I may have blogged on this before, back in the recesses of history, but it’s one of those issues that pops its head up and bites us time after time. What am I whittering about? Book data, and its consequences for the book supply chain. So you publish a book, and you assign it a publication date. How on earth do you advise the retail world about its availability, and what can you do when something goes wrong?
Well, the first step in the book data and supply chain is Nielsen Book. Nielsen Book is part of the Nielsen Company. It is an independent company that claims to be the world’s biggest provider of book data-related services to more than 100 countries around the world – but because it also incorporates the UK ISBN agency it is often treated as if it has a semi-regulatory status. UK publishers are required to obtain an ISBN from Nielsen for every book they publish, and then to register that book on the Nielsen Book database. By doing so, the fact that your book exists is made known to any retail outlet, library, whatever, in the world. The record for an individual book also list the book’s distributor, and a publisher’s distributor can feed data through to Nielsen regularly on the book’s status and availability.
That’s a very fine thing, because it means that anyone around the world who has access to that database can find out how to order that book.
Perfect, right? Couldn’t be simpler. A one-stop shop.
Well, no. Where everything starts to get very murky is with some of the online retailers – let’s take Amazon as an example, simply because they’re the bane of our lives. Every author wants their book to be listed on Amazon (and every publisher wishes it wasn’t seen to be so necessary, because the discounts Amazon requires are normally phenomenally large!) Nielsen feeds through data that we give them on new book information, including cover photos, to Amazon and then (on a good day) our book will be listed as in existence on Amazon sites around the world. Again: easy, right? Add your new book details to just one database – the Nielsen database - and everything is set into motion and the entire supply chain falls neatly into place.
Er – no. Because even though Amazon knows (through the Nielsen database from which it obtains its book information) that it can source any of our books that their customers might order, through our distributor, Booksource - it won’t. Amazon doesn’t work like that. It’s a long story, but to cut it short, before it will buy/supply a publisher’s book it requires the publisher of that book to have set up an account with them. That sounds easy, too – but unfortunately it is completely unfeasible for a small independent like us, as their minimum discount is 60%, which, after paying print costs, shipping costs, author royalties and other fixed costs, would leave us completely in the red on every one of our books that was sold through Amazon. We just can’t afford it. And so, unless we can find another way of dealing with Amazon, our books will be listed on the site as in existence, but they’ll be listed as unavailable.
There is a way around this: Amazon will source books from (among others) a UK wholesaler of books called Gardners. We do have a relationship/account with Gardners: it operates by buying Two Ravens Press books in some bulk from our distributor, which it then sells on to independent bookstores – and online retailers like Amazon. It is, if you like, operating as a middleman (yes, another one. The book supply chain is full of them). So: our problem is solved. We can supply our books to Gardners (at a discount lower than Amazon would require if we dealt with them directly) and Gardners feeds information on our books to Amazon and lo and behold, when Gardners have our books in stock they are listed on Amazon as in stock. Very fine indeed.
Until something goes wrong. Which it did yesterday, with the latest of our new books, Alex Pheby’s Grace, whose publication date was Jan 14. Alex emailed me to say that although Amazon had been allowing pre-orders for Grace, as it usually does for novels before their publication date, it had now sent emails to a number of his contacts saying that the book was unobtainable.
Mass panic at TRP HQ. How could this possibly happen? There are large numbers of the book sitting at our distributor, Booksource, in Glasgow, ready to be sent out, and the Booksource system shows it is available and in stock. Panic again. Check Nielsen: yes, the database says the book is available and in stock. Check other online retail sites: some show it available and some don’t. Which ones don’t? The online retailers that source books through the wholesaler Gardners rather than direct from our distributors. Check Gardners… ah.
To cut a long story short, our contact person at Gardners had changed and we hadn’t been informed and the information I’d sent through on Grace and other forthcoming titles hadn’t been passed on to the appropriate buyer and so no-one had ordered them and so Amazon, looking on the Gardners system, hadn’t found it there and so they’d just shrugged their shoulders and decided the book wasn’t available.
Problem solved, right? Yes, but solving the problem will take a good few days, because by the time the order is placed by Gardners and the books are sent down to them by our distributor and Gardners put them into their system as ‘in stock’ and the information gets passed through to Amazon and Amazon (notoriously slow) manages to update its system … at least a week is going to have passed, and probably more. Which is a really irritating thing to happen to a new book.
So. A lengthy tale, but one that hopefully demonstrates just how convoluted and precariously balanced the supply chain in this business can be. And how difficult it can be sometimes for us to keep on top of things, and how much we rely on other people to tell us when something doesn’t appear to be working.
I’m hoping for a quieter day today :-)
Sharon
