A Bookseller Counts His Books
THE Christmas season is in full swing. The Bookstore is bustling with more visitors than we have in any other fortnight of the year: customers with Christmas lists in their hands surge speculatively from counter to counter. The selling fever has infected our entire staff.
My buyer keeps popping into my upstairs office saying, ‘ I ’ve had to order five hundred more of Gone with the Wind, ’ or, ‘We’ll need a hundred more of Drums along the Mohawk, and An American Doctor’s Odyssey is going fast — I ’ll have to reorder to-morrow.’ This constant demand for the best sellers makes me wonder: First, where is the money coming from to pay for all these orders? (Is the depression really over?) Second, what about the fifty thousand other titles we carry in stock? And third, why are we so foolish as to carry those fifty thousand other titles if no one seems to want them?
This led me to make an analysis of our sales. Instead of finding, as I expected, that the majority of our gross sales in dollars is represented by the best sellers, I found a very different story. Of our own list of best sellers, the first six in fiction and the first six in non-fiction represent only from 10 to 15 per cent of our total sales each week. The variation of 10 per cent to 15, one week against another, will depend on whether or not we have had a special campaign on some new leader. I then took the sales of the entire list of best sellers (some fifty titles) which appear on ‘What America Is Reading,’ the national chart of best sellers conducted by the New York Herald Tribune, and was surprised to discover that the dollar volume of the entire list (of course my six best in fiction and six best in non-fiction were included) represented only 18 per cent of my total sales for that week.
My curiosity next led me to analyze the remaining 82 per cent of sales. I had long known that my Scientific and Medical Department represented about 71/2 per cent of the total volume; that the Religious Department — which includes, in addition to current religious literature, Bibles, Prayer Books, and Hymnals, and (for some reason which I cannot fathom) maps, guides, globes, and so forth — was good for another 7 per cent. This figure will undoubtedly be increased by the very large sale, which we confidently expect, of The Bible: Designed To Be Read As Living Literature. It is interesting that for the first time in our 108 years of bookselling we are now treating the Bible as a new book and reporting it as one of our six best sellers. Unquestionably, if you will now look at the ‘What America Is Reading’ chart, you will see The Bible close to the top.
Periodicals, including subscriptions, amount to another 7 per cent; surprisingly large, perhaps, considering the fact that news stands are so prevalent throughout our city. Probably the sale of English periodicals not usually found at news stands accounts for this.
Our Rental Libraries produce another 8 per cent of our total volume. The few pennies a day per book do roll up when there are some four thousand titles from which to choose. This department started ten years ago and has grown steadily, taking its licking, of course, as did everything else in the book field because of the depression, but holding its percentage of the total. As a bookseller, I recognize that Rental Libraries may be an economy for the public, but oh, how unfair to the authors when from twenty to forty people get the pleasure and benefit out of one copy and the poor author the royalty on only one copy! Publishers, authors, and booksellers talk about this unfairness, but I fear that, like Mark Twain’s ‘weather,’ nothing will ever be done about it.
Dictionaries alone produce another 2 per cent, the great majority being the G. & C. Merriam publications. Reference books, which include cookbooks (and there are hundreds, with Fanny Farmer well in the lead), produce another 3 per cent.
If my arithmetic is correct, these various classifications, together with the best sellers, account for about 50 per cent of our total volume.
But what of the remaining 50 per cent? We know that publishers spend 90 per cent of their advertising money on less than 10 per cent of their titles. We know that only a few hundred authors out of some ten thousand ever have the pleasure of seeing their books appear on the ‘What America Is Reading’ chart. We know that the vast majority of titles shown us by the publishers’ travelers are purchased by us — not in large quantities, to be sure, but in fives, tens, even occasionally in twenty-fives.
There are several reasons why books do not make the best-seller grade. It may be that the fashion in books at the moment — and there is just as much fashion in books as in clothes — does not coincide with the time of publication. Sabatini’s earlier historical novels, when first, published in this country, sold only a few hundred copies each, because there was no ‘fashion’ for historical novels; but, when the fashion changed, these same titles were reissued and then sold into five figures. It may be that the reviews are noncommittal. This is the worst possible catastrophe that can happen to a book; a slamming review or a difference of opinion by reviewers often increases sales. Or it may be that the publisher had too little faith or too sound business judgment (depending on whether you are the author or the publisher) to spend a lot of money advertising the book.
Again, it may be that the title is wrong. A title hard to remember or to pronounce has killed many a book. A really great book, in my opinion, published a few years ago under the title of The Old Man Dies, never reached its deserved market because the public turns away, subconsciously perhaps, from ‘Old’ or ‘Death,’ except in a detective novel, and the combination of the two words was just too much. Willa Cather’s name is big enough to carry any title, as it did with Death Comes for the Archbishop, but — there is only one Willa Gather. It is just in the last few years that ‘Murder’ could be used successfully in the title of a detective novel.
Or it may be that the publicity is wrong. Every publisher to-day maintains a publicity department whose job is to find ways and means of calling the attention of booksellers, newspapers, and the public to a particular book. Some books and some authors naturally lend themselves to publicity, but, with the terrific compet ition of at least four times as many titles published each year as can be properly marketed by the booksellers, publicity departments cannot be expected to ring the bell for very many titles. It may be that the jacket is wrong. Publishers spend much time and money on the jacket with the hope that it will catch the eye of the bookstore browser. Here, again, the competition is tremendous, and a book which receives little or no advertising in the newspapers and magazines, and has a poor jacket, is doomed.
With some ten thousand titles published each year, it is obvious that booksellers cannot give adequate attention to all those which rightly deserve promotion. Publishers and authors complain bitterly at times that if the booksellers were really on their toes many more copies of this or that title could be sold. This is undoubtedly true so far as any one title is concerned, but a bookseller can concentrate, with some degree of success, on only a few titles at a time. This, of course, pleases a few publishers and authors, but naturally produces caustic remarks from those who are not thus favored. If, however, a bookseller concentrates too heavily on a few titles, he finds at the year’s end that many titles are no longer salable because their chief sales argument of being ‘just published’ no longer holds. Because the life span of a book is greatly reduced by the pressure of speed in American living, it is the exceptional book which is not forgotten two months after publication. That terrible date — December 31 — sounds the death knell of 90 per cent of all books published during the year.
Even when new books are published with the right title, jacket, publicity, and in fashion, the ripple they cause does not, in many cases, extend much beyond the author’s acquaintances. In some cases a small bookseller will get excited about a book and sell five times as many copies of that title as will be sold by the large booksellers. Very often we have sold from 5 to 10 per cent of the entire edition of a book (our normal sale would average about 1 per cent) just because it delighted us to the point of special promotion. As nearly as I can tell, these new books which do not become best sellers nevertheless do account for about 40 per cent of our total dollar volume.
The remaining 10 per cent of our sales are the good old standbys which sell year in and year out. Dickens still leads the field of the older writers, although even his popularity, so far as sales are concerned, grows less each year. Kipling sales increased somewhat this past year, probably owing to his death. Hardy is a very steady seller, with his Tess of the D’Urbervilles outselling any of his other titles. Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn still retain their popularity. The call for Stevenson is reaching the diminishing point, and the poor bookseller who stocks Meredith has a permanent investment. There is still a constant demand for the poets. In the juvenile field, Black Beauty, Heidi, Pinocchio, and the Alcotts, in their many editions, arc safer than government bonds as stock items. Alice in Wonderland sells bot h as a juvenile and as a grown-up, and I am sure that this title, if carried in our Scientific or our Religious Department, would sell even there.
My analysis of sales, however, has restored my confidence that we are on the right track in carrying those fifty thousand other titles; that we are doing our part in the distribution of all books; that the book world is not really dominated by best sellers; and, finally, that the vast majority of our authors, who never ‘make’ the best-seller charts, can find some consolation in the fact that booksellers are still ‘carrying on.’