Click here to see PW's expanded list of 2002 Holiday Gift Books
It's not just the books themselves that are looking good this holiday season, but their potential sell-through. With the period between now and Christmas accounting for as much as 40% of most gift book publishers' sales, hopes are high for a very merry Christmas. Late last year, after September 11, a weakened economy and high returns, a number of illustrated book publishers began to rethink format, price point and content. And two houses-Abrams and Rizzoli-restructured their operations entirely. To get a fuller picture of the gift book market one year later, PW talked with publishers about the latest trends.
What's in a Dollar?
As satirist Tom Lehrer wrote (with tongue firmly in cheek), when it comes to gifts, 'what's important is the price.' For illustrated gift books, price is not always the most critical factor, although it certainly plays a role in a book's ultimate sell-through. But as John Brancati, director of sales and marketing and new product development for Rizzoli and Universe, notes, the odd thing about gift books is 'it's the only segment of the publishing industry where prices have gone down. I have at home a Georgia O'Keeffe book from 1975. It was priced at $75, and today it would be priced at $75.'
That's not to say that customers won't spend more for the right book. But in Brancati's experience, 'price points are very real. Fifty dollars is a line you don't want to cross lightly.' On the other hand, with so much competition at the lower end of the scale, Rizzoli is experimenting with what Brancati calls 'the trophy gift where $100 is not enough.' Rizzoli has the distinction of publishing this fall's most expensive gift book, a $275 signed and numbered oversized collection of photographs complete with gatefolds, New York, New York by Richard Berenholtz.
Although Chronicle publishes few trophy titles, 'there are certain books where price is not the way to approach it,' says publisher Jack Jensen. He singles out Chronicle's bestselling hardcover The Beatles Anthology, which has just been reissued as a $35 paperback, as an example of going over $50 with no trouble. 'We created a hardcover book that looked like a $75 book and priced it at $60,' says Jensen. 'People do respect quality. If you have the right content artfully delivered, the pricing issue is not so significant. The goal is to produce quality books at reasonable prices.'
As National Geographic discovered last year when it was hit with high returns, price does matter for heavily illustrated books. This year the Washington, D.C., house refocused its list to encompass more subjects and at the same time lowered prices. 'Last fall, we were creeping up to the $50 price point. What we're doing is looking very closely at price point,' says editor-in-chief Kevin Mulroy, who notes that National Geographic is now trying to stay within the $35 to $40 range. 'We've done some things to diversify the list. We're moving away from strictly photographic books or monographs, because photography has been extremely hard hit. We're looking for books with more obvious commercial value and bringing more things to the list-more reference and more history.' He notes that this fall's The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation, which commemorates the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, will have more text than photography. Another new direction for the company is natural history, as Mulroy points to novelist Barbara Kingsolver's Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands as an example.
Diversification does matter, as Clarkson Potter's editorial director, Lauren Shakely, says. 'One of the things we did years ago was spread our list in terms of price point and categories.' She adds, 'I've been present in two full cycles of economic downturn. Our books are selling really well this fall. We've already had to reprint Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa Family Style, which gives us hope.'
The previous downturn to which Shakely refers has many similarities to today's recession: George Bush senior was president, and America was involved in a war in the Middle East. 'During the Gulf War era,' says Shakely, 'our books were all the same format. We spent a lot of time developing our cookbook format, because people always have to eat. We fine-tuned our small gift-book format to have more text.' Nowadays, Clarkson Potter has a dozen different strategies for pricing and format, soon to be a baker's dozen with the addition this fall of its Pottery Style gift line of note cards, journals and photo albums.
Where the Trends Are
Of course, part of what is driving down price-or at least keeping it down-are promotional books, which British packagers are selling directly to retailers like Barnes & Noble and Williams-Sonoma, and publishers like Taschen that deliver interesting and unusual books at significantly less than most U.S. publishers. Rizzoli's Brancati, for one, believes 'there is a big distinction between a Taschen and Koenemann [on one hand] and Book Sales [a remainder house].' He characterizes packaged titles as ones 'where price is the overriding factor above design or content.'
'We can't ignore Barnes & Noble as a player,' adds Leslie Stoker, publisher of Stewart, Tabori & Chang. 'Promotional publishing affects all of us. They're beating us on price and presenting a book that's really attractive.' Since promotional publishing is largely subject driven (planes, cars, flowers, dogs), like other houses STC competes by concentrating on finding strong authors for its books.
In fact, it is this very emphasis on authors that Clarkson Potter's Shakely regards as one of the key trends in illustrated book publishing. 'Booksellers used to say that the consumer wasn't as conscious of author as of content. Now I think the marketplace has changed. Because of cable TV, people are so much more aware of those personalities. We try to find an author who will be recognizable to the consumer.' Celebrity authors enabling Clarkson Potter to compete with lower-price promotional books include Emmy-winning lifestyle guru Christopher Lowell and Anne McKevitt, who has had several prime-time TV series in Britain on decorating.
At Thames & Hudson, president Peter Warner is not as worried about the effect on his list of promotional books: 'A lot of our list is aimed at niche markets, whether it's fashion or textile.' The books in the publisher's eight-year-old Most Beautiful Villages series continue to sell strongly despite a $40 price tag, and none has been reissued in paperback. One of the earliest books, Tuscany (1995) by Hugh Palmer and James Bentley, continues to sell more than 10,000 copies a year. While the newest one, Country Towns of Provence, is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and has 10,000 copies in print, Warner notes, 'The book clubs are not as big buyers as in the past.'
Another trend that illustrated gift book publishers cater to is the housing boom and nesting. 'People are looking for books on home renovation,' says STC's Stoker. 'Five years ago, we were publishing more Euro-centric books. Now we've rediscovered American homes. Certainly it does feel like the right time to celebrate America in all the lifestyle categories.' At the same time, she's noticed, 'Lifestyle books have to be practical. They have to have almost exhaustive research.' For her, books like Roderick Shade and Jorge Amado's Harlem Style embody this trend.
Eric Himmel, editor-in-chief of Abrams's adult trade publishing, regards the resistance of the marketplace to higher-price books as 'the overarching trend of the past five years-$50 to $60 art books are good values, but they're now often perceived as being too expensive. As a result, we're trying to create more substantial hardcovers in the $30 and $40 range.' As part of what Himmel characterizes as the house's effort 'to develop fresh approaches to books as objects,' Abrams is publishing more paperbacks and smaller-format books. He notes that at $35, Richard Avedon Portraits, the companion volume to the exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is priced less than any previous Avedon book. It's also designed accordion-style, so that the pages can stand up like a mini-exhibit. In another format switch, last fall Abrams shrank its oversize book on Earth from Above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, into a 9½'x6½' format. The squat fat book looks, says Himmel, like 'a little cinder block.'
Whatever the format, the search for new outlets continues to take publishers well beyond such traditional 'nontraditional' book outlets as the warehouse price clubs. Prefacing his comments with 'you cannot replace the experience of going into a bookstore,' Chronicle's Jensen says, 'There are a lot of people who appreciate books, but don't go into bookstores, especially for gift books.' With a little prodding from a guidebook writer, who couldn't find her books when she was on the road, Chronicle has now added between 30 and 40 car washes in California to its gift book accounts.
Similarly, Thames & Hudson's Warner says, 'We're trying to publish more books that appeal to stores outside the traditional bookstore.' He's hoping to boost year-round sales in nature stores, for example, with Roger Camp's Butterflies in Flight, which is in the traditional Japanese orihon style, or accordion format. Thames & Hudson is also doing more college publishing, such as Frances K. Pohl's Framing America: A Social History of American Art, which came out in an academic edition last spring and has just been released as a $75 trade hardcover.
Although the fall/Christmas season remains the strongest gift book season, publishers are looking to expand sales at other holidays and times of year. 'We've been surprised with the success of Baseball as America: Seeing Ourselves Through Our National Game [$35], which was published in conjunction with a traveling exhibit of the Baseball Hall of Fame. We sold 35,000 books,' says National Geographic's Mulroy of the spring release. 'That's going to cause us to experiment more with illustrated gift books in the summer.'
What's Next
While just the name of the category 'illustrated books' might say it all, one trend is to add more text and, in some instances, to remove all the art entirely. Next spring, Abrams is publishing its first nonillustrated book about the art world, I Bought Andy Warhol by Richard Polsky. At sister company STC, 'We're looking at [nonillustrated] books as well-in food, fitness and health, and nutrition,' comments Stoker. 'The books would still be beautifully designed..' However, she doesn't anticipate her first text-only books until 2004.
At Aperture Books, newly appointed editor-in-chief Bob Morton, who was with Abrams for the past 25 years, isn't planning anything that drastic. Still, he says, 'My habit in making books has been to have really strong text. I'm looking for all our books to have more than just brief texts. Text enlarges the subject. For me, it's not a complete book without reading and looking at pictures.' As for other changes, Morton says, 'I'm pleased to be here to do more of the same. I'll maybe broaden the base of subject matter a little wider than just monographs. My sense is that the pure photography market has always been hard to reach.'
If there's any theme to today's gift book trends, it's diversification and experimentation. From low- to high-end, small size to oversize, paper with French flaps to limited edition hardcovers, variety is what customers want, especially by name-brand authors. While it's too soon to measure the long-term effects of today's changed lists, publishers are pleased to have lowered returns so far this year. 'This year is much better already,' says Thames & Hudson's Warner. 'It's profoundly different. For a period last winter, we just couldn't figure out where stores were finding the books to return.'
Click here to see PW's expanded list of 2002 Holiday Gift Books
