Writers Tricks of the Trade Volume 6 Issue 2 | Page 34

ON AMAZON STORES AND PUBLISHERS ACCEPTING
STANDARDIZATION; TWO UNRELATED COMMENTARIES
Mike Shatzkin offers his insight about what is going on with Amazon
and brick and mortar stores. The Shatzkin Files is consistently an
interesting source of information, and this is a reprint from his blog dated
February 10,2016.
When the “Amazon-opening-400-stores” rumor landed a week ago, many
people were gobsmacked. It took me a minute to get past that, which also
required getting past my firm conviction when they opened the Seattle store
last year that it was an information-gathering exercise, not the opening move
of a bigger retail play.
But, when you think it through, it not only doesn’t seem crazy that
Amazon would open stores, it seems like an obviously compelling move.
Other retailers that started strictly online have opened retail locations,
most notably the eyeglasses shop Warby Parker. (This New Yorker
story mentions that. It also has an interesting disclaimer at the end
because “Amazon Studios is producing a New Yorker series in partnership
with Condé Nast Entertainment”. Wow.)
“Omni-channel”, which is really a new-fangled fancy term for selling both
online and through a brick store, is the buzzword du jour of retailing.
Actually, the online piece of that is the harder part and Amazon already had
that licked.
Barnes & Noble “beat” Borders largely because they had a network of
distribution centers that made stocking their retail locations extremely
efficient. Amazon’s network of distribution centers is complicated because it
isn’t just books, but they have many times the number of points of inventory
storage as B&N. In fact, they have many times the number of storage points
as B&N and Ingram and Baker & Taylor combined!
Amazon has tons of information that nobody else does that would inform
their stocking decisions if they harnessed it. They know where searches are
coming from for particular book titles or for generic needs, both
geographically and psychographically. And they probably can detect early
lifts for particular books faster than anybody else, simply because they have
more data.

Mike Shatzkin
Mike Shatzkin is the
Founder & CEO of The
Idea Logical Company
and a widely-acknowledged thought leader
about digital change in
the book publishing
industry.
In his nearly 50 years in
publishing, he has
played almost all the
roles: bookseller,
author, agent, production director, sales and
marketing director, and,
for the past 30 years,
consultant.
His insights about how
the industry functions
and how it accommodates digital change
form the basis of all of
the company’s
consulting efforts.
Read more about Mike
Shatzkin.

It is possible that if B&N and the indies had responded differently to
Amazon Publishing, agreeing to stock the books rather than boycotting them,
this could have played out differently. (No stronger argument could be made
MARCH
APRIL 2016
RITERS’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE
for
the- efficacy
of that strategy than this post
arguing
that storesWshould
PAGE
24
stock Amazon titles to punish them because the returns would make them
unprofitable! You can’t beat logic like that.) If the stores had stocked their