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The new owner of The White Horse Bookshop, city insurance veteran Robert Hiscox, has said the way for indies to compete with Amazon is to be nimble and offer different services because “big competitors get bureaucratic.”
Speaking at The Great Bookshop Debate chaired by the New Statesman's Jason Cowley (pictured), held at Foyles Charing Cross Road last night (2nd July) as part of Independent Booksellers Week, Hiscox said: “We are up against a big competitor, but I know from dealing with big brokers who want to come in the front door, the back door and the garage that big competitors get bureaucratic. We have got to offer something different.
"When I started out in insurance I wasn’t the cheapest, I never set out to be the cheapest, but I offered different things to competitors and after 50 years of business that has proven to work. It’s not all about price. We have got to offer something our competitors don’t. People will come to shop in bookshops if they think it is worth it. We will always be up against someone bigger and uglier who can grind us down.”
Hiscox, who formerly ran Hiscox Insurance who bought The White Horse Bookshop in Malborough earlier this year, added that parking, business rates acted as deterrents to independent shops thriving. He said The White Horse Bookshop was going to try and negotiate its business rate and said “parking meters hit you as soon as you come into Malborough and try to park. It is almost as if there is a “go away” attitude to visitors when they come, which is incredible.”
Author Louise Doughty also argued that the digital revolution has led to publishers releasing a narrower range of titles for bookshops to sell outside commercial hits.
Doughty said more authors were getting dropped from publishers and that the range of literature companies are willing to release is getting smaller as the industry is being challenged by the rise in e-book sales.
She explained that retail promotions like the WH Smith’s Richard and Judy Book Club “don’t help” by pushing a small pool of books which receive great commercial success, although she admitted that her novel Apple Tree Yard (Faber) performed well when it was selected for that promotion recently.
“There are plenty of authors my age who publishers are no longer willing to hang onto just incase their ninth novel gets picked up by the Book Prize,” Doughty said. “There was a time in my career when I was pretty close to falling off that precipice, if I had not been rescued by Faber, an independent publishing house. Publishers are commercial operations, it has always been that they have had to look harder at an author if they are on their fourth of fifth book which is not selling, but there is no doubt that that has accelerated in the digital revolution.”
Doughty said a positive outcome of this trend was a rise in “really tiny” publishing houses which picked up those authors, naming Salt Publishing and Arcadia Books as two examples.
However, she also highlighted that e-book sales were more beneficial for authors because they received a 25% royalty rate from them, in comparison to a 7% royalty rate on print books. “If my paperback book is selling for £3.99 and my e-book for £3.49, I know what I make far more money on.”
Despite that, Doughty said she thought bookshops and online retailers could coexist in the same marketplace quite happily together.
The debate also discussed the affordability of physical books after one audience member said she was an avid print reader, but was increasingly unable to afford the cost of physical books, whereas e-books were much cheaper.
Nicholas Lovell, author of The Curve, warned that he thought the cover price of books was only going to rise. “It is my belief print books are going to get more expensive because as fewer are sold and more e-books are going to be given away for free, they are going to be more of a precious commodity,” he said. “Some well-produced books will continue to sell at £100 or £500, my feeling is it is an upward trend.” However, Hiscox disagreed with him. “I would argue with you there, because the price of printing is getting lower. The commodity itself is getting cheaper to produce,” he said.
Kate Gunning, key account manager for independents at Penguin Random House, agreed that the “cover price gets discussed a lot” in her meetings with booksellers. She said: “In general independent retailers don’t discount books, so the onus is on the publisher to set the right price.”
Mark Forsyth, author of exclusive Independent Booksellers Week essay "The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What you Wanted" (Icon Books) said he remembered a time you would walk into Waterstones and the front tables were filled with “Cheryl Cole’s autobiography, David Beckham’s autobiography, etc”, explaining that now internet retail was growing “people who want to buy those books go there, leaving bookshops to the rest of us who want to read proper books.”
Jasper Sutcliffe, buying manager at Foyles, said that competition was a positive thing for business, whether it be Amazon or Blackwell’s. “We at Foyles believe that bookshops are here to stay and we are a vibrant community. What we have seen since we opened our new flagship shop three weeks ago is a huge amount of people coming through the doors and enjoying this physical retail space.”