Philip Pullman leads writers condemning ‘pernicious’ book discounts
With more than two months to go before Philip Pullman’s longawaited new novel from the world of His Dark Materials is published, pre-orders have sent La Belle Sauvage flying up bestseller lists. But with booksellers already slashing the cover price in half, the award-winning author has spoken out about how cheap books devalue the experience of reading, and called for an end to the “pernicious” doctrine of “market fundamentalism” if literary culture is to survive.
Pullman is president of the Society of Authors, which is launching a campaign for publishers to stop damaging authors’ earnings by discounting bulk sales to book clubs and supermarkets, and has slammed the cut-price culture in his trade.
“I don’t like it when I see my books sold cheaply,” Pullman said. “But I’d like to think I’m speaking on behalf of all authors who are caught in this trap. It’s easy to think that readers gain a great deal by being able to buy books cheaply. But if a price is unrealistically cheap, it can damage the author’s reputation (or brand, as we say now), and lead to the impression that books are a cheap commodity and reading is an experience that’s not worth very much.”
He suggested the government should coordinate a search for new ways of working, involving representatives from across the book trade.
“We do need a discussion with all parties in order to come to some sort of settlement that is fair to all,” he said. “At the moment, the situation with discounting online, in supermarkets and book chains is absurdly unfair. The classic example was the final Harry Potter - a book, if there ever was one, that would have sold to everyone for full price, and which everyone discounted so much that enormous amounts of money must have been lost to the trade.
“Everyone in the books ecology, starting with the author and including the publisher, the distributor, the booksellers, the libraries and ending up with the reader, should benefit from a healthy book trade. The nation benefits in other ways too, that aren’t visible in the short term but stand out in stark relief over the long term. If a nation allows its literary culture to die, it’s a sign that it doesn’t fundamentally care.”
Pullman said that he was “not blaming any one of the parties involved in the book trade in particular” for the current situation, because “I want the whole trade to prosper”. Instead, he looked to “a simple villain - the doctrine of market fundamentalism, that the market knows best, and that a free market is the best of all possible states”.
“This is absolutely pernicious,” the novelist said. “Authors are not the only ones who suffer: so do other producers, such as farmers … The system is unbalanced. We need to rebalance it in a way which is fair to everyone. A price for a book is not fair unless it guarantees the writer a decent return.”
Pullman is not the only writer taking a stand. The Society of Authors’ campaign over “special” discount sales came after James Mayhew, creator of the Katie and Ella Bella Ballerina series, rejected a discounted deal his publisher proposed. Hachette’s Orchard imprint wanted to include 10,000 sets of 10 books from Mayhew’s Katie series in a discount book club catalogue - a deal for which he would recoup very little.
‘I was going to get approximately three or four pence per book’ … Ella Bella Ballerina author James Mayhew. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian
“It was a risk to speak out - it was a hard decision,” said Mayhew. “But I decided to do it when for the first time I sat down and did the sums, and worked out how little I was going to get - approximately three or four pence per book, for a series I have invested in for almost 30 years.”.
Citing research published in 2014 that found authors earned, on average, £11,000 a year, Mayhew calculated that he needs the royalties on his books to be around 50 or 60p per book. “Every author has fallow periods and we need royalties at these points to keep us ticking over,” he said, agreeing with Pullman that the “business model at the moment isn’t quite working”. But Mayhew went one step further than Pullman and called for a return of the Net Book Agreement (NBA), which allowed publishers to set retail prices but which was declared illegal at the restrictive practices court in 1997.
“It’s not completely impossible for some kind of new version [of the NBA] to be introduced,” Mayhew said, “and that’s the ultimate thing to hope for.”
Authors also need to educate the public, Mayhew continued. “People don’t realise how little the author gets. Even at a full price of £6 we are only getting approximately 50p. I think in the same way as people buy fairly traded in terms of food, I hope they might do so for books as well.”
Tamsin Rosewell, of independent bookseller Kenilworth Books, first sparked discussion about the discounting of Pullman’s novel with a blog in which she revealed that in order to be “part of the buzz” around La Belle Sauvage, she would have to sell the book at a loss or for no profit at all.
“The implication of a significant discount is that the goods have less value than their printed price,” wrote Rosewell. “I don’t think you could overstate the value that writers like Philip Pullman and JK Rowling add to our nation, so why are we devaluing them by discounting their work so heavily at the time when it is most desired - at the point of its first publication?”
Penguin Random House declined to comment on the discounting of Pullman’s novel. Stephen Lotinga, chief executive of the Publishers Association, said: “There is no prospect of a return to the NBA and we believe efforts are better focused on matters such as supporting booksellers in their call for a reduction in business rates, which could make a genuine difference for independent retailers up and down the country.”
Rosewell said that a new NBA would “need to be a little different”, but that she had “absolutely no problem with the idea that it is possible to reinstate it”. “The market is a human constraint - of course we can change … What is going on in the market generally is not really sustainable.”
Chocolat author Joanne Harris also agreed that she would like to see the NBA return in some form. “The power to offer books at a greatly reduced price has allowed supermarkets and online retailers like Amazon to overwhelm the market,” said Harris, “crushing all opposition and creating a virtual monopoly.”
She stressed that ensuring authors make a living is not only vital for the writers themselves, but also, in the longer term, for readers. “Most readers want a wide variety of books to choose from, not just a small selection of big-budget titles,” she said. “That means giving debut and diverse writers the chance to be published, and to earn a living - not just a handful of highly paid big names”.