THE DEPARTING CEO REMINDS US THAT BARNES & NOBLE IS OF INTEREST AND IS A SOURCE OF CONCERN FOR ALL PUBLISHERS
MIKE SHATZKIN
FOUNDER AND CEO OF IDEA LOGICAL COMPANY
THIS BLOG POST BY MIKE SHATZKIN WAS DATED JULY 9 , 2018 , BUT SINCE IT REFLECTS THE STATE OF OUR INDUSTRY , IT IS REPRINTED HERE WITH PERMISSION .
W
hen Barnes & Noble interrupted Holiday week day-dreaming to announce that recently elevated CEO Demos Parneros had been abruptly dismissed for a contract violation that also eliminated his severance , it not only ignited a minor industry of speculation about “ what happened ?” but it also called attention to the commercial situation at Barnes & Noble . And that , in a couple of words , is “ not good ”. There are two inexorable and unrelenting shifts taking place in the book businiess , and while neither of them are B & N ’ s fault , it is also true that neither work in B & N ’ s favor . One is that more and more book purchasing is taking place online and less and less in physical stores . And the other is that more and more books are being published and sold , or distributed , from outside the commercial realm . That is , the entities publishing books to make money on them are seeing their share being sliced away by countless cuts from independent authors and various corporate and cause organizations that want to put books into people ’ s hands and devices to increase their fame or promote a message , not primarily to make a profit .
Since Barnes & Noble ’ s great expertise centers around promoting and selling books to consumers in physical stores working with publisher trading partners who are trying to make a profit , that means that their part of the book market is just getting smaller in ways that could only be addressed by selling more online and being a more effective conduit for noncommercial distribution . They ’ ve failed miserably for two decades at the former and there isn ’ t big money in the latter .
Just before the Parneros announcement , I had lunch with an industry expert who expressed mild surprise that “ the publishers haven ’ t just bought B & N and fixed it ”. This same seer thinks Amazon may be teetering on the edge of vulnerability because they have taken the tactic of steering customers to their own product too far for their own health in the book business .
And on the day that Parneros ’ s firing was announced , I had met with a publishing veteran from just-smaller-than-Big-5 publishing . He does commercial books , but the ones that don ’ t usually command six-figure advances . He finds it hard to imagine how
WRITERS ’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE
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