30 October 2009

pricing update....

An update on the predatory pricing, from today's Publishers Weekly Daily newsletter (30 October 09)


Wal-Mart, Amazon Limiting Discounted Purchases
Plans by independent booksellers to buy the 10 November titles being offered at steep discounts by Wal-Mart, Target and Amazon have been foiled by the big box retailers who are limiting the number of books one customer can buy. According to the Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart is limiting purchases to two copies per customer, Amazon has a three-copy limit and Target five. There has been lots of discussion in bookseller forums about buying quantities of titles at the big box retailers as a protest to the discounting policies, but also as way to get a better margin since the 10 books would be cheaper to buy from the stores than from the publishers.

29 October 2009

Bill Petrocelli on the Price War

Under the title “Not a Simple Price War -- It's a Fight Over What You Get to Read” Marin bookseller Bill Petrocelli of Book Passage in San Francisco and Corte Madera has published an absolutely right-on screed about the current price war on books.

I mentioned the situation here two weeks ago, and was planning to say more. Writing for the Huffington Post, Bill said it for me and for all fans of good books. I’ll devote the rest of this Words on Books to excerpts from Bill’s article:

“What looks like a simple price war between Amazon, Target, and Wal-Mart over a handful of bestsellers is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in the book business. The larger fight is really over what you get to read.

“The price war began October 15 when Walmart.com dropped its prices drastically on several bestsellers. Amazon.com and Target.com quickly followed suit, and within a couple of days the prices were down to $8.99 and heading lower... these behemoths were clearly selling those books below cost and engaging in an illegal form of predatory pricing.

“The authors affected by this price slashing were not amused. James Patterson said, "Imagine if somebody was selling DVDs of this week's new movies for $5. You wouldn't be able to make movies." John Grisham's agent added, "I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted bestsellers take the consumer's attention away from emerging writers." The American Booksellers Association saw things the same way, saying in a letter to... (the) Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, that these companies are using books as loss leaders to sell other kinds of merchandise. ‘The entire book industry is in danger of becoming collateral damage in this war.’

“Predatory pricing is a means of driving other booksellers out of business. When this happens, the choice of books is one of the first things to suffer.

“... the literary life of America has to go through two very narrow choke points: publishing and bookselling. Both of these choke points have become more and more constricted in recent years as a result of economic concentration and market manipulation.

“Publishing is now consolidated in the hands of a few large conglomerates that control most of what is published in America. There are, to be sure, many booklovers in the publishing divisions of these giant corporations, but they are outnumbered and out-maneuvered by the bean counters... It is not an atmosphere that favors innovation or literary discoveries...

“... The chain stores had been doing their best to squeeze out the independent stores over the last 20 years or so, and now they in turn are being squeezed by the mass merchandisers... Big-box mass merchandisers, like Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco, have taken over 30 percent of the book market. These mass merchandisers are now selling as many books as Barnes & Noble and Borders combined.

“It's hard to exaggerate the consequences of this mass-merchandiser dominance. These (big-box) outlets carry, at most, a few hundred titles at any given time. This means that a handful of books -- far less than one percent of all the books published -- are probably accounting now for more than 30 percent of all sales in America. Price wars in this segment of the market... (are) driving more customers to these merchandisers in search of quick bargains on a handful of big-name books.

“Publishers are under more and more pressure to subsidize these new, ruinous prices, and they will probably end up pushing more and more of their resources in that direction. But it's a devil's deal...

“...There's a big difference, say, between 500 buyers all buying for their own stores and one chain-buyer purchasing for 500 outlets... ...when the system is dominated by a small handful of powerful buyers, their decision can make or break a book... One of the dirty little secrets of the book business is that publishers often check in advance with the buyers for the chain stores and mass merchandisers before agreeing to publish a book. If the answer they get is no, the book may never see the light of day.

“One of the ironies of the current price war is that it includes ‘The Lacuna,’ the latest novel by Barbara Kingsolver. But Kingsolver wasn't always a bestselling author. When her first novel, ‘The Bean Trees,’ was published in a modest print-run in 1988, independent booksellers recognized it as a literary treasure and sold thousands of copies. After that the chain stores climbed on the bandwagon, but without that first push from independent booksellers Kingsolver's career might never have taken off.

“Anyone who loves books should worry that the doors seem to be closing on the Barbara Kingsolvers of tomorrow.”

NOTES:

"Not a Simple Price War -- It's a Fight Over What You Get to Read" was published on the Huffington Post on October 28. Read the entire posting here, with references and attributions to document his points:

From the bookseller newsletter Bookselling This Week: “William Petrocelli is an author, a bookseller, and a former attorney. He spent a few years as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of California and then as a poverty lawyer in Oakland, California, before going into private practice. For the past 30 years or so, he has been the co-owner with his wife, Elaine, of Book Passage in San Francisco and Corte Madera, California.

Petrocelli is the author of ‘Low Profile: How to Avoid the Privacy Invaders’ (McGraw-Hill) and co-author of ‘Sexual Harassment on the Job: What It Is and How to Stop It’ (Nolo Press). He is also the author of the forthcoming novel ‘The Thirteen.’ ”

22 October 2009

That Cow Came Home

It started with a challenge from an author friend, Lewis Buzbee. He posted this on Facebook: “I just finished reading ‘Cow Across America’ by Dale Neal, and if you want to be reminded of how good novels can be, why we need them, and how they can, yes, make you laugh out loud and cry at the same time, read it. I guarantee it. You buy it and don't like it, I'll refund your money.”

So I went out and purchased the book from my friendly helpful local independent bookstore, and then I read it, and Lewis definitely does not owe me a cent.

I can’t say I’m quite as all-out enthusiastic as Lewis, but the book is excellent. It’s a first novel, it’s a grabber of a story, it’s multi-generational, specific to the Carolina mountains and at the same time universal as Homer.

Not to get all highfalutin about it, because the book is anything but high brow: Dwight Martin is a kid bored with visiting his grandparents in the country, but surprisingly intrigued by his grandfather’s stories. The stories may be true, or maybe not, but they’re good stories and one of the kids in the story also is named Dwight, and Pop has a story about that, too.

The title “Cow Across America” refers to a group of connected stories Pop tells about himself and a boy named Dwight and a cow named Daisy who one summer decided to walk west, all the way west, coast to coast. Pop’s stories are spread over years and many summer visits by the young Dwight to Pop’s isolated hill farm. Turns out the boys and the cow got home again. At least the way Pop tells it, they did.

The reader wonders, while wandering through these delicious tales, who, finally, is the narrator of the book, and what is HIS story? Stories about Dwight and Wylie and Daisy are set far in the past. Then there is Dwight Martin growing up in the present and learning about love and life.

In the opening scene: “Two weeks shy of turning ten, Dwight Martin wrote his first novel. It took most of the morning, far longer than he would have believed, and his finger hurt where the pencil had pressed a saddle-shaped callous against the knuckle, but he kept writing, filling the blue-ruled pages of a wire-bound notebook, nodding slowly as his sentences raced toward the red margins.”

In the last pages Dwight is grown up, waiting for a plane in an airport lounge, still wondering about things: “(He) never understood why travelers read novels in airports, noses pressed to the latest best-seller about serial killers or lawyers, while real life streamed about them in the terminal, a thousand and one stories on their way to different destinies and unforseen fates.”

This is excellent stuff, playing with our sense of time and place, moving backwards into myth and forward into the unknown, all the while staying centered on a boy’s life.

Author Dale Neal lives in Asheville and writes for a local newspaper. “Cow Across America” is his first novel, and it won the Novello Literary Award, intended to promote Carolina writers.

Lewis Buzbee dropped me a follow-up note: “Dale is a friend of mine, a writer friend. I've known him for 15 years probably. I had no involvement in the making of this book, other than being his pal... with this book, I really lost track when I was reading it, forgot that it was Dale. I was just reading a wonderful book... really glad you liked it, Tony.”

NOTES:

“Cow Across America” by Dale Neal. Novello Festival Press hard cover $21.95. ISBN 9780981519234.

Novello Festival Press announces publication of Dale Neal’s first novel.

Fascinating essay by the author on how he came to write this book.

There is a connection here with the novel “Cold Mountain” by Charles Frazier. Charles and his wife Katherine in 2004  founded the Cold Mountain Foundation to promote and support other writers from the Carolinas. Their funds helped subsidize publication of “Cow Across America.”

“H.L. Mencken, in his famous book The American Language, mentions highfalutin as an example of the many native U.S. words coined during the 19th-century period of vigorous growth. Although highfalutin is characteristic of American folk speech, it is not a true regionalism because it has always occurred in all regions of the country, with its use and popularity spurred by its appearance in print. The origin of highfalutin, like that of many folk expressions, is obscure. It has been suggested that the second element, -falutin, comes from the verb flute-hence high-fluting, a comical indictment of people who think too highly of themselves.”  The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright c 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

15 October 2009

News and some made up stuff too

At a recent bookseller’s trade show author Timothy Egan suggested that there should be some sort of "cash for clunkers" policy for booksellers.

WHAT IF... In record time President Obama today proposed a short-term boost for the flagging publishing industry, a set of rules and regulations promulgated by the Agriculture Department under the heading Feed Your Head (of Cattle) for Farmers, a proposal already nicknamed by Republicans the “Cash for Chapters” boondoggle.

Under the proposed new plan farmers would receive cattle cars filled with no longer fully functioning books. They would mulch them, scatter the resulting mixture on their fields, and thereby raise much more interesting and well-educated cattle at less cost than current methods.

Opponents of the plan, which included all Congressional Republicans, noted the plan pays farmers when local charities and church-sponsored bookstores could simply strew their unwanted books along highways near farms, letting the farmers do the rest.

“This book bill weakens my American values,” said Republican spokesperson Clo Miles. “Where’s the help for big corporate farmers in this proposal?”

Under the new regulations, donors of clunker books receive a gift card to purchase one new book recommended by Oprah. New books are expected to force out the old while supporting publishers and several best-selling authors.

“It’s win win win,” said Al Knopf of Random-Penguin-Harper-Houghton-Harcourt House. “We win win win!”

* * * * *

In other news, actual, real news, a church in North Carolina, with 14 adherents, plans to burn books, including copies of the Bible, for Halloween. At least 298 online news articles cover this event, so it must be true.

Pastor Marc Grizzard told the Associated Press the King James version of the Bible is the only one his church follows. He says all other versions are "satanic" and "perversions" of God's word and he’s going to burn them.

So much for North Carolina. In SOUTH Carolina, kids are being urged to trick or treat for books rather than candy at the Independent Mail newspaper 2009 Literacy Festival. Books, no candy. Guess how well THAT will go over. Children are asked to dress like a favorite character from a book and enjoy games, crafts and story-telling. A free book for every child will be donated by a local foundation. Just no candy.

* * * * * *

Friends of the Plainville Public Library holds the annual book sale this weekend... the Wall Street Journal reports the new Sarah Palin memoir is expected to sell well... Wal-Mart.com has announced it will pre-sell selected new books for $10 each, and many other titles half off list price. For comparison, books now on the New York Times Best Seller Fiction List have an average retail price of $26.47 each.

Wal-Mart is promoting not-yet-published books in order to utilize generous publisher rebates and promotions when most available. Amazon.com has cut some prices to match. It’s a battle of the giants. As the old saying goes they lose money on every sale but make it up on volume.

* * * * * *

The highly progressive Huffington Post online has opened a new section on books and publishing. Right now they are laying odds on the National Book Awards, publishing various book-related blogs, and generally hotting up the world of books for interested readers. You might want to take a look:

NOTES:

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & The Fire That Saved America by Timothy Egan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hard cover $27. ISBN 0618968415.

Christian book burning in North Carolina:

Current NY Times best selling fiction:

1    THE LOST SYMBOL, by Dan Brown. (Doubleday, $29.95.)
2    AN ECHO IN THE BONE, by Diana Gabaldon. (Delacorte, $30.)
3    ROUGH COUNTRY, by John Sandford. (Putnam, $26.95.)
4    THE LAST SONG, by Nicholas Sparks. (Grand Central, $24.99.)
5    THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett. (Amy Einhorn/Putnam, $24.95.)
6    HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY, by Audrey Niffenegger. (Scribner, $26.99.)
7    THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS, by Debbie Macomber. (Mira, $16.95.)
8    SOUTH OF BROAD, by Pat Conroy. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $29.95.)
9    ALEX CROSS’S ‘TRIAL’, by James Patterson & Richard DiLallo. (Little, Brown, $27.99.)
10  HOTHOUSE ORCHID, by Stuart Woods. (Putnam, $25.95.)

Total $264.67 for an average retail price of $26.47

Books, not candy, for Halloween: