Tacitus Schmacitus

Posted by on Nov 14, 2009 in publishing, shopping

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.

► Tacit agree­ment | theBookseller.com

  • http://www.michaelfuchs.org/life/words/ Michael Stephen Fuchs

    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.)

  • Ian

    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.