I loved Publishers Marketplace‘s headline on Julie Bosman‘s piece: this is a news story? Because duh, books *can* be sold in other places…like clothing shops, butcher shops, carwashes, cookware stores, cheese shops, and pretty much anywhere where people might add a book to their checkout line. Why else would Starbucks hop on this particular bandwagon?
“It’s a way for the book business to stay alive,” said Abby Hoffman, the vice president of sales and marketing for Chronicle Books in San Francisco, which sells most of its 350 offbeat titles each year to places like high-end grocery stores, children’s clothing stores and wineries. “Anyplace that sells merchandise is a place to sell books.” But that’s not all: Simon & Schuster, one of the industry’s largest publishers, is urging its sales representatives to punctuate their bookstore rounds with impromptu pitches at promising shops and markets they spot in their travels. Hachette Book Group routinely changes the color or design of book jackets at a store’s request so the book will color-coordinate with merchandise. And HarperCollins plans to design books for its spring catalog in shades of “margarita and sangria,” greens and reds that store owners have told the publisher will dominate that season’s color palette, said Andrea Rosen, vice president for special markets.
The bottom line? To follow customers who might not otherwise visit bookstores into the places where they do shop, rather than waiting for customers to show up at bookstores or click on Amazon.com and other online sales sites. And that’s why in the last four years Simon & Schuster‘s special market sales, as they are called, have grown by 50 percent, surpassing total sales to independent bookstores. No doubt the figures are similar for other publishers, too…