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jsburbidgeAnd now for another couple of lessons in how to lose sales, if you are a bricks and mortar superstore chain.
1) If you carry a series, carry all of the series.
In particular, don't leave gaps.
About a week ago, I finished the second volume of Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels, which my daughter had given me for Father's Day. (I had already read the first one a year or two ago.) It's a nice, competent, somewhat blackly humorous series which is a cut above mind candy but not likely to be on my Hugo Nominations lists, and I'm not running out and buying everything in it at once. Still, the second volume set up an obvious sequel, in the way that second volumes do, and I went into the local (to work, five minutes' walk away or so) Chaptigo willing to pick up the next volume, Aloha From Hell, and possibly it plus its successor.
No luck.
Oh, they had other volumes, relatively heavily weighted towards the later volumes, but also including the first two. Just no third one. Because it was a fairly casual, mild interest, no immediate need, I didn't bother hunting down possible other copies, and (again, no great need) I'm not going to buy later volumes until I've read or at least have the earlier ones. So no sale, either of it or its successors.
A couple of weeks pass.
2) Get in books when they come out.
Tuesday was the release date for Jo Walton's The Philosopher Kings, which I am willing to go out of my way for, but even more willing to pick up as soon as possible (in paper, not electronic format -- I have people to lend it to after I finish it).
Chaptigo indicated, on Tuesday, that although it was available for order online, it was available at no stores in Toronto at all. (A Canadian author, at that, and the predecessor has been selling well enough that there are three copies in hardcover of The Just City at my closest IndigoSpirit (which has stock control policies which are, let us say, not very midlist-friendly).)
In conjunction with the fact that Bakka's weekly update on their weblog indicated that they had it as of Tuesday, this indicated a trip to Bakka, after the Dominion Day holiday was over. So I went up at lunch and picked it up, along with (as it was on my mind) Aloha From Hell.
So Chaptigo lost two, possibly three, sales right there.
If you have no competition, you can afford to be sloppy, but if you run a bricks-and-mortar store in a location with competition, if you aren't on the ball, it's easy to lose sales like that.
This is heightened by the fact that purchasers who will pay the premium for a hardcover over a digital copy or a later paperback copy are probably willing to go out of their way to get it.
I could have pre-ordered the Walton from Amazon or Indigo, but I would still have been unlikely to get it any faster than I actually did; and I ended up supporting a local independent bookstore. And a customer who's focussed on getting an online discount isn't a potential customer for a bricks-and-mortar store in any case.
In the first case, assume that I had been dedicatedly looking for the Kadrey the first opportunity I could get. There's a copy at another, smaller IndigoSpirit store downtown, so I could have gone there, which is fine for the chain as a whole, but it still represents a lost sale for the manager of the more major store; and calling to reserve the copy at the other store and sending the customer there is at least as inconvenient. So even in that case it's almost a wash for Indigo as a whole (slight hit taken from my irritation at their stocking policies) but a loss for the site itself -- and Indigo has been closing down sites in Toronto; you can be sure that headquarters pays attention to each site's sales figures.
Driving me to e-book purchases doesn't work either; if I had wanted an e-book of the Walton, I could have downloaded it from Google onto my phone, which is easier than getting it via the Kobo store -- a lot of people have Android phones and tablets -- and a subsequent download of an epub (no DRM, as it's from Tor) could be managed at any desktop PC where I was signed in. And I won't buy the Kadrey in digital form, as it has DRM and I can't read it in my preferred e-reader.
I honestly don't think that this is, as such, the result of having bean-counters run the chain; I suspect that it's the result of a "just good enough" stock software system that doesn't make connections, doesn't anticipate, doesn't have the flexibility that a human checking up on stock does.
I could make a guess at the scale of the cost side of that cost / benefit equation -- assuming that they already have a tailored stock-control system; if they don't, the cost is much, much higher. You'd need a ton of flags regarding authors, series, anticipated popularity as derived from media as well as sales of other works by the author, typical time between re-ordering and stocking by publisher, pattern tracking sensitive to individual stores, so you can assume both programming time and ongoing manual input costs. Call it a half a good developer for a year added to existing costs plus management overhead plus ongoing data-input (mainly centralized) of a fifth of a clerical person a month ... that's, um, somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars in the first year and a ongoing cost of between ten and twenty thousand dollars a year to feed the beast enough information for it to make a difference, plus occasional software tweaking.
If an average HC is $30 CAD and an average trade paperback is 15$ CAD (MMPBs have a different sales model, typically, and the considerations I've listed are mainly at a higher end), and the typical cut of the bookseller is 40% for non-bestsellers, then each sale gained gets about $6 to $12 in additional revenue. Amortise the software cost over, say, three years and expect to be in balance after five, and you need ... about 3,500 to 6,000 extra sales a year to justify the costs involved (and the costs are still less than hiring one full-time staff person each year, including benefits). If they have on the order of a hundred stores (6500+ employees, some of whom will be head office, so I'm guessing at on the order of a hundred locations averaging between small stores with four to five staff and superstores) that means an extra 35 to 60 sales per year per location. However, that has to come from a particular subset of dedicated readers who don't do e-books, don't order (much) online, and come in frequently, and I wonder whether even that number of gained sales is realistic.
A small specialty store can manage this sort of stock management inside the head of its manager. If a large store gives its local floor managers rein to order effectively it can make up some of the gap... but factors of scale and control (local people can slip up badly, too) are likely to keep that sort of freedom in check.
Even if the approach passed a cost-benefit test on its own, it would increase their gross revenue by about .0004% (revenue is about a billion dollars, according to Wikipedia). Chapters Indigo has announced that their strategy to increase profitability involves emphasizing non-book merchandise to a much greater degree. From an opportunity cost perspective, I doubt that this sort of attention to detail, as a business strategy, is going to make a lot of sense.
1) If you carry a series, carry all of the series.
In particular, don't leave gaps.
About a week ago, I finished the second volume of Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels, which my daughter had given me for Father's Day. (I had already read the first one a year or two ago.) It's a nice, competent, somewhat blackly humorous series which is a cut above mind candy but not likely to be on my Hugo Nominations lists, and I'm not running out and buying everything in it at once. Still, the second volume set up an obvious sequel, in the way that second volumes do, and I went into the local (to work, five minutes' walk away or so) Chaptigo willing to pick up the next volume, Aloha From Hell, and possibly it plus its successor.
No luck.
Oh, they had other volumes, relatively heavily weighted towards the later volumes, but also including the first two. Just no third one. Because it was a fairly casual, mild interest, no immediate need, I didn't bother hunting down possible other copies, and (again, no great need) I'm not going to buy later volumes until I've read or at least have the earlier ones. So no sale, either of it or its successors.
A couple of weeks pass.
2) Get in books when they come out.
Tuesday was the release date for Jo Walton's The Philosopher Kings, which I am willing to go out of my way for, but even more willing to pick up as soon as possible (in paper, not electronic format -- I have people to lend it to after I finish it).
Chaptigo indicated, on Tuesday, that although it was available for order online, it was available at no stores in Toronto at all. (A Canadian author, at that, and the predecessor has been selling well enough that there are three copies in hardcover of The Just City at my closest IndigoSpirit (which has stock control policies which are, let us say, not very midlist-friendly).)
In conjunction with the fact that Bakka's weekly update on their weblog indicated that they had it as of Tuesday, this indicated a trip to Bakka, after the Dominion Day holiday was over. So I went up at lunch and picked it up, along with (as it was on my mind) Aloha From Hell.
So Chaptigo lost two, possibly three, sales right there.
If you have no competition, you can afford to be sloppy, but if you run a bricks-and-mortar store in a location with competition, if you aren't on the ball, it's easy to lose sales like that.
This is heightened by the fact that purchasers who will pay the premium for a hardcover over a digital copy or a later paperback copy are probably willing to go out of their way to get it.
I could have pre-ordered the Walton from Amazon or Indigo, but I would still have been unlikely to get it any faster than I actually did; and I ended up supporting a local independent bookstore. And a customer who's focussed on getting an online discount isn't a potential customer for a bricks-and-mortar store in any case.
In the first case, assume that I had been dedicatedly looking for the Kadrey the first opportunity I could get. There's a copy at another, smaller IndigoSpirit store downtown, so I could have gone there, which is fine for the chain as a whole, but it still represents a lost sale for the manager of the more major store; and calling to reserve the copy at the other store and sending the customer there is at least as inconvenient. So even in that case it's almost a wash for Indigo as a whole (slight hit taken from my irritation at their stocking policies) but a loss for the site itself -- and Indigo has been closing down sites in Toronto; you can be sure that headquarters pays attention to each site's sales figures.
Driving me to e-book purchases doesn't work either; if I had wanted an e-book of the Walton, I could have downloaded it from Google onto my phone, which is easier than getting it via the Kobo store -- a lot of people have Android phones and tablets -- and a subsequent download of an epub (no DRM, as it's from Tor) could be managed at any desktop PC where I was signed in. And I won't buy the Kadrey in digital form, as it has DRM and I can't read it in my preferred e-reader.
I honestly don't think that this is, as such, the result of having bean-counters run the chain; I suspect that it's the result of a "just good enough" stock software system that doesn't make connections, doesn't anticipate, doesn't have the flexibility that a human checking up on stock does.
I could make a guess at the scale of the cost side of that cost / benefit equation -- assuming that they already have a tailored stock-control system; if they don't, the cost is much, much higher. You'd need a ton of flags regarding authors, series, anticipated popularity as derived from media as well as sales of other works by the author, typical time between re-ordering and stocking by publisher, pattern tracking sensitive to individual stores, so you can assume both programming time and ongoing manual input costs. Call it a half a good developer for a year added to existing costs plus management overhead plus ongoing data-input (mainly centralized) of a fifth of a clerical person a month ... that's, um, somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars in the first year and a ongoing cost of between ten and twenty thousand dollars a year to feed the beast enough information for it to make a difference, plus occasional software tweaking.
If an average HC is $30 CAD and an average trade paperback is 15$ CAD (MMPBs have a different sales model, typically, and the considerations I've listed are mainly at a higher end), and the typical cut of the bookseller is 40% for non-bestsellers, then each sale gained gets about $6 to $12 in additional revenue. Amortise the software cost over, say, three years and expect to be in balance after five, and you need ... about 3,500 to 6,000 extra sales a year to justify the costs involved (and the costs are still less than hiring one full-time staff person each year, including benefits). If they have on the order of a hundred stores (6500+ employees, some of whom will be head office, so I'm guessing at on the order of a hundred locations averaging between small stores with four to five staff and superstores) that means an extra 35 to 60 sales per year per location. However, that has to come from a particular subset of dedicated readers who don't do e-books, don't order (much) online, and come in frequently, and I wonder whether even that number of gained sales is realistic.
A small specialty store can manage this sort of stock management inside the head of its manager. If a large store gives its local floor managers rein to order effectively it can make up some of the gap... but factors of scale and control (local people can slip up badly, too) are likely to keep that sort of freedom in check.
Even if the approach passed a cost-benefit test on its own, it would increase their gross revenue by about .0004% (revenue is about a billion dollars, according to Wikipedia). Chapters Indigo has announced that their strategy to increase profitability involves emphasizing non-book merchandise to a much greater degree. From an opportunity cost perspective, I doubt that this sort of attention to detail, as a business strategy, is going to make a lot of sense.
