Title Fight

There's been quite a lot of Twittering going on about the recent Money Programme special on the book trade. Called Title Fight it was, for my money (pun intended), a fair and balanced analysis of the business side of publishing and bookselling.

I must declare an interest here as I gave a couple of background interviews to the programme makers, explaining the ins and outs of how the retail side of things really works, and I could see some of the stuff I mentioned covered in the broadcast - although unlike Will Self and Fay Weldon I clearly wasn't deemed gorgeous enough to actually appear on screen.

Unlike the more tabloid-like exposes of book retail that we have seen appear in the broadsheets in recent years - publishers have to pay for retail space shock horror - this was a much more sensible look at how things work and I would urge you to watch it if you are interested in knowing more about how the world of books operates. The link above should take you through to the BBC iPlayer where you can watch it for about another week or so.

There was, of course, the usual bleating from literary types about the commercialisation of the industry but even they, by the end, were delighting in the fact that books sell a lot more nowadays.

I must confess to emitting a small chuckle when the managing director of Waterstone's was walking the presenter around one of their stores and she started pressing him about the marketing fees the retailer charges. He quite rightly pointed out that any fees only come in to play once a book has been selected by the buying team - the suggestion that publishers can 'bribe' their way in to a promotion has always been bollocks - but I am not sure I would agree with him that what they charge is 'a small marketing fee'. She pushed him to reveal the amounts, which he understandably would not, but said 'I can assure you it is very small'.

I suppose your take on that depends on your definition of very small. Promoting a book in a front-of-store promotion in every branch of a retail chain can cost hundreds or thousands of pounds. At Christmas, or for the lead offers throughout the year, you are often looking at tens of thousands of pounds. It is not unusual for a major publisher to spend hundreds of thousands with just one retailer at Christmas. Personally, I don't consider any of these amounts to be very small.

That being said, the actual amount could be argued away as irrelevant if spending it proves to be value for money. Paying a retailer in the region of £20,000+ to be their book of the week makes sense if you then sell 30,000 copies in a seven day period. Handing over a quarter of a million pounds to cover a range of books at Christmas is a wise investment if those books go on to shift a million copies or more.

The whole thing starts to crumble though when the investment being made does not deliver a return. A few flops here or there are only to be expected but when it is costing £2 or £3 in marketing fees for every copy of a book you sell it simply cannot sustain itself. You'd be better off giving the books away for free or taping five pound notes to the front and letting them fend for themselves.

That is not purely the fault of the retailers, publishers need to be sensible about how they spend their money, and retail promotions are not compulsory. But in these difficult economic times publishers are bound to be more restrained when it comes to retail spend - many small publishers already avoid the big Christmas promotions as they cannot make them work - and it will be interesting to see if the big chains start to reduce their fees if more and more promotional slots remain unfilled.

Anyway, do watch the show if you can and your comments would be very welcome here.

Comments

[Bob]

Balls! Can't watch it cuz I'm not in the UK. Ah well.

[Danny Rhodes]

Great post.

As a writer I was thrilled when 'Asboville' was selected as a 'Waterstones Paperback of the Year 2006' but not so thrilled when I discovered there were in excess of 250 novels in this promotion. This meant that I could go into one store and find 'Asboville' face up on a flat table (great) but go into another and not discover it at all (not even a lone copy on the shelf in some cases). In the end we were of the opinion that the book most certainly sold more copies by being selected for the promotion than it would have were it not selected, so I guess everybody was a winner in a way.

My new novel 'Soldier Boy' is heading for a similar promotion in Waterstones (though on a lesser scale). It will be interesting to see how this one works out...

[kevin duffy]

Scott,

I've just watched the money programme and although it's apparent that those with the biggest marketing pocket will nearly always win, buying prime spots in the high street book chains, there is some hope in the guise of passionate booksellers. Ian at Leeds Wats fell in love with the The art of being dead by Stephen Clayton and gave us a window and a dumpbin at the front of the store. The sales generated by this meant the book was the biggest non promotional title in their store for 12 weeks. Fantastic and it didn't cost Bluemoose a penny. However, when I mentioned how well it was doing to the national buyers they didn't seem that interested to roll this success out as we couldn't afford to buy similar spots up and down the UK. However, thanks to people like Ian, small independents can still get a good airing but for how long?

[FFS]

Small is also relative - a publisher can't pay £2m for Dawn French and the like and then bleat about marketing costs. Well they can, but they shouldn't...

[John Self]

What I don't quite understand is how these charges can be referred to by retailers as "marketing charges". I haven't seen the Money Programme yet but I did watch a similar report somewhere else recently, where a retailer said these charges basically just cover the retailer's costs in running the promotions.

But how? I can see that printing up promotional posters etc for the Book of the Month or whatever can cost money, but how does it cost the retailer anything to put book X on a 3-for-2 table instead of book Y? Is it the cost of having the staff do it? Yet what else would they be doing? Or the cost of printing up the stickers? If they cost several hundred pounds for each roll, then head office needs to start bartering with its stationery supplier. A very few of the 3-for-2 titles do get promoted in newspaper ads, but I'm guessing this is paid for separately by publishers on top of the 3 for 2.

What we've all agreed in the past when discussing this is that the one area where you can be sure that promotions are entirely merit-based (as opposed to merit-and-moolah-based) and devoid of money changing hands, is in the Staff Recommendations bays. Yet I notice that the lines here are beginning to blur, with a current Waterstone's promotion for "Hidden Gems" which looks rather like Staff Recommendations (and does include a favourable quote from a Waterstone's bookseller with each title) but which are clearly chain-wide, and which therefore leads me to presume that these have been paid for too. So can we entirely trust that these 'hidden gems' would have been promoted if the publisher hadn't paid for it, if W's really does believe they are worthy of wider readership?

[Scott Pack]

FFS. You make an excellent point.

John. Actually they are being perfectly honest when they say the charges cover the costs of the promotion. In fact, if it is anything like my day they only cover about half of them. Each campaign will have printing costs for posters and point of sale material and each campaign will receive press advertising, sometimes TV and/or radio as well. All the money the publishers pay goes straight to that. Waterstone's make no profit from the charges.

You may well be right about the Hidden Gems though, it is unlikely that it is free to publishers. The most amusing one of late was some kids book prize they sponsored where you had to pay if you made it to the shortlist. I think they reversed that decision though.