a patch-up of a post

The blogosphere is humming with all kinds of bad news for writers (and bookbuyers; I think we forget sometimes how integrally connected these two are): Waterstones, already swallowed alive by HMV, is to be further constricted within the giant gut, shops shut, lists constrained, and "academic" books (ie, I think, poetry) to be thrown overboard. (It's my metaphor, I can do what I like. A pirate's life for me, yo ho!)

Borders is on its way out - well, the parent company wants to concentrate on its domestic market, which means our UK branches (so good for periodicals and American editions) will have to sink or swim as they may; but I think I heard a rumour now of a bailout.

Now, against all that, the Tart of Fiction has been running a very useful series of posts, with many links, about the increasingly surreal way in which publishing today commodifies writers. Susan Hill has also touched on the subject, in fact beating me to my conclusion - which is that the tide has got to turn, sailors must be spat out of whales, albatrosses go home to roost, etc. In short, small presses and booksellers, this is your moment!

I'd been meaning to write something about all this all week, but didn't. Below is the text of my comment on the Tart of Fiction, which I now realise is about the best I'm going to do on the subject before I go on my crazy trip to St Ives tomorrow morning. (Crazy, because I'm not feeling at all well. I've ordered cabs for both ends - of the journey, of course, not of me! - and a Tesco delivery tomorrow evening to the holiday house - how efficient is that.)

My comment:
I think the corollary to all this has got to be the demise of the high street bookselling giants. I was working in bookselling at the time they started bestriding the land, and everybody predicted dire things. Then the end of the New Book Agreement. Everybody predicted dire things but the industry went, oh no! See! It's making skinflints who never bought books before buy books! It's a bookselling renaissance!

Well, what it's done is to take Peter Mayer's dictum about selling books being just like selling carrots and grow it (like a carrot in a polytunnel?) into a monster. The profit margins are gone. Books have got to sell - new bookstores have got to be profitable in their first quarter of trading. Buying is centralised so there is little of the old "local author, local shop" ethos. We, the punters (okay, not you and me, but our non-writer friends) just buy what's put in front of us, we like those little "staff recommends" cards - we're not thinking, "hey, what's missing?" (Eureka!)

Waterstones' policies have driven a lot of this. I read somewhere recently (but couldn't find it again, so not sure where) that Waterstones has 2 out of every 3 high street book sales. That pretty much means that anyone reading anything off the beaten track (read: not bestseller or "classic") is not getting it at their local bookshop. I buy a lot in my (remaining) local secondhand shop and otherwise rely utterly on Abe and Amazon. Sadly.

This isn't sustainable. Someday soon the bookselling disaster and the publishing disaster will have to come together to be seen as one great big disaster.

Independent presses are on the up. Susan Hill is right, & given the whole publishing scene I'm not sure why more isn't being made of this - it is an opportunity for independent booksellers to rise again and hit back at Waterstones. (Speaking of small presses, one of the best small presses I know, which has achived great things already, is run in his off hours by one guy who works - guess where - in a Waterstones!)

When all the dust settles it'll still be a shame about Dillons, though.