Handle with care(lessness)
Publishers think books are precious. Somebody should tell their warehouses.
My favourites this week
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Golden gossip: The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil by Tina Brown. Bursting with juicy titbits on recent royal dramas from Prince Andrew to Megxit. The former editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Tatler is impeccably sourced on both sides of the Pond - and has a razor wit. Had me guffawing in public.
A glorious summer read: Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler. One of my all-time favourite novels by one of my favourite writers. An ode to friendship, to growing old together and to rural Wisconsin. One of those books where the place is as much a character as the people. Beautiful.
By popular demand: You lapped up The Passenger, the series of travel guides to a soul of a place, not its coffee shops. So I’ve ordered three more for you: Brazil, India and Turkey. Or browse the whole collection under “travel inspiration” on the Backstory home page.
A friend of mine keeps apologising for having asked me “Where do you get the books?” He thinks it was a dumb question. But it is one of the biggest.
There are lots of sources of used books. But, generally speaking, there are only two ways bookshops buy their stock of new books. The first, and most obvious, route is direct from the publisher. So far, I have placed orders with each of the “big five”: Penguin Random House, Pan Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. Each in turn has a baffling array of imprints you need to try to remember (Cornerstone means PRH, for instance; Sceptre, Hachette).
A subcategory of this first group is the smaller, “indie” publishers. Some of them do their own sales, but some of the biggest and best - Faber & Faber, Atlantic, Profile, Canongate, Europa, Granta, among others - are sold through Faber’s “Indie Alliance”. This is great for two reasons: you only deal with one sales rep rather than 16, and my local rep happens to be brilliant.
A good rep is gold dust. She (mostly she so far) or he will get to know a bookshop’s market and suggest upcoming books (“titles”) that should fly off the shelves. They can also help the bookshop pitch for events with authors and help with in-store “merchandising” like window displays. The bookseller will try to drive down the “base” margin they get on normal orders (the gross profit the shop will make) as well as any additional discount for big bets on a new title or special events.
***Join Backstory’s first-ever online event: Sally Hayden, author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned, will talk with Rainer Münz, one of the world’s foremost experts on migration policy. Extremely timely given events in Ukraine and the UK’s deal with Rwanda. 7pm (2pm EST), May 3rd. Get your ticket here***
The second route is from a wholesaler. Or, actually, it would be more accurate to say the wholesaler. Until recently, there were two big players, but one of them went bust at the start of the pandemic. There are very specialised wholesalers, and international ones, but for the UK mass market, it is really a field of one.
Of course, since a wholesaler is a middle-man between a publisher and a bookshop, they take a cut. They have enormous buying power, so I assume they are not buying at anywhere near the same “base” terms as an individual bookshop. Still, generally speaking, a bookshop would make a bigger margin buying directly.
Why, then, would a bookshop buy from a wholesaler? There are good reasons and one big, bad reason.
The best reason is that they are extremely efficient. By and large, a wholesaler will deliver an order the next day. Another good reason is sheer scale. The main wholesaler, Gardners, stocks about 500,000 different titles at any one time. It is obviously quicker and less hassle for a bookshop to place one order with one, reliable supplier than to place dozens of orders with the smallest publishers. There is one delivery to chase up, one invoice to be paid.
The bad reason is that (and there’s no way of sugar-coating this) even the biggest publishers are staggeringly incompetent at distribution. Not knowing anything about the book trade, I assumed that the big dogs would have slick operations to get their books from A to B. Not least because they’ve been supplying Amazon for three decades: a good customer, you might think, to learn from about getting the right thing to the right person at the right time.
Not a bit of it. To be fair, some are better than others, and several give the impression that they are genuinely trying. But still. Wow. None of them do next-day delivery as standard. (Some don’t even seem to do next-week delivery.) Tracking is unheard of. Ordering systems are clunky and prone to human and system error. New books are often not delivered in time for their publication date. Orders go missing or are duplicated.
Worse than that, though, are the damages. As you know, books are precious. Figuratively, of course, but also very much literally. Yet some arrive looking like props from a literary juggling competition. Again, some publishers are better than others. The worst chuck in hardbacks with paperbacks with little or no protective packaging. Unsurprisingly, it is not at all rare for books to turn up dog-eared or otherwise crumpled. Four copies of Empire of Pain arrived last month with biro marks on the cover. You can claim back the cost, but it seems a tremendous waste.
I’m very new to this game and I’m well aware that other booksellers will have been pointing this out for 30 years or more. But, still, with my new pair of eyes, it is madness. I’d love to know more about why things are the way they are and whether there are plans afoot to change them. Please let me know if you know!
Tom
Team Backstory loves
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You’ll laugh, you’ll cry: The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne. An incredibly moving story of growing up in Catholic Ireland, coming out and dealing with the AIDS epidemic. A tearjerker that also makes you weep with joy. - Lucie
Beyond the umbrellas: The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung. Outsiders sometimes struggle to grasp the creativity, humour and hope of the city. This lyrical memoir picks apart clichés by weaving her narrative into that of her home, as both fight for freedom from the influence of their past and the expectations of the future. - Tara
Computer says no? Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing by Gretchen McCulloch. If you’ve ever wondered why people don’t put full stops at the end of their texts or how o_O came to mean baffled, this is a thorough guide to the internet’s influence on communication and how it is changing the way we see the world. - Tara
There's a typo in the author of the last book. It's Gretchen McCulloch not Cretchen.