In The Bookseller on Friday there was a very excited article about a piece of research that they have just commissioned in an effort to identify the main drivers for book sales. Bear in mind that it was a small sample – 1000 people, across the UK – and I’m not sure how these people were identified for the study. Anyway: interesting results. Apparently 26% of the population make their buying decisions about books based predominantly on retail displays. The second most influential factor was newspaper and magazine reviews (14%) followed by TV and radio mentions for a book (13%). Recommendations from friends and family were next at 12%, 9% gave internet recommendations as their main reason for buying a book, and 2% relied on the advice of shop assistants or librarians. A previous study in 2005 had identified ‘word of mouth’ (recommendations by family and friends) as the main driver for book sales; the researchers suggested that there was a clear shift towards the increasing influence of big in-store displays and promotions.
Maybe it’s just me, but I do find it a bit depressing to have it confirmed that a quarter of all decisions about which books to buy are made on the basis of people just browsing the books with the biggest displays. We know that’s how the market works, otherwise big publishers wouldn’t pay a small fortune for window and other displays in major book retailers. But I suppose there’s a part of me that wishes more people would make their book-buying decisions not based on who can shout the loudest but on a bit more research into what’s out there and what might be more interesting to read. Like everything else, people will undoubtedly say that they ‘don’t have time’ for that – but there’s such a lot of good information out there now about books, whether it be from readers’ groups or internet blogs or reviews … and customer reliance on big displays and promotions to make their book selections is one of the things that makes the UK such a very conservative book market, and that works against books that are ‘different.’
It’s interesting to sit and speculate about what’ll happen to the book market over time if this continues – whether at some point it’ll become so driven by promotions and big marketing and publicity spending and greater and greater discounts to the big retailers that even the bigger publishers won’t be able to sustain the publication of more than a handful of key highly commercial titles a year. Of course what I’d like to see is a revolution – more and more publishers refusing to accept the huge discounts that big stores demand and the unlimited returns that can put an entire print run into the red … and so refusing to accept this crazy state of affairs where the publishers are the only ones who ever seem to take a significant financial risk at every stage of the business … or maybe a return to the net book agreement :-) – but then if we didn’t have a decidedly revolutionary (or bloody-minded, depending on your perspective) attitude to life we wouldn’t be sitting here still finding some joy in what we do at Two Ravens Press in spite of all the adversities.
And then, there are always the goslings.
Sharon
