So maybe we should look to our own lives and the decisions we make and the fact that the choices we make can have a huge cumulative impact on society and especially our local communities.  This ties in with the new Indiebound initiative from the Booksellers Assocation.  Imported from the American Booksellers Association (all members are independent booksellers unlike the BA where my fellow members include Tesco and Waterstone’s) where Indiebound has been running for a couple of years as a grass-roots movement inspiring people to use their local independent businesses.  Our Indiebound pack arrived on Friday and both our shops now have the ‘Eat, Sleep, Read’ posters up.

And the Indiebound movement exemplifies what I was saying about how our personal choices can have a political impact, in some ways far more than waving a placard on a anti-globalisation march.  How many people  have ever ordered a book or CD from Amazon or bought a cheap t-shirt from one of the bargain-basement fashion retailers (who could sell it that cheaply because it was quite probably made in a sweatshop)?  We are seduced by cheapness into buying more than we need, often at the price of exploiting poorer communities.  Sometimes we are seduced by global branding and advertising into paying more than we need for products – Starbucks became fashionable in the UK at least partly because we were lured by the ‘Friends’ image – as though sipping an over-priced macchiato in a cafe with sofas would suddenly make us beautiful and interesting and surrounded by similarly hip friends.  We all do it – I’m as guilty of falling prey to the lures of imported out-of-season veg as anyone else.

Meanwhile, independent businesses – cafes, greengrocers, fishmongers, hardware shops, and – of course – bookshops are disappearing from our communities.  In terms of bookshops, when you shop with us you might not benefit from the loss-leader discounting seen on-line and in supermarkets (which is why you won’t see the new Jamie O or Nigella on our shelves – it isn’t worth wasting the space on them and we’d rather find you original and reliable alternatives) but you will benefit from our expertise; our knowledge of local titles and those most likely to be of interest to our customers, the quirky titles and lesser known authors that we search out and the events we run from bookgroups to author events.  You contributed to your community indirectly because local businesses donate to local causes in a way that major retailers don’t and you enabled us to create local jobs and pay local taxes.

In brief, shopping local and shopping independent whenever you can shows that you care about your community and that you don’t want to live in a homogeneous world where everything is bland and the decisions about what you wear, drink, eat and read are made by national or even international companies.

Voting is important but sometimes we send out a political message as much by the choices we make on a day to day basis just as much as we do at the ballot box every four or five years.  Sometimes it’s our personal decisions which are the most significant political statements.

However, an increasing number of seminars are being run such as the Booksellers Association’s programme for independent booksellers, and some events for budding authors as well as events run by the British Council, PEN and Booktrust to name just a few.  Booksellers are increasingly being seen as an important group of attendees (even more so this year when there were few foreign buyers for publishers to talk to) and it’s a useful way for us to see what’s new and forthcoming, especially if you’re somewhere like Edinburgh where it’s easy to feel that we don’t exist apart from the three weeks in August when the book festival sets up camp in Charlotte Square.

On two of the days, there were presentations by publishers to independent booksellers of their titles for the latter half of 2010.  In theory, publishers had about 20 minutes to present the books that they thought would be of particular interest to us – in practice, some had little idea of time-keeping and took a rather scattergun approach but on the whole it was really useful, especially as we’re already starting to think about the titles that we’ll include in our Christmas catalogue (do I win a prize for the earliest mention of the dreaded ‘C’ word?).

Whilst listening though, I did make some notes and thought it might be interesting to share them with you, dear reader… Apologies for the length of this post in advance.

Monday morning…

Not many people here which seems odd – so useful to know about forthcoming titles and see jackets etc and as it seems every publisher is drastically cutting their rep teams meaning that we see them less and less frequently.

Random House up first and seem on the ball… new Kate Atkinson title is something to look forward too and will do very well for us.  New Salman Rushdie; lovely looking book by Simon Heffer about the correct use of English – could be this year’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves; new Nigella Lawson – will be so discounted everywhere that we may well not bother getting any in.

Headline  on next… Daisy Goodwin’s new novel My Last Duchess looks fun – might ask for a proof of that; Andrea Levy’s new book will be out in pb in the autumn; Grumpy-Old-Women type book from Jenny Eclair might do well as Christmas gift if really funny as so much of that market seems to be aimed at men.

Time for a coffee – I think.  It’s hot and wet but I genuinely can’t tell whether it’s tea or coffee.  Maybe we should just refer to it as a cup of ‘brown’ rather than be too definite.

Pan Macmillan next out of the blocks.  Oh no, these chaps want to be funny.  Saints preserve us from unfunny presentations…

Some interesting titles – collected letters of Nelson Mandela will do well and a biog of Obama by a Pullitzer Prize winner should have the necessary gravitas to sell well to our customers; book about beer; new Bret Easton Ellis; new book by Kate Morton is apparently all about a country house, time slip, part thriller, part ghost story, part romance – so that would be just like her first book, The House at Riverton then?  Oh well, if it ain’t broke…

Even the publishers feel the need to apologise for the forthcoming Jeffrey Archer (and well they might) but I think if I was Colleen Nolan I might be a bit miffed at the sneering at my forthcoming novel – whether she’s written it herself or not (and I expect the latter), they’ve signed it up and shouldn’t snigger about it.  It didn’t look enticing to me, but it is what it is and some people will enjoy it.

Little Brown next – Shirley Williams’ autobiography, Margaret Atwood and Jane Gardham into paperback; book on cheese by Alex James of Blur fame (seems to me that his name has become Alex-James-of-Blur); new David Sedaris will be a treat as will Sandy McCall Smith’s new Isabel Dalhousie in October.

Next comes Sam from Faber, presenting the whole of the Independent Alliance – we always look forward to her visits because the IA publishers are so in tune with our type of customer and Sam’s so aware of our market too.  And she often brings coffee which is always welcome.  Very much looking forward to the second Simon’s Cat book and the quirky and beautiful The Butterfly Isles by Patrick Barkham.  Also, book on the history of Ordnance Survey maps (my father-in-law’s Christmas present); new Herta Muller title and Lights Out in Wonderland by DBC Pierre should be interesting.

Day 2,

A few more booksellers today; coffee/tea – let’s just stick with ‘beverage’ still dreadful.

Bloomsbury on first and they’ve got some interesting books – new books from Sue Miller, Lisa See, Howard Jacobson.  Four new titles in the Bloomsbury Group series although the covers seem to be getting progressively worse in this list; new cookbook by Monty and Sarah Don looks lovely but will be so discounted elsewhere that I’ll probably just get one in for myself; another title in the River Cottage Handbooks series – Hedgerow – which will be great for the autumn.

Bloomsbury shouldn’t have pointed out that they were going to be promoting one of their kids’ books mainly through schools and libraries – doesn’t indicate that independent bookshops are going to see a lot of sales and isn’t terribly helpful to mention to a roomful of indies.

HarperCollins on next – Louise Rennison’s Withering Tights, her new series after Georgia Nicholson, looks brilliant and I can’t wait to read it; biographies of Roald Dahl, Edward Heath and Coco Chanel look good; The Blitz by Juliet Gardiner will be great. And a new Oliver Jeffers children’s book is always a treat.

Russell Brand’s follow up to his Booky Wook – This Time It’s Personal has a missing apostrophe on the cover so let’s hope that was a draft image… and the HC chap is dreadful – a last minute stand-in due to the volcanic ash problems but he just read the Powerpoint slides out to us in a dull monotone – might as well have just emailed the slides to us all.

Penguin’s got some interesting autumn titles – new Moomins books, new Dick and Felix Francis title – have sentimental memories of my gran enjoying those so will read it as soon as it comes out because of that; new le Carre,

The Hodder chaps are great – sitting down at the table to talk to us, noticing our reactions and asking us questions – they seemed really interested in the books and in us.  Which is nice.   Dawn of the Bunny Suicides will be huge at Christmas; biography of Debo Devonshire will be great but no doubt heavily discounted on-line so not a huge seller for us; Awkward Family Photos from the blog of the same name is a perfect Christmas humour book and there’s a new Jill Paton Walsh/Dorothy L Sayers book out which I’m looking forward to.

Orion next – Keith Richards autobiography; Marco Pierre White; Pink Floyd The Wall illustrated by Gerald Scarfe; new Maeve Binchy; new book from Bernard The Reader Schlink.  They’re also bringing out a special edition of Ballet Shoes in hard back – cloth bound etc but bafflingly they’re pricing it at £6.99, rather than the £8.99 I would have expected.  It just goes to show how mad pricing is – over-inflated for the cookery, thrillers etc which will be hugely discounted and some real gems are underpriced.  Still we’ll sell dozens of that Ballet Shoes in the run-up to Christmas are whatever price they put on it.

General points re success of presentations – you know, just in case any publishers read this (and yes, I can see your IP addresses and know who you are Penguin, HarperCollins and Waterstone’s…)

• Don’t tell indie booksellers about all your new books – just pick out the ones which will be of greatest interest to us.  I know Nigella/Jamie or whoever will sell shedloads but they probably won’t sell masses for us when Tesco are knocking them out for a fiver.
• Be interesting.  An over-heated conference room and a really dull presentation means that we start drifting off.  Or Tweeting about how grim this is and then it flashes up on the screen in the foyer because of the LBF10 hash-tag and then everyone knows how bored I was… Oh yes, that happened!
• Make sure the coffee’s decent.  Or at least recognisably coffee.
• See it as an opportunity to tell us about your new authors, or your authors who are more indie and less Amazon oriented.
• Don’t flash up a mock-up of your super-duper on-line marketing campaign with its prominent link to Amazon in the corner – it isn’t going to move that book to the top of my list.

Overall though – some really interesting books coming out during the rest of 2010 and lots of ideas for our Christmas catalogue and some authors to try to organise events with.

Read more

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.

The neighbourhood of Edinburgh where our bookshops are – Bruntsfield – is largely made up of independent businesses ranging from cheese shops to a hardware shop to boutiques to restaurants to delis to florists to bakeries and a sports equipment shop.  We have some chains of course – the pharmacy, the bank, the ubiquitous branch of Subway – but overall it’s a vibrant community where the quirky rubs shoulders with the practical and turnover of premises is comparatively low with vacant properties being snapped up.  It’s an area which attracts students, actors, writers and artists as well as the usual Edinburgh inhabitants such as lawyers and bankers and the Indiebound ethos should be a perfect fit.

In the next month or two, the Booksellers Association will start rolling out Indiebound among its independent bookseller members and most people I’ve spoken to have been quite enthusiastic.  It’s also something we’ve been advocating since last summer’s pathetic attempt to develop bookaholism as an industry-wide marketing concept (see how we suggested using the Eat, Sleep, Read slogan here).

However, the ABA’s campaign is uncompromising in it’s attitude that independent is good and chain is at best bland and at worst unethical and it will be interesting to see whether the BA can manage to maintain an ‘Indie is Better’ stance when they also include members with diametrically opposed views – WH Smith, Waterstone’s, Tesco etc.  And those members are powerful; BA membership subs are calculated according to turnover so Tesco and Waterstone’s will be paying an amount which gives a lot more clout than those of us at the lower end of the scale.

I really want IndieBound to work and I firmly believe that we’re seeing the beginning of a resurgence in the fortunes of the independent bookseller but whether indies can thrive as part of a trade body which is trying to represent everyone or whether we need an organisation that is solely concerned with the needs of independent booksellers is something that will be need to be considered as we see how successful IndieBound UK is.

Andrew speaks for all of us when he says that he thinks that independent bookshops are a growing force to be reckoned as booklovers become disillusioned with the limited range in supermarkets and the inceasingly mainstream offerings in chain bookshops.  As he says, the book is “old technology, more than than 500 years old, and it’s lasted so long because it works. It’s a very private experience. All the feedback I get from customers is, ‘I like the feel of paper, I like the smell of bookshops, I like the sound a hardback makes when you crack it open’.”

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 have to give this some thought before Monday, especially as I’m on the programme with Stuart Kelly, Literary Editor of Scotland on Sunday, but I do have one prediction.  It’s something that struck me a few weeks ago when I read about Waterstone’s falling profits.  If Waterstone’s continues to depress the overall performance of the HMV group, it doesn’t take much to realise that the parent company will reorganise it.  It may be hived off, bought out by venture capitalists asset strippers and implode as Borders has recently done.

Alternatively, given that the best performing areas of Waterstone’s are in non-book areas such as stationery and E-readers, and the worst performing are books due to constantly reduced margins as the chain tries to compete with Amazon, HMV might absorb some branches into their record shops (are they called record shops now that no-one buys records any more?).  It has already been mentioned on The Bookseller’s website by one commenter on a thread about Borders that in Newcastle the store has been bought and “it will be an HMV with a small Waterstone’s included in store” (thanks to Book Monkey for pointing that out).

Might this be the one of the first indicators that Waterstone’s presence on the High Street will be shrinking as Gerry Johnson’s bosses realise that a policy of cutting prices to the bone and still seeing falling sales isn’t maybe the way forward?  Retaining market share shouldn’t come at the cost of increasing losses.  Maybe the route to profitability is to reduce range still further, shrink shop size and concentrate on a narrow range of highly-discounted titles on sale in huge “media megastores” alongside the cds, dvds and games consoles that already fill HMV branches?

That would suit us very well…

* Now I’ll probably get people leaving semi-literate comments informing me that actually she is a literary talent of Nobel Prize-winning standard.  In capitals.  Just like they did when I wrote about how I thought Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series was a badly-written pile of poo which also had alarming opinions about what the perfect boyfriend is.  And it isn’t standing in your room watching you sleep – that’s a stalker, that is, and you need a restraining order.

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.