Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

It’s a sad fact of life, but publishing is a business. Not only that, it’s a cutthroat business. So is bookselling.

With profit margins shrinking and the sudden surge in e-book sales, the entire industry is in an uproar, and nowhere more so than in good, old brick-and-mortar bookshops. Frankly, aside from a recent visit to the Mecca of Books (a thoroughly unsatisfactory visit, too, I might add), I can’t remember the last time I was in an actual bookstore.

Well, it just became a shooting war.

Stephanie Burgis, author of the beloved Kat books for young readers, recently posted about major developments between Simon & Schuster and Barnes & Noble (lots of ampersands there…sorry). She refers us to articles posted in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (both of which are worth a read), but here’s the bottom line:

Barnes & Noble has reduced [Simon & Schuster] book orders greatly, to almost nothing in the case of some lesser-known writers.

This, in my opinion, is the death-knell for B&N. If they don’t back off of this stance, I give them five years, at most.

Booksellers get lots of perks from publishers. They order books at a discount (naturally). Publishers pay to have their books displayed prominently, essentially renting bookseller marketing space. They allow booksellers to return any books they can’t sell. There are variations on these, and other items, too, but those are the Big Three, and they are critical elements of negotiations between publisher and the bookstore chains.

In this case, B&N wants deeper discounts, more money for marketing, and more control over e-book pricing. S&S said “Sorry, no,” so B&N retaliated by drastically cutting their orders of S&S titles, down to zero in many cases. New and lesser known S&S authors who have checked B&N inventories for upcoming titles have found that their presence in B&N stores has dropped by 50% or more.

First of all, who does this hurt? Well, it hurts S&S, of course, which is B&N’s intention, but more than that–much more than that–it hurts the authors. It’s already difficult for new and lesser-known authors to keep a career going because of what’s known in the business as “ordering to the net.” In this practice, a bookstore would order, say, 10 copies of a new author’s book. If they sell 8 of them, for the next title from that author they’d order 8 copies (and likely sell 6). You can see how this quickly becomes a death spiral. Now, for the big chains, add in the fact that an author has to sell “x” number of copies nationwide before they’d get reordered at all on the next title. With small-to-start and ever-decreasing numbers ordered, it’s easy to see how a new author’s work can be stillborn when it hits the shelves.

Now, though, B&N isn’t ordering any copies, which can kill a writer’s career before a debut. Authors must negotiate a new contract for each book (or set of books in a series), and your past sales numbers are crucial to the kind of advance you get, or whether you’re offered a contract at all. Case in point, the final book of my Fallen Cloud Saga. The FCSaga was always outlined as a five-book series, but Penguin/Putnam dropped the series after Book IV due to poor sales figures. A bitter experience, to be sure, but from a business perspective, understandable. With this B&N bombshell, how many writers will find their careers trashed, their trilogies truncated?

But in the end, this hurts B&N also. B&N won’t have titles of the S&S titles people want (without a special order), and people (like me) who used to favor B&N simply because it was brick-and-mortar, will give up and go to Amazon. With the increase of POD-published books, B&N’s insistence on returnable stock is already starting to eat into its title inventory. Now, with publishing mergers creating fewer and fewer but larger and larger Publishing MegaCorps, B&N is cutting ties with one of the Big 6 publishers.

Good luck with that.

k