A homage to Alan Street of Gardners

I realise that time has slipped by since The Cupboard’s last blog. It has been heartening to see sales of Nod off in French and Nod off in Spanish increasing month on month through the book wholesalers, Gardners Books.

As all publishers and most authors know, actually writing or producing a book is the easy bit. The hard bit is trying to get it into bookshops. A few years ago there was time for sales reps to visit bookshops and speak to booksellers. They could check the shelves and make sure that books that sold were re-ordered (and organise the return of those that didn’t). But with the advent of electronic tills, consumer buying has become easier to track. And book-stocking, particularly by the big chains, has become increasingly centralized. This exposed the reps as an ideal cost-cutting target. And where one publisher committed repicide, others were swift to follow.

So, with no reps left trying to keep booksellers informed, they have to glean information from marketing sheets, catalogues and reviews. Imagine trying to keep up with over two hundred thousand books published each year in Britain? That means 500 titles a day (with no stopping for holidays). With time an increasingly scarce commodity for all of us, booksellers now rely more on wholesalers (such as Gardners and Bertrams) to sort through the daily tide of titles and fish out ones they think will do best. Plus booksellers have accounts with the wholesalers. They don’t have time to deal with individual publishers (there are over 400 independent publishers alone, never mind the big publishing houses such as Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin and so on). Imagine your already valuable time being swallowed up dealing with all those different accounts departments.

So while you may think the book you have written/published is a sure-fire best-seller, even if it is a guide to bee-keeping in the fifteenth century, unless it is physically in a bookshop ringing up sales (and more importantly electronic data) then it will languish beneath the booksellers’ radar. And if it isn’t selling, then it can’t be much of a book. Many a good book has been published which has barely seen the light of day before it gets pulped through lack of sales. Once the book has been sucked into this cycle, there is very little the author and editor can do to rescue it – even though they know it’s a good solid title that would bring in steady (though may be not spectacular) sales over a number of years. I’m talking reference titles rather than fiction (which is an even more difficult area).

The Publishing Cupboard was immensely lucky to find itself washed up against Alan Street of Gardners Books. He took a chance with us. This means that any bookseller (Amazon included) can simply order our Nod offs from Gardners. They even appear in the Gardners online catalogue so that they come to booksellers’ attention. Don’t imagine that it comes cheaply. In order to secure this deal, we have to give a discount of over 55%. But as both Gardners and the bookshops themselves have to make some money, this is always going to be the case. It is something that the publisher just has to factor into its costs. Plus Gardners hold stock for you.

We get the best deal when people buy from our website. Although we pay postage and a fee to Nochex for each sale, we are left with the bulk of the asking price. Which means that we can go on and produce even more useful (and some may think, boring) titles. Something which is very close to our hearts. Nevertheless, we recognise the important role of the wholesaler and are grateful to Alan and Gardners for their continuing support.