Indie market share may be hovering at 3%, according to a report from the Book Industry Study Group, but that doesn’t mean that publishers aren’t working as hard as ever to keep bricks-and-mortar retail viable. This was a point stressed during Tuesday’s opening session of the New England Independent Booksellers Association Fall Conference, in Providence, R.I.
Billed as “A Conversation with Publishers,” the plenary panel featured Molly Stern, senior v-p, publisher of Crown Publishers, Hogarth, and Archetype; Dennis Johnson, cofounder and copublisher of Melville House; and George Gibson, publishing director of Bloomsbury USA. In the talk, booksellers were offered an opportunity to continue an earlier dialogue begun last spring at Hachette’s offices in Boston, when booksellers were invited to discuss, with the publisher, key issues in the business.
“I am both anxious and optimistic about this industry,” said Gibson, summing up the mood of many in the room. “I think we’ll be reading print books for a hundred years. I don’t think they’re going away.” Gibson, a former bookseller at Boston's Old Corner Bookstore, added: "Independents have come back to the center of conversation. We’re all trying to grow our sales at independent stores.”
That “all” includes mega-houses like Penguin Random House, where Stern affirmed that “the value of [the independent] market means a great deal to us.” She noted that the company changes the way it does things based on indie feedback. She highlighted the fact that PRH is providing two-day shipping over the holidays again this year.
“I’m a little player in a market run by giants, and that’s your problem, too,” said Johnson, who once worked at the Massachusetts shop, Brookline Booksmith. He explained how much trouble he has has getting bookstores like Barnes & Noble to pick up Steve Almond’s Against Football (which Melville House published), even though the NFL keeps helping. “I’m not hiring editors any more,” he said. “I’m hiring marketers. They’re calling you up. How can we get stores to pay attention to us?”
Horne acknowledged that in the past two years publishers have been doing more to drive sales to the indie channel. She cited programs like co-op and signed books, even book ads like a recent one that Hachette ran in the New Yorker, which went beyond just listing the ABA’s IndieBound website.
Not a program, per se, but in recent years Bloomsbury and other houses have been “up-speccing” physical books with better paper and more readable designs, noted Gibson. “It’s important that we do that, even if we price [the book] a dollar more,” he said.
For Stern, the visuals that make a book stand out need to begin early, starting with the galleys. Because of technology it’s getting cheaper to make beautiful things. “The world is our oyster,” she said. “We’re all trying to make good choices.”
In response to a question from Horne about a practice that has long frustrated booksellers—authors, who link their website and tour schedules to only one store, usually Amazon—the publishers agreed to be more proactive. “Publishers can set best practices,” said Stern.
The session ended before any conclusions could be reached on how publishers and booksellers can partner to sell more books. Two ideas—indies selling e-books and B2B—were both dismissed. In one case, if a bookstore sold only e-books it would be out of business immediately. In the other, it’s something many publishers already do. But one of the key things that did emerge, which was particularly encouraging to booksellers at the show, is that growing the indie channel does matter.
