The Publishing Contrarian

Where do I find the mass grave of the 2500 bookstores that went out of business between 1990 and 2006? I want to stand beside it and bid adieu to Murder Ink, Coliseum Books and Micawber Books—bookstores-turned-white-elephants that have recently succumbed at the ages of 34, 32, and 26, respectively—as their corpses are tossed on top of the bones of their erstwhile predecessors. Then I want to grab the owners of the 97 new independent bookstores that arrived on the scene in 2006 by the scruff of the neck, drag them to the edge of the grave and scream: “Don’t make the same mistakes these guys did.”  

Because they bring incredible enthusiasm and vigor with them, I love the idea of brave, out-of-industry folks entering the independent bookstore fray, but they’ll need more than bravado to be successful. If they’re to avoid the same fate as their forerunners, as my mystery entrepreneur said in last week’s post, they’ll need to bring fresh ideas and inspired new ways of doing business. And…they’ll have to figure out what is working for the top 100 independent bookstores and the largest independent bookstores like Barbara’s Bookstores, Bookshop Santa Cruz, Powell’s City of Books, City Lights Booksellers, Elliot Bay Book Company and The Tattered Cover Bookstore, then adapt their insights to their own enterprises.

Still Dining at The Alfresco Dumpster After All These Years! 

Did you see The New York Times Metro Section on January 10th, 2007, and the article: “Two Places Where Readers Hold On to Their Bookstores”? Peter Applebome, “Our Town” reporter, covered two 34-year-old bookstores about an hour out of the city nestled in suburban areas: Village Bookstore in (simply rich) Pleasantville, NJ, and Second Story Book Shop in (really rich) Chappaqua, NY.

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Let’s stop boo-hooing and get on to the business of conjuring up ways to reinvent those independent bookstores that are still managing to survive, while the big boxes and online retailers busy themselves trying to knock each other off with price wars and territorial imperatives. 

Actually, as I think about it, this situation is kind of like the implosion of the independent stock photography business in the late 1990’s and early 2000. [Stock photo agencies maintain libraries of photographs for commercial use by advertisers, packagers, publishers, web designers and the like. Originally, stock photos were “rights-protected” and were only leased to users, as opposed the more recent situation where many images are designated “royalty-free” and sold outright.] The industry was different, but the battle royale taking place between Getty Images and Corbus (think Microsoft) over dominance and market share wreaked havoc in that industry in a manner very similar to that being wrought on the independent booksellers now. Price wars turned $3500 rights-protected images into $250 images, while high-quality royalty-free (read: cheap) images ($79!) decimated the rights-protected business model. Small stock photo agencies hunkered down in fox holes, but most ended up waving white flags, joining one warring side or the other and surrendering their inventories—ostensibly as “acquisitions,” but more accurately as starving prisoners of war whose assets were pillaged. The dead stock photography agencies were buried.

As the business model shifted, it was all about “just surviving” and not going under until a new model could emerge. In the stock photo industry survival turned out to be about understanding what the people who bought photos really wanted and needed (mostly cheap, unprotected images), and then being willing and able to switch from bricks and mortar to clicks and mortar and ultimately to clicks alone (sound familiar?) in the nick of time. The stock photo industry shake-up and shakedown left a very different industry in its wake.

But enough of the gloom and doom. As Mark Twain said: Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. Let’s do something about it!

Wicked Witch Asks Entrepreneurs for Advice: I fired off emails to some entrepreneurs I know (not in the bookselling business) to get their insight into transitional periods when business models become outmoded and only the innovative will survive. Below is the strongest, most direct response I received. The businessman who fired off his recommendation sold his 25-year-old international company several years ago to a publicly traded company. Luckily, I caught him between tee times. He took the time to hold forth and give me his thoughts. He is also a HarperCollins author, by the way.

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My plan for New Year’s Eve was NOT to go to Times Square, thank you. I’ve been there. Believe me, once is enough. If you’ve ever been, you know you dare not lose your footing lest you get trampled to death. Not to mention that when your companion grabs you at midnight for a kiss, you can only pray that no one lurking beside you is making a grab for your wallet. For a decade, I’d danced until midnight at New Year’s Eve parties held at the Diplomats’ Dining Room at the United Nations. I’d wandered the 4 AM streets of the city on New Year’s morning trying to find a vomit-free cab. This year, however, I found I preferred a quiet champagne fizzle and the sleep of the networked-out innocent to the tabletop dancing girl of yesteryear.

Indeed, Terrible Teddy, aka TT (the 22 lb Maine Coon Cat I picked up about three weeks ago from ARF, The Animal Rescue Fund), and I cozied up together in front of a fire in East Hampton. We’d agreed to stay up until 11:59 PM, sipping warm milk (him) and other beverages (me) and then call it a year. Frankly, I think both of us were happy to watch my 2006 calendar go up in flames. Gargantuan TT had spent six months up island squished in a cage designed for your average-sized Tom cat. He was headed for the gallows when ARF rescued him (cherry picked him, they said) and—dare I say this—foisted this big, bad-ass cat off on me. (Hey, Sara Davidson, you think that I didn’t hear the front door slammed shut and bolted at ARF as a crated TT and I headed for my Jeep?) By New Year’s Eve, with the help of a full belly feeding and full body brushing, TT’s demeanor had turned from paw-swiping raptor to sandpaper-tongue kisser, and he had tentatively plunked his lard-ass self down on my lap, making sounds reminiscent of  a purr while I read The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty.

Here’s to 2006. [Unprintable.] Here’s to 2007! “Bottoms Up!”

Yes, I think the ringing out of 2006 signifies the end of a hard year for TT, too. He was in cat jail and I was spending the holiday season in civil court in Morristown, NJ, waiting for a verdict from a jury of my peers. I believe I was in bed in the fetal position with the covers pulled over my head on New Year’s Eve last year, unable to eat, eyes ringed with fatigue, hair falling out in clumps onto the pillowcase, 40–count ‘em–pounds skinnier than I already was. You know what I’m talking about: that Bela Szigethy v. Lynne Scanlon multi-year, multi-motion, trial-by-jury horror wrought by multizillionaire Bela Szigethy on me. (One of my New Year’s resolutions will be to only mention the lawsuit half as much as I have. I promise. Wait, stop trying to uncross my fingers!) I’ll be mopping up my own blood for years.

Let’s Party! Get Down!

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