Books
A very Zavvi guy
11.07.08 Graeme Neill
When you walk into Zavvi’s offices in Hammersmith, the first two photographs you see are not of rock stars but authors. Rather than Jay-Z or David Bowie, Russell Brand and George Foreman at signing events adorn the reception walls.
Granted, Brand and Foreman are hardly Salman Rushdie and Doris Lessing—but it is a sign that the music and DVD retailer is taking books seriously. This month Zavvi rolls out a book offer to its 125-store portfolio. Shops will now carry a prominent book chart wall and stock between 400 and 12,000 titles.
The move is the brainchild of Gary Williamson, Zavvi’s energetic “head of related product”—meaning he oversees all of Zavvi’s stock apart from DVDs and video games. The job marries his two loves, music and books, and he speaks with rapid-fire enthusiasm about both.
He still remembers the hill in Manchester he sat on when he first read Hunter S Thompson, and clearly recalls the effects of Bret Easton Ellis.
“American Psycho just blew me away,” he says. “When I was a teenager if you asked me to list my favourite things in life, the first thing would have been the Stone Roses and the next would have been American Psycho. It’s completely wild but then quite boring in places and then goes wild again. You don’t get that with a book such as Life of Pi. And the first cover—to me it’s as iconic as ‘Dark Side of the Moon’.” True to his job, Williamson is currently rereading Nick Kent’s collection of music journalism, The Dark Stuff.
Williamson oversees a six-strong book team who handle buying and marketing. He talks of his love of recommendations, confessing that he asks people on public transport about books they are reading. “I love it when people tell you about a great book,” he adds.
His hope is to grow Zavvi’s sales of cult titles alongside the conventional bestsellers. During a trial of books sections, the retailer stocked the likes of Trainspotting and Cocaine Nights under a “Chemical Culture” banner. “As a reader they are the type of books that if I went into a typical book store I couldn’t find easily,” he says. Who would an ideal Zavvi book buyer be? “I want a 17-year-old to pick up On the Road in our store and pass it on to their mates.”
The retailer has followed supermarkets in cross-promoting books with other products. A recent promotion for Father’s Day saw titles by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May stocked alongside “Top Gear” DVDs and tie-in CDs. “It’s obvious. The idea is that our offer is not centred in just the book department.”
Williamson says that he wants the retailer to sell the likes of Irvine Welsh (“as important to me as the Happy Mondays or Oasis”) as effectively as supermarkets can sell certain brands of author. “I want us to have a mass market approach to cult bookselling.”
Music retailers have only recently started to turn around their businesses after failing to keep pace with digital changes. With the book industry full of discussions about file formats, digital rights and e-books, what can it learn from the mistakes music made? “I think the book industry should not be scared of new advancements,” he counsels. “They should welcome new technology and incorporate it quicker. Music retailers could have reacted quicker to counter what was happening on the internet.
“The lesson to be learned is that people will traditionally go into bookshops, but stores need to be exciting and not stale. Every day [staff] should walk in and think ‘right, how can I do this better?’”
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