Why Tobias Buckell's Latest Isn't Stocked at Borders, and other stories

[davidlevine]

This is a really important essay for anyone who wants to understand the bookselling industry today. Read it.

http://antickmusings.blogspot.com/2008/10/on-being-skipped.html

(Hat tip to jaylake)

Comments

[andrewwheeler.livejournal.com]

I think you're focusing on the individual book level, and there it always seems plausible to add just one more -- after all, what's the marginal cost to a giant chain of one more book?

But a large, complicated inventory -- not to mention a budget -- can't be managed on that kind of ad hoc level.

And, of course, if you start adding one book here and two books there, pretty soon you don't have room on the shelves for all the books you've bought. That either leads to stock being returned even quicker to make room for the new stuff, or to books never making it to the shelves. (And neither of those will be good, for authors or for bookstores.)

It makes the most sense if you think of the buyer, who starts each month with a set budget of dollars to spend and a certain number of shelf-feet to fill. Once the money's gone and the shelf-feet are full, he's done, even if there are some decent books that he didn't get to buy.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

But now we're back (if you've read the earlier comments in this topic) to the picture of the poor widdle giant chain bookstore that just finds it so hard to keep the names of more than a dozen bestsellers in its cute little head at one time ... oh wait, it does carry more books than that.

Seriously, the kind of restrictions you're here describing don't match up with the severer limitations described in your original post.

[andrewwheeler.livejournal.com]

I think you're deliberately misrepresenting the scale here -- it's not "more than a dozen bestsellers," it's a store with at least 10,000 active SKUs at one time. Your position seems to be that if they have 10,000, then they could have 20,000, or 50,000, or 100,000.

If you don't see a difference there, then I suppose we just radically disagree.

Every single additional SKU has to be managed, and it's disingenuous to pretend that it's just "one book," since there are thousands upon thousands of books in an identical position.

Seriously -- how many more different titles do you think Borders should put on its shelves right now, and how should they make them fit? (Double-shelving?)

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not deliberately misrepresenting the scale - I'm indulging in a little sarcasm to suggest that the argument only works on a much smaller scale than a large chain bookstore.

In terms of the costs of inventory control (that was what Alice was using as the limiting factor, not physical space on the shelves), the larger the base you start with, the more can be added without straining the system. That's a basic rule of any database.

So no, 20K isn't the same as 10K, but there's a lot less difference between the two than a bestseller-only sideline rack doubling it's capacity.

But even that is beside the point. The whole "they can't carry every book in print" argument is a red herring, an excluded middle. The question you were attempting to address in your original post was about the total exclusion of large chunks of the brand-new midlist. That's not the same thing at all.

You also imply that this is a relatively recent and growing phenomenon. So in terms of physical space on shelves, one can only assume that shelf space in those giant Borders is being squeezed off into hyperspace. [That was sarcasm again.]

[andrewwheeler.livejournal.com]

After I posted, I thought of a stronger argument -- for your side. Borders recently tightened their inventory quite seriously for financial reasons. So I think most people would say that Borders currently is stocking fewer SKUs (or, in their case, BINCs) than would be best from an inventory-management perspective. (Some Borders stores have shelves looking a bit sparse these days.)

So the shelf-space argument is still a decent one, generally and in theory, but I won't try to rely on it here. Borders is in a cash crunch, and that's behind their recently increased number of skips. (But hold that thought.)

I'm not entirely sure we are talking about "the total exclusion of large chunks of the midlist," since no one is talking publicly about the number of books skipped in any category. We do know that Sly Mongoose and Lord Tophet were skipped, because their authors came out and said so. And from the interest in this topic -- and many of the comments around the 'net -- it looks like many other authors have had similar experiences. But we really don't know what the percentage of skips was for Borders in, for example, the first six months of 2007 versus the first six months of 2008.

So we're assuming that there are suddenly more skips, but we don't really know that. (No one's even checked to see what the number of books published looks like -- there can be an increase in skips under the same inventory policies if the volume of books published goes up.)

That's as far as I'm willing to go without better data: it looks like Borders is skipping a larger percentage of probably the same volume of books published, almost entirely for financial reasons, and that looks to me to be a debatable inventory strategy at best.