Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 3, Volume 8 | Page 39

publishers will navigate a world without
B&N in it and is quite candid about how dif-
ficult negotiations with the already-nearly-
hegemonic Amazon already are with the
B&N counterweight still alive and active.
To be clear, there is no suggestion in the
Parneros firing or in any recent financials
that B&N’s demise is imminent. But the
store sales shrinkage is evident and shows
no signs of abating. And there is nothing in
the performance of their dot com business
that suggests they’ve cracked any codes af-
ter nearly two decades of pretty steady loss
of share of the online book business to Am-
azon.
The suggestion that publishers buy and
fix B&N surprised me a bit. There was talk
about publishers setting up their own
online book sales competitor to Amazon 20
years ago and it is evident now why that
wouldn’t have worked. Amazon’s signifi-
cant competitive advantage came from the
fact that making money from the book
business wasn’t their primary objective:
building a customer base on the back of the
book business to create a bigger market-
place and ultimately a cloud computing be-
hemoth was where they were going. No
publisher or consortium of publishers was
going to adopt a vision like that.
But the suggestion does have logical el-
ements. Publishers have the most to gain
from a prosperous Barnes & Noble and the
most to lose if it goes away. Publishers are,
along with store lease-holders, B&N’s most
significant trading partners and creditors.
And Amazon competes as a publisher,
Barnes & Noble still owns a publisher, and
major publishers owned the Brentano’s and
Doubleday bookstore chains in decades
F ALL 2018
past, so publishers and booksellers have
owned each other over the years.
I hadn’t seriously thought about the
idea but I did when it was suggested by a
worthy observer. But still, from here, the
challenges of creating a partnership that
could actually operate and synergize on
publisher strengths such as author connec-
tions, in-house end-customer lists and
communication, and all that a publisher
knows about the timing of promotional op-
portunities around any particular book ti-
tle, look insuperable.
Even without new owners, Barnes &
Noble doesn’t lack for suggestions about
how to improve their business. A piece
from CNN earlier this year enumerated a
number of ideas:
1. Downsize and curate
2. Ditch Starbucks
3. Build a community
4. Be like Indigo and sell “home goods”
5. Kill Nook
The post-Parneros chatter I’ve seen
leans heavily on the “success” of the
Waterstone’s UK turnaround under
bookseller James Daunt; many on listservs I
frequent think B&N could fix their prob-
lems if they just hired a smart indie
bookseller to head things up. With all re-
spect to what Daunt has accomplished, the
challenges of running a massive operation
of hundreds of stores are quite different
from what it takes to run one store or three.
The skill sets just don’t overlap.
In addition to those pesky inexorable
trends, there’s one more big problem loom-
ing: Amazon is just beginning to move into
the brick-and-mortar space. There are only
a handful of Amazon bookstores now, but
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W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE