The Bookseller.com

8th January 2009

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

Unbeatable offers

29.08.08

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was standing outside a bookshop on a summer Saturday and it was heaving. I am not talking about a bit of a queue. The place was packed with people jostling for position and buying piles of books.

This doesn’t happen in bookshops. They are normally such civilised, reserved and, dare I say it, quiet places outside of Harry Potter season. So, why all the fuss?

Sadly, it was because of a closing down sale. British Bookshops shut their Windsor branch last weekend and were flogging off everything at half price. The young and old of the royal town were steaming in there to pick up a bargain.

I have seen similar crushes in the Next sale or the HMV Christmas Clearout, but rarely in a bookshop. Why doesn’t the first day of a new “three for two” offer have people queuing or pushing each other out of the way to get their mitts on a bargain?

Well probably because a) half the books in the new offer will have been in the previous one, and b) they’ll be around for weeks and months to come. There is no sense of urgency from the customer because they know that all the bestselling books are going to be in a promotion for as long as they remain bestsellers.

You can’t blame retailers for that. If the books in a multi-buy were only in the offer for a week or two then they might well fly out the door, but what happens once they have gone? Readers do not, and will not, gravitate to full price books in sufficient numbers. The pull of the multibuy is too strong.

Having said that, the most successful bookshop offers are usually the ones that don’t last very long. Just think back to the glory days of the Waterstone’s Christmas offer of the week, or the W H Smith “this weekend only” chart deals. They sold lots of books in a very short space of time. These sorts of offers excite people. They also pull in punters who are not frequent book buyers, and when competition is so intense across the whole high street, that is no minor detail.

I am not suggesting that retailers should change their strategy because a bunch of middle-class shoppers got all hyperactive over one closing down sale, but it would be nice to think that there is something round the corner that will energise and excite both consumers and the industry as the credit crunch gets ever more crunchier.

It will be interesting to see what the autumn and Christmas high street promotions have in store.

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