But – with a few exceptions – I haven’t been told this by people at the frontline of the booktrade.  I’ve been told this mainly by the Booksellers Association.  And told this in an incredibly patronising manner when I queried whether this was something they should be upporting and raising my own worries about the future implications of WBN.

So, aware that it might just be me and that I was missing something, I emailed half a dozen booksellers who I know and respect and asked what they thought.  In the main they shared my uneasiness. One agreed with me but took comfort in the fact that the list of books were the sort “chosen by people who read for people who read and by the middle class for the middle class. I’m going to hope that it doesn’t impact on sales as these are exactly the sort of Guardian readers who see shopping local and in ‘real’ shops as a political movement”.  Which is very true and one which probably (I hope) applies to our shop in leafy south Edinburgh as well.

Another – more forthright – bookseller said: “my main issue is that it is such a tremendous missed opportunity.   Byng et al are great at getting the publicity, but the idea itself is only marginally better than the … ‘bookaholic’ wank.”  Yes, ‘bookaholism‘ – remember that?  It was kicked into the long grass after the trade made it clear what a lousy idea that was…That same bookseller was fairly blunt in his views of the BA too and I have to agree.

Someone else, after making the point that WBN seems to promote the idea that it doesn’t really cost anything to write, publish or retail a book and that they’re not really worth paying for, said: “At best, it seems like some kind of industry-wide loss leader / giant marketing campaign which might be perfectly normal business practice for the chains and large publishers, but unfortunately it’s not really something I can afford my customers to become accustomed to just yet … but at worst, it seems to be cutting me and my shop out of the book scene in the town completely – why bother with the bookshop when WBN / publishers are giving the books away free?”

Others had similar thoughts although a couple did say that they would have a think about how they could get involved if they thought it might get some new people through the shop doors but they didn’t seem to think that was likely, given that it seems to be mostly about readers giving books to other readers rather than trying to recruit more people to the joy of reading.  These are not head-in-the-sand, Luddites who are negative about every new initiative that is mooted.  These are knowledgeable, experienced booksellers who are regularly lauded as some of the best in the country.  People with years of experience as booksellers but also – crucially – as people who run their own businesses.

So, having established that I am far from alone in the trade in my worries, I started asking our reps what responses to WBN they were hearing as they travelled highways and byways bringing news of forthcoming titles.  Without exception they told me that my feelings seemed to be universal among independent booksellers and that even in the chains the response was generally negative and at best disinterested.

And that’s before we even get to the comments on my last blog post where the pro-WBN lobby were so spectacularly outnumbered by the anti-WBN brigade.  And the emails I’ve received from publishers, booksellers, readers and authors in the last couple of days almost all of which agreed that WBN is pure folly.  That Amazon will have even more books priced at 1 penny by 6th March and that many books will end up languishing in boxes, undonated, as suggested by Tim and The Bigooner, is highly likely.

We are not stupid and nor are we mean-spirited – we give a lot of books to charities, we run book groups for adults and children, take authors to schools and The Edinburgh Bookshop will soon be launching our big new charity project.  and like us, most booksellers I know also run a shedload of charity and not-for-profit activities.

But we still don’t see why giving away so much stock is the best way to spread the love of good books and to promote reading.  And we don’t like being condescended to by our own trade body, or publishing lackeys who have no idea of the stress and responsibility of running your own business and can’t even begin to comprehend the fury some of us feel at being screwed over in this way.  Publishers, booksellers, authors and readers have a symbiotic relationship and to alienate booksellers by effectively cutting them out of the supply chain is foolish.  We all need each other.

Next blog post – how World Book Night could have been run in way which would promote reading, promote book sales and to reach even more people…

The public (those who are aware of it) think it’s a great idea and quite understandably so – it’s getting something for free and we all love a freebie, especially some of the book bloggers who’ve been so breathlessly excited about WBN.  Less excited are some authors – the writers of the 25 selected books will not receive royalties and given that most authors earn a very small income from their writing it sets a worrying precedent for those further down the ladder from these best-sellers.

Much less excited too are booksellers: while some are cautiously positive, most of the people I’ve spoken to are horrified; when we’re already being undercut by supermarkets who can wrestle bigger discounts from publishers and Amazon and Tesco etc are even selling books as loss-leaders, to further erode our market and the perceived value of books is foolish in the extreme.  And that’s the problem: not that this will necessarily undermine sales but that it’s another way of eroding the public’s perception of the value – and cost – of books.  As one hugely well-respected bookseller said to me “people will think that if the trade can afford to give away so much, our margins must be enormous and our profits vast…”.  It’s hard to think of another industry which has given so much product away.  Or indeed one which would want to.

When I contacted the Booksellers Association – our trade body – and raised my concerns I was very patronisingly put in my place.  That I don’t see the wonder of Jamie Byng’s grand idea is down to the fact that I’m a Luddite and a flat-earther who refuses to appreciate the amazing surge in reading that will result from World Book Night.  A surge which is unproven, unresearched and even the Hon Jamie – a man of many ideas, some genius and others utterly ridiculous – can only claim that “everything in my experience and instincts say its [sic] going to do something really amazing for books”.  I’m not a fan of market research – much of it has a flawed methodology and makes unjustified claims (although that’s probably because I come from an academic background where every assertion has to be have substance), but surely before the booktrade gives away £9 million of stock there should have been some sort of research?  I’m finding hard to see how the instincts of Jamie’s intestines should be grounds for this sort of giveaway.

Tim Godfray, Chief Executive of the BA, tells me that the BA Council see World Book Night as an opportunity for bookshops to “Reboot their Reading Communities”.  WTF?  That’s one of the problems with projects like this – slogans that at best mean nothing and at worst are merely spin intended to distract from the poor thinking behind them.  He also pointed out to me that booksellers are not being asked to make any financial contribution, implying that that means we’re not entitled to any opinion.  Which is wrong – the activities of the BA are funded by subs paid by members and so the time he and the rest of the staff are spending on this is in fact funded by booksellers and we should be able to question whether this is the best use of their time and our money.

Tim informed me that most of the funding, whether in kind or in cold hard cash, is coming from publishers and others in the trade.  That publishers are happy to forgo such a chunk of profit on some of their best-selling books is indeed surprising, but given the discounting they indulge in, endlessly eroding profit in the quest to sell just a few more books in the supermarkets, even if it’s at a loss, logic does seem to be in short supply in the boardrooms.  And I suspect that in order to get these books printed for free, the printers have tied those publishers into contracts regarding the amount of business they’ll put their way in the next few years, thereby covering their costs.  I’d be amazed if that’s not the case.  And of course, the authors concerned are losing out.  Those whose books have been chosen might be selling enough to not miss the royalties – authors such as Lee Child, Marian Keyes and Margaret Atwood are probably not too fussed and have no doubt been spun a line about how this giveaway will do (completely unquantified and unknown) wonders for their backlist sales.  But for many authors WBN merely reinforces the public’s suspicion that all authors are minted and can afford to work for free and that they certainly shouldn’t expect to get paid.

World Book Night means that booksellers, already working hard to make customers realise why indies don’t discount in the same way and why Amazon can afford to knock our cookbooks at less than half price (because they don’t have to have shops, or trained staff etc) will have to work even harder now to reinforce the idea that there is a cost involved in producing and selling books.  After all, if you’re a punter and there is a charity shop full of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie that were given away aren’t you going to wonder why Muriel Spark’s other books are being sold at £8.99 in the bookshop up the road?

Next blog post – Not just me – reactions from others in the trade

Blog post after that – how this could have been done in a way that promoted reading AND book sales

An army of Bookstart coordinators run activities such as reading groups in community centres, promote library membership, advise childminders and nurseries and generally work tirelessly to build on the basic premise of giving children their very own books from an early age.  And the inclusive nature of the scheme which gives books to all pre-schoolers rather than just those who are means-tested or specially selected by some other means as needing additional help promotes the idea of reading as an activity for everyone.  It doesn’t feel like charity or ‘intervention’ and thus has no stigma.

My own experience with young people who haven’t developed the habit of reading possibly points up the need for the Bookstart scheme rather well.

I have a PGCE and worked for some time with teenagers who were drifting into further education following undistinguished school careers.  This was in the mid to late ’90s and these teenagers were too old to have benefitted from Bookstart.  The common factor that linked all of them was that they didn’t read for pleasure.  I found that if I could get them to start reading it helped their attainment levels in the subjects they were studying.  What they read might not have been directly related to their courses but it was part of a process that made visiting the college library less of a chore, helped them to realise that the knowledge it held could help them to achieve the jobs and careers that they aspired to but which they felt were impossible to grasp, that books were not dusty and irrelevant.  Would they have passed more exams if they and their parents or carers had benefitted from Bookstart?  Maybe not.  But it wouldn’t have hindered them and it might have improved their attainment levels.

It is not over-dramatic to say that losing Bookstart would be a tragedy.  Books can change lives.  Establishing and maintaining the habit of reading can dramatically alter the life chances of children and young people.  Books are one of the foundation stones of our culture and to erode the importance of reading will undoubtedly undermine much of our country’s literary, artistic, scientific and business standing.

That picture book about a penguin or a patchwork elephant or a cat or a digger is the beginning of an imaginative adventure which can change lives. Don’t let that adventure be stifled at the very beginning.  Bookstart’s £13 million of funding is the equivalent of a second-class stamp for every person in the country.  Not even peanuts; cheaper than peanuts.

You can sign the petition to keep Bookstart’s funding here.  Please do.

Since early February I have been organising the Scottish book launch for a new title by an award-winning and very popular author who writes books for teenagers. It’s going to be a schools event and when the publisher phoned us up to talk about it we were extremely excited. We were asked whether slightly less than three months would be too short a time to plan a large schools event and we said no, because what a great opportunity for teenagers readers to hear a high-profile, critically-acclaimed author talk about their new book (for free, by the way!). Surely any sane school would email me back before you could say “gold-plated extra-curricular activity”?

Well, you can see where this one is going. Granted, there are a few schools who have been great: they’ve replied promptly with enthusiasm with an awareness of that free author events are quite rare and are of educational value. However, the experience in general has left me frustrated, disillusioned and not a little angry. Firstly, getting past school secretaries seems to require the cunning of Frank Abagnale Jr. and the hurdling skills of Kriss Akabusi: why is not alright to give me a teacher’s work email address? They are – like me – at work. It does not give me access to children and when you cannot transfer me by phone I’m lacking in options. You may claim to be able to forward the email but past experience demonstrates that you will not.

When I’ve eventually made radio contact with teachers (“Houston..[crackle]…are you there?”) I’ve been taken aback with the ennui. Responses have included: “An event ending at 12 may not give the children time enough to get back for lunch” (the school is 30 mins away and they’re teenagers not four-year-olds), “the children only get back from their holidays on the Monday, so they may be too tired” (from what?) and “they’ve got a lot on that term”. This last may be true, but we’ve specifically invited the year before serious exams so as not to clash with that, and surely three hours out of one school day to enrich a child’s literary education is something no parent is going to object to.

There’s been a lot said about how children stop reading in their teenage years and after this adventure all I can say is no wonder when the people the people in charge of enthusing them are quite so laissez-faire about the whole matter. I know schools are judged on their exam results, but through sheer pride I would have thought they would also like to produce adults who are enthusiastic and life-long readers. I’m sure that they have enormous pressures with timetables and government targets, but I found it significant that some people were immediately thrilled and others I rang off the phone wondering whether I had to stand on the school field with a pointy stick and visual aid featuring Very Good Author as illustration. When I was seven, Humphrey Carpenter came to my school and did all the voices in his newest book. And I can remember today the laughter in my stomach – far better, in fact, than whatever lessons I had that day.

It’s not that we look down on self-published authors, it’s just that generally speaking if someone is a good writer and professional in their approach and believes in what they’re writing and listens to constructive feedback their work will find a home with a ‘traditional’ publisher (ie one which doesn’t expect the writer to pick up the tab and which spends time and money editing, typesetting, designing and marketing the book).  There is no great conspiracy that stops people becoming published authors.  Really – agents and publishers need to turn a profit and are looking for great books and if no-one wants yours then you need to look at the reasons you’re getting knocked back and address them.

The perils of self-publishing is something I’ve written about before about a year ago: here, here and here and other people who are much more authoriative than me such as Nicola “crabbit old bat” Morgan and the marvellous Jane Smith at How Publishing Really Works have written lots on the subject.  But despite the increasing number of people warning against self-publishing – even if you don’t get ripped off it’s unlikely that you’ll end up with anything a bookshop wants on their shelves – the number of self-pubbed titles arriving on our desk is increasing exponentially.

In the last few weeks we’ve received children’s picture books with illustrations described as ‘naive’ but which were actually just dreadful; books with grammatical errors in the blurb*; memoirs of people that no-one – barely even Google – has heard of; soft porn which managed to be neither erotic or literary despite the enthusiastic claims in the blurb; books with covers so ugly only their creators could love them; books with glowing endorsements from the people who run the self-publishing outfit (to paraphrase Mandy Rice Davies ‘well, they would say that, that wouldn’t they?); poetry which wasn’t even emo-6th form level and there seems to be a never-ending supply of would-be literary fiction, YA books about vampires and children’s books about anthropomorphic toys, including a bear named after a domestic airport (I mean, WTF?).  And there’s one libellous joy which wasn’t sent directly to me by the author but which the temptation to rip apart here is almost too great… for the moment I’ll wait until his on-line rantings get too personal and then the gloves will be off.

So, if you have self-published your book and want to send it to us do make sure that it will stand up to our (very) critical scrutiny, that there’s nothing on the outside which will make us chuck it straight in the recycling box and that you accept that the chances of us stocking it, based on past experience, is about 1 in 75.  We’re so short of space that we don’t have room for the complete canon of Jane Austen so your book is going to have to be seriously good for me to shoehorn it onto our shelves instead of finding space for Mansfield Park.

* and please don’t jump in here to criticise any grammatical or punctuation errors I may have made – this is a blog post, not a book I’m publishing and which I expect to stand on its own merits alongside professional published titles.

But between the publisher and the reader is the bookseller.  And whilst there may be booksellers who’ll buy most anything a publisher tries to sell them, either because they have soooo much shelf-space to fill or because they haven’t got a handle on their customer base or maybe they just have too much money to spend, most of us are harder to sell to.

Take our shops for example.  We’ve seen three reps so far this week from major publishers and we’ve ordered in some lovely books which are coming out in April and May.  What we do buy is good literary and middle-brow fiction, Radio 4-type non-fiction, biography, history, interesting foodie and craft titles (making stuff is very popular), good crime (nothing too gory, Scandinavian crime in translation is hot at the moment following the success of Stieg Larsson) and more quirky titles – Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists?  Well yes, madam, here it is.  And yes, I know they hadn’t got it in Waterstone’s.  Sometimes we buy in books knowing exactly which customer will buy it and we’re often spot on.  For example, we have a regular two-year old customer who is obsessed with diggers and we know who will buy Middle Eastern history titles.

However, it’s interesting to look at what we haven’t bought.  Quite a large number are titles we don’t have a market for – for example, we sell very little chick-lit (and what we do sell has generally been by read by Becky or I and chosen because we liked it – it doesn’t tend to hit the shelf until then); we don’t sell celeb autobiographies; we take hardly any celebrity chef titles because they’ll be half-price or less on-line or in the supermarkets and so on.  If a rep tells us that a book will be in a Waterstone’s promotion we tend to bypass it or just take one copy.

Sometimes we don’t buy because the covers are so unremittingly awful and sometimes it’s because the rep just couldn’t sell the book to us (and there’s an art to selling books that’s quite different to say, double-glazing) and sometimes we’ll look up from the AI (Advance Information sheet) with a simultaneous “what the fuck?”.   And in some of those cases, the rep will shrug and say that that’s been a fairly common response…  It isn’t a bad thing for them to admit that to us by the way – it builds trust and means we have more respect for them and are more likely to believe them when they say that a book we’re not fussed about is really good.

And it’s a shame for the average books with the unexciting covers or the WTF books because they and their author have spent years going through the publishing process – agents, editors, acquisitions meetings, editing, type-setting, cover design… and much money has been spent quite apart from the author’s advance.  But no-one thought about how this could be sold to a bookseller and whether it was something we could in turn sell to a customer.

So there you go – agents might be a primary filter but booksellers are the filter of last resort.  And when you browse a bookshop full of titles you loved or which make you want to read them remember that we’ve worked hard just to make sure that they’re there for you.

* and yes, I don’t care how marvellous you think your novel is; if there isn’t a market for it, it won’t find a publisher.  If it is constantly turned down then it’s either not good enough or not enough paying readers will want to buy it and the book trade is just that – a trade.  Agents, publishers, booksellers are all in it to make a living, just as we assume that most writers are.

I’ll come on to that in a minute but first I’d like to share with you the decidedly tasteless poster that was adorning their front window.  As one chain crashes and burns and hundreds of people lose their jobs two days before Christmas (and just along the street the Wesley Owen Christian bookshop is having a closing down sale because they’ve gone into administration) gloating about it really is classy isn’t it?  It isn’t as though everyone in the trade who even glances at the trade press is unaware of how Borders staff are feeling and given that hundreds of people were made redundant at Waterstone’s earlier in 2009, you would think that the Big W would hesitate before indulging in such schadenfreude, wouldn’t you?  Especially when figures like these are being released showing that Waterstone’s itself is hardly in rude health.

And the Waterstone’s sale?  Well, they’ve got an awful lot of Jeremy Clarkson and Delia’s new Christmas book lying around – we counted well over a hundred copies of the latter – but what was surprising was the amount of discounting going on on titles that shouldn’t really need to be discounted – titles that have been selling well for us at full price such as Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson and Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams – so it looks as though they’ve over-ordered on those and discounting heavily makes a smaller loss than the costs involved in returning them to the Hub and then back to the publishers, with all the attendant problems that have been experienced getting books out of the Hub, never mind back in and out the other side.  And the shop was a mess which never gives a good impression when combined with knock-down prices as they chase Amazon to the bottom of the market – after all, who wants to look like a bargain basement?

All in all, our visit made us feel quite pleased with how the first few months at The Edinburgh Bookshop have gone – not complacent by any means, but positive and we’re enthusiastic about the new year.  But that poster in the window – that really gave us an opportunity to feel morally superior.