A lot of surprise has been expressed about the demise of A & R bookstores and by association, Australian Borders bookshops (also owned by REDgroup retail).\u00a0\u00a0Voluntary administration is the slippery slope to bankruptcy.<\/p>\n
I’m actually surprised they didn’t go broke a few years ago – to me that’s the astonishing part.\u00a0\u00a0 And I was mourning the demise of A & R when they ceased publishing (great Australian books) and were bought out by an overseas investment company.<\/p>\n
Blame has been sheeted home variously to the increase in online book purchases, E-books, the GFC, parallel importation laws, the higher price of books in Australia\u00a0etc etc.<\/p>\n
However the bankruptcy of A & R boils down to one thing.\u00a0 Appallingly bad business management (from the top).\u00a0 Selling what they wanted to sell and\u00a0how they wanted to sell it, rather than selling what the average Australian customer wanted and providing good service.\u00a0 For example, stocking a huge percentage of books written by overseas authors (instead of locally produced books), and a huge percentage of stock\u00a0being best sellers – not necessarily in Australia –\u00a0 i.e. cheap books to buy in and whack a massive margin on (instead of stocking a wide variety and assisting book lovers to purchase specific titles, and speedily).<\/p>\n
It’s easy to blame increasing online sales for the fall in retail sales in recent months, as Gerry Harvey and others did not long ago.\u00a0 But in reality, it’s the superb service and provision of better quality information\u00a0on items for sale by online sellers that is taking business away from\u00a0traditional shopfronts.\u00a0\u00a0 Because however time-poor most Australians think they are, many treat shopping as recreation, not an onerous activity.\u00a0 And the vast majority of people would much prefer to walk into a shop and handle goods before buying.\u00a0 When it comes to books\u00a0it’s certainly true that most\u00a0buyers prefer to walk up to the shelf, lift off books and have a flick through (a quick look at any images and reading a line or two from different parts of the book)\u00a0– feeling the weight of the book and assessing (unconsciously or otherwise) the quality of it – before handing over their hard-earned money.\u00a0\u00a0 Bookbuyers are buying online because they either can’t get the books they want from conventional bookshops or the price is very much cheaper online.<\/p>\n
A & R began as a fabulous Australian publishing company and ended as a business taken over by a pack of money-hungry investors.\u00a0 Like any business, if it’s run by people who don’t love the specific business they are in and who are only in it for the money, then it will show up one way or another.<\/p>\n
Everyone seems to have forgotten the furore several years ago\u00a0caused by the A & R demand to publishers to pay for shelf space.\u00a0 It’s the best public illustration of business managers\u00a0absolutely clueless about good business management.\u00a0 Any smart retail business manager knows\u00a0success is dependent on a healthy, happy partnership between the producer and the seller – there must be enough profit on both sides for everyone to stay in business (and eat).\u00a0 A & R made enemies of the publishers who supplied them with stock to sell by insisting on one-sided business arrangements, capped off by their astonishingly greedy demand for\u00a0shelf space fees a few years ago.\u00a0 Any\u00a0remaining illusions book publishers had been under, regarding the goodwill A & R management had towards them, evaporated overnight.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What is not of course known is the other bad business practices.\u00a0 These are a few I have personally encountered when dealing with A & R over more than 5 years: \u00a0a policy of stocking almost no\u00a0 books produced by authors living in the local area unless they were sold in all other A & R stores; stocking self-published books\u00a0only if they could squeeze on to the tiny \u00a0‘local’ list or if they had already become best-sellers; head office refusal to even bother answering requests to be included in sales catalogues (for a good fee, of course); standard supplier payment terms of 60-90 days after the end of the month, and quite often closer to 120 days; the necessity for publishers chasing A & R payments to have to ring overseas, and at overseas business opening hours; adding an extra amount onto the publisher’s recommended retail price (although the wholesale price is a percentage based on the RRP) and not even informing the publisher….the list goes on.\u00a0 In short A & R management have\u00a0treated suppliers like dispensable cash cows and customers like idiots who should be prepared to fork out their hard earned cash for whatever it suited A & R to sit on their shelves.\u00a0 And now A & R\/REDgroup retail\u00a0are bleating they’ve gone leg up and looking around for others to blame.<\/p>\n
The demise of A & R is a good thing for the Australian publishing industry – it has cleared the field of dead wood and will assist the many independent booksellers to flourish.\u00a0 A & R have been taking the cream off the top by stocking a relatively narrow range of the top-selling imported books (easier), rather than a wide range (to suit the customers).\u00a0\u00a0 I deal with bookselling businesses from Townsville to Darwin, Broome, Perth and Melbourne and all points inbetween.\u00a0 Some are completely independent while many others belong to a buying group.\u00a0 Almost all the booksellers I deal with are booklovers and good business managers.\u00a0 We consider one another allies and are genuinely pleased to see one another do well.<\/p>\n
I feel very sorry for the book loving staff amongst the A & R employees, including the manager of the A & R bookshops here in Townsville, who has been fabulous to deal with over the last 5 years.\u00a0\u00a0 Many have expressed exasperation over the years because there has been improvements they would like to have made but they have not been allowed to.\u00a0\u00a0I am confident\u00a0these people will do well if they take on an independent bookselling business themselves.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I would encourage booklovers to resist the urge to buy magazines and books from the chainstores such as Big W, Target and K Mart.\u00a0 These retailers are cherrypicking a tiny number of the top selling titles and slashing the retail price to bottom-drawer\u00a0through massive buying power, in the same way that Woolworths and Coles cherrypick top draw pharmaceutical lines and leave pharmacies to sell everything else.\u00a0\u00a0Many members of the public are\u00a0bleating about the high costs of some items in speciality shops, not realising it costs a lot more to stock\u00a0a\u00a0wide range of slow-selling items than a narrow range of top sellers.<\/p>\n
Down the bottom of the pile is the producers of the goods for sale in bookshops\u00a0–\u00a0authors.\u00a0 Australians need reminding that most authors receive something like a pitiful 1% of RRP and that a large print run is around 10,000 in Australia.\u00a0 Months or years of work is\u00a0poured into writing a book yet authors receive a fraction of what is the average annual income for an Australian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A lot of surprise has been expressed about the demise of A & R bookstores and by association, Australian Borders bookshops (also owned by REDgroup retail).\u00a0\u00a0Voluntary administration is the slippery slope to bankruptcy. I’m actually surprised they didn’t go broke a few years ago – to me that’s the astonishing part.\u00a0\u00a0 And I was mourning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1161"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1168,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions\/1168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}