An article in the Wall Street Journal last week reported on the slow and continuing death of Barnes & Noble, the last of the megabookstores.
It reminds me of an observation from a friend (and
soon-to-be-laid-off executive in the publishing industry). I paraphrase: “B&N
and Borders came in and drove some many independent book stores out of business.
Now the big guys are getting squeezed out by e-books and Amazon. The result—no bookstores.”
My favorite part of the WSJ article is the second and third paragraph:
Some publishing executives say they have noticed signs that the retailer is reducing the range of titles it stocks, as it gives more floor space to toys, games and other products that generate high profit margins.
While that strategy is boosting the company's bottom line, publishers worry it may also drive book lovers to Amazon.com Inc…. which says its physical book sales are still growing.
I could have told them this was happening a year-and-a-half ago when B&N asked our critique group to move out of their store because we took up valuable retail space (we were shoehorned into a corner between a row of bookcases an a wall display).
Other factoids and info from the article:
- B&N is cherry picking the top selling titles, and buying fewer of those titles. My observation: This can only be bad news for new authors struggling to be published.
- One of the many downsides to this cherry picking is that consumers quickly realize B&N is no longer the place to shop, which is reflected in the decreased traffic in their stores.
- In 2011, B&N had an 18% market share of the bookselling business. This year that slice of the pie has narrowed to 16%.
The woes of the retailer are compounded as it concedes defeat on the e-reader war as reported in an online WSJ article:
- Losses for that part of the market doubled in the quarter ending this past April.
- B&N will cease production of its color versions of the Nook (its own e-reader) and will seek a third-party manufacturer to fill the need.
- In a bow to e-reader competitor Kindle, B&N added Google’s Android App store to the Nook, which now means you can download Kindle to your Nook. When I purchased my Nook Color you couldn’t do this. I had to get one of my sons to hack into it and install Android. When I did this, my purchase of Nook books went from not-a-lot to virtually nothing.
One of the by products of this implosion of megabookstores is the rebirth of the independents, but the question remains whether that sector can gain a toehold against Amazon and the e-book market (which is the same as saying Amazon and Amazon).
What is the bottom line for writers as Barnes & Noble approaches death?
- On the downside, there are fewer places to sell our books.
- On the upside, consumers will continue to rely on the online market, which is easier to infiltrate for the author who has some online savvy.
- An increased important of the independent bookstores, where authors have a greater opportunity with regional sales, speaking engagements and other promotions.
So excuse me. I need to find another article about online marketing for authors.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Photo by By BrokenSphere (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Comments