Publisher’s Plans Anger Bookstores

Posted by: imani on: January 11, 2007

• In: Current Events | General | Publishing
• 9 Comments

If this deal goes through as is I will no longer buy books from Chapters.

A pilot marketing project would give the bulk of its budget to the Chapters/Indigo chain, independent bookstores complain

JAMES ADAMS

From Thursday’s Globe and Mail

Representatives of a consortium of six medium-sized Canadian-owned publishers are scheduled to meet today in Toronto with members of the Canadian Booksellers Association to try to resolve a dispute over a controversial book-marketing “pilot project” scheduled to start next month and largely targeting Chapters/Indigo stores.

The $120,000 scheme by the consortium — whose members are McArthur & Co., McClelland & Stewart, Raincoast Books, House of Anansi Press, Cormorant Books and Thomas Allen Publishers — would put themed displays of the publishers’ books in high-traffic areas in Chapter/Indigo outlets on four separate occasions throughout the year.

Five or six backlist titles from each of the publishers would be featured at any one time, for a duration of at least four weeks, with Chapters/Indigo ordering as many as 3,000 copies of each title. Chapters/Indigo representatives will choose the books to be presented from lists supplied by the publishers.

Almost 70 per cent of the $120,000 would be used to purchase ads in various Chapters/Indigo publications and on its website, while the balance would be used for advertisements in Canadian newspapers.

The plan by the newly formed More Canada Marketing consortium has raised the ire of some of Canada’s independent booksellers not only because of its focus, for 2007 at least, on 90 large-format Chapters and Indigo outlets — the independents’ biggest competitors — but because the consortium is hoping to get money from the federal and Ontario governments to make it happen.

One of the key figures in the consortium, McArthur and Co. founder and president Kim McArthur of Toronto, is unapologetic about the scheme, or at least its goal.

Canadian-owned publishers have drastically declined in number in the past 10 years, she said last week, and those remaining lack the resources of foreign-owned firms such as Random House of Canada and Penguin Canada.

Hence, the need for government support “for Canadian titles from Canadian-owned firms.” As for the emphasis on the Chapters/Indigo stores owned by Indigo Books & Music, “we can’t help it that Indigo is such a big part of our market.” Indeed, McArthur estimated the company, with its 230-plus stores nationwide, “accounts for 70 per cent of our business.” A pilot project “has to start somewhere, and why shouldn’t it be with a national retailer?”

This “collaborative effort,” as Sorya Gaulin, Indigo’s vice-president of public relations, calls it, is the result of a meeting McArthur had last January with Indigo founder and CEO Heather Reisman and Joel Silver, the chain’s head of print procurement. McArthur told Reisman that she was worried about the “ghastly” number of returns Canadian publishers were taking from Indigo and how these publishers needed some sort of compensatory regime because “we don’t have the balancing effect of something like The Da Vinci Code to keep up our revenue stream.”

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Here is the rest of the article. I don’t pay taxes (yet) but the idea that these publishers want taxpayers money to channel their books into a single retail store in Canada seems rather ludicrous. Seriously? Seriously.