Every year we go to a friend’s for a Christmas drinks thing – you know the score – the same bunch of people, the same canapés, the same wine and the same easy chat. All good stuff.
Conversation hovers around those safety zones of film (did you see?, wasn’t X great?, have you joined lovefilm? etc), music (do you remember that brilliant album by x?, Radiohead were great at Glastonbury – shame we had to watch it on skyplus etc) and books. Yes books.
Remarkably there are still some people out there who value books and who enjoy the fact they don’t have screens, they don’t require batteries and they can (just about) survive an accidental dip in the bath. All good. I enjoy chatting about all of this but something stopped me cold in my tracks last year. I was talking to an intelligent, middle-class woman who works in a highly paid job in advertising and she said ‘I am surprised that Jamie Oliver book isn’t selling very well.’
‘Really?’ I said, as I scratched my head and was about to point out that it was currently breaking all records and sitting at Number One in the charts.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘All the bookshops are having to cut the price to 50% off.’
Picking myself up off the floor it dawned on me that all this sophisticated discounting we are all told we have to embrace and the whole culture of price promotion sometimes had a negative effect on consumer confidence in a book. Not suprising really – if I went to Paul Smith on the first day of the new season and looked at some rather wonderful suits only to see that they were in a Buy 1 Get 1 free promotion I might think I was being palmed off with last season’s leftovers or, worse still, damaged stock. That would never do.
In no other areas of commerce would a retailer take their must-have prime products and cut them to bargain basement prices.
A weird kind of madness has washed over the book trade and maybe, just maybe, we should look back to those days of the Net Book Agreement (where book prices were fixed. By law.) and wonder whether we took a wrong term somewhere along the journey. Of course we would not have a mass-market as we do now but we would have a thriving independent sector, we would have publishers able to support an author through the slow upward curve to profitability and we might NOT have a world where three or four key buyers made the decision as to what we were all going to read.
Gosh I do sound like a Grumpy Old Agent but there is a lot to be grumpy about. In my next posting I will be very positive indeed (promise). Must dash now – I gather Hatchards have some full-price Dan Browns in stock and those non-discounted copies are rarer than hen’s teeth. I must have some for my collection…..
*Grumpy Old Agent is Simon Trewin, CEO of Simon Trewin Creative: Literary and Media Rights Agency. He tweets as @TrewinAgency and is currently open to submissions.
Comments