Will holiday sales help Canadian book biz?
Publishers and retailers temper expectations for normally lucrative season
In New York, a week or so ago, the famous Strand bookstore sent out a call: “We Need Your Help!”
“The Strand’s revenue has dropped nearly 70 per cent compared to last year,” wrote the shop’s proprietor, Nancy Bass Wyden, in a letter. “We need to mobilize the community to buy from us so we can keep our doors open until there is a vaccine.”
And like some present-day remake of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” customers lined up around the block and placed so many orders for books they crashed the website.
The famed Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Co., also made an appeal to its customers in a message this week. “We are struggling, trying to see a way forward during this time when we’ve been operating at a loss, with our sales down almost 80 per cent since March.”
Book buyers around the world were mobilized by the calls, their generosity rivalling that of George Bailey’s friends and supporters when they stepped in to save their local Building and Loan. The last time I checked, neither site was taking orders, but they were taking a short hiatus to process all those they’d received.
The massive losses in sales for book retailers are happening across the board, including in Canada. As we head into the important holiday shopping season, the publishing industry is hopeful the pivots they’ve made to deal with COVID-19 will take them through the season, even as they keep their expectations modest.
“We’re basically keeping our head above water,” says Ben McNally, proprietor of the Toronto bookstore of the same name. Sales are down 70 per cent since the beginning of pandemic lockdown in March; still, he says, “We’re lucky.”
In a confluence of events, he’s undertaken more change than most other booksellers this year, having to give up his expensive downtown Toronto digs when his lease ran out at the end of August, and move to anew location in the east end of the city. It’s saved him a lot on rent and allowed him the relative luxury of not being tied into a lease; he can be flexible in his future plans.
And there are bright spots. McNally is noticing customers are buying more books at once: “People aren’t going out of the house so much, we’re seeing a lot more 10-book sales,” he says.
He also has a program where he sends customers a book every month. Take-up on that program is up about 20 per cent since March.
But that’s exacerbated another problem: uncertainty in inventory and stock. Because he doesn’t have walk-in traffic, he says, it’s difficult to decide how many books to order; and sometimes when he’s gone to order a book, it hasn’t been available. He’s finding it a lot more difficult to get his hands on smaller-run new books that might be specific to his customers’ interests. “Our business is built on what we think is good, as opposed to what’s out there.”
Uncertainty and unpredictability is likewise the wild card for David Caron, publisher of indie house ECW Press. We can’t predict where COVID-19 is going take us — are bookstores going to have to close down again, for example?
“One trend that we can predict is that readers will buy more of their books online (and we will market our books primarily online),” he says. “For the last decade, our online sales have been about one-third of our sales, slightly more than 32 per cent on average. And now they’re getting up to 60 per cent.”
What’s wonderful to see, he says, is that “a good chunk of this has been through indie booksellers.”
Caron says, as a publisher, shipping is costing him more — instead of big orders from booksellers he’s getting multiple small orders. However, McNally, as a bookseller, passes on the cost of shipping to customers.
“We have to protect our margins as much as possible or else we’re not going to be around,” McNally says. “I sort of worry about ( independent bookstores) who are losing money on shipping.”
The big elephant in the room in any talk about bookselling is Amazon. The company, says Caron, has been “a great way to get books to readers,” but its unpredictability since the beginning of COVID-19 causes him some concern.
“As they said publicly in March and April, they were not letting in any products besides ‘essential’ products and books didn’t make that cut. That loosened up for us around the end of April, but there have been sporadic ‘outages’ since then, lasting a few weeks at times,” Caron says. “It’s like your power going out. You’re not sure when it’s going to come back on. And when it does, you’re worried when it’s going to go out again. As orders ramp up for the holidays, what’s going to happen?”
Big publishers are facing the same concerns in terms of getting their books to customers — especially for big books such as Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land,” out Nov. 17 from Penguin Random House.
“We’ve been preparing for a holiday season that’s begun much earlier than usual this year as no one is quite certain what the shopping experience will be like,” says Beth Lockley, vice-president of sales and marketing at Penguin Random House Canada.
“Knowing that there would be challenges around printer capacity, we’ve done a lot of work upfront to manoeuvre around these issues and to make sure we have a steady flow of books coming in to ensure all our bookselling partners are as consistently supplied as possible through the holiday season,” she says, adding that “having consumers shop early and instore where they can is definitely ideal.”
One of the positive spots for publishing throughout COVID-19 has been in ebooks, during which Kobo Rakuten Canada CEO Michael Tamblyn says he saw massive increases in reading activity.
“I think what we saw during COVID was about a 90 per cent increase in the amount of reading that was happening on the platform. So an almost doubling of the amount of time that people were spending; people had time on their hands.”
While book sales fell in the first part of the year, according to BookNet Canada, they did bounce back “significantly” as stores began to reopen in June, July and August. Weekly sales during those months “have generally been trending above the corresponding weeks from 2019,” it reported at the end of August.
Which is all to say, it takes a community of book lovers to save a local business — and perhaps to save an industry that is warily eyeing the lead-up to Christmas, tempering their expectations and hoping that customers will keep on reading and keep on buying until we finally find our way through to the other side.