maybe then still order online to get a better discount) they get out of the habit of visiting the shops. Most sales come through word of mouth anyway, and if you’ve heard of what you want, you don’t need to browse for it. Whether ebooks (and their successors) get to 10% of the market in a decade’s time, or 50% (the most common estimate), or more, it’s going to further contribute to declining shelf space. And they’re going to push the price of printed books down, which increases the relative unit cost of handling them in the warehouse.

In the town where I grew up and first started buying books 40 years ago, there was one small independent that had been there for a century. New books on the tiny ground floor, second hand books on the four rickety floors above. Then came the new large airy malls, and the bookshps with them; one that later became Waterstones, Ottakers (which later became a second Waterstones), and what turned into Borders (now closed). The space given to selling books in the town was multiplied by factors of 10. I can see it going all the way back down again. There will be the occasional quality book that you buy off a shelf, but there will be more browsing of books online to see whether you really want to invest the time in reading; you will buy more, but at half price or less, you will read more, but put half of them down unfinished.

In the meantime, for the publisher, it gets harder to justify the cost of trying to get the books into the shop in the first place.

Our own returns rate in the USA has been relatively steady at between 27-35%. The steady overall rate has been disguising widening variations amongst the accounts. I realise that with a relatively specialist list we’re not representative. But Amazon as a % of our sales have gone up steadily from around 12% a few years ago to approaching 40% today, and they have no returns.

On the other hand Barnes & Noble have gone in the other direction, despite the efforts of the sales team. And the returns rate has gone up to 80%.
So for every 10,000 books sold in, 8,000 are coming back.
For a sample $100,000 worth of initial sales, or 10,000 books at $10 ($20 retail), the costings look like;
Distribution +sales cost at approx 25% of $100,000; $25000
Returns at 45 cents a book, for 8,000 books; $3600
2000 books sold; Revenue $20,000
Authors royalties $2500
Print cost of 10,000 books (some of which can be sold again); $20,000
Which leaves a loss of $31,000, before catalogue costs, marketing costs, pre-print costs, overheads etc.

It’s a lot of work to put in to achieve such a negative return. Particularly if authors then complain you’re not working hard enough to get books into shops. In fact, the harder you work, the quicker you go bust. At 50% returns it’s still unworkable. At 30% it’s marginal, and pushing trolleys in the supermarket car park looks like a good career move. OK, that has its problems, occasional wobbly wheels, rain, but less stressful, healthier, and leaves you time to read what you want.

There’s an obvious answer of course. Publish more commercial books. Fewer of them. Market them harder. Only bring out those you think there’s a chance of being picked up for store promotions, and invest everything in that.

20 years ago, 10 years ago, even 5 years ago, that would have been the right answer. Though then why not work for one of the Big Six publishers who has the clout to do it properly? Now, I can’t see it. It’s locking you into the downward spiral. Readerships are expanding, fragmenting, communicating differently. They’re more international, more local. More online, more diverse. With more choice, at more prices, in more formats. They can even publish their own book in the time it takes to read one. Why would a publishing company invest its future and that of its authors in single 3 for 2 or half-price promotions in one bookshop chain in one country that is struggling to keep its own head above water?

So, paradoxically, we’re better off not trying to sell books into (a lot of) shops.

So, given that an author can put a book up on Amazon themselves, what’s the point of a publisher?

Going to have to leave that for a future post.

John Hunt

A Message about Life from Archangel Gabriel

Dear One,

Trust that the Source of all life is active within you.  As you grow in this trust, the world around you manifests in new, more harmonious ways. Trust is an active principle of God. The freedom you seek to live in joy responds to this quality of trust. It takes active awareness to call in the Divine Light that activates this quality of trust within you. You can trust that there is a benevolent Source of Good active in the Universe that responds to your heartfelt call.

Allow the seeds of trust to sprout within your being.  Nurture them with your loving attention and feed them with Divine Light. Trust exists as a quality within all beings. Everyone trusts in something. The question becomes, what are you trusting in? Clearly if you are imagining dire circumstances, worrying that you will not be able to do or be what you want, or thinking that things may work other than the way you prefer, all of these demonstrate your beliefs and what you are trusting as truth in your life.

As an active Divine principle trust exists. Trust is receptive to the flow of your desires. With the intentional awareness of your thoughts, trust can be used to sort out the tangled beliefs wrapped in the mind. Through the active principle of trust, an expansion can occur in your energy field that allows a greater flow of Divine Light into your thought processes. It is this expansive activity of Light that can clear away the alternatives that are not so appealing for your life’s path.

Divine Light carries an amazing intelligence as well as the blessing of God’s Love. This light is a continuous flow that unifies the field of consciousness to work in harmony with more expansive qualities of thought. You can ask for the Light of Trust to flow through your being in a pillar of Gold. Anchor it in the Earth, and feel its centering, calming influence within you building the energy of trust.

Trust is faith in action and requires your willingness to join in the process of creation. This time on earth has an accelerated energy available to be used as active creative forces. Use them carefully because as you become One with the Force of Creation, you will be manifesting that which most dominates your thought processes.  This is not new information but the energetic activity is so powerful at this time, a cautionary note is required. There is an offering from the Angelic Dimensions and Angelic assistance is available. This is something in which you can trust.

Find many more things to trust so you can build this muscle and it can be serving you in daily activities. The more you rely on your trusting heart the more optimistic you will become. This optimistic nature trusts that Benevolent Outcomes are available in every situation. You can know and trust that there is a Creative Solution no matter how dire things appear.

Trust is like a little boat upon the sea…

Trust becomes a boat in which you can float down the river of your life, buoyant in the Divine Flow.  There is no need for you to row upstream resisting What Is, or struggling to make things happen in a certain way. When you trust the flow of Divine Energy, there is a wind in the sail of your purposeful life. You won’t find yourself becalmed in the seas of doubt when you claim the quality of Trust as your guiding Truth. Doubt takes the winds from your sails by contraction of the natural life force given to you by God. When the river flows slowly, blowing on the sails is not helpful. All you can do is relax and trust in Divine Timing. Trust is the rudder that steers your boat, and worry can be like the weeds that stop your forward movement by wrapping around this steering mechanism. Be attentive to the insidious thought forms that keep your life’s boat from floating free in the river of Divine Creation.

You are not alone in your journey of life. The Angelic Realms have been gifting all of humanity with their accelerated energy presence. The Angels answer the calls of humans who remember, and trust in the presence of God’s messengers. With this presence available and the active principle of Trust working within your world, all that you need is given with grace and ease. Opportunities are provided and expansive choices are offered. All you have to do is climb in the boat and keep your mind and heart open asking for the light to guide you as you allow yourself to float on these rivers of life.   There may be rapids and sometimes steep falls, but with a trusting heart and a clear intention to stay afloat in the river of Divine Creation, a graceful flow will be apparent in every area of your life.

Bringing Heaven to Earth is not difficult; it just takes trust. Trust in the Angelic Dimensions working within you, trust in yourself as a vessel to receive Divine Light, and trust that as people work together in harmony with God, the way is open for Peace to manifest on Earth.

And so it is.

Shanta Gabriel
For Archangel Gabriel

Copyright: January 26, 2010

Shanta Gabriel is a teacher, healer and the author of The Gabriel Messages. A book of inspired communication from Archangel Gabriel, it ignites the spark of hope in the heart of those seeking peace in their lives.  This volume of timeless and compassionate wisdom for the 21st Century is personal as well as practical, and provides clear suggestions for emotional and spiritual balance.

Shanta’s work with the Archangels was both unexpected and spontaneous when she received a surprise visit from Archangel Michael in 1988.  This huge winged being blessed her healing work with Light and opened the way for communication from Archangel Gabriel in 1990. She has received messages from Gabriel since that time. Shanta also produced a popular purple card set called Angel Messages and wrote the Angel Messages Book and Cards.

As a part of her ongoing with work with the Archangels, Shanta offers a monthly newsletter, “Archangel Gabriel’s Messages to the World.” She also continues her work through private sessions that include Angelic Life Path Readings as well as hands-on Angelic Light Therapy work.  Shanta leads an inspiring and experiential seven-month Archangel Study Program that uses the essence of each Archangel as it is reflected in the human chakra system.  Shanta assists the anchoring of that energy into the being through original meditation CDs, flower essences and in-depth study. Shanta is available for TV and radio interviews, and to lead workshops that bridge Heaven and Earth through Angelic Light Therapy and Communion with Angels. For more information about her seminars and private sessions, to see frequent messages from Archangel Gabriel, or to sign up for her free newsletter, see: www.thegabrielmessages.com.