The Bookseller.com

1st December 2008

Scott Pack is publisher at The Friday Project, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Failure to comply

21.02.08

First things first. The editors would have loved for me to write a column about the exciting sale of The Friday Project, but chaps in suits with calculators are still doing their thing, so I can't. Sorry. Instead, I wanted to discuss a pressing issue for many of us—the C-word. By which I mean, of course, "compliance".

Publishers all know how the model works. A retailer selects your book for promotion, and you hand over extra discount and a marketing fee, safe in the knowledge that you have secured prime retail space for your book and that the sales are going to flood in as a result.

Of course, the assumption is that you will actually get the space in shops you have paid for, but things don't always go according to plan. Compliance checks from publishers are an industry standard nowadays, and have become a staple part of the role of the sales rep. Publishers are increasingly concerned that the promotional slots they have paid for are not being delivered by the retailers, and the pitch is becoming even more queered now that the biggest chains have different tiers of promotional activity depending on the size of shop. Put simply, publishers don't think retailers are getting it right as often as they should.

Naturally, there are two sides to every story. When I was at Waterstone's, I often received calls from frustrated publishers reporting that "no shops have our book on display", or some variation on that complaint. Sometimes this would be backed up with a compliance grid, detailing what reps found, or didn't find, and where. But most of the time it was based on hearsay, frequently from the authors themselves. When we followed up, we found that 60–70% of complaints were unfounded. In most cases, the book was precisely where it was supposed to be. One of the problems, as far as I could see, was that many authors seem to be completely incapable of finding their own books in bookshops. Even worse are authors' mums, or authors' best friends.

Any retailer with hundreds of branches is bound to have some problems with compliance. Not every bookseller will put every book in the right place on the right day, and I think most publishers accept that (authors' mothers are a different story). There is, however, a general feeling that things are getting worse, and that the more complicated promotional structures are proving harder to deliver at high street level. Publishers and retailers need to chat frankly about the issue before the former start withholding promotional fees. It is in every-one's interest to get it right, and a solution shouldn't be too difficult to find.

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