Oh great - more ridiculous discounts. And the poor bloody independent is left wondering where the publisher discounts come from to allow such offers to customers. 80%!!!!

I have never known an industry like this one which is committing suicide day-by-day. Absolute madness, and publishers get all they deserve. They can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Such a shame because bookshops are an important part of any retail mix, in my view. But not to HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin and so on. Shortsighted and sad. Still, the Chief Execs and the London staff will be made redundant with big pay-offs whilst the bookseller slowly bleeds to death.

Oh, and I would like to contribute on other debates as well, but because I can't afford the subscription, I'm not allowed to. Shame on the Bookseller magazine. There is knowledge out here going to waste, and it could help a bookseller somewhere....

We are doing rather well, thank you.

And no publisher gives discount that allows 80% off. Easy to blame the publishers, nut have a look at your own store. Look hard enough and you'll find the reason it s closing

The reasons are perhaps understandable but Publishers' Sales Directors
have been big on selling but small on strategic thinking . They will sell their books to the supermarkets encouraging aggressive discounting with little regard for the medium term implications for traditional retail .
The BA could have done generic campaigning to educate publishing houses on the implications of favouring product exploiters to the detriment of product stockists and specialists. [Without it being anti competitive incidentally]. Instead as we know they brought them inside the tent of BA membership .
The result is that sales bonuses were paid but the retail trade is effectively dead. It amazed me how they hunted with both "the fox and the hounds ",in seeking to supply to Wholesalers AND their customers as well ? Even today I see blogs where the publisher clearly does not get the strategic inconsistencies of this . IF publishers had withdrawn from the indie sector years ago , given wholesalers the terms that supermarkets enjoyed, then they could have better competed in their support of indies.
Now publishers are having to reconnect directly with the reader in their E book supply bonanza, thus eventually rendering even the chains redundant .
Since the start of time publishers have controlled the market . After all the NBA was a publishers agreement , as is the latest Agency Agreement , which is currently being investigated .

"Still, the day is approaching when authors and agents will bypass publishers altogether."

Now, I regularly see sentiments like this peddled on here, as if to wag a sanctimonious finger at all publishers and tell us we're all going to get our comeuppance soon.

Is this why publishers, and certainly we are, are still drowning under a deluge of book proposals? This great mass exodus toward self-publishing doesn't seem to be drying up our supply of good, quality content.

I'm sure there are "authors" (and there will be so many more "authors" out there now) who will prefer to take their book to market themselves in thia brave new world, but the vast majority seem to be sticking with us for now, you'll no doubt be sorry to hear.

RRP is a joke. Jamie Olivers book @ £30 when the ASP was £10.72. Maybe there should be a 2nd level of pricing that all trade suppliers/retailers get their discount calculated on. So Amazon, Sainsburys etc can carry on conning their customers into thinking they are getting 65% discount and B&M bookshops can compete on the bigger titles. I hearby propose this new RRP to be the P ublisher A djusted R etail P rice. :-p

I really do think it is time to get the printed price taken off of books.

I didn't really think it practical to take prices off books based on the need to sticker everything that came in through goods in,[and to select the margin in every case?]particularly if that is a very busy operation.
I then came up with a cunning scheme for the wholesaler to have each indie customers' mark up plan in our system [ just like the supply discount matrix] eg for pb , HB fiction etc built into the computer and to automatically produce stickers with prices on a sheet or for a charge stuck on for you before we shipped.
This would be done at the same time as running the invoice . In this way you could even mark selected books above RRP as well as mark down.
Clearly as these are just low tack stickers ,you could easily remove and re sticker individual titles yourselves for whatever reason .
Then I retired . Just as well Bertrams IT dept are thinking .

@ Corey T.
he has it in a nut shell, publishers should have a cost price of their "product", including royalties print etc, add in fixed cost price per item (obviously this is a figure slightly made up- but could be calculated) then add a profit margin - hey presto you have a PRICE you wish to achieve. !!!

removing RRP will only alter the % discount - not the price to pay..... as Amazon / supermarkets etc. would still pay the publisher only £7 or £8 for the 30 quid Jamie Oliver book, and so would still sell for £9/£10. while the indie would still only be able to negotiate a price of £16 / £18 and so still needs to sell for £ lots more to make a margin, as relative fixed costs per item are far more per copy sold.
so customers can still scan a barcode on their phone see the price on amazon and say mmmm no ta.

Cost price + fixed costs + margin wanted = price customer to pay.

and our local WHSmiths sells most non-rrp stock (especially maps) at £1 above RRP. clawing money back for the %off, as the customers perceive them to be cheaper places they dont actually check if they ARE or not.

Under the terms of our contract we pay authors 10% of the cover price in royalties, so the cover price is important. We also only sell at one rate through our distributor Central Books. So the rate is fixed to as Corey suggested. But the online sellers still sell the books at a huge discount. The prices are actually less than they buy the books for from our distributor. It's a strange business.

I think the elephant in the room in this debate is Amazon Marketplace. The reason why Amazon can afford to sell so many new books at a loss is because they are raking in fees from Marketplace sellers for doing absolutely nothing other than providing an online shop window. This is the real anti-competitive element of their site. They are able to corner the market in new books (and CDs and DVDs and just about anything else) by offering artificially low prices while at the same time taking a massive cut from all the Marketplace sellers who would once have been their competitors. It's a brilliant strategy and it works like a dream for Amazon and their customers - for now. But who knows where this elephant is leading us all...?

It seems to me bookshops want to blame the publishers, but it makes no difference if we don't give a discount. The online sellers discount the books anyway. I see them selling our books for £3. We don't discount any of our books so they are selling them at a loss.

But the fact is that Amazon don't supply many or most of the books they display. When I let all of our following know this they buy elsewhere and this is the message that needs to get out. Look at all of our books on Amazon, and look at the books by similar literary publishers. They are all displayed but with the message 'Out of Stock' or 'Unavailable'.

The worst thing about this is that they still take orders for the books saying they will get them when they're back in stock. None of our books are out of stock. They are all easy for Amazon to supply via Central Books. There are many publishers who have been complaining to Amazon about this for years but it makes no difference.

They take orders for books they have no intention of supplying when those books are easily available via Nielsen and the distributors. You only have to compare what they say about our books on Amazon and on Book Depository. They own Book Depository and yet Book Depository take orders and supply all of our books immediately.

Amazon gives the impression our books are out of print or hard to get, which isn't true. By taking orders and sending emails over a period of weeks telling customers the book isn't in stock yet but they will let them know when it is they lose publishers and authors a high number of sales. I was with a larger literary publisher before starting my own company, and the same thing happened for them.

Customers use Amazon for information on book availability and the message needs to get out that they don't supply many or most of the books they display. When they are seen as this unreliable it will make a difference. It also means there are many books Amazon doesn't supply which bookshops could sell. The reason customers have come into shops, having seen a lower price on Amazon, may well be that Amazon didn't actually supply the book - that's the marketing message bookshops need to put across.

This isn't just my company I'm talking about - I've had this discussion with a number of publishers including some well established literary fiction and poetry publishers. They have tried and tried with Amazon but get nowhere. I know one very powerful woman in publishing tried a strong campaign and got nowhere. The sad thing is that customers still believe the information on Amazon and keep wanting to buy there - they trust Amazon. With more information about what is really happening they wouldn't have this trust and would shop elsewhere.

Instead of blaming publishers for doing nothing, you should realise we have been trying for years but they don't listen. They do lose a massive number of sales by taking orders and not supplying books. The discounted prices aren't as serious a problem as that.

The way they display wrong information and take orders with no intention of supplying the books should be illegal in my opinion.

A publisher you are way off line . They need to buy off wholesalers to survive . Do you actually know what wholesalers do for indies?

Well yes, we absolutely have to stock our books with a wholesaler. Most bookshops and online sellers will only buy from them. We love it if people buy direct from the website but very few people will so wholesalers are vital.

The wholesaler also supplies the books sale or return to bookshops all over the UK and Ireland, so bookshops are really supported by all of this. We couldn't really manage the workload without them warehousing our books.

We could give independent bookshops a lower rate if we didn't have to go through a wholesaler though, because a commission is taken at each stage. But we have to sign a contract only to use the wholesalers in the UK. We do arrange better discounts for bookshops overseas, while still managing to pay the authors their full 10% of cover price royalties.

Some people think the below cost books displayed by online sellers don't actually exist, and that they're 'loss leaders' attracting people to their sites when they have no intention of supplying the book. Apparently this is illegal and when somebody in a strong enough position challenges it legally hopefully it will stop. It's easy to blame the publishers for discounting, but these low prices seem to me to be due to aggressive marketing strategies by some online sellers. The important way to challenge this is to increase awareness in buyers that these books don't exist and won't be supplied if ordered.

Adele,

As somebody who runs a large and successful fiction section in a large bookstore, I would be very interested to know who you represent and what you would recommend? I am looking to expand my short story and poetry sections and am always keen to support the more specialised and knowledgeable publishers since the majority of my short story fans are literary readers, rather than the blockbuster type.

Do you have a website I could check out (forgive me if you've already mentioned this elsewhere).

Mr D - I co-own Ward Wood Publishing and won't promote our authors here but if you look on the wardwoodpublishing.co.uk website you will see they are award winning. They are also very aware of the need to promote their books and are very active. If you're in London I would also help in other ways, and I would like to take up the challenge thrown down for publishers and booksellers to help each other rather than bickering by saying I do promote any bookshops who stock our books and would like to put a page on our website for that. Thank you for asking!