After successfully importing the World Book Night program from the U.K. this spring, “we believe there are opportunities for us to share and learn between countries,” said American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher at a session held yesterday afternoon on Indies International. Under his questioning, panelists Simon Skinner, sales director for Nielsen Book UK; Fabrice Piault, vice editor-in-chief of the French book trade magazine Livres Hebdo; and Franziska Bickel, owner of the Vogel bookstore in Schweinfurt, Germany, discussed the effects of fixed book pricing, chain stores, and online shopping on their businesses, as well as higher sales taxes for electronic downloads.
In France, the fixed price law that prohibits discounting by more than 5%, and has helped preserve market share. “The book market is flat and a little down,” said Piault, “as everywhere in Europe. Last year it was -1%.” Still, with a smaller population and less land than the U.S., France has significantly more independents, between 2,000 and 2,500; the ABA, by contrast, has just under 1,600 members. While online sales in France are now 13%, over the past six years the market share for traditional bookstores, he said, has decreased only slightly, from 25% to 23%. One unusual thing that has helped French booksellers since 1988 is ADELC, an association created by publishers to lend money to booksellers to invest in their businesses. These 0% loans, totaling more than $25 million, said Piault, have gone to more than 400 bookstores.
Like France, Germany, too, is experiencing flat sales, even with fixed pricing. “The power readers are no longer coming in the book shops,” said Bickel. “The owners have no drive; they are not really engaged. So people go to a very quick click on Amazon. The Amazon market is coming up. I suppose it will be the only one that sells downloads.” Although the number of stores in Germany has declined over the past decade, it has not been nearly as dramatic as the change in the U.S. In 2000, there were 5,200 bookstores. By 2011, the number had dropped to 4,900.
Although Bickel’s store sells calendars and bookmarks, Bickel wants bookstores to be, well, bookstores. “I don’t like nonbooks. If I buy a book from an editor [or publisher], I have 40% or 45% [returnable]. If I buy bubblegums and nobody likes it, I have to eat it. The big chains now have plants, shoes, socks for the iPhone. I don’t know if this will be the way for them.”
By contrast, the last ten years or more without net pricing in the U.K. has fueled the growth of online sales and given chains and supermarkets the opportunity to discount, according to Skinner. “I wouldn’t say [bookselling] is doing fantastic. To be honest, there are two halves. The online market, Amazon, are doing o.k.; High Street bricks-and-mortar are not doing very well at all. Overall it’s a pretty flat market,” he said. At the time, when net pricing was dropped, he noted that many said that it could be the end of independents. There are now between 350 and 400 independents, and the U.K. lost two big book chains, Borders and Wordworths.
One response has been the rise of what Skinner called “the professional bookseller, running bookstores like a business.” He estimated that bookstores in the U.K. have been forced to shift their product mix to an even split of books and nonbooks. “People are finding ways to subsidize selling books,” Skinner said, citing a bookstore/café, where the most profitable piece of business is ceramic wall tiles. Another he described as a bookstore/ ice cream shop. It entices authors to make an appearance and have an ice cream named after them. Both he and Bickel see possibilities in a nascent buy local movement.
A panel on Putting the “Sell” in Bookseller, moderated by Dan Cullen, content officer of ABA, offered another possibility of growing sales by looking beyond a single sale to making a lifetime customer. Booksellers Arlene Lynes, owner of Read Between the Lynes in Woodstock, Ill., and Calvin Crosby of Book Passage in San Francisco, Calif., joined Chris Zane, founder and president of Zane’s Cycles in Branford, Conn., and author of Reinventing the Wheel, to discuss enhancing the retail experience for both booksellers and customers.
Making emotional connections and building relationships with customers is key, the panelists agreed. So is engaging customers, before, during, and after the sale. Lynes, whose store is located in the town where Groundhog Day was filmed, described how her employees talk up books as they ring up sales. One customer made six separate transactions, based on conversations with booksellers at the register. Her anecdote prompted Cullen to joke, “That was a Groundhog Day customer!”
Zane urged the booksellers to go beyond engaging customers and to “raise the bar” in building long-term relationships. He suggested selling books with a money-back guarantee. “Try it with my book,” he urged, promising to reimburse booksellers for any copies of Reinventing the Wheel that customers return.
