Brace yourselves – here comes another blog about the difficulties of publishing literary fiction! Not so much a moan, though, as an attempt to explain. Almost always, our authors are delighted to see Two Ravens Press books in bookstores (especially their own books!). New authors always ask about our ‘distribution’ and which stores we work with – do we get books into Waterstones, for example. They see that as a fine thing. There is a sense that, if a book is in a bookstore, then it’s as good as sold. That it must be doing well. That the publisher must be doing well. Good things all round. And it’s a perfectly reasonable attitude to hold. The trouble is, we are increasingly finding that getting our books into bookstores in a big way is almost always bad news.
Why? Because it’s no good just getting them into the bookstore – you need to get people to buy them. Otherwise the bookstore will just send them back – at an enormous expense. Take Waterstone’s. I like Waterstone’s. They will take literary fiction. They’re interested in new writing. There are very few independent bookshops we’ve found who are as willing to take a chance on literary and innovative fiction as Waterstone’s are. (Times are tough for them too – it’s not a criticism!) But there’s a price to pay. They’ll order in your books if they like the look of them, but if they haven’t sold, or aren’t selling quickly enough, then 3 months later they’ll send them back. Makes sense: there are hundreds of new books – thousands of new books – being published every month, and only so much shelf space. Can’t blame the bookstores – but look at the impact it has on a publisher. We’ve talked about returns before, but for those of you that don’t know, a book returned costs us about 1/3 of what the bookseller would pay us for the book if they sold it. On the average £9.99 book, we’re lucky to make a ‘profit’ of £1.50 when it’s sold at average bookstore discounts (not much, when we somehow have to pay for our own time and there are also the company’s overheads to take out of it – which means that £1.50 isn’t pure profit at all). A return from Waterstone’s can cost us more than £1.50 (distributor’s fees for sending out and taking back in, total around 24% of invoice price i.e. around 15% of retail price. Plus postage to send out in the first place. We don’t pay return postage back from the store, thank heavens!) So even if we sell that book again, the profit is already gone.
So, what are the chances that the average work of literary fiction – especially from a new author – is going to sell out in 3 months? Well, judging by our experiences, negligible, without a LOT of marketing spend behind the book (and trust us, no marketing spend is possible on the kind of profits a small press will make from literary fiction). Even good book reviews in the national press don’t have the big impact on sales that you might expect. Which raises the whole question of whether the British book-buying public actually wants literary fiction that is challenging and different at all – but that’s for another day!
The truth is that, with the exception of a small handful of bookstores that really make an effort and support us as a independent press and put our books out on a table rather than just spine-out on the shelves … we make either no profit at all, or an active loss, on any bookstore purchase that isn’t a direct response to a customer order (in which case of course it is already sold). The truth is that we will make profit in future predominantly on web sales (and, especially in the case of poetry where so many books are sold at readings, through author events). And we can also feel more secure about sales to bookstores or online retailers via wholesalers like Gardners and Bertrams, who have pretty stringent returns policies that they in turn impose on bookstores, and who generally order our books in sensible quantities (though at the price of pretty hefty discounts!)
So what to do? What kind of business model does that impose upon a small publisher determined to make a go of things and yet very much needing to make something resembling a profit one of these days?! Well, obviously it would be foolish to say we’re never going to darken the doors of bookstores again! – we do need to have our books out there – albeit in sensible quantities. But what we are now trying to do is ensure that the bookstores we market to are the ones that have a genuine customer base for new literary fiction. That we focus on bookstores in the area where our authors live – which means we need very active authors who will promote their books locally. That we spend increasing time and effort trying to attract visitors to our website and our blog, on the assumption that what we will then have is an audience who are already predisposed to the kind of work that we publish.
I’m always interested by comments from both readers and writers on this kind of issue – the publishing business is an incredibly complex one, and so much of it can seem counter-intuitive. After less than two years in the business, there are days when we still shake our heads in utter perplexity!
Sharon
