Sean Williams

You know, I'm a little conflicted....as a librarian, cheaper books (especially medical ones) would be nice, but I don't believe that authors should be penalised. Oh the conflict, the conflict.

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Cheaper books are definitely a good thing, and I am painfully aware that the fiction and non-fiction markets are very different. There are no guarantees, however, that lifting import restrictions will result in cheaper novels for readers, particularly when the $A is weak against other currencies. The report itself acknowledges that at an exchange rate of .69 (which we know is the ten year average) there is no differential on price.

Some other points to bear in mind, from the PC report (which I'm sure you're already aware of):

- The industry is "flourishing" right now.
- The report predicts "a reduction in publishing activity" if restrictions are lifted, and that Australian "authors would generally face reductions in their income" via "lower royalty payments" and other mechanisms.
- This "would likely result in some authors exiting the market, and might discourage some others from entering it", which is something of an understatement. Our average wages are already among the lowest around!
- "[N]ew or undiscovered authors would find it more difficult to gain attention in an open market". Quote-unquote.
- The report also highlighted an increase in "the difficulty for all new authors in obtaining local publication".

Not very cheery all round, if you're a writer or have writer friends. :-(

(Re-posted to get rid of an egregious typo.)

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Actually, we librarians are screwed budget wise no matter which way we go. Medical texts will not go down in cost. So I support the writersw, because if you lot don't make a living, who's going to write the things I want to to read?

Also Swancon on RN
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2009/2535756.htm

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Great to see Swancon getting some publicity. I wish, though, that mainstream media could resist plastering any kind of SF mention with pictures of people dressed up as Klingons. I have nothing against cosplayers or Klingons, but it does paint as a bit of a monoculture, when in fact we're a very diverse bunch.

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I spent half of Wednesday explainging to people who know that I read in theis field, that science fiction is just bloody Star Trek (no I'm not a fan) or Star Wars (ditto, sorry Sean. I do read your other stuff).

My preferred science fiction is that of Le Guin, Stanley Robinson, and Alfred Bester.

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christinebongers.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)

Great advice for the thousands of book lovers being bombarded with the Dymocks petition. The Brisbane protest is being organised by a group of children's authors who are conscious of sparing innocent staff; their argument is with those much higher up. They are a nice mob, those children's authors; can't see it turning ugly. :)

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I'm sure it won't, but one bad image in a Dymocks-friendly paper would cast all us writers as a bunch of agitating whingers. That would be a terrible thing.

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To misquote:

Well-behaved writers seldom make history.

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Ha! Maybe. Perhaps that's what I'm doing wrong. :-)

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The original quote (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/harrison.html) is my standard reply at work when someone calls me bossy, or stroppy.

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nyssa-p.livejournal.com

Aha! I got that email the other day and scoffed at it.

Now you've just given me a shiny sword to use. I imagine if I flail it about, it'll hit something at sometime. :P I'll do it!

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Hurrah! Good on you. And thanks. The more people who do this, the better. Here's what I wrote in my unsub letter:

"I'm unsubscribing from your Booklovers newsletter in protest at the email sent in support of lifting trade restrictions on Australian books. This will gut the local publishing industry and ruin the careers of hundreds of Australian writers. Dymocks is making tons of money already. If you really cared about cheaper books for Australians, you'd pressure the government to drop GST from booksales instead."

A bit dumbed-down, but I figure that's what I really wanted to say.

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Books should be GST free. I hate the GST. It wrecked a perfectly good Interlibrary Loans system that worked like slightly disfunctional clockwork. Howard will always have my emnity for that.

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The Democrats didn't make any friends out of it either...

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It was Howard's idea.

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ladnews.livejournal.com

He was definitely the prime bastard in this case (and so many others).

Edited Date: 2009-04-09 05:27 am (UTC)

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Tar and feathering is too good for the man.

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Yeah. Political suicide could be used in there somewhere, if a slowish version.

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As an employee of Dymocks myself, I can indeed confirm that we on the 'ground floor' have had no input whatsoever into this petition - we all just received it via email, same as you folks. It's difficult to predict what effect - if any - a concerted protest from writers might have on the proposal, but I suspect The Powers That Be will certainly be surprised: from what I've gleaned from chatting to others, it seems that this petition is more about being seen to pursue a customer-pleasing policy (we get *so* many complaints from customers about the cost of books in Australia compared to overseas) at a time when saving money is at the forefront of everyone's mind. I'd honestly be surprised (although obviously I don't know for sure) if Dymocks had even thought about the effect this may have on local writers.

On a more personal note, like others, I'm somewhat torn on the subject - cheaper books would be nice, but I'd also hate to think that the local literary scene would suffer. On the other hand (the self-serving one), I personally don't make an actual living from writing; I need to sell books to get by, and if customers aren't buying books due to pereceived high cost, that's me stuffed. :)

In the end, abandoning the petition altogether seems likely to hurt the least number of people, particularly since the current recession's got to end sometime, and readers may then stop complaining so bitterly about prices.

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Stop complaining? Not when I saw a $26 MMPB the other day, we won't.

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Well, everybody needs a hobby. :) Seriously, though - that is too damn pricey for a PB. I wouldn't have bought it either. Unfortunately, unless the owner of the shop in which you saw that book has hiked up the price beyond all reason (which is not impossible), it's likely that the retail price is simply based upon a standard mark-up from the cost price (which would therefore also have been too damn high). And lemme tell you, it's not a big mark-up, either. Standard mark-up on books is around 66% on cost; compare this to the average mark-up on food, electronics, homewares, and virtually anything else you can think of, which can be anything from 100-500%! Factor in such things as competetive pricing, theft and nonreturnable firm sales, and I guarantee you that (most)booksellers don't make much more on books than writers do, no matter what the conventional wisdom on that point may be. I'm sure that publishers could provide ample justification for the existing prices on books (labour, materials, etc), but if anyone expects books to get cheaper, it needs to start at the publishing level; and if that were to happen, it seems likely that payments to writers would also dwindle. Doesn't seem to be an easy answer here.

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Not that I know, but my guess is the book transporters must be making some money here.

The most expensive place I mentioned above is Borders. They are always the most expensive. Dymocks is somewhat more reasonable.

Still, something is broken when (exchange rate craziness aside), you can get 'em cheaper from the other side of the world as individual items. Part of the problem maybe, there are so many titles?

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Agreed, on all points. :) I may be wrong, but I'd always believed that transportation costs were simply taken out of publishers' costs, and thus shouldn't represent an additional 'slice' of the overall rrp of a book.

Yes, Borders are expensive (as are A&R now, since they're trying to recoup the cost of buying Borders), but some of this is due to the fact that they (Borders) import a fair number of titles, and add the cost of freight to the standard book price, rather than waiting for local release. The upside of this is that they can catch a bigger slice of the market for a given OS title before local editions arrive; however, the wait for local imprints of big OS releases is usually only a month or so, and (judging from my store's sales figures) only the real die-hard fans seem willing to pay 20-40% more to get that must-have book the second it becomes available, so I'm not sure whether this actually works for Borders or not.

Licensing payments to OS publishers aside, I still don't understand why a US PB will cost around US$7.99 (say, AU$12 at present), while a locally-printed (not imported) edition of the same title will cost anywhere from $19.95 - $21.95 (and still creeping up - in recent weeks, I'm seeing a number of $24.99 PBs that seem identical in size etc to the $19.95 ones).

As far as ordering individual titles from OS is concerned, much as I hate to say it, readers are better off going via Amazon etc than ordering through a bookshop: online, you'll only cop the standard OS price, with a very small postage charge on top, thanks to Amazon passing on their own savings on 'bulk' postage; since most local bookshops only buy small quantities of OS titles at a time, postage is far steeper, and this naturally gets passed on to the buyer at this end (I recall that A&R used to charge an extra flat rate of $6.50 postage for any item ordered from OS).

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"Licensing payments to OS publishers aside, I still don't understand why a US PB will cost around US$7.99 (say, AU$12 at present), while a locally-printed (not imported) edition of the same title will cost anywhere from $19.95 - $21.95 (and still creeping up - in recent weeks, I'm seeing a number of $24.99 PBs that seem identical in size etc to the $19.95 ones)."

Yeah, this is the bit where I suspect some middle-man does well. While there is some transport involved, this suggests that Australian printers are worth 40% of a books costs or something.

Even if you stick 'em in your garden variety consumer post satchel, a bookshop's postage on a few paperbacks at normal punter rates (assuming they aren't Stephens King or Erikson) is a couple of dollars? One at a time isn't much - so how does the printing/distro bit locally get so much cash?

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"Even if you stick 'em in your garden variety consumer post satchel, a bookshop's postage on a few paperbacks at normal punter rates (assuming they aren't Stephens King or Erikson) is a couple of dollars? One at a time isn't much - so how does the printing/distro bit locally get so much cash?"

I suspect because nobody's really called them on it yet. :)

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Yeah, so who wants to write the reverse case - Australian book distribution a rort, costing multiple times that of other countries?

Certainly must be tied in to current protectionism somehow?

Probably articles on the net I gues about the cost breakdowns elsewhere, so could compare that, taking in your historical exchange rate and the Democrat Toerag Bendover Merchant tax.

Given what you and Sean are saying about it not being the writers and booksellers getting the extra cash.

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It may not necessarily be protectionism: it may simply be a case of 'this is how much we charge', and nobody has ever seen fit to challenge it. For example, it's only over the past couple of years that customers have started to question the price of books in local bookstores, and that's only because the popularity of Amazon and others has educated readers as to how books ideally *should* be priced. Before that, nobody ever gave it a thought (not even local booksellers). It would be interesting to see what the response to a challenge to the distributors would be, though - probably much like the response of the banking industry a few years back when customers suddenly realised how much they were paying in fees for supposed services: Tough.

To be honest, there's probably also an issue over what all the various people involved with writing, publishing and selling a book consider to be a 'decent' profit. Personally, as a bookseller, I don't think retaining 30-40% of the rrp is all that great: with that sort of margin, I need to sell a hell of a lot of books to pay for overheads before even thinking about making an actual profit. On the other hand, speaking as an author, 40% represents a comparative fortune. I supect that if you asked publishers, printers and distributors to justify their costs, they could do so easily (on paper, at least).

In the end, any changes to pricing will come down to a hell of a lot of compromise between all concerned, and it's bound to be a horribly messy process. Can you really see anyone involved agreeing to make *less* money in order to make the pricing 'fairer'? Meh.

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The Book Depository actually does free shipping to Australia, for books that you can source via the UK - which can take a little time if the US only version.

Fishpond does it if you order $50 worth. Not so useful for 1 book, of course. They are also oz/nz focused, so nice to use them as a sort of compromise.

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It sounds like BD have worked out their costing vs pricing far more realistically than the rest of the market, otherwise they wouldn't be able to stay afloat (at work, we don't add the cost of postage to OS books we order for specific customers either, but we end up making virtually nothing on them; it's more of a goodwill thing, and doesn't hurt us too much because we don't buy much from OS, but we couldn't run a business on doing it). Presumably they buy wholesale, charge regular rrp, and absorb the postage cost; not much margin in it, but perhaps doing well from repeated custom and word-of-mouth offsets this. Perhaps this is something the local book industry needs to consider more carefully: lower margin vs greater sales.

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Yeah, I couldn't believe it at first, either. Whether there's more fat in the UK to help there or not with them, I dunno. As you say, orders to Australia likely not too big a percentage for them, but they are likely to get considerable goodwill and people like me doing free marketing for 'em for selling some very low margin stuff.

If entry level books become $25, kids aren't going to be getting them, probably, compared to movies. Seems nutty to me. Although a few articles have said kids books are selling - maybe because they actually are cheaper than this?

Every time there is an exchange rate swing, stuff goes up on the back of that, and almost never shifts the other way cf - jump when we dived to 50, and recent one we are talking about here. Not much sign of a shift the other way (I think?) when it was over 80 for a long time, and even up to 97.

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'If entry level books become $25, kids aren't going to be getting them'

Hell, at that price, *I* wouldn't be able to afford them! Even now, most YA fiction seems to be purchased by parents - unless you count absolute teen faves such as the 'Twilight' series, all of which are around the $30 mark (although they are quite big books).

Twilight aside, YA books (novels) are generally about $16.95: same size, weight and word-count as an adult book. Nuts, innit? And even the kids' stuff is edging up towards $18.95.

As for the exchange rate swing, yeah, again, nobody ever wants to make *less* money, even if financial movements allow or warrant it. That, unfortunately, can be put squarely down to human nature.

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Hey, in Australian we've got free public libraries - no book is out of reach, at any cost.

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This is such a complex issue, and it requires a complex response. That's one of the reasons why I'm unhappy about protests. The other is that I know lots of good people (such as yourself) who are making an honest living on the coalfront and don't deserve to be the target of anyone's ire. I wish books were cheaper too, but I don't think this is the way to go about it. And I'll happily pay more if that's what it takes to keep a local industry alive--not just for my own sake, honest. Initiatives like the Big Book Club, which rely on the presence of authors to raise publicity for reading and literacy initiatives, would really struggle to find anyone. For one. Writers' festivals are another.

Anyway, I could go on. Just really wanted to say thanks for popping by, Chuck. It's great to hear your thoughts on this matter.

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sherylgwyther.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)

It is a vexed situation - and we certainly aren't antagonistic towards Dymocks staff (or any staff who work for the group called 'Coalition for Cheaper Books') - bookstores' staff usually love it when authors come calling to their shops. But we authors face an insidious white-anting of our industry if the protection of those restrictions on Parallel Importation of Books are lifted. Even after 12 months, as the PC suggests in their recent Review report.

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Hi guys... can't really take issue with the sentiment, but really a protest in front of a bookstore to get the message across???? Seems this a pointy-head debate revolving around competition policy and even if Dymocks head office (read Bob Carr) is gung-ho the franchise owners won't be. The Productivity Commission Head Office is in Canberra... seems a smarter location for a protest if you ask me

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