Tuesday, July 17, 2007

The Price of Retail

Watch your jaw on the desktop when you read these figures regarding Waterstone's charges to publishers for 'maximizing their books' potential', as reported by The Times.

Emma Barnes of Snow Books has commented before on this blog that in fact Waterstone's operate a sliding scale of charges in order to accommodate small publishers, but the books of small publishers are of course unlikely thus to get the kind of 'maximization' being referred to here, and Anthony Cheetham of Quercus Books is now quoted as saying:
There is a genuine level of exasperation and anxiety in the publishing industry that the booksellers have gone too far down this road. It’s the reader who loses because it’s throttling the distribution of a wider range of high-quality books and [perpetuating] the system whereby you plaster the entire country with copies of the same few books.
Thanks to Debi for the link.

1 comment:

The Poet Laura-eate said...

A frightening article for any author! As if there weren't enough middlemen cutting slices out of each poor author's book and ensuring few will ever scratch a living as full-time authors! How many innocents remain who still imagine published authors are wealthy, I wonder?

The only positive I can see in this is at least it might offer an opportunity for independent bookshops to grab the USP (unique selling point) of advertising that they 'stock the books that no one else will!', and makes a nonsense of the benefits of their large rival bookshop chains if all their stock is mostly the same!

Thanks for raising the profile of this hidden author abuse Elizabeth. Great blog, by the way. Informative and interesting.