The Bookseller.com

18th May 2008

Philip Stone is charts editor of The Bookseller. He was formerly a bookseller at Waterstone's.

Farewell R&J Book Club bonanza?

22.04.08

In my bookselling days, I used to be a real book snob. And I confess, a smidgeon of snobbery still lingers. When a customer made the choice to include a Richard & Judy Summer Read as part of their 3 for 2 purchase, I was gob-smacked that they'd passed on "real" literature like The New York Trilogy or the collected À La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

But then the literary David Mitchell became a member, and winner of R&J's 2005 Book Club. Strange, I thought. I like him. And then I read, and loved, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. Strange, I thought, I like her.

Even the authors themselves have been guilty of TV book club snobbery. Most memorably in the US when Jonathan Franzen suggested his reputation within "high art" circles would suffer when The Corrections became a member of Oprah's Book Club.

But slowly and surely, I came to accept just how important R&J were to the bookshop. And just how important the customer who watched the show and bought the book was to any chance of a monthly bonus.

The figures are mind-blowing. R&J's picks have been worth close to £150m to the entire book market since their inception in January, 2004—2.1% of all book sales. And there's only been 74 of them--74!

But their move to UKTV could spell the end of the staggering stats.

Some industry commentators suggest that the R&J brand is big enough to cope with the move to the "new-look", non-freeview digital TV channel—as long as retailers continue to support the dynamic duo. And it could benefit from its new, prime-time 8pm-9pm slot, although their reputation as a "daytime" duo will be defunct. Amanda Ross herself steadfastly maintains that "the success of the Book Club is not about ratings".

In my opinion, however, to believe that the R&J club will continue in growth at their new home is, frankly, delusional. A much more likely scenario involves crashing and burning, or at the very least, pulping.

The 16 titles that were members of the 2007 Book Club/Summer Read were worth £26.8m to the market, with the shows pulling in around 2 million viewers in their 5pm slot on Channel 4. According to TV industry figures, the most watched show on UKTV Gold this year was a "Royle Family" repeat in January which pulled in 350,000. On UK TV Style an edition of "Extreme Makeover" pulled in a 2008 high of 257,000 last month.

If the Independent is correct, then they can "expect a much lower audience of fewer than 400,000". If true, then the worst case scenario is that customer demand and retailer scale-outs follow suit, free-falling by four-fifths. It means their market worth next year could be little over £5m - a huge reduction on the £26.8m figure of 2007.

To use a cliché: only time will tell.

But what is essential to soften any fall, is that the trade doesn't sit idly by, worrying about how R&J's move to UKTV will affect them. What the trade needs to do is turn the thinking on its head: "What can I do to help R&J achieve some record-breaking UKTV viewing figures, leading to record-breaking R&J book sales?".

If they don't, retailers across the UK will be struggling to make up a hefty shortfall by year end.

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