Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 3, Volume 8 | Page 41

be: ditch that supply chain and negotiate a
deal to lean on Ingram’s instead.
Also sensible is CNN’s notion that
Barnes & Noble should ditch its proprietary
Nook ebook platform. When it was first
launched 10 years ago, B&N found a ready
market for both ebook reader hardware
and the content itself from their store
shoppers who weren’t really online shop-
pers. Of course, that was very likely the
foundation of the chain’s business. But, in
time, that advantage ran its course. There
are fewer store shoppers who don’t shop
online than there were ten years ago. And
the explosive growth in the ebook market
has abated. So B&N is maintaining a brand,
including dedicated hardware and soft-
ware, on a flat or declining revenue base.
And hardware and digital content are not
where B&N has any branding or expertise
advantage.
It would certainly seem like a collabora-
tion with Kobo or Google would be a more
profitable and less demanding way for B&N
to maintain its relationship with ebook cus-
tomers than trying to maintain the Nook
brand.
The one part of a supply chain that B&N
needs to automate and own is a system to
employ data to make store stocking deci-
sions. They pioneered this in bygone days
with so many titles on automated reorders,
or what they called model stock. There is
no way to run small stores profitably with-
out new systems to reduce the need to
make human stocking decision. And there
is no way to compete against what Amazon
is likely to do over the next five years with-
out many more small stores than B&N
F ALL 2018
could open if they have to locate, lease, and
staff every one.
So the idea for survival from here is to
build out the brand by putting Barnes &
Noble book departments inside other peo-
ple’s stores. They can do this with Ingram’s
supply chain, if they automate the buying
decisions for the “last mile”. The more of
this they do, the more data they’ll have
about what is selling and where to improve
the automated stocking decisions.
Of course, the number one thing to do is
to make BN.com as customer-friendly and
robust for book and author discovery and
discussion as Amazon is. If they had done
that 10 or 20 years ago, they wouldn’t be in
the pickle they’re in right now. Either this is
a stark demonstration of how brilliant Am-
azon is at tech or it just reveals a massive
fail by B&N. Either way, they are now about
to compete with Amazon in the physical
space as well. Everybody in the publishing
world wishes them the very best of luck,
but the good wishes generally exceed the
expectations.
It would be disingenuous of me not to reveal
explicitly that I have long enjoyed a very good
relationship with Ingram and am working on
an exciting project with them at the moment
that has nothing at all to do with the sugges-
tions in this piece. I only hasten to add that my
role with them is both modest and quite tangen-
tial to their extraordinary capabilities, which
are managed very well with absolutely no help
from me.
Mike Shatskin
P AGE 36
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE