The Bookseller.com

29th August 2008

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

Why Harry missed out

18.07.08

This time last year I was on my way home from work when I saw the following headline in one of the free rags: "Harry Potter and the publisher's Asda ban". Genius. The story, of course, referred to Bloomsbury cancelling the supermarket chain's half-a-million copy order of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, due to "unsettled bills", soon after Peter Pritchard, Asda's director of general merchandise, accused the publisher of "blatant profiteering" by setting the book's r.r.p. at £17.99.

Asda soon apologised, and soon after announced they were going to sell it for £5, a decision that left Bloomsbury "bemused". Fast forward 12 months and the Asda/Bloomsbury relationship is once again in the news, and I've been caught in the middle of it. And, truth be told, it hasn't been a particularly pleasant experience.

Thanks to Asda's "£1. Magic Price" promotion proving so successful, it secured close to an 80% market-share of UK sales of the children's edition last week, according to Asda and based on Nielsen BookScan data. The consequence being that Asda's huge share of sales plummeted the average selling price of HP7 to a barely believable £1.96. That's 78.2% off the £8.99 r.r.p.

Based on the normal level of discount given to the trade, Asda may well have lost £3.50 on each copy sold. The idea, presumably, is that they can make that money back through many a new customer coming through their doors to pick up HP7 and leaving as a fully-fledged member of Wal-Mart's World.
 
All of the above meant a tough decision had to be made at The Bookseller; the result being that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows isn't a Bookseller chart-topper this week, for precisely two reasons:
 
Firstly, it didn't sell enough. The children's edition sold 37,644 copies  from its release on Thursday to the end of play Saturday - almost 20,000 copies short of ousting Linwood Barclay's No Time for Goodbye (Orion) from atop the charts.
 
But secondly, most controversially, and after much discussion, debate, opinion polling, and caffeine, the decision was taken to remove the title from The Bookseller's charts altogether.

The Bookseller's prestigious bestseller lists have long-had a strict inclusion/exclusion policy since the days of BookTrack. Any book that sold, on average, at less than half its recommended retail price is ineligible for inclusion. This prevents mass-discounted remainder stock, bulk-bought old editions and book freebies rung through the till from entering the charts. Only in times of exceptional heavy-discounting (Christmas and the January sales) is this 50% threshold lowered, and only very slightly. When the HB HP7 was launched last year, we took the decision to lower the threshold by 5% for a single week, accepting any title that had been discounted by 55% - namely HP7 which sold at 54% off its r.r.p. in its first part-week sale.

But at a massive 78.2% discount? It's just a stretch too far. We would've had to tear up our own rule book, and our 20-year history of comprehensive, accurate and robust sales monitoring and analysis to move the discounting threshold from 50% to 80% to include HP7 - something that would be exceptionally harsh on the numerous other publishers who aren't afforded such a relaxation of the rules on a weekly basis.

It was a tough decision but, I think, the right one. On my head be it.

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