Flashlight: Strobing the book world # 5

I’ve got a rather full agenda at present. There’s suddenly a lot to think about in all sorts of ways and while a lot of it should be on the blog, I’m a bit pushed for time to think and write.  Here in the interim are some of the things that I’ve been been looking at this past week.

Not a lot to say on the demise of Waterstone’s 3 for 2 promotion largely because it is just the retirement of a promotional tactic and not the fall of the Roman Empire. The fact though that it caused so much ink to be spilled is in itself a telling comment on how important this simple pricing mechanic had become to the perception of the Waterstone’s brand.

Critics of the move are absolutely right to point out that it will have an impact on sales but I think the point has been missed that what we are seeing is not just a shift in promotional strategy but a deliberate alteration of their brand positioning. Clearly this is an attempt to move away from a value-led proposition to a more value-added proposition. I have no idea whether this will work because I can’t yet see what the full shape of what that new offer will look like. Obviously this is risky but while the sales impact may well hurt, if Waterstone’s is successful in redefining its territory, it may pay off. We watch with interest.

James Bradley is an Australian novelist who has written a very thoughtful, considered response to Ewan Morrison’s Edinburgh Festival lecture. Absolutely a must read. As is his book The Resurrectionist I might add.

Faber and Faber partnering with Perseus is highly interesting news, marking as it does, the evolution of Faber’s business model towards an offering that supports the business of publishing in tandem with the publishing itself.

Alan Cooper gives a new view of how the local bookshop might reinvent itself.

Paul Carr cuts up rough with Graham Swift on the remuneration of authors.

And who could forget its Booker Shortlist day. Very interesting list it is too. Have absolutely no idea which book will win.

Lastly I really enjoyed watching the Twitter feed from last week’s #Bookcampaus run during the Melbourne literary festival by If:Book Australia. Great idea and surprising how much inspiration you can get from 140 characters at a range of over 2500kms. I also enjoyed this lecture by If:Book’s Chief Executive Kate Eltham.

Flashlight: Strobing the book world #3

The final demise of Borders in the US is the big news, two good pieces here from Ed Nawotka on Publishing Perspectives and Mike Shatzkin over at The Shatzkin Files. Update: More on Borders from Slate.

With that context, developments at Waterstone’s in the UK are going to become hugely interesting as James Daunt takes a look at buying. I’m not yet sure how this new system is going to work but given the analyses of Border’s demise above, its obviously a crucial element in Waterstone’s survival. I’ll be watching how this develops with interest. This ‘alternate reality‘ article by a former Waterstone’s suitor is also well worth a read on what might have been.

And while we ponder the buying of print books, digital just keeps on rolling.

Here in New Zealand it’s National Poetry Day and our office is quieter than usual as people have popped off for a bit lunchtime verse.

On a personal note, I think my ‘MCing’ of the New Zealand Book Industry awards went okay though I might have chosen a better anecdote than the one about Waterstone’s Stratford’s septic tank. Still, you live and learn and it could have been much worse…

Or even worse…

‘Sacralising’ the bookshop

Test of Time edited by Andrew Holgate and Honor Wilson-Fletcher (Waterstones 1999)

I was going through some boxes of old Waterstone’s stuff last night and came upon the book pictured above. Test of Time was an accompaniment to a promotion we ran around classic books. We asked a panel of the great and the good to define what they meant by a ‘classic’ and to choose their top tens. We took their lists, chose a hundred books  and ran a major promotion around them. The media loved it and so did the public, we sold a ton of books.

The introduction to the book was written by Professor John Sutherland. It was obviously mostly about the concept of a classic but the passage I cite below caused some interesting debate in the Waterstone’s marketing department of the time:

There is something enormously reassuring about books. Some pre-industrial things last, they tell us. This, as it happens, is the motif which Waterstone’s has chosen to stress in its marketing operations. Go into a ‘big W’ and what you enter is a kind of mini-cathedral dedicated to the book as timeless icon. It’s a consciously different marketing strategy from that currently being imported from the US by Border’s Inc. Their trick is to ‘bland down’ the book (‘desacralise’ it , as we used to say in our hot Marxist youth). You go into Border’s, buy a paper, buy a coffee and Danish, buy a book – no difference. There’s nothing special about these bundles of printed materials. Books? No big deal – do you want cream with that? It will be interesting to see which of the two strategies – reverencing books or normalizing them – works better.”
From the Introduction to Test of Time published by Waterstone’s. (Edited by Andrew Holgate and Honor Wilson-Fletcher 1999)

At the time, the big threat was not Amazon or the supermarkets but Borders (and the oft-rumoured but never realised intervention of Barnes & Noble). The debate was all about the contrast between these two brand positions and how they might play out. More than once it was asked; should Waterstone’s take a more inclusive stance?

As it turned out Waterstone’s size following the Dillons merger dictated that it do just that, lessening the blue water between the two brands. I’m not sure,  given the size of that business, that it could have done anything else but I am pretty clear that the ‘normalizing’ approach put the Waterstone’s brand out of sync with the clientele that had become native to it.

As James Daunt arrives at Waterstone’s I wonder if he will be thinking of how to re-‘sacralise’ its brand (which is certainly the approach taken at his own eponymous chain) and if so how is he thinking of doing it?

Flashlight: strobing the book world

Mike Shatzkin-the latest from Mike and this time the added bonus of a particularly lively and interesting comments section

BBC’s Today programme-First of two discussions (part two tomorrow) on the future of the book industry. Some good insights, not least from Sarah Waters

Publishing Perspectives-The Challenges facing Waterstone’s from Phil Downer.

Unbound.co.uk-As the book market opens, new models as opposed to new formats also become possible. This is an interesting possibility and one to watch.

Personanondata: Way past the tipping point-ebook readers sales double from November 2010 to May 2011

Waterstone’s Bagged

Clearly, the talk of the moment is the Waterstone’s deal.  Reading the Bookseller articles and their attendant comments you get a clear sense of relief at the news from both the senior echelons of the UK trade and the booksellers at the till face. I think they have every reason to feel better but Waterstone’s is far from out of the woods.

There will be much talk of the Hub and which branches will survive. There will be discussion over the empowering of branches and whether the purple t-shirts will remain. These questions will of course, have a bearing on the survival of Waterstone’s as a business but for my money there are two main challenges that James Daunt will have to face:

1) How to operate in the digital space in a way that is compelling and at least in line with the market.

2) Defining the Waterstone’s ‘brand’ and who it serves. And when I say brand, I categorically do not mean ‘is the logo any good?’

The first is an existential challenge, the primary forces of which Waterstone’s does not control. Of course, to survive it must have some answer, some bold and  sure-footed approach that marks it as a leader and to which readers respond. I’m going to save talking about my views on that for a later post.

The second challenge is absolutely in Waterstone’s control but because it concerns the company’s very DNA, it may be even harder to address.

Over the past 15 years, Waterstone’s brand has been stretched as its size outstripped the reach of its original positioning and it has been increasingly unable to reconcile a coherent vision of itself with the business reality of being a 300 branch market leader.

At that size it cannot go back to the young pretender status it once held and was probably most comfortable with. But in this climate neither can it go forward as a corporate behemoth responding slowly and bureaucratically to what are absolutely existential threats.

It needs therefore to make some decisions. It needs to set aside the tactical questions of t-shirts and hubs and become absolutely and completely clear about its answer to the question ‘what will a chain of successful bookshops look like in the 2020 and who will shop there?’

The answer, if they get it right, is worth a gold-plated $53,000,000.

As an outsider unencumbered with Waterstone’s history but with an instinctive, entrepreneurial approach to bookselling,  James Daunt may just prove to be the right man at the right time with the right answer. To do so he will need to balance the measured conservatism of the Daunt experience with a radical strategy to revivify his new charge in a manner appropriate to the times. Clearly this will not be easy, but I wish him the very best of luck.