Beyond the Elements of Style

It’s a relevant question. Especially with the advent and quick adoption of ebooks, nowadays booksellers can be bypassed altogether. So we watch as bookstore after bookstore closes down and we tut-tut a lot about it, but fewer and fewer people are able and willing to pay the higher prices that independent booksellers have to charge. And so lines start getting blurred. At one time Amazon was primarily a bookseller … not anymore!

Two years ago, I had a conversation with bestselling author Jodi Picoult (I adapted one of her novels for the stage and she’d come to see it performed). She said that it used to be her best sales were in bookstores, but not anymore. “It’s Walmart and CostCo now that are selling the most books.”

Really.

“The book trade” is defined quite clearly. That trade consists of retail stores that exist primarily to sell books (or at least, were founded with that purpose——nobody cared if sideline product revenues happened to eclipse actual book sales).

K-Mart and Target sell lots of books, but they are not classified as “bookstores” by anyone in the retail world. Kroger sells lots of books, but they’re in the grocery trade. Costco sells lots of books (and groceries), but they are in the “wholesale club” trade. Your books may happen to do well at office supply stores and on websites, but that doesn’t put them in the book trade category.

These distinctions exist, among other reasons, to help define sales turf among sales reps of all sorts. They might be in-house sales reps, contract reps, distributor’s reps, etc. When one signs an exclusive contract with a sales representative (whether it’s an independent commissioned sales rep or a book distributor with a staff of sales reps), the contract defines the boundaries of that exclusive territory. “Book trade” distributors have exclusivity within the book trade, but do not have exclusivity outside the book trade. Whether that sales rep can sell to other territories (wholesale clubs, gift shops, grocery stores, sporting goods stores, office supply stores, hardware and home improvement stores, etc.) is also determined contractually, as those territories may already be assigned to other sales reps.

This may seem archaic, but it’s very real. If you’ve ever worked in a business with a sales staff (whether they are assigned to a department in a department store, sell radio ads, cars, whatever), you know that the issue of turf for these very competitive people is very important. Further, the people on the receiving end of those sales calls also like the notion of exclusive territory, since it keeps the number of sales calls down to a minimum (you don’t want five different sales reps pitching the same product to show up on your doorstep!).

How many books do the book aisles at K-Mart and Target have to sell before they are considered part of “the trade”? Already they’re pushing more than a lot of the independent bookstores some of you are trying to get your books into. Granted this market caters to beach reading and dictionaries for the back-to-school crowd, but it’s still a large market.

As I already mentioned, K-Mart and Target are general merchandise discounters. It doesn’t suit their needs to be reclassified as a bookstore, grocery store, auto parts store, furniture store, clothing store, even though they sell all those things. Businesses that manufacture/sell products in particular categories report on those stores as a distinct component of their business. “We sell X percent of our products to hardware and home improvement stores, X percent to big-box retailers, X percent at our website…” and so on. Each category has its own specialized realities, so it’s not lumped in with categories that operate differently. There are different customer profiles, different sales terms, different procedures for pitching products, different definitions of “standard industry practices,” and sometimes even different labeling requirements.

A businessperson (and as an author, you are a businessperson, whether you like it or not) who ignores a potentially lucrative market is not a particularly good businessperson. At the very least, the businessperson ought to research that market and decide if it’s suitable for his/her product. It’s safe to say, however, that each particular category in retailing has to be considered on its own terms.

What is beach reading? In the case of K-Mart, Walmart, and Target, you’re really talking about specific types of books that can be sold in large numbers to the kind of customer that buys books in those stores. Bibles, parenting books, dictionaries, and road atlases may not qualify as “beach reading,” but they happen to sell well in those stores. You probably wouldn’t try to sell paté de foie gras in K-Mart or Target, either, even though some people might buy it: too few are likely to buy it to justify offering it for sale.

Consumers are pretty smart. They know that if they want specialty items, they’re most likely to find exactly what they desire at a specialty store. If they want mass-market items, they’ll usually find the best price at a general merchandise discounter. Harry Potter? Anywhere and everywhere, just find the best price. Balzac? Hie thee to a bookseller!

Let me turn the question around. How many espressos, large coffees, bagels, muffins, mints, music CDs and movie DVDs do the large bookstore chains sell before they are classified as a Starbucks that sells books instead of being part of “the trade”?

As far as the retail world is concerned, until they take down the Barnes & Noble sign and replace it with a Starbuck’s sign, it’s a bookstore. Among other things, reclassifying a store means reassigning a valued client to a different sales rep. As that rep might put it, “that’s taking food out of my children’s mouths.” A sales rep scorned can be a very dangerous person indeed.

Reclassifying a store also has to do with consumer perceptions. In the public’s mind, what is one’s purpose for visiting a particular store? If the primary purpose for the vast majority of customers is to drink a latté, and they can optionally buy a book to read while they sip, then it’s best to classify it as a café, advertise it as a café, list it in the Yellow Pages as a café, etc. At one time, A&P was a tea merchant. Eventually, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company became a grocer. That sort of thing doesn’t happen frequently, but it does happen.

Count up the number of K-Mart or Target stores. Simply getting two copies of your book on the shelves in one of those chains would consume nearly an entire print run for most authors. People buying books in those stores aren’t in the same mindset as people spending an afternoon drinking coffee products and playing chess in a “trade” store. They are in there buying other things, and simply make a pass down the isle to pick up a book to read at the beach.

If a book is suitable to sell in K-mart or Target, and the publisher can afford to produce the book in the quantities required and accept the typical high level of returns that come from those accounts, that’s just super! Just remember that it doesn’t really matter where your books are sold—just that they are. It doesn’t make you better or worse than an author who sells books elsewhere. If I could sell my books effectively at office supply stores, I’d do it!

One important trait for survival in this world is to match your own perceptions of——and responses to——the world to the way the world seems to work. Some people are able to succeed despite some glaring mismatches between their perception and that of those around them.

So sell your book where you can, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!