DJ Taylor: Dan Brown is going to be the ruin of us all
It defies business logic that the book should be sold at half price
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Over the next few days an extraordinary farce will start to be enacted in bookshops and supermarkets the length and breadth of the UK. I refer, of course, to the long-awaited publication of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, officially released tomorrow, but already available (apparently) in fragmented form on the net. The element of farce attaches itself not to the contents of the novel but the way in which it is being brought to the punter.
You are a Dan Brown fan, let us say, anxious to get your hands on a copy first thing tomorrow morning. How much can you expect to pay? The price on the cover says £18.99, but Waterstone's has been hawking pre-order copies at £9.49 for the past six months. A click or two on the computer screen reveals that Amazon and WH Smiths are touting exactly the same knock-down. And here anyone with the least head for business will start to wonder how Waterstone's, Amazon and Smith's are going to make a profit out of this autumn's number one bestseller. Even with a 60 per cent discount from the publisher, overheads and promotional costs will swallow up the margin.
The answer, mysteriously enough, is that hardly anyone in the British book trade, apart from Dan Brown, his agent and his publisher, will make any money out of The Lost Symbol. The big chains are using it as a loss-leader to coax in trade. Many independent booksellers will find themselves in the absurd position of buying their copies not from the wholesaler with whom they usually deal but the Asda down the road.
At a rough calculation, several million pounds that could have been used to irrigate an industry struggling to emerge from recession is simply being thrown away in defiance of fiscal logic. Here, after all, is a product that hundreds and thousands of people want to buy. Why not make them pay a proper price for it?
By chance, the fanfare over The Lost Symbol's arrival in last Friday's Bookseller coincided with two other announcements. One was the demise of the fine old independent publishing firm of Marion Boyars. The other was the news that authors' advances are being squeezed. Up to a point, that is. Should you happen to be in the Dan Brown category you can expect to receive even more money up-front; the rest of us, though, can expect rather more frugality from our sponsors.
All this renders the book's publication horribly symbolic. For all the bright-eyed talk about 'diversity' in the nation's bookshops, the over-riding tendency in publishing is for more discounted copies to be sold of fewer, similar books. Some might argue that putting Dan Brown on sale at half-price is a thoroughly democratic way of making literature more accessible to a mass public. In the end, though, price-cutting simply devalues the allure of what remains.
After all, reasons the punter ignorant of book-trade economics, if Dan Brown's 600 pages sell at £9.49, why can't all novels be just as cheap? A return to retail price maintenance, in which books have to be sold for the prices stamped on their jacket, can't come soon enough.
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Comments
If the large retailers, who are pretty adept at making decent profits, have calculated that using one book as a loss-leader will boost their sales of other products to give greater overall turnover, how is that throwing away millions of pounds? You seem to be criticising the bookshops for deliberately not making the maximum money on one product, but at the same time conceding that they will be making more cash out of the punter overall than if they hadn't.
We're all doomed!
DJ Taylor needs to realise if you write a book people want to read and pay for then your book will be sucessful and everyone will make money. If you dont then why should you make any money?
If not the Publishers whose duty it is to protect the booktrade, then who?
Who cares what they cost ?
I thank you
Firozali A Mulla
1) All novels, except those by celebrity writers and celebrity-anythings, should be launched in public toilets and then ceremonially torn-up flushed down the drain. This will demonstrate the obvious fact that toilets are more important than books.
2) Like the farmers of Afghanistan, all writers, with immediate effect, should redeploy theri skills into the respectable and lucrative trade of dope-dealing. Opiates are far more useful than books.
3) A think-tank, reporting to Parliament, should be set up to investigate and consult on the general uselessness of books.
4) Any book which sells less than 50,000 copies in the first week of publication should be ritually pulped and the author, forced to undertake community service for the next seven years.
5) Reading should be subjected to normal Health and Safety Risk Assessment procedures.
6) Anyone found writing anything less than an instantly acclaimed NUmber One worldwide bestseller should be deported to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those with Number Two bestsellers should be sent to the Possilpark, Glasgow.
1) All novels, except those by celebrity writers and celebrity-anythings, should be launched in public toilets and then ceremonially torn-up flushed down the drain. This will demonstrate the obvious fact that toilets are more important than books.
2) Like the farmers of Afghanistan, all writers, with immediate effect, should redeploy theri skills into the respectable and lucrative trade of dope-dealing. Opiates are far more useful than books.
3) A think-tank, reporting to Parliament, should be set up to investigate and consult on the general uselessness of books.
4) Any book which sells less than 50,000 copies in the first week of publication should be ritually pulped and the author, forced to undertake community service for the next seven years.
5) Reading should be subjected to normal Health and Safety Risk Assessment procedures.
6) Anyone found writing anything less than an instantly acclaimed NUmber One worldwide bestseller should be deported to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those with Number Two bestsellers should be sent to the Possilpark, Glasgow.