An earlier Inside Publishing dealt with
Book clubs and Mail order. The other half
of the non-retail market is called ‘direct selling’, sometimes
known as display marketing. This encompasses selling at home, in the
workplace and door-to-door. It has become much more important in the
UK and in the US, although it is still relatively rare elsewhere.Non
book-buyers
The theoretical basis for direct selling is that many people never go
into bookshops, because they find them intimidating or they do not
habitually buy books. The intention is to reach them directly, often in
their place of work, and to show them the books, selling them on the spot
or taking their orders to be fulfilled on a future visit.
Low prices
Two factors are important in relation to selling books in this way: the
pricing and the visual appeal of the books. The direct sellers usually
negotiate very good deals with the publishers for large volumes of books,
which are often specially printed for them with the seller’s logo. They
get a ‘run-on’ price, as the start-up costs of the book have been set
against the main ‘bookshop’ edition. This enables them to offer the
books at very low ‘bargain’ prices, which are attractive to the
impulse purchaser and also encourage gift purchase.
What kind of books?
The books which work best for direct sellers are highly illustrated
colour titles, although reference also sells well, especially if the books
are being sold to a market concerned about children’s homework.
Children’s books in general do well, as do Cookery, Health, Mind, Body and
Spirit, Gardening and other popular hobby areas. Gift books can do
extremely well and offer real value-for-money appeal if they look
attractive and expensive.
The books that don’t sell well through direct sellers are fiction,
which is pretty dull to look at, and more serious non-fiction which is not
in an illustrated format. Both of these need a readers’ market and sales
are driven by the author’s name, the subject matter, the bestseller lists
or reviews and press coverage.
Door-to-door
There is much less door-to-door selling of books than there used to be,
now that encyclopaedia salesmen no longer ply their wares from street to
street but sell on the Internet, on disk or CDROM. The increasing
sophistication of mail order lists and the opportunity to sell on the
Internet have made the old sales approaches seem a bit hit-and-miss.
Targeted selling is much more in vogue now.
Selling from home
Selling from home is rather like Tupperware parties used to work. It
has also fallen out of fashion, but there was a time when firms such as
Dorling Kindersley employed a large army of sales people who worked from
home in this way.
What about the author?
From the author’s point of view, the problem with direct selling is
that the author only gets a small royalty, which is based on receipts,
i.e. the amount the direct selling operation pays for the books, rather
than the published price. To balance this, there is the fact that large
numbers of books may be sold. Another factor is the anxiety that the sales of
books at very low prices may affect sales from bookshops, on which the
author gets a higher royalty.
Very cheap books
There is great concern that the availability of very cheap books is
starting to affect the public perception of the price of books. If you
can buy a big colour book for £5 or £10 ($7.99 or $12.99), why should it
cost three or four times as much from a bookshop? This is particularly
the case in the UK, which is thought to have the deepest book discounts in
the world. It’s nice that consumers get cheap books, but less good for
everyone else involved, particularly the authors and the bookshops.
But do books sold at a large discount through non-book outlets
affect the perceived value of all books? If you subscribe to the idea
that the direct sellers are selling books to people who don’t usually buy
them, you will not be concerned about this. But if you think that the
catalogue distributed through the Sunday papers by the British direct
sellers the Book People is actually reaching a lot of book-buyers and
making other books seem expensive, than you might feel differently about
this. The jury is out.
Chris Holifield
