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out of stock, out of mind
This morning’s issue of Shelf Awareness brought my attention to Peter Osnos’ comments at The Century Foundation
Mr. Osnos describes the difficulty he had trying to buy a copy of Wilfred Sheed’s The House that George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of Fifty, which had just received a front page review by Garrison Keillor in The New York Times Book Review.
An aside: This reminds me of the difficulty Leonard Garment had buying his own book, Crazy Rhythm, anywhere on the West Coast right after its publication in 1997.
Anyway, Mr. Osnos’ experience (like Mr. Garment’s) is a truly important one, but I’m afraid that the situation he describes might not have become a website column had amazon.com not run out of copies of the book he wanted. Had he still been able to acquire it quickly at Amazon, I imagine he’d not have been quite so frustrated by his inability to find a copy at the dozen or so bookstores—both chain and independent—that he contacted in NYC. Had Amazon been able to fill his order quickly, it might have appeared to him, as to any reader, simply as a shift in the book delivery system rather than the innate failure of current sales and distribution practices to bring more than a relative handful of titles within the reach of readers.
I assume along with Mr. Osnos that the book’s first printing has sold out. An enviable problem for a publisher to have, really. But I don’t think that is a relevant part of the failure he’s so clearly identified. I mean by this that his consumer difficulties could just as easily have occurred with a well-reviewed book that was not out of stock at the publisher’s warehouse.
It’s easy to imagine that at least some of the stores Mr. Osnos called were contacted by other readers following the NYTBR review. It’s also easy to imagine that the sales manager for the book let the buyers at the chains know of the forthcoming review. And it’s just as easy to envision this scenario for other well-reviewed but under-stocked titles. In fact, publishers—especially independent publishers—struggle with that frustrating reality every season, especially with second and third novels by serious authors, books that are likely to be (or at least should be) reviewed widely and well.
And yet somewhere in the background I hear publishers and editors and marketers lamenting again that reviews no longer sell books.
I’m going to work my way back to the subject of The Text Entire here soon, and part of my point will be this: What is fearsome about the digitized future is that it will not (or would not) likely be friendly to the vast majority of books published today. But I believe it will have the capacity to support books that are good. When we are ready and able to ensure that well-reviewed books are widely, easily, quickly available through all channels, then the industry will be in a position to move into the next, digitized phase of publishing.
This, I think, is far more relevant than foreseeing just exactly what morphing form the digital book world will actually take.
Fred Ramey
Posted 7/31/07
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>>> I sing a simple song