Last Monday at 8:30am I began to type the first lines of a new novel. These sentences are unlikely to see the light of day but they’re a start — I am out on the pitch swinging my arm in a fashion that convinces me at least, which is certainly an advance on the week spent inside the pavilion whitening my pads and tidying the locker.
To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers. We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the e-book and electronic readers sold by, among others, Amazon, which seems bent on reducing publishers to an archipelago of editorial sweatshops and the writer to the little guy stitching trainers in an airless room.
Publishing seems to be one of the great mysteries of commerce. Despite the large numbers involved — a total of £1.752 billion (US$2.7 billion) was spent on 235.7 million books last year in the UK alone, nearly four books for every man woman and child — the business today is a testament to self-deprecation, with only a few people willing to assert the unique value of books and their content.
When you transfer the model into any other business, the way books are sold seems like an evolutionary freak. Imagine you are the owner of a chain of ironmongers and a man suggests that you sell his new line of household equipment. You agree but with the following conditions: First, though he retains ownership of his pans and brushes, you will take something more than 50 percent from any sale. Second, he must pay for front-of-store display to make sure the goods catch the customer’s eye. Third, if they don’t sell within a specified period he pays to ship them back to his warehouse. Fourth, if your centralized ordering system breaks down and the items fail to materialize during the broom and mop-handle promotion, he has no comeback.
That is how publishers sells books: Having paid an advance to a writer and stumped up for editing, design, marketing and distribution, they take all the retailer’s risk.
Selling through the supermarkets is even tougher. There is huge competition for space and the supermarket demands a much greater percentage of the sale price. Publishers guard the figures closely, but 65 percent is not uncommon; one asked for 85 percent before Christmas. In order to sell more hand-crafted mint chocolates and olive oil, the supermarket may choose to make a loss leader out of a bestseller by Dan Brown or JK Rowling, thus devaluing the book and harming the trade of the local book shop in one swipe.
“Supermarkets like to give any specialist shop a good kicking,” one publisher said.
The forces in the book market are increasingly monopolistic, particularly when it comes to selling on the Web and on the new battlefront of e-books. Amazon, the online retailer, has unprecedented power to squeeze publishers’ margins and to compete with high-street retailers. The company now wants to make its Kindle reader the primary platform for e-books and is pursuing a strategy that when the publisher supplies books at wholesale it will also license the books at a very low price to the Kindle. In effect publishers would be providing the means to cannibalize their own product, and at a discount. Unsurprisingly they prefer a model that allows them to appoint a company such as Apple as an agency for their books.
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