The Bookseller.com

21st November 2008

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Last hurrah or new beginning?

15.08.08 Tom Tivnan

Fact: no two people in television have had a greater impact on the book trade in the past few years than Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan. Since launching in January 2004, the 82 titles featured on the 10 "Richard & Judy" Book Clubs and Summer Reads have had sales of more than £158 million through Nielsen BookScan, 2.1% of the total UK book market. Some of the trade's biggest titles of the past few years have become bestsellers largely because they have been "R&J" selections, including Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (Picador), Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife (Vintage) and Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Penguin).

The popularity of the clubs has been achieved not just by pushing the titles on TV, but by astute selections by "Richard & Judy" producer Amanda Ross. "People have responded to Richard and Judy because there has been no agenda," says Nikki Crowther, W H Smith's trading controller for fiction. "There have been such a wide range of recommendations, and our customers really have come to trust the books they choose."

Yet as the Summer Reads finish this week with James Bradley's The Resurrectionist, the future of the "R&J" clubs hangs in the balance. The show will move from Channel 4 to digital multi-channel broadcaster UKTV, and audiences are predicted to plummet. Retailers and publishers must be asking themselves what effect this will have on the promotion.

A digital divide
The "Richard & Judy Show" will be the flagship programme on UKTV's new entertainment channel Watch, a rebranding of its UKTV Gold +1, and will run weekdays from Tuesday to Friday, with a highlights show on Mondays. The channel will launch on 7th October, backed by a massive print and TV campaign. "It's a fresh, modern and exciting channel with books at its centre," says Amanda Ross.

Yet no matter how fresh and exciting the channel is, will many people see it? Viewer numbers will be limited as the channel will initially only be available for Sky and Virgin subscribers. However, UKTV is positioning "Richard & Judy" as its main asset, hoping that TV's first couple will be able to boost its profile.

UKTV currently attracts about 27 million viewers a month in terms of "audience reach"—the percentage of the population who view a channel for more than three minutes in a given day or week—yet that figure is spread over 19 multi-channels. The broadcaster's highest ranking station is Dave, its "TV for blokes" channel. The British Audience Research Board (BARB), the organisation that tracks TV viewership, puts Dave's reach for the week ending 20th July (the most recent figures available), at 11,854,000, with an audience share of 1.1%. Its highest-ranking programme for that week was a repeat of the BBC series "QI", which attracted 469,000 viewers. The rest of UKTV's stable of channels for that week had audience shares between 0.1% and 0.6%.

Contrast those numbers with Channel 4, which for the same week had a reach of 30,323,000 and an audience share of 7.2%. "Richard & Judy" regularly pulls in about 1.5 million viewers in its current mid-afternoon slot on Channel 4.

Television insiders are unconvinced whether Richard and Judy's pulling power will be able to break the broadcaster into the mainstream. "Time will tell whether the new show will be successful," says Rob Shepherd, multi-channel reporter at TV and radio trade magazine Broadcast. "UKTV right now doesn't have a broad audience base, and the 'Richard & Judy' show itself had been losing some viewers on Channel 4. That said, I think it is quite a coup for UKTV in getting them to move to what is essentially a niche broadcaster."

UKTV had success when it rebranded UKTV G2 as Dave, boosting its share from about 0.1% to its current levels. Dave, however, is on Freeview; with Watch currently only slated to be shown on Sky and Virgin, most TV analysts say that R&J may struggle to hit those "QI" figures of 469,000.

So will declining viewers tear the guts out of the "R&J" book clubs? Most in the trade, for the moment, are optimistic. "The move to UKTV may actually help because I think they may put more energy behind books," says Tesco's category manager David Cooke. "But the power is in the stickers on the books. When we put the books into our range, they sell before, and after, the programmes air."

The figures back Cooke up. For the 2008 Summer Reads, for example, sales for Linwood Barclay's No Time for Goodbye (Orion) shot up to 5,267 in the week the list was announced, after selling just 13 copies the previous week. It then had weekly sales of 21,411 and 31,293 before selling 53,952 the week it was featured on the show. Subsequently, sales remained very strong—in fact it hit its highest total in the following week (56,339)—shifting more than 40,000 copies a week since.

"I think the point now is that the Book Club and Summer Reads are totally outside the show," says 
W H Smith's Crowther. "In a way, it doesn't really matter about the show, it is about the brand."

Steph Bateson, books buyer at Asda agrees with Cooke and Crowther that, for the immediate future, the promotion will be sustained by the "R&J" Book Club name and brand. Yet she adds: "The interesting thing is to look at how it will still be doing three or four years down the line if the show doesn't get the viewers. Will the brand decline? I don't think so, but I think retailers need to get behind it and publishers need to see that it is still important and continue to put forward the right books."

Maintain momentum
Marcel Knobil, the consultant who founded the Brand Council and Superbrands, believes that for the book clubs to prosper, Richard and Judy must keep the momentum going. He says: "It is like Heinz Baked Beans suddenly being taken out of all the supermarkets and you could only get them in corner shops. People would still buy them because they are a great brand, but after a while, when they are not front and centre, they lose traction.
"Richard and Judy have to shout a little louder if they want to be more than just a niche programme, and need to work all that much harder."

Knobil has applauded the duo's recently announced media partnerships. Shortly after the UKTV launch in October, Richard and Judy will join forces with the Daily Mail for a club for first-time writers. The Daily Mail New Writers Book Club will feature one book a month, covered on air in a similar style to the book clubs.

The broadcast will be featured in a double-page spread in the Daily Mail's Weekend supplement the preceding Saturday, which will include an interview with the author, a synopsis, and articles from Cactus TV's Ross on reasons for selection. The first six monthly selections will also feature in a new writers' category at next year's Galaxy British Book Awards, which will take place on 3rd April.

Richard and Judy will also host another Christmas books show, which will run for five weeks and feature books in six categories: celebrity autobiography, history/serious non-fiction, humour/stocking fillers, children's picture books, coffee table books, and food & drink.

"They are not quite Oprah, but they do have resonance," Knobil says. "Some brands do disappear, but if they continue to find the right partners and look to extend the Richard & Judy brand, they can keep the buzz going."

'Richard & Judy' in numbers
Total life sales across all editions for "R&J" recommendations: 26,446,963. Retail value: £158,005,054 (to 2nd August).

The Top 10 Life Sales (all editions)
Pos  Title                                                  Sales          R&J series
1      The Lovely Bones (Picador)              1,546,356   '04 BC
2      Labyrinth (Orion)                               1,105,838   '06 BC
3      The Time Traveler's Wife (Vintage)   1,018,295   '05 BC
4      The Shadow of the Wind (Phoenix)   934,415      '05 BC
5      PS, I Love You (HarperCollins)          931,995      '04 SR
6      A Thousand . . . (Bloomsbury)           894,398      '08 BC
7     The Island (Headline Rev)                  892,422      '06 SR
8      The Interpretation . . . (Headline Rev) 887,955     '07 BC
9     Brick Lane (Black Swan)                    797,149       '04 BC
10   The Memory Keeper's . . . (Penguin)  776,870       '07 SR
BC = Book Club, SR = Summer Reads

Series comparison
A direct comparison of how the 10 different "R&J" clubs have driven book sales is tricky, primarily because the number of books selected for each series has fluctuated between six and 10 titles. But based on sales aggregations and averages, it appears the Book Club started relatively slowly back in January 2004. The Star of the Sea and The Lovely Bones were the standouts, with The Lovely Bones the eventual Book Club winner. Yet despite these two titles both selling more than 130,000 copies over the series, the average weekly sale of one of the 10 titles was just 5,592 copies, by far the weakest "R&J" output to date.
But as the trade jumped onboard the "R&J" juggernaut and the brand started gaining recognition with customers, the numbers rose sharply. The average weekly sales per book since the 2004 Book Club have fluctuated between 10,080 and 20,695 during the series, with the only blip being the six-week 2005 Summer Read titles, which enjoyed an average weekly sale of 7,175 copies (the average sale of each title over the course of the series was 43,050).

The monster series was last year's Summer Reads, with each title enjoying an eye-popping average weekly sale of 20,695 copies. Across the eight weeks, a member of the club enjoyed average weekly sales of 165,563 copies. In total, 1,324,502 copies of the eight books were sold by the end of the series. Five of them sold more than 100,000 each copies during the run: The Memory Keeper's Daughter (320,921), The House at Riverton (298,983), Relentless (188,705), The Savage Garden (166,413) and Getting Rid of Matthew (126,993).

Life beyond the series
The "R&J" sticker on a book virtually ensures that a title will continue to shift in big numbers long after the programme has aired. By the end of 2007, for example, a member of the Summer Reads had sold an average of 329,185 copies through the TCM, after enjoying an average sale of 165,563 copies during the eight-week series. In the 2004 edition of the Book Club, the 10 titles went on to sell an average of 306,416 units by year-end, a tremendous jump from the 55,921 average during the series.

For individual books, the leaps can be enormous. Åsne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul (Virago), sold a respectable, if not spectacular, 35,670 copies during the 2004 Book Club. By the end of the year, it had sold 303,120 copies through the market, and life sales currently total 475,317 units. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (HarperPerennial) sold 92,521 copies during the 2007 Book Club, with sales of 385,959 by year-end and current life sales of 446,455.

Top 10 Average Weekly Series Sales
Pos Title                                              Sales
1     No Time For Goodbye                  44,466*
2     Labyrinth                                       40,269
3     The Memory Keeper's Daughter   40,115
4     The Interpretation of Murder         37,515
5     The House at Riverton                  37,373
6     The Island                                     30,649
7     A Thousand Splendid Suns          28,107
8     The Righteous Men                      27,507
9     The Outcast                                  26,825*
10    The Time Traveler's Wife             26,418
*series still being broadcast

Top 10 Sales during a series
Pos Title                                               Sales               Series(**)
1     Labyrinth (Orion)                            402,690           '06 BC (10)
2     The Memory  . . . (Penguin)           320,291           '07 SR (8)
3      The Interpretation . . . (Headline Rev)300,122      '07 BC (8)
4     The House at Riverton (Pan)         298,983           '07 SR (8)
5     A Thousand . . .(Bloomsbury)        281,072           '08 BC (10)
6     No Time for Goodbye (Orion)        266,795           '08 SR (8)*
7     The Time . . . (Vintage)                  264,179          '05 BC (10)
8     The Star of the Sea (Vintage)       189,538           '04 BC (10)
9     Relentless (Corgi)                         188,705           '07 SR (8)
10   The Island (Headline Review)       183,891           '06 SR (6)
BC = Book Club, SR = Summer Reads *series still being broadcast ** = weeks

Data compiled by Philip Stone. Source Nielsen BookScan to 2nd August 2008.

 

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