The Myriad Evils of Retail Pt. I

Before I explain why I hate the very concept of standard, brick and mortar retail stores, especially large chains, I should preface this by saying that they used to be fine. Not that they've changed all that rapidly or anything. Or even all that much. It's everything else that's changed. They're middle men. Time was, that was a valuable service that justified the rest of it. Chains no longer provide any service worth mentioning, and the taste-making services of indies are in doubt. In both cases, the reason has a lot to do with TEH INTERNETS. I think you'll see what I mean when I'm done.

Evil #1: Undue influence on the production of the product. This is true in many industries, but I know the details best in books. For example, if Barnes and Noble doesn't like your cover, regardless of the fact that the editor, author, lead designer all think it's great and accurately represent the book, you're stuck. B&N purchasing execs literally just go through a list of covers and say "yes, no, no, no, yes, yes, yes." If they say no, it means they will not carry any product with that cover, forcing additional costs to the publisher (hiring a freelancer for a week to make a few new mock covers can cost a few thousand dollars. It's less for inhouse staff, but you're still spending the time and money twice).

Evil #2: Discounts. Not sure how to break this to you guys, but running a store is supr expensive. There's a 3 story B&N on 5th Avenue in NYC. I shudder to think what that space cost them in an area where a studio apartment the size of a closet runs two or three thousand smackers a month. Consequently, they need to sell at biiiiiig profits. If you're one of the biggest publishers, you're selling at probably a 50% discount to indies. To big ol' chains like Borders or Walden books, 55% or 60% is more likely. Niche publisher selling to a chain? Maybe 70%. So that 25 dollar hardcover, which costs four dollars a piece to produce PLUS overhead (i.e. the salary of your staff, plus author royalties, plus returns, plus warehousing etc.) is actually sold to the bookstore for $10.00. Lot of people have seen how quickly book prices have risen in the last twenty years and think publishers are greedy. Truth is, even with *some* books selling in numbers that seemed unimaginable in the recent past, margins are slimmer than ever. Again, I don't really fault retail for this as such. It's probably not even fair to call this evil. It's necessary for their own business. And historically, without them you'd never get the books to the readers. it doesn't seem necessary anymore. Digital distribution would get around it entirely. Online warehousing surely buys at similar discounts, but is less likely to return books. And you'll note the margins are better. Go ahead and look up any book you want, first on Amazon then on B&N.com. Amazon is pretty much always a few dollars cheaper because warehouses are cheaper to run than stores. B&N could match it, but then they'd undercut their retail outlets which they are loathe to do. If the market shifted even more towards online warehouses and digital distribution, at the very least prices come down and spur sells. Best case scenario, the margin per book would increase too.

Evil #3: Return policies. This is the big problem, and the place where digital copies and online warehouses present such a huge advantage to publishers over retail outlets. See, starting in the 70s as chain bookstores got to be very big and successful, they began to implement automated ordering systems. Their aim was to keep on hand only what they were sure they could sell, and quickly based on data gathered from that item and similar items in the past. What this means is that modern stores of many sorts, not just bookstores, order, return, re-order, re-return and re-re-order before they've even paid for it the first damn time. It creates a logistical nightmare for shipping and warehousing, adding costs on both sides (but usually more for the manufacturer/distributor/whatever than the retailer- chains act like they're doing you a favor by carrying your product. And until recently, they were probably right, and depending on the product they still might be). It also reinforces homogenization. This is why some books have sucess you never would have seen 20 years ago while many other books have been completely lost in the crowd. Even very good ones. For instance, what if your book is sort of timeless? Never hits best seller, but it's selling slow and steady for months, and even years? Well, don't expect chains to support that. You're gone immediately. What if it's a good book but aimed at a target audience that usually doesn't follow new releases? Genre fiction for instance. My eyes nearly popped out the first time I ever saw a Sci-Fi novel in hardcover prominently displayed in a bookstore's "New" section. Goodness. The very idea of a hardcover SF is mind boggling. Speaking from experience, that audience follows authors if they follow anything. Also speaking from experience, they get the short end of the stick- In the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section there will be 3 shelves of LoTR, then one shelf worth of all the classic names- Asimov, Dick, Leguin, Adams, Clarke, what have you. Then there will be case after case of sexy witches and handsome brooding vampires. Unless you love trends, you're not well served by chain bookstores. Neither of course are mid-list or small time authors, niche and indie publishers, and even specialist imprints of larger ones. But here's the thing. Returns suck for every industry and this is more and more often the model. So I don't want to make it sound like Len Reggio is the devil. He's not. But it IS true that Book Publishing in the US is saddled with what is quite possibly the worst returns policy of any industry, anywhere, ever.

Legend has it, it goes back to the great depression. Not only can bookstores return pretty much anything at any time for any reason, and not only is the majority of the burden on the publisher, books also have to deal with a loss most industries don't. Okay, hardcovers can be damaged. May need to be tossed. Maybe need a new jacket. But that's par for the course for any industries' returned items. Trade paperbacks and mass markets? Bookstores PULP THEM and send back THE COVER IN A GIANT STACK OF COVERS. So not only do the publishers lose the sale if it's returned, they lose the product, which means the money they spent producing it? Might as well have been thrown in a giant flaming hole in the ground. Go ahead and look at some of your papebacks. Probably on the page with the CIP data and whatever there will be a note that will read something like "If you bought this book without a cover, it was reported destroyed to the publisher." So now you know what that means. That means they bought it, got their money back without returning the product, and sold it to you anyway. In other words, not only is it the only industry that doesn't get it's product back when it is "returned" there's a built in and easily exploitable method of piracy. The simple truth is that if you have a 50% return rate, you're not doing too badly.