Tacitus Schmacitus
by Ian Hocking
Scott Pack replies to a Guardian piece by Stuart Jeffries that (according to Scott; I haven’t read it) is another ‘why can’t bookshops be like the old days’ article.
Among other things, Scott writes:
Less than a decade ago it would have been possible to walk into a branch of Waterstone’s, especially some of the London shops, and ask for the bestselling book in the country only to discover that they didn’t stock it because ‘it wasn’t our sort of thing’. I remember an occasion when one branch refused to unpack a science fiction promotion because ‘our customers don’t like sci fi’. The same shop would complain whenever we ran a Jacqueline Wilson offer as ‘she’s a terrible writer and our customers can’t stand her’. I am not making any of this up. Is this what Jeffries wants? Really?
I’m not entirely convinced that this is a bad thing. When – years ago now – I was hawking my own book around branches of Waterstone’s, I had assumed (along with the public, I think) that such bookshops are essentially autonomous. However, on every occasion, I was told that the manager/manageress lacked the power to make buying decisions (or was too worried to exercise it), even when the decision centred on four or five books of a local author. So if there was a time when the managers of Waterstone’s branches were less timid, I’d say winding the clock back would be no bad thing.
He goes on to say:
Waterstone’s has branches in towns across the land. In some of these places a new Andy McNab novel will sell 20 or 30 times more than a new Martin Amis. The stock and merchandising of the shop should reflect that.
Which I agree with. I can’t stand Martin Amis and thoroughly enjoyed Bravo Two Zero when I was a teenager.
There is an interesting question at the heart of this debate. What do you or I want in a bookshop? Personally, I don’t really want bookshops at all. I want the recommendations of my friends and a web browser that gets me to Amazon.
Literature and the shops that sell it are two dissociable entities. As are, I think, words and books themselves.
Just four quick points:
1) Re: rewound clocks. The bestselling author in the country doesn’t need to be further promoted by being piled to the ceiling in Waterstones. Bookstores used to fulfill a useful function of connecting readers with new writers and new books. In the age of the recommendation engine (Amazon’s in particular), we no longer particularly need that function. But there’s still no call to reward success (rather than merit) with additional promotion. That’s not ‘giving the customer what he wants’ that’s a profit grab.
2) I’ve grown to accept that Martin Amis is the Marmite of contemporary English letters.
3) Andy MacNab has published a lot of books since Bravo Two Zero, none of them, I believe, readable. The non-fiction book demonstrates that he can string a sentence together; but the numerous fiction titles equally prove he can’t craft a story. Then again, Chris Ryan can do neither. Which reminds me that any seven-man SAS patrol that produces two bestselling novelists also doesn’t need our help or promotion.
4) You can’t wander into Amazon on a rainy Sunday and chat with the nice staff members, and caress and flip through new titles, and – with all the skill and stealth of an SAS patrol (or, rather, more stealth and skill than that one) – put your own books at the front of the display table, which the nice staff members now wink and nod at. (I’m not talking about Waterstones, incidentally, but Daunt in Chelsea. You can spot me at the nearby grocery checkout, as I’m the one with the 142 cloth Daunt Books bags spilling out of my other bag.)
Hi Michael
(1) Agreed.
(2) I bloody hate Marmite.
(3) This is true. I don’t even remember Bravo Two Zero being a good book…but it was certainly gripping.
(4) Yes, I do like that kind of bookshop – it’s just (as you say) Waterstone’s is not it, and it’s damnably hard to find non-Waterstone’s bookshops. There are one or two in Canterbury, Actually, I had a pleasant experience in a W’s yesterday. The chap saw that I was buying ‘Twilight’ (for my girlfriend! honestly!) and told me that it would be in my interest, financially, to buy all three on promotion. He even walked to the top floor of the shop to get me one with the correct cover so that the three would make a set. Nice chap.