Rivers runs through it

Julian Rivers has a lot to answer for. The recently retired deputy chief executive of wholesaler and library supplier Bertrams Group may have inspired Terry Maher, former chairman and chief executive of Dillons' parent company Pentos, to launch an all-out assault on the Net Book Agreement.

"I attended some publisher's reception with him in a church crypt in the late 1980s," Rivers recalls, "and I said: 'Terry, if you really do want to get some attention on this Net Book Agreement, you are going to have to discount the Booker shortlist.' His eyes narrowed, and the rest, as they say, is history."Not that Rivers has any regrets about being in the vanguard of the fight to abolish the NBA. His only disappointment is how chain booksellers and supermarkets responded--by marketing through price at the expense of anything more interesting or creative. "Ask me whether, as a result of the NBA going, retailers and publishers are doing the right things, and I would say that I don't believe they are. Discounting bestsellers like Harry Potter is bonkers. It is very poor marketing."

As for the NBA itself, he points to the narrow boundaries it permitted for book marketing. "It was so restrictive that you really couldn't promote books in a way that had any strength. It's the chains that have got themselves into a mess, aided and abetted by the supermarkets. The supermarkets, bless 'em, are a temptation to publishers."

Moving target

Rivers' observations about the trade reflect his unusual career path. He is one of the few industry insiders to have worked at board level across the entire trade: for a publisher, a bookseller and a wholesaler and library supplier (see CV box above). "One could say it is harder to hit a moving target," he jokes when asked why he did not stick to one sector of the book trade.In fact, his moves across the trade divides are, he says, symptomatic of a low boredom threshold. "I get to the point when I want something different. I could pretend it was a great master plan, but it was a series of opportunities and accidents that took me through."

He is open to new opportunities now that he has stepped down from his post at Bertrams to become a non-executive director. The world of publishing, however, seems the most attractive. "There is no doubt that publishers have the most fun, because they are closest to the creator of the product," he observes.Looking back, he believes that of all three sectors publishers lag behind the other two in understanding of the market. "Publishers generally have, in relative terms, little knowledge of the detail of the market. They see a market for their books, but as far as the whole landscape is concerned, their education and knowledge, and possibly interest, is the least of all the sectors."

Retail is the toughest: "To run retailing in a professional way, with high street rents paid on bookselling margins, is incredibly tough. To be successful one has to be incredibly switched on and very, very focused." By its very nature as an intermediary, wholesaling has the broadest perspective, he says. "Wholesalers know the most about the overall market, because they are taking the books into all the distribution channels."

Brand builder

Rivers gained a reputation as a brand builder at mind, body and spirit publisher Thorsons, where he was involved in transforming the company from a small family-owned business into a multi-million pound brand that was eventually sold to HarperCollins for between £12m and £15m in March 1989. He claims that the company grew during his tenure as marketing director by more than 600%, an achievement he puts down to "setting the books free".

What this means is marketing direct to the consumer rather than promoting to the trade. "We marketed over the heads of the professionals and went straight to the book buyer," he explains-- not bypassing traditional distribution routes, but actively seeking potential readers and communicating directly with them rather than relying on booksellers' own marketing. In part this was a response to booksellers' lack of conviction about the potential market for MBS.

Thorsons dealt with this scepticism by hiring a professional magazine reader to demonstrate that MBS had an enormous following. "Before we went into any new market the reader analysed who was reading and writing what, so that if we went to a buyer in a conventional chain and they said it was not a market for them, we could say, 'You might not like these books or want to chance the market, but we can demonstrate to you that this month 200,000 people have read about this particular subject in these magazines and they are in your market.' We demonstrated the value of the market on a no-risk basis.

"My style of marketing is to take all the obstacles away and deliver the book on a no-risk basis by showing that there is a market for it. You just have to find a way to set the books free." Is this a sign of frustration with the traditional trade? No, he says firmly (though not entirely convincingly). "We used the traditional routes, but we marketed over their heads." He adds: "I don't think the word is 'frustration'. I think the trade is . . . a very conservative business, even today with the chains and the new blood."

Marketing versus promotion

Publishers would do well to follow Thorsons' example. "I think the trade is missing a number of tricks. Frankly publishers don't market books, they promote. Promotion means you are promoting to established clientele; marketing is taking books to places where they haven't been before. There is a different dynamic."It is a subject about which Rivers is passionate. For once, he says, it is the small publishers that are showing the big boys how to do it. "It tends to be the small publishers, privately owned, who break down the barriers and get their books to a broader readership through whatever means. There is a massive opportunity to sell more books to more people through a number of routes."

Rivers points to an invisible market of readers, people who borrow books and buy them secondhand or from non-traditional outlets and whose reading habits do not register with Nielsen BookScan. This is an immeasurable opportunity, he argues, for booksellers to sell more books. That these "shadowy readers" do not contribute sales to the general market does not bother Rivers, who believes that they can be converted into customers of traditional bookshops.

Rivers' faith in creative marketing is fuelled by his experience at Dillons, which was, he says, both the best of times and the worst of times. The best was watching queues of people outside signings with authors such as Margaret Thatcher. "That is when you think: don't ever say there is a problem with the market for books--there is a problem with the marketing of books."

The worst period was sliding from trade darling to trade pariah as Dillons led its assault on the NBA and then imploded, leaving the trade littered with publishing casualties.

Staggeringly boring

At Dillons, Rivers learned about creative marketing, which is, he claims, sadly lacking in the trade now. The over-reliance of chains on discount has created conformity on the high street, he claims. There is simply too little for customers to identify with or be faithful to if chain after chain looks and feels the same. "Chain marketing is staggeringly boring in most cases" is his verdict.

What is his solution? "There has to be more creative marketing, particularly in partnership with publishers. Something different, something better." He adds: "Before the end of the NBA we found ways to get people into Dillons by adding value, by having a fantastic range and display and through creative marketing, as opposed to price promotion."

Price should be part of the marketing strategy, not the sum of it, he says. "It is about constantly having fun, without falling into this rut of 'how much are we going to discount this or that.' I did discount the Madonna Sex book way back, but I have to be honest, the real reason I did it was so that I could run a full-page advertisement in the London Evening Standard saying: 'Cheap Sex at Dillons'. It worked. It was creative, a bit of fun and it was about the Dillons brand values, as opposed to a cheap offer."

High hopes A member of the much vaunted trade associations' Liaison Group, Rivers has high hopes that this platform will restore some sense to the trade. "The forum [Liaison Group] may not be a way of changing the rules but of trying to advocate a little calm and maturity," he observes.

Certainly Rivers wants the forum to address what he sees as the biggest issue facing the industry at the moment: uninspired price promotion. One way of doing this is through the debate about cover prices. He claims to be "absolutely neutral" about the issue, while describing the reaction to the debate in some quarters as "the full forces of conservatism manifesting itself through shutters going down across Britain".

"One has to remember that a very large number of books are sold each year without cover prices," he argues. "At Dillons about 30% of a business mix of £150m were books that were academic or technical, the majority of which didn't have cover prices. So it can work, and there are systems of paying royalties on the r.r.p."

Fears that the removal of cover prices will usher in dealer pricing, and that authors' royalties will be paid on net receipts rather than r.r.p., are unfounded, Rivers believes, because of the practicalities involved in changing author contracts. "There is real logic in a retailer setting the price up or down for the books it sells in each locality." He adds, pegging his colours firmly to the mast: "You can't tell me that a backlist book should be priced the same in Inverness as in Trafalgar Square."

Locking in the retailer?

One suspects that Rivers' conversion to the removal of cover prices may have something to do with increasing the dependence of independent booksellers on wholesalers, though he does not say this. What he does say is: "The manual work involved [in price marking] is a golden opportunity for Spar-type support from wholesalers."

He is adamant that the evolution of wholesalers post-NBA has been positive for independent booksellers, and contests any suggestion that there is little to differentiate the big three, Bertrams, Gardners and THE. There can be no doubt that wholesalers have done much to reinvigorate independent bookselling post NBA. Rivers believes that independents have also been boosted by the influx of fresh talent from the chains, former branch managers and head office personnel such as Julian Toland and Hazel Broadfoot at the Bookshop Dulwich Village and Richard Barker at Gerrards Cross and Wantage Bookshops.

Independent publishing, Rivers says, has seen a similar uplift thanks to corporate refugees such as Andrew Franklin at Profile. "We are seeing examples of brilliant titles where the publisher is acting as a 360