Consuming Books

The Marketing and Consumption of Literature

Stephen Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134209408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The buying, selling, and writing of books is a colossal industry in which marketing looms large, yet there are very few books which deal with book marketing (how-to texts excepted) and fewer still on book consumption. This innovative text not only rectifies this, but also argues that far from being detached, the book business in fact epitomises today's Entertainment Economy (fast moving, hit driven, intense competition, rapid technological change, etc.).

Written by an impressive roster of renowned marketing authorities, many with experience of the book trade and all gifted writers in their own right, Consuming Books steps back from the practicalities of book marketing and takes a look at the industry from a broader consumer research perspective. Consisting of sixteen chapters, divided into four loose sections, this key text covers:

* a historical overview
* the often acrimonious marketing/literature interface
* the consumers of books (from book groups to bookcrossing)
* a consideration of the tensions that both literary types and marketers feel.

With something for everyone, Consuming Books not only complements the 'how-to' genre but provides the depth that previous studies of book consumption conspicuously lack.

1 Rattles from the swill bucket

Stephen Brown

Keep the aspidistra buying

In his semi-autobiographical novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell (1936) describes the miserable existence of an advertising executive, Gordon Comstock. Despite his natural flair for copywriting, Comstock is unhappy with his lot. Penning facile slogans on behalf of the New Albion Publicity Company – and concocting cretinous copy for the Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites account – is deeply unfulfilling for someone with literary ambitions. Selling, he believes, is unseemly, commerce is crass, advertising is a scam, little more than ‘the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket’ (p. 55). So Gordon quits New Albion, takes a part-time job in McKechnie’s bookshop and publishes a slim volume of poetry, which sells a grand total of 153 copies before it is remaindered. The remainders remain resolutely unsold.

Down on his uppers, and living hand to mouth, Comstock slowly loses the will to write. He makes no progress on his monumental poem, London Pleasures – on a good day he deletes five lines – and spends most of his time in the bookstore, where he keeps a weather eye out for passing trade, scowls at the puerile advertising posters across the street and ruminates on the behavioural quirks of his customers. He can spot timewasters a mile off; he’s a fair idea of what browsers are looking for; and he possesses the rare ability to turn wary prospects into willing purchasers. It thus seems that for all Gordon’s loathing of the stick-rattling racket, this ex-advertising executive is blessed with considerable marketing savvy. Comstock, however, refuses to recognise his calling. He pines for literary acclaim, but gets none. He detests the bookshop, though that’s where he’s happiest. He hates everything about copywriting and only returns to it reluctantly when his girlfriend falls pregnant and he has no realistic alternative. Yet selling out to selling is the smartest move he makes in an otherwise awful existence.

Clearly, there are worse things in life than rattling sticks inside swill buckets.

The swill bucket strikes back

Seventy years on from Aspidistra, one can’t help but wonder what Orwell would make of our literary-advertising-bookselling nexus. Today’s bookstores, for starters, are far removed from the squalid gestalt, uninviting atmospherics and condescending customer service of McKechnie’s. The Waterstone’s, Borders, Barnes & Nobles and Amazon.coms of this world are capacious, commodious, comprehensively stocked, competitively priced and unfailingly consumer-friendly (Douglass 2005). With their coffee bars, comfy sofas, calendars of bookish events and customer-oriented marketing strategies, they are ‘third places’ where bibliophiles foregather and time passes pleasantly (Olderburg 1989).

The twenty-first-century publishing industry, what’s more, is a site where culture and commerce converge, converse and, on occasion, convert base MSS into gold (de Bellaigue 2004). Although it isn’t the only such site – every cultural product wrestles with the lure of lucre – the book business epitomises today’s so-called Entertainment Economy, where every industry is a stage and all the brands are players (Wolf 1999). Indeed, the cultural industries are not only some of the pre-eminent econo-dynamos of our postmodern world (movies are America’s second biggest export, after aerospace) but they are some of the prime movers of urban/regional regeneration (Gateshead, Baltimore, Glasgow, Bilbao, et al.). The booktown phenomenon, where settlements on their uppers have been revitalised by boosterish bibliopreneurs, bears witness to this post-industrial propensity. In South Wales, for instance, the declining mining village of Blaenavon has been completely transformed thanks to the opening of 17 bookstores and the staging of a biennial literary festival (de Bruxelles 2004). Similar renaissances have been reported for Montolieu (France), Fjaerland (Norway), Parati (Brazil) and Kampung Batu (Malaysia), among others.

South Wales, of course, was a powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution and, in a world where coal mining, tree felling and steel rolling have been superseded by data mining, web logging and rolling news programming, it is entirely appropriate that Blaenavon is at the forefront of today’s Intellectual Revolution, our inverted post-Marxian world where the cultural superstructure supports the economic base (Leadbeater 1999). This inversion, nevertheless, has not been without cost. The book business, many critics aver, has become less and less about books and more and more about business (Robinson 2004; Sutherland 2004; Trewin 2004). Certainly, the industry has been transformed by several latter-day developments that have, in effect, brought books to book. These include increased competition, rapid consolidation, changing channels of distribution and the perils of celebritude.

Competition

With regard to competition, perhaps the most striking thing about the twenty-first-century book business is the staggering number of titles now available (Rebuck 2004). It is estimated that 120,000 new books per annum are published in the UK. In the US, it’s 175,000 or thereabouts. The worldwide total is somewhere in the region of 1 million, which works out at approximately 4,000 per day or one every 30 seconds.¹ So overwhelming is the flood of new books that it is increasingly difficult for any single title to stand out from the crowd. Worse still, Zaid (2003) facetiously argues, the textual deluge is doing nothing for us. Far from adding to the fount of human knowledge, this voluminous inundation is making us ever more ignorant:

If a person read a book a day, he would be neglecting to read 4000 others, published the same day. In other words, the books he didn’t read would pile up 4000 times faster than the books he did read, and his ignorance would grow four thousand times faster than his knowledge.

(p. 22)

Above and beyond the tsunami of new books, there’s the perfect storm of existing publications. The used book trade has been reinvented by the Internet. No more poking around in the uncatalogued bowels of insalubrious back-street outlets, perversely pleasurable though some people find this. Charity shops, too, have got their bookselling act together – Oxfam currently sells 15 million books per year in the UK, up from 12 million in 2002 – which means that traditional bookshops have to fight ever harder for their share of the nation’s literary outlay (Ahmed 2003). As if that weren’t enough, competition-wise, recent years have seen the rise of ‘bookcrossing’, where people leave spare copies of their favourite reads in public places in the hope that they’ll be picked up, read by and change the life of, anonymous passers-by (Anon. 2004).

In addition to the increased competition from used-book stores, charity shops and free gift givers, there’s the ever-burgeoning threat of non-literary alternatives. One of the publishing industry’s foremost concerns nowadays is that books are losing out to movies, DVDs, computer games, music downloads, lifestyle magazines, home cinema systems, text messaging, websurfing, recreational shopping and the rest of the Entertainment Economy’s cornucopian offerings (Michel 2005). This is especially so with the younger generation, who look to Playstation rather than Plath or Proust, and iTunes instead of Ishiguro or Isherwood. A 2002 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) found that fewer than half of all American adolescents (46 per cent) had read a work of literature in the previous 12 months. Ten years earlier, the bookish proportion was 54 per cent, and in 1982 it was 59 per cent. The trend, NEA concludes, is nothing less than a ‘national crisis’, one that is likely to be replicated in the rest of the Western world (Italie 2004).²

Consolidation

On top of the rise of inter- and intra-type competition, the book business is consolidating like there’s no tomorrow. Just as the car industry, chemical industry and computer industry evolved in an increasingly oligopolistic direction, so too the once populous publishing sector is dominated by a small number of extremely large organisations, many of which are subsidiaries of even larger multimedia empires (de Bellaigue 2004; Epstein 2002; Schiffrin 2002). In August 2004, for instance, the legendary British publishing house Hodder Headline was acquired by Hachette Livre, a division of the French conglomerate Lagardère (Irvine 2004). This acquisition makes Hachette the second biggest publisher in the UK, after Random House, with 13 per cent of the market. Random House, with 17 per cent, is a subsidiary of Bertelsmann, the German media group. Penguin, with 10 per cent, Harper-Collins, with 9.5 per cent, and Pan Macmillan, with 4.5 per cent, are subsidiaries of Pearson, News Corporation and Holtzbrinck, respectively. Of the top eight UK publishing houses, only Bloomsbury (2 per cent) remains independent, though this is largely attributable to the gazillion-selling Harry Potter franchise (Robinson 2004).

The rationale for this trans-national consolidation process is transparent enough.³ On the one hand, publishing is a fairly low-growth industry – approximately 1–3 per cent per annum, roughly in line with inflation – and hence the only way to keep profit margins healthy is through acquisition, rationalisation and the search for scale economies (e.g. through the centralisation of necessary functions, such as accounting and production, and the bulk buying of consumables, such as paper and packaging). On the other hand, the resources that parent companies can bring to bear on key titles are stupendous, in theory at least. All manner of media synergies, between television channels, radio stations, syndicated newspapers, glossy magazines, ISP portals and suchlike can be pressed into promotional service, which helps build the all-important buzz that transports titles to the top of the bestseller lists, guarantees in-store promotional support and gets the nation’s bibliomanes in a must-read lather (Lieberman and Esgate 2002).

Consolidation, clearly, bestows benefits on certain brand name authors, but it also incurs costs. The old-school, somewhat fusty, nothing-if-not-gentlemanly ethos of the book trade, where ‘challenging’ authors were supported, often for decades, until such times as the reading public caught up with them, has been sacrificed on the philistine altar of sales figures. Every title these days is expected to turn a profit. Failure to do so spells the end for the author and, as often as not, his or her editor. The upshot is that fewer risks are taken, dumbing down is rampant, the market is flooded with sure-fire bestsellers, such as celebrity cookbooks and miraculous dietary regimens, established authors are supported at the expense of quirky new-comers, and literary culture generally suffers as a consequence (Ugresic 2003).

The situation, in truth, is not as bad as the naysayers suggest. As the ‘polarisation principle’ posits, developments at one pole of the corporate/ cultural spectrum are often counterbalanced by antithetical innovations at the other (Brown 1987). Large grocery supermarkets create conditions conducive for small convenience stores; high-price luxury brands call forth cut-price knock-offs; the canonisation of once shocking artistic movements gives rise to new rounds of avant-garde affront. The same is true of publishing, where recent years have not only witnessed widespread consolidation but also the emergence of tiny publishing houses such as Profile, Canongate, Greywolf, The New Press, McSweeney’s and many more. True, these imprints lack the clout of the multinationals and many are absorbed by the majors once they reach a certain size (Fourth Estate is a famous example), but the key point is that consolidation is not necessarily the Avian Flu of the book business.

Channels of distribution

Although the polarisation principle primarily pertains to horizontal competition – large organisations beget small – it is no less relevant in the vertical situation. That is to say, the rise of publishing conglomerates such as Pearson and Hachette Livre is partly a reaction to, and partly the cause of, increasingly concentrated channels of distribution. The independent bookshop, that much-loved local institution, is declining rapidly, both in terms of overall numbers and market share (Gaisford 2005). Conversely, the chain bookstores – Borders, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Ottakars, W.H. Smith, Books Etc., etc. – are burgeoning like nobody’s business. In Britain, Waterstone’s has 200 outlets, with eight more planned, Ottakars added 12 new stores in 2004 alone and Borders has announced massive UK expansion plans.

To be sure, this decline of the independent and rise of the chains is not a recent phenomenon. Shop numbers generally have been falling for decades (Dawson and Kirby 1979). However, the abolition of the Net Book Agreement in 1995 accelerated the process, since it allowed chain stores to undercut the prices of independents and seize market share. The depth of stock, attractive store atmospherics, perennial promotional activities, and programmes of high-profile events that chains typically offer, also add considerably to their consumer lustre. Many literati, of course, deeply regret the decline of the small store and deplore the purported impersonality, efficiency and money-making mindset of the multiples. Books, they say, are ‘different’ and should be treated as something akin to a social service-cum-sacrosanct repository of high culture. Such nostalgic yearnings – apotheosised in the saccharine Hollywood movie You’ve Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan – conveniently overlook the fact that almost every aspect of the books business has improved immeasurably in the past half-century. As McCrum (2004a, p. 18) contends:

The last 25 years have seen a revolution in book trade practices. If they are honest, many readers will be able to remember an age when books were badly printed, sloppily edited, horrible to look at and impossible to find.

In that not so distant time, bookshops were small, dark and over-heated, imbued with the special aroma of stewing food. Authors were isolated, impoverished souls, trapped behind typewriters. Periodically, like children at half-term, they would be lunched, extravagantly, by publishing grandees who would spend in three-star restaurants as much on a three-course lunch as they would subsequently offer as an advance against royalties.

Pace Mark Twain, moreover, rumours of the independent bookshop’s imminent death are grossly exaggerated. They may not be able to compete with the chains on price or product range, but diverse differentiation strategies are available to them – specialising in certain sectors, genres or market segments (travel, sci-fi, children’s, rarities, remainders, university textbooks, etc.), the provision of quality customer services (gift provision, expert book search facilities, organising local reading groups et al.), taking the store to time-poor customers (as exemplified by The Book People, which sells a wide range of titles in workplaces and to those who wouldn’t normally darken the doors of traditional bookshops), or indeed developing into ‘destination’ retail outlets (such as Foyles in London, Hodges Figgis in Dublin and City Lights in San Francisco). Doing a Borders and becoming a chain is yet another possibility – Borders began as a single-unit campus bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan – though this is much easier said than done.

The difficulties facing ambitious independents are well known – lack of capital, buying power, management expertise and so on – but they are compounded by two additional channel developments. First, the major grocery retailers, such as Tesco and Asda in the UK and Wal-Mart and Costco in the US, are diversifying into books big time. Granted, their interest is currently confined to blockbusting bestsellers, as well as genres that complement the companies’ core offer (cookery, gardening, health and beauty, etc.). However, their buying power is such that they can circumvent wholesalers, negotiate directly with publishers and offer prices that independents simply can’t match. So rock-bottom are their prices that many independents bypass book wholesalers and stock up on key titles at friendly neighbourhood grocery superstores. As there is nothing to stop grocery retailers expanding their ranges, what’s more, the pressure on wholesalers and independents can only increase (Green 2003).

A second, and even more significant development, is the advent of on-line bookselling, particularly the prodigious Amazon.com. Amazon, admittedly, is something of a money pit. Its profitability is moot, to put it mildly, many contend that its business model is fatally flawed, and its latter-day popularity is a triumph of cyber hope over e-expectation (Epstein 2002). Yet, most would agree that Amazon has revolutionised the retailing of books. The range, the prices, the personalisation software, the (accursed) one-click function, the no-questions returns policy, the used books option, the Bezos factor, the arrival of the package, like a gift from the gods, all contribute to the unique experience that Amazon offers, the fierce customer loyalty it engenders and its steadily rising market share. Even the most customer-oriented independents are hard pressed to compete with the battler from Seattle, albeit the immediacy, tactile pleasure and sheer serendipity of instore book purchasing retains its attraction for many besotted bibliophiles (Basbanes 1999; Baxter 2002; Fadiman 1998; Gurria-Quintana 2004).

Celebrity

The bookshop, in short, will never die completely, even if extant channels are comprehensively reconfigured. The book trade has reinvented itself on numerous previous occasions and it appears to be in the throes of yet another makeover. Appropriately, then, perhaps the most striking development in the contemporary book business is its celebration of celebrity. It has become a fully fledged branch of the Entertainment Economy and, if not quite the new rock ‘n’ roll, let alone this season’s black, it is a lot cooler than it used to be (Rosser 2004). Book festivals, book signings, book tours and all the trappings of postmodern celebritisation are part and parcel of the bookselling circus. Photogenic authors are glam...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface: Beanz Meanz bookz
• 1 Rattles from the swill bucket
• 2 Selling God’s book
• 3 The extraordinary tale of an eight point eight million dollar book
• 4 The pleasures of the used text: Revealing traces of consumption
• 5 Culture club: Marketing and consuming The Da Vinci Code
• 6 Martin Amis on marketing
• 7 Paperback mother …
• 8 On the commercial exaltation of artistic mediocrity: Books, bread, postmodern statistics, surprising success stories, and the doomed magnificence of way too many big words
• 9 Book-reading groups: A ‘male outsider’ perspective
• 10 You can’t tell a book by its cover: Bookworms, bookcases and bookcrossing
• 11 Consuming literature
• 12 Riddikulus!: Consumer reflections on the Harry Potter phenomenon
• 13 Telling tales of Virago Press
• 14 No experience necessary (or, how I learned to stop worrying and love marketing)
• 15 I write marketing textbooks but I’m really a swill guy
• 16 A step-by-step guide to Bridget Jones’s Diary, Fight Club and the ‘how to’ industry
• 17 Bonus chapter: Dream of fair to middling marketing