It’s all about the money

Think about this the next time you walk into a bookshop to have a browse.

Do you stay near the front of the shop and look through the latest books or latest offers on those big tables piled high with books? Are you taken by the books eye-catchingly displayed just within easy reach and in a prominent position in the bookshop?

You imagine as you browse that the bookshop staff might have lovingly displayed these books here because these are the best books or the books that they have enjoyed. Or that these books have some sort of special aura of greatness or popularity which is why they are here for you to pick up. Or even that these are the only books in the store - period.

The truth known by authors and publishing insiders alike for ages is that those books are there because of the money. The money that the bookshops demand from the publishers for prime retail space on that first table write by the door. But it’s never been made public - till now.

The Times reports about the hidden cost of a bestseller on a leaked document from Waterstones, the UK bookshop chain:

The most expensive [display] package, available for only six books and designed to “maximise the potential of the biggest titles for Christmas”, costs £45,000 per title. The next category down offers prominent display spots at the front of each branch to about 45 new books for £25,000. Inclusion on the Paperbacks of the Year list costs up to £7,000 for each book, while an entry in Waterstone’s Gift Guide, with a book review, is a relative snip at £500.

I can understand why this has become so. Think of the cost of retail space in the UK - and in London in particular. Think of the finite amount of space a bookshop has compared to the infinite number of books out there. How do you get a shop front in along the prime shopping streets of London eg Oxford Street or Regent Street - ahead of your competitors who also want a slice of the lucrative action? You pay the huge rents for it. How do you get a presence in the prime spots in a bookshop - ahead of all the other publishers who want to put their infinite number of books there? You pay for it.

So those books have to blockbusters to make a return for the publisher.

And for the authors who write good, even great, books that may not have the crowd-pleasing quality to sell a million, their books are stuck somewhere in the back shelves. It’s even worse for the self-publishing author who doesn’t have any financial clout or proven track record - you can walk the streets for days with your suitcase full of books, trying to get a bookshop to take a few copies but this kind of mega-muscle is what you are up against. Because for every book on their shelves that doesn’t sell - or doesn’t sell well, that shop is losing money.

If you are a book-lover and want less well-known literary gems to continue to be a part of our culture, move away from the front tables, go to the back shelves, look at the books with their spines turned to you. Or even better, buy your books off Amazon where they have an infinite amount of space to store an infinite number of books. Surf, browse, take a risk in your reading. Try something obscure that your friends may not be reading. Be the first to tell them about it, be a trendsetter not a follower.

Keep those poor non-blockbusting authors alive, support the self-published writer.

On a more light-hearted note, I wonder if property investors/ speculators could get a piece of the retail book space action by leasing the front tables of bookshops and subletting to publishers? You know, like that investment deal where you can buy a hotel room and share part of the income from it with the hotel owner. I’m off to talk to my bank now about getting a buy-to-read mortgage…

Photo: thanks to amalthya from flickr.com