SYP Conference 2010

Posted on November 30, 2010 in Uncategorized

Julia Kingsford, Head of Marketing at Foyles Bookshop now has her dream job, but the transition wasn’t a smooth one, with bumps along the road to the final destination. Having always known she wanted to work in publishing, she began her career as a Marketing Assistant but, dissatisfied with the role and struggling with low income, left after a number of months.

Her career saw her working for prestigious arts and media companies such as the Barbican and the BBC, but she struggled to find a role that entirely suited her and realised that however much she’d disliked her first role in publishing, nothing had dampened her passion for books and reading, eventually making the decision to return to the book industry.

Her quest to return back to books took her to the world of bookselling in 2005, as Promotions Executive at Foyles, managing the events programme and working on marketing projects. Following an internal restructure she was promoted to Head of Marketing at the age of twenty-eight, opening the door to a range of opportunities, experience and responsibility at a young age.

Selling the role of a bookseller, Kingsford poses a work experience question to the audience, revealing that very few people consider high street or independent booksellers as a route into the industry, preferring unpaid internships or work experience to paid retail work. Such a route can provide a significant amount of information on the trade, at the same time as being surrounded by one of the main arenas of bookselling and customer feedback. Kingsford observes that ‘retail can be perceived as dirty work,’ but these jobs are important to how the customer eventually buys the books that publishers are producing, without which, the system would fail.

Kingsford paints a clear picture of the supply chain, with traditional bookshops, high street chains, independents, mixed multiples such as WH Smith, supermarkets and the internet. The difference between these is the price and the range. With approximately 1.2 million titles in print, Waterstones say they stock approximately three hundred thousand titles across all stores, compared to varying numbers in supermarkets – with individual stores possibly stocking up to one hundred thousand titles. Foyles Charing Cross Road branch hold two hundred thousand alone – all under one roof!

But the internet has the advantage of range. Without the issue of a physical stockholding, all of the approximately 1.2 million in print titles are available to browse on websites. On the price point, supermarkets and bargain booksellers sell their books cheapest, favouring volume and turnover over value and profit, albeit with a small range. Amazon has the consumer advantage of offering wide range and heavy discounts. Kingsford conjectures that heavy discounting is often funded by profits elsewhere in the business and, in Amazon’s case, particularly from the commission made on marketplace sales.

So why are booksellers important? Ultimately, they are the gateway to reaching the end consumer and the best way of understanding the market. ‘If you don’t keep books front and centre for people, they will buy something else or nothing at all’, says Kingsford. She provides an example of how to approach this. When attending a dinner party, we get caught up in the traditional gifts of flowers or wine. Why not take along a book? The price will be the same, if not cheaper, and will ultimately bring books into the mind of the host and the guest, potentially boosting sales in the future. It seems that non-traditional approaches are needed to save the traditional bookshop.

What can publishers do for booksellers? They can produce good books that consumers want to buy, along with providing balanced margin and marketing contribution. If bookshops decline the entire trade loses out. The demise of Borders at the end of 2009 saw many publishers’ sales move to other retailers, but an estimated 25% of their sales simply vanished from the market.

So what does the future hold for publishing and bookselling? As we head towards an ever increasing digital arena, one might think this a safe bet for the progression of the industry. When making comparisons to the music industry, products have changed significantly in a short time span of approximately thirty years. Book production has been a slower process of hundreds of years, starting out with cavemen drawing pictures on walls. An interesting assessment which clearly represents the scale of progression, indicating that eBooks will not dominate overnight.

It is true to say that bookselling and the trade are making a significant shift but buying online ultimately does not provide the same customer experience that a proportion of the market are accustomed to. Certain books shape the trade and publishers invest vast sums of money on promoting titles front of store. eBooks have the potential to sell alongside the print edition, boosting sales, rather than shifting them.

*Many thanks to Julia Kingsford for her assistance with the information in this article*