Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 3, Volume 8 | Page 40

you can bet that they would view any “solu-
tion” that might save B&N as just another
suggestion for what they might do them-
selves to win in the physical world.
And if you take the number one sugges-
tion from CNN — the most obvious and
most important one — you see that the
Amazon competition will be a real problem.
Yes, it is a correct analysis that the super-
sized bookstore is a dinosaur; massive in-
store selection with many titles that hardly
ever sell is a relic of the pre-Internet age.
And the “curation” that makes a small se-
lection work effectively is more easily de-
livered by Amazon’s massive supply chain
and highly localized market knowledge, not
to mention their ability to “promote” by
email the existence of a store or anything in
it to a large percentage of purchasers in any
locale. Similarly, Amazon will find it easy to
sell “home goods”, or whatever else is the
right thing for any particular location be-
cause they probably already do. And while
B&N is being urged to ditch the money-
demanding Nook ebook line, Amazon
would be using Kindle as a springboard to
the extent that is relevant at all to a store-
shopping audience.
I’m going to admit to a bit of a chuckle
when I read “build a community.
A community? One community? Does
that mean one community for people who
read Civil War history and romance fiction?
No, that’s a silly idea. A bookstore actually
needs to foster many communities. You can
be pretty confident that Amazon knows
that.
The key suggestion here duplicates one
I made as a consultant to Barnes & Noble
almost two decades ago: don’t perfect just
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE
the massive store, but learn how to make
smaller ones work. Put the top 50 books on
sale in more places; don’t try to create hun-
dreds of repositories for tens of thousands
of books that have tiny audiences. That’s
what Amazon looks like they’ll be doing.
But it is precisely not what B&N built ex-
pertise to deliver.
It is ironic that at the time I made the
suggestion in the early 2000s, B&N was still
in the process of winning its superstore
competition with Borders based on its su-
perior supply chain. B&N could, and did,
put replacement copies on the shelf for
steadily-moving backlist pretty much in-
stantly when the single copy they carried of
so many of those books sold. That was effi-
cient and profitable. Borders didn’t have
the supply chain to match it, so they had
less profitable stock turn and were out of
the steady sellers more of the time. Of
course, that was hardly the sole reason
B&N survived a decade ago when Borders
went out, but it was certainly a contributor.
But now that supply chain is getting in-
creasingly expensive. Every time you close
a store or shrink the book footprint in a
store, you increase the unit cost of each re-
placement copy the supply chain delivers
because a pretty fixed cost is covered by
less volume. In the intervening time, In-
gram has built an equivalent capability, so
the independent bookstores that have
sprung up to replace Borders are benefiting
from the same ability a B&N store has to
keep stock moving without the fixed ex-
pense.
So, suggestion number one from me for
improving the profitability of B&N would
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