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justforbooks · 5 years ago

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Could lockdown herald an exciting new chapter for the book trade?

By Rachel Cooke

The pandemic has thrown publishing and booksellers into crisis – and left customers struggling to obtain books when they most want them. But some in the industry sense an opportunity to drag it into the 21st century

On 18 March, Emma Corfield-Walters received the news that for the second year running, her shop, Book-ish, in Crickhowell in the Brecon Beacons, had landed the title for Wales in the regional round of the independent bookshop of the year award. Corfield-Walters has run Book-ish for 10 years. It has 16 staff and a cafe, is the base for a literary festival that she also organises, and is credited with having played a major part in the regeneration of Crickhowell’s award-winning high street. Above all, it is a highly successful business: 2019 was a record year. The fact that it would now again be a contender for the overall prize – to be announced in June at the British book awards – was for Corfield-Walters a hard-earned affirmation of a decade’s passion and work.

But she was hardly celebrating. Britain was then five days from lockdown. “It was surreal,” she says. “We’d won best bookshop in Wales, yet I wasn’t sure for how much longer I’d have a shop that people could visit. It was like that scene in Star Wars when the walls are moving in, and the room’s getting smaller and smaller. The goalposts were shifting every day. At first, we thought: OK, we’ll buy hand sanitiser! But by the weekend, it was clear the shop would have to close.” Her first thought was for her staff, who are “like family” to her; the government’s subsequent announcement of its furlough scheme came as a huge relief. But there was also the question of her stock, and how she might keep selling it. Suddenly, the Book-ish website, hitherto used only to sell event tickets and signed copies, came into its own: “On the Saturday before lockdown began, we managed to get all 6,000 titles from the shop on to our website.”

What’s life like now? Luckily, her wholesaler has remained open, and can help with the delivery of titles not in the shop. But mostly, she spends her days operating as a frantic one-woman postal machine: “I’m on my own here, fielding calls, tweets, Facebook, managing the website, and picking and packing, picking and packing.” Her customers have been supportive. Some days, she sends out up to 50 parcels. However, this cannot make up for the shortfall in income that is the result of a closed shop and cafe. “We’re about 50% down,” she says. “Though across the trade, that’s relatively good. I’m on the council of the Booksellers Association, and on average, those shops that are still able to send out books are making only about 18% of their normal sales.”

What about reopening? Will this happen soon? She agrees there are good reasons for bookshops to be included in the first wave of non-essential businesses to reopen in any loosening of the lockdown; reading, as the World Health Organization notes, can boost mental health. But logistically, it’s going to be difficult: “I’m not sure how we’d open for browsing. Most independent shops are small. We’re not chains; we don’t have the infrastructure to make major changes in the way we operate. We’re also community hubs. We had a very emotional conversation on Zoom yesterday at the Booksellers Network coffee morning. People were worrying about their vulnerable customers: the ones who come in for a glass of water, the older person who just wants a chat. How will this work with social distancing? Realistically, I can’t see us opening before September.”

How long can she keep going financially? For the first time in our conversation, she is briefly silent. “I don’t know,” she says, at last. “I’ve been too scared to do cashflow projections. My landlord has been great, and reduced my rent. But I’ve still got utilities bills and insurance to think about. If this level of sales carries on, I’ll be able to pay my overheads. But if government support for the furlough scheme stops, there will be, across the trade, redundancies. That terrifies me.” Does she expect some shops to close? “I’m not sure. I have friends at indies that have done so well in the past three years. They’re so forward-thinking and creative. But if you’ve rent to pay, and no website… ” What about her? Will Book-ish get out of this alive? She is determined that it will: “We’re all in flight or fight mode at the moment – and I’m fighting.”

When the lockdown began on 23 March, the ramifications for the book industry were extremely grave. Waterstones closed all 280 of its branches, its chief executive, James Daunt, having previously insisted the chain was no different to a pharmacy or a supermarket and would therefore stay open (the U-turn came after some staff complained they felt at risk, and had been given no protection or hand sanitiser). Britain’s independent book stores also shut their doors (at the end of 2019, there were 890 such shops in the UK and Ireland). Supermarkets, which sell popular books in large quantities, focused their efforts on food and ceased ordering from publishers. Meanwhile, Amazon suddenly and dramatically “de-prioritised” book sales in favour of what it deemed to be essential goods (food, yes, but also, it would seem, hair dye and DIY equipment).

People were shocked. “It was a precipice at first,” says Jeremy Trevathan, the publisher of Macmillan’s adult division (he oversees Macmillan, Pan and Picador). “We thought: this is so grim.” Jo Prior, managing director at Penguin General, felt the same way. “It was alarming and strange when the shops closed; very shocking and dramatic.” Sales plummeted. “Some publishers are saying they went down up to 60%,” says Philip Jones, editor of the Bookseller.

For some it was even worse than that. The small presses, which have no marketing budget, depend on booksellers to press their titles into the hands of readers. “Bookshop sales are down by 90%,” says Kevin Duffy, who runs Blue Moose, a publisher based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. “It’s horrific. We need the high street to open tomorrow. If it doesn’t happen by September, we’re going to be in dire straits.”

Approaches to the emergency varied. At Macmillan, executives took voluntary pay cuts on a sliding scale from 20% rising to 50% (its managing director, Anthony Forbes Watson, took a 50% cut). Only three staff were furloughed. At Faber, on the other hand, the sales team has been furloughed almost in its entirety; the publishing schedule having been radically reduced, the work wasn’t there for people to do, while its international sales team cannot currently travel, which makes their jobs difficult. At Penguin, some employees have been furloughed, but “patchily”, across the business. “I’ve furloughed members of my communications team,” says Prior. “We’re resting them because they were working on books that are now delayed.”

How many books have been delayed? Again, the picture isn’t consistent (though spooked newspaper literary editors will testify to the scale of the shift; at one point about a month ago, the volume of books coming in for review was noticeably dwindling). While some have pushed the publication of new titles into the autumn, others have moved them into 2021. “We did take the decision to move off a huge amount into July and the autumn,” says Prior. “Not everything: the new Lee Child has just come out. Mrs Hinch [the Instagram cleaning expert] is doing well. But most things – things that are dependent on physical retail for support – will be published when we expect shops to be open.” At Faber, most of its list has been moved on. “We’ve turned the dial, pushing everything on three or four months,” says Stephen Page, its chief executive. “But we’ve put most literary debuts, which need the oxygen of booksellers, into 2021, because the autumn is going to be so crowded.” All this isn’t without risk. “We still don’t know what the autumn is going look like,” says Philip Jones. “There are no guarantees. But even if things are close to normal, the danger is that many of these books may get lost in the trample.”

How soon will the high street reopen? “There’s been a lot of chatter,” says Daunt. “But we need to be told when we can reopen, and no one from government has been in touch.” Is he making preparations? “Yes. It requires a lot of operational thought: a lot of training and investment. It’s a far from trivial exercise. How do you ensure your staff are protected and customers properly informed?” Unlike the independents, Waterstones branches are relatively big. “There’s never a great intensity to book shopping outside of December, and we have tables, which can act as a means of ensuring social distance. Still, it’s extremely challenging. Every part of retail will be different. Bookselling is our profession and our vocation; we want to be open. But we don’t want to do it prematurely, or to be out of sync with our customers. Some places are not going to be busy for a while: out-of-town shopping centres, our big metropolitan city-centre shops; people aren’t going to want to get on the underground to go to Picadilly to buy a book.” Nevertheless, he is upbeat. “We are profitable and well run; we have been through hard times before. But also, we have something people really want to buy.”

This much is certainly true. In the days before the lockdown began, Waterstones reported a 17% uplift in sales, a rise that has only grown in the weeks since; a central irony, for publishers, has been that in the moment when books have been suddenly more difficult to get hold of, demand for them has never been higher. A recent survey suggested that 40% of people say that books have helped them get through the lockdown. All publishers report a dramatic increase in traffic on their websites, and in ebook and audio sales. Online sales at Waterstones are growing 30% each day; as I write they are up some 1,500%, a long line of Royal Mail trucks queuing outside its warehouse every night, where there used only to be one. “It’s still a relatively small proportion of the sales that were coming out of our shops,” says Daunt. “But hopefully, customers can now see that online is not a monopoly.” Publishers are unsurprisingly thrilled by this. Can Amazon’s monopoly be broken? “One thing that must come out of this is a model where online selling is more plural,” says Stephen Page.

Publishers are cagey about the idea of getting into selling themselves. Some dismiss the idea out of hand: it’s too complex and too expensive; they don’t want to anger Amazon. Others, off the record, agree that the industry is having this conversation. It has been forcefully brought home to them, Amazon having, as Philip Jones puts it, “turned off the tap” of supply so suddenly, that they have grown too dependent on it; that the supply chain is too fragile. “This is the moment,” says Jonny Geller, a literary agent who represents, among others, John le Carré, Howard Jacobson and Elif Shafak. “I’ve been saying this to them [publishers] for 20 years: why do you not go into direct selling? You have the data, the bookclubs, the websites. Previously, they just preferred to pump money into ailing chains, but I think they’re now being forced to consider it – and if this situation goes on much longer, they will have to.” He sounds frustrated. “Television, which is much more expensive to make, has worked out how to deliver content to people. Publishing is just clinging to the same model it had in 1920. When Tony Parsons’s new novel came out [Parsons is another of Geller’s clients], you couldn’t get hold of his book – but on the same day, I ordered a badminton kit from Amazon that arrived the following morning.”

Geller is also critical of the decision of publishers to push back their schedules. “They’re concentrating too much on furloughing and saving and hunkering down. It’s such a narrow approach, everything in the deep freeze. Another of my clients, Alastair Campbell [Tony Blair’s former press secretary], has written a very powerful book about depression. It was planned for spring, now it will come out in August or September. I’m troubled by this. If there was ever a time for a book of this kind, it’s now. I think this is where morale is low for authors – and if publishers had invested better in distribution, we wouldn’t be having these debates. They’d just be publishing as usual.” How are writers responding to the changes and uncertainty? “They’re well equipped. They’re experiencing what they always experience: self-isolation. But it’s also hard to know what to write, what’s relevant. That’s the deeper question. And I do feel desperately sorry for some of those being published now. For many of them, publication has just gone by.” Authors whose books have been published during this time have mixed feelings about it. “I’m publishing into a big, black hole,” Lionel Shriver tells me, though she adds that her sense of “personal loss” is valuable in writerly terms: she better understands what so many others are going through. But for some, it is, if they’re honest, a boon in terms of coverage, if not in sales: with fewer books being published, less obvious titles are more likely to be reviewed.

This said, writers cannot look forward, this year, to going out into the world to talk about their books. Literary festivals are a major victim of the virus. Hay and Edinburgh fell early, and others followed. Cheltenham, held in October, is still booking writers. But it’s hard to see, realistically, how it can go ahead; social distancing will not allow for crowds in muggy tents. “A few weeks ago, we were still planning to deliver a physical festival this autumn,” says Sarah-Jane Roberts, the co-director of the Manchester literature festival. “But the ongoing uncertainties and concerns around the pandemic has made this more unlikely. We’re deeply disappointed, and though we’re resilient as a festival, and have a wonderful team of trustees and partnership organisations, we do worry about the next few years, and the long-term effects of losing a year’s box office.”

The next 12 months are, she believes, going be highly challenging for the festival community. Lots of action around events has moved online. Emma Corfield-Walters has got together with three other independents – Forum Books in Corbridge, Booka Books of Oswestry and Linghams, Heswall – to produce a series of events on Facebook Live (authors who have appeared so far include Robert Webb and Marian Keyes). Today sees the conclusion of The Big Book Weekend, a virtual festival organised by writer Kit de Waal and Molly Flatt of the Bookseller, produced in association with BBC Arts, which featured 27 author events, each of which should have taken place at a cancelled festival. But while these initiatives are spirited, popular and may sell books, there’s no ticket revenue in online. They are no substitute, either, for a shared experience; for the sound of applause and the prospect of a drink, a bun or a deckchair later.

Philip Jones has edited The Bookseller since 2012. “I’m often accused of being a Pollyanna when it comes to the trade,” he says. “But this period has challenged even me. Wherever you turn, something’s damaged.” What’s striking, however, is the positivity to be found almost everywhere. Sales have begun to recover. “The supermarkets and Amazon are getting back to normal,” says Jeremy Travathan. “There’s light at the end of that tunnel, and the indies have been incredible, delivering books by skateboard and so on. We kept on our sales reps, the better to support them. A great thing that has come out of this has to do with the ecosystem. In normal times, you’re negotiating to get the best deal you can. It can be tense and difficult. But now we’re working with retailers and printers to make sure they’re OK, while authors and agents are being incredibly thoughtful about things like cashflow. As a company, I don’t think we are nervous about the future. Commercial fiction is doing very well, but even in literary fiction, we don’t feel things are dire. We assume, like the government, that the market will be down 70% this quarter, and 50% in the third. But we predict that the fourth will be close to normal.”

Funding for prizes is going to be a worry in the future, and literacy charities are going to find the landscape much more severe. “The arts are going to have to fight so hard,” says Jo Prior, who is chair of the Women’s prize for fiction and a trustee of the National Literacy Trust. “Corporate funding is going to be difficult to come by, and we haven’t even begun to see the impact on organisations like the NLT, which do so much brilliant work.” But – and this is surely the most significant point – there is a sense that this period has given many in the industry new perspectives (and, perhaps, a kick up the backside). For Stephen Page of Faber, for instance, working from home, about which he used to be sceptical, has caused him to think about how publishing might be more inclusive. “Town hall stuff is difficult [when people are at home],” he says. “But one thing that has occurred to us has to do with regionality. The vast majority of people who work at Faber now have to be able to get into the office [in Bloomsbury], but this experience shows people can work from anywhere – and a more distributed workforce means a more inclusive workforce. That’s an interesting thought.” The lockdown has also accelerated companies’ thinking about online. “We’re learning better to connect with readers,” says Prior. “We want our website to be more of a destination. People are loving our Penguin Perspectives series [in which the likes of Nick Hornby and Philip Pullman write about the issues of the day]. Publishers can introduce writers to people in an unmediated way: that has become real in this period, and I think it will be lasting.”

Above all, this time of seclusion has put the book centre stage once again; it has not seemed so alive, or so vital, in many years. “People need stories,” says Kevin Duffy. “They take comfort in them.” He points to the success of Blue Moose’s Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession, a novel about two ordinary men, and kindness. “People have told me that in lockdown this has been a balm for their souls. I get emails on a daily basis thanking me for it.” Beyond their anxiety, I sense in those I talk to a certain excitement; a recalibration of sorts. “The last four or five years in publishing have been great,” says Stephen Page. “We’re in mourning for them. But you can only dwell on that for a few moments before you say: the reading and the writing are still there. Original work will come out of this lockdown, just as it did out of austerity; it has shone a light on globalisation, and the inconveniences that we have, to a degree forgotten, like mortality.” He and I are talking via the screens of our laptops, and though his face keeps freezing, I can see how strongly he feels. “We are going to have change,” he says. “I feel sure this is a [permanently] changed environment. But my vocation as a publisher feels very central and important. Reading has had an exciting six weeks. It’s breathing for some people. Now we just have to figure out the next bit.”

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