Nicholas Clee on why most bookshops these days offer you the same stuff
Walk into any big bookshop, and you are confronted right away with the three-for-two tables. It's a year-round sale at our bookselling chains. If you do not want The Time Traveler's Wife and The Jane Austen Book Club with Small Island thrown in for free, you can get six quid off Jamie's Dinners or Piers Morgan's The Insider.
Many book lovers look back in nostalgia to the early 1990s, when Waterstone's would make bestsellers of such challenging works as Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters, and when a shop's stock would reflect the enthusiasms of its staff. The chain has a more middlebrow profile now. Variations in the books on the shelves reflect not the tastes of individual managers, but the recommendations of sophisticated stock-control systems.
What do you expect? These are companies with shareholders to satisfy, with expensive rents to pay, and with intense competition to counter - from each other, from supermarkets and from Amazon. They need to make big returns from their top lines, and to keep turning over the rest at a steady rate. Waterstone's discovered recently that it was carrying an alarmingly large amount of stock for which it never found any buyers. While we all like to make extraordinary discoveries in bookshops, most of us would concede that it's not good business for the trade to hold books on the off chance that the few people who might be interested in them will drop by.
This is the background to a controversial address to the recent Booksellers Association conference by Waterstone's marketing director, Lesley Miles. Publishers continued to churn out titles that booksellers had no hope of selling, she complained. They advertised their books to a trade audience and the small coterie who read the literary pages, rather than a broad potential readership.
Publishers in the audience were very cross - although, given Miles's influence, they did not express their anger on the record. They have cut their lists in order to spend more money on fewer titles; and, when planning marketing campaigns, they have to build into their budgets the hefty sums necessary to secure the support of Waterstone's and its competitors. They interpreted the subtext of Miles's address as: "We want even more of your money."
Her real underlying subject, however, was that books are a mature market, offering reasonable growth in good years, but rarely enough to excite the City; and there are signs of some less good years ahead. Waterstone's sister company, HMV, has been enjoying the boom in DVD sales; but no new format is going to give double-digit growth to booksellers. At almost every session at the conference, the industry was debating the urgent need to increase the number of book buyers. Emergent readers, lost readers in the 15-30 generation, grey readers whom marketeers neglect: the book trade needs you.
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