The Best of Times

It's exactly ten years since the bookshop company I worked for - Ottakar's - was taken over HMV Media, who incorporated the shops into its Waterstone's chain. I was happy at Ottakar's. It was a company that valued individuality, not only tolerating the quirky and eccentric, but actively encouraging it. Ottakar's and I were a good fit.

The company culture came from its founder and managing director, James Heneage - a man who was the antithesis of the grey-suited businessman. Fiercely intelligent and disarmingly honest, he had an unusual background. Expelled from a famous public school, he went on to join the army at Sandhurst and was allegedly responsible for the only mutiny in his regiment's history, when he got his soldiers lost in a jungle.

I suspect that many of the anecdotes about James were apocryphal, but it wouldn't have surprised me if they were true. James was a larger than life character, with a clipped military voice that boomed across the room. During a visit to one shop in early December, James was dismayed to find that there were no Christmas decorations and bellowed at the manager "What are you? Some sort of Calvinist?!"

But underneath the bluff exterior, there was a great warmth and we all felt that he was on our side. I have met many politicians, actors, writers and artists, but few of them have had the charisma that James Heneage possessed. He was a natural leader.

I enjoyed the job because in addition to the mundane business of running a shop, I had the opportunity to hold events, write articles about authors and meet a variety of people at launch parties. Sometimes the encouters were quite surreal: a conversation about NCP car parks with Lee Child, meeting John Grisham in a medieval hall that looked like something out of Hogwarts, dancing with a very drunk Mrs Doyle from Father Ted, meeting a True Crime author who told me that he could kill me with his bare hands if he wasn't a Buddhist, discussing the book trade with Jacqueline Wilson whilst sitting on a merry-go-round, advising Katie Price what she and Peter Andre should read in bed together...it was all very amusing.

I also worked with some lovely people - bright, unpretentious, full of fun, mostly. Most of the staff went on to greater things, but a few would have struggled to find employment anywhere else; for example, one member of staff liked watching DVD boxed sets of Apollo landings in real time and also had a collection of music by Nazi swing bands (one dance hit was called 'Bomb England'), but they loved their books and were a real assett to the business.

When the company was taken over, the new owners said how much they valued our 'passion' and wanted to incorporate it into the wider business, but within a year my job had turned into a very dull admin role, with all of the important decisions made elsewhere. After 18 unhappy months, I decided to leave Waterstone's before they left me.

But rather than dwell on sad endings, here's a small celebration of what I loved about Ottakar's:

Partly out of devilment, but also in an attempt to boost sales, I held an event featuring dangerous and exotic animals during the school holidays. In hindsight, it could have ended badly, but luckily it passed without a hitch. This woman has a rather useless chameleon on her arm. Why hasn't it turned blue?

In this photo, I'm holding a tarantula, wondering what will happen it it jumps off and runs away.

The Science Museum decided that their existing bookshop was too dull and asked Ottakar's to come in and make it more 'visitor friendly'. Less charitable souls might say that we took a good academic bookshop and dumbed it down, but it went down very well with the Museum and I really enjoyed the challenge of setting up a shop in such a unique envionment.

I'm not sure if the Museum realised how little we knew about science - we were completely winging it - but I think we got away with it.

I was very flattered when James Heneage told me that I was the ideal man for the job, possessing the necessary tact and diplomacy to deal with the museum authorities. Later I discovered that four people had turned the position down before I was offered it.

We had to work with the existing fixtures and fittings, all of which were very drab, but managed to come up with something half decent. Unfortunately, the director of the museum didn't like the illuminated sign, as he felt that the phrase 'Adult Books' had unfortunate associations.

An Ingmar Bergman moment from a lovely weekend in Sweden, courtesy of one of my ex-booksellers from the Clapham branch, who let us use her flat in Stockholm. As much as I love books, it's the people that I valued most about the job.

In the Crawley branch, we held the longest ever Jacqueline Wilson signing event, which lasted for eight hours. This photo doesn't do justice to the length of the queue.

Even the most jaded, world weary bookseller would be hard pressed not to be moved by an event like this. Jacqueline Wilson was wonderful and made every child feel as if they had a special bond with her. It was quite terrifying when it started, as I had no idea that so many people would turn up. When some very 'assertive' mothers started to surge forward, I had to act quickly to avoid a punch-up.

In Ottakar's the ethos was that quirky, interesting shops were good for business. Staff were encouraged to think of innovative ways to display and promote books, which made the job far more interesting for them. Every shop I worked in had at least one talented artist who produced the most astonishing windows.

In 2005, I had to open a shop in Worthing at the same time that my father was dying. It was a challenging time, but in many ways it helped having something to focus on. It was the first time I'd had the opportunity to recruit a team of staff from scratch, so I decided to follow my gut instinct and pick people I'd be happy to go to the pub with. The result was one of the happiest places I've worked in.

The set-up week involved converting a bare shell of a unit into a fully stocked shop with 25,000 books within five days. Every day we worked for up to 12 hours, then went out drinking. No matter lively the evening was, everyone was back the following morning at 8.00 sharp, which was quite remarkable in some cases.

The takeover of Ottakar's wasn't a certainty. The bid had been referred to the Monopolies Commission and we spent the best part of a year wondering what our fate was going to be. But on a Monday morning at the beginning of July, I turned on my PC and saw an email that read 'Welcome to Waterstone's'.

My heart sank.

If I ever come into a small fortune, I will revive a branch of Ottakar's just for the fun of it. I suppose the name is copyrighted, so keep an eye out for a bookshop called Ottokers, O.T.Takars or Otto Kerr's.

Booksellers

After my recent post about publishers' sales reps, it seems only fair to turn the spotlight round to the booksellers. What type of people work in a bookshop? Are they passionate, slightly unworldly bibliophiles, who live and breathe books? Or are they a bunch of slackers, who break out into a cold sweat at the prospect of having to do a proper job?

During a very dull moment in a waiting room, I tried to remember everyone I'd ever worked with. I got to 200 before my memory started to become hazy. I felt slightly guilty when I realised that I hadn't given some of my ex-colleagues a second thought since we'd last met, but I expect they'd probably say the same about me.

The weekend staff were particularly hard to remember. The boys, who all seemed to be studying 'A' level English, merged into one amorphous blend of earnestness and skin complaints, although there were a couple who amused me by telling dirty jokes (which I then passed on to the reps).

The girls were easier to recall because some of them had recently friended me on Facebook, in a barrel-scraping attempt to pass the 500/1000 friends mark (I quietly 'defriended' them after a suitable period, but I doubt that they noticed).

However, they weren't 'proper' booksellers. The weekend staff were merely taking a brief pitstop on their way to a glittering career (at least, that's what they told me). The idea of becoming a full-time bookseller horrified them almost as much as the thought of their parents having sex.

When I asked one girl what job she wanted to do, she replied: "I don't know yet, but I do know one thing: I'm not going to work here." She later became our floor manager.

As for the proper booksellers, in the early days of Waterstone's, the slackers ruled the roost. For them, bookselling was a continuation of university life, with its constant shortage of money and cramped bedsits; redeemed only by brilliant conversations with like-minded people and long periods of inertia. The hours weren't as great, but at least you didn't have to wear a suit.

Anyone who actually wanted to be a bookseller was regarded with a mixture of contempt and suspicion. Was that really the limit of their ambitions?

In hindsight we were probably awful. Our hatred for the customers - those people who dared to interrupt our conversations and ruin our displays by buying the books - was only exceeded by our contempt for a head office who lived in an ivory tower and dared to suggest that we should only stock books that seemed likely to sell. Philistines!

Oddly enough, the customers seemed to like our bolshy attitude and inappropriate clothing, so when one male member of staff decided to create a bondage outfit out of dustbin bags (complete with holes for the nipples) and serve at the till, no-one batted an eyelid.

The till-points of Waterstone's contained many frustrated writers, artists, teachers and media people, waiting for their dream job to come along. Surprisingly, their hopes weren't always in vain. After a year of displaying no discernible work ethic or talent, X would effortlessly drift into a key role at the British Council, whilst Y suddenly became a production assistant at Channel Four. How did that happen?

The Waterstone's staff uniform, circa 1993

At the end of five years of watching other people move on to better things, I felt that I ought to create an illusion of progress and left to run an independent bookshop. At the time it seemed like a sound move, but I quickly discovered that I was working for the Arthur Daley of bookselling, with van loads of dodgy stock mysteriously appearing on the shop floor overnight. I didn't want to be Terry McCann, so I started job hunting.

In 1996, a new bookselling chain - which seemed to have risen without a trace - was advertising for managers. After a rather unconventional interview with James Heneage, the managing director, I became a 'manager-in-waiting' at Ottakar's.

Ottakar's, which was a nationwide chain of smallish shops in market towns, was a revelation. I soon realised that outside London, booksellers were a very different breed. The staff I met actually seemed to take a pride in their work and would happily break-off a conversation if they saw that a customer needed help. I felt as if I had joined a group of evangelical Christians: wide-eyed, enthusiastic and committed. Some of them even wore ties.

I've no doubt that the good morale was a reflection of the leadership, but I also noticed that outside London, booksellers were generally more motivated than my former colleagues. They weren't passing through on their way to something better. This was their career.

Keeping up with such enthusiastic people was exhausting, but I did my best.

At Waterstone's most of the staff I met were in their 20s and all of them were graduates, as Tim Waterstone refused to employ anyone without a degree (by doing this, he missed out on some very good booksellers).

Ottakar's was very different, with a mixed bag of people whose ages ranged from 16 to 65. Some of them had degrees, but many had simply joined when they left school or moved across from a completely different area of retail. Sometimes the recruitment criteria were a little too lax, for me at least.

It took a while to get used to seeing a copy of the Daily Mail (or worse) in the staff room and when I spotted well-thumbed copies of novels by Patricia Cornwell and Terry Pratchett, I realised that there weren't going to be many fist fights for a proof copy of the latest Umberto Eco.

My shop in Crawley

I was at Ottakar's for ten years and, during that time, came to recognise similar types in every branch I ran or visited. Every shop had its high flyer (usually under the age of 23) who seemed more competent than the manager and was usually destined to be their boss in four years' time. Some managers felt threatened by them. I just saw an opportunity to take a long holiday without worrying about the shop.

These high flyers were usually counterbalanced by one or two no-hopers who could spend an hour discussing Robert Jordan's 'Wheel of Time' series with a customer, but still hadn't unpacked yesterday's delivery. They seemed to think that promotion was a simple award for long service and could never understand why some young upstart had been promoted over their head.

In Ottakar's, although the booksellers came from a variety of backgrounds, the one thing they all shared was a genuine love of books and a morbid fear of having to sit at a desk for eight hours a day. Bookselling provided a variety of work centred around something that actually mattered, which was not something that the local call centre could offer.

The last day of Ottakar's, Worthing, before it was converted into a Waterstone's

At my branch of Waterstone's (which was probably atypical) in the early 90s, the attitude was more cynical. The staff had no loyalty to the company and regarded their jobs as a temporary expedient. They might enthuse over certain titles, but the idea of being passionate about all books would have been viewed as absurd. Indeed, neatly hidden away at the till point was a small sticker that said "Books are crap".

However, in their own way, the arrogant slackers of the early Waterstone's years were often very good booksellers. Freed from the constraints of the career ladder, completely indifferent to the concerns of area managers, they ordered what they liked. One buyer was chastised by his manager for buying ten copies of a £100 Ansel Adams book, but they all sold within days

Fifteen years on, the new owners of Waterstone's were keen to turn their backs on an era in which the easiest way to identify a member of staff was to look for the scruffiest person in the shop. Graduates were no longer essential. The main qualification was a passion for selling. To the horror of many, a couple of managers had been recruited from Gap and Burger King!

There was a clear message: we don't think bookish people are always good at selling. In today's tough commercial climate, we need proper retailers.

(This YouTube video is a brilliant satire of Borders and the pre-Daunt Waterstone's - sadly embedding has been disabled, so follow the link and skip the advert after five seconds)

In my darker moments, I wondered if they were right. Perhaps the traditional booksellers were just unemployable misfits who'd enjoyed years of sanctuary in the book trade. However, after three years of 'retailing', with planograms, loyalty cards and a staff training scheme called 'Get Selling', Waterstone's was on its knees and almost disappeared from the high street, until a Russian oligarch came along and bought the company from HMV.

Today, things have come full circle. Unable to compete on price, booksellers are returning to their traditional role as curators of the huge, bewildering range of books in print. However good Amazon is, they will never be able to match the fiction-in-translation table at the Brighton branch of Waterstone's.

During the next decade, many bookshops will go to the wall - that much is certain - and booksellers will become an endangered, exotic species. However, the best bookshops should survive (high street landlords permitting).

But to return to the initial question: who becomes a bookseller? Looking back over 20 years of bookselling, I don't think I could say that there was a typical bookseller. There were some quiet, bookish types (who often left to train as librarians), but there were also louche bohemians, alcoholics, artists, drug dealers, ex-nuns, former policemen, future policemen, writers, rock musicians, reiki therapists, scientists and poker players.

Misfits. All very different, but all round pegs that didn't fit into square holes. With fewer bookshops on the horizon, things are going to get much harder.

Homage to the Sales Rep, Part Two - From Our Northern Correspondent

Many thanks to those who tweeted links to my last post. I had no idea that a rambling tribute to the humble sales rep would provoke such a response. One comment, posted by a former colleague of mine, was so long that Blogger had a brainstorm and rejected it. Fortunately, he saved the text and emailed it to me.

I have reproduced it here, without permission, because it's far too good to languish in the obscurity of my email inbox.

Born 17 years before me, Mr X experienced the golden age of the book trade, when booksellers only had their wits and a micofiche to rely on. In those days, there was no '3 for 2' nonsense (a book cost what it said on the cover, so you could like it or lump it) and sales were achieved through good bookselling alone. How things have changed.

I'm not sure if Mr X wishes me to reveal his identity, but I have provided two visual clues for those in the know:

"What a wonderful post, Steerforth – and how brilliantly you capture the dogged spirit, essential kindness and serial eccentricity of reps. Your piece set me thinking of my own start in bookselling an age ago in the ‘60s.

I had washed up in Oxford after a failure to return the foetid hug of library school in the hot Summer of Love. Well, what would you have done in Aberystwyth in 1967? Bibliography and Classification at Llanbadarn Fawr or the beach, the Beatles and boy oh boy at Borth?

Clue No.1

My brother lived in Oxford and I had run there, away from my parents’ searing disapproval of my throwing away a decent living. They had seen a good career for me among the card files and date stamps of the West Riding County Library at Wakefield. Naturally I finished up in Blackwell’s.

Time passed and I found myself running the General Books Department in what was then undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest bookshops. Almost immediately, General became regarded as a dark ravine of insistent vulgarity, overshadowed by the high mountains of fine academic provision which surrounded it. I was unbelievably crass and ignorant when I began. I knew I wanted things to change. After all, not long before, we had been told to sell the 6 subscribed copies of Portnoy’s Complaint from behind the counter.

Around the same time, a huge debate among my seniors resulted in a decision that 36 copies of the first complete paperback edition of Lord of the Rings would suffice to meet the demand from town and gown. Things could only get better.

And this is where the reps came in. Only they weren’t called that. They were never called that. They were “travellers”. The qualifying “gentleman” was invisible but implied. It was indeed exclusively a masculine world. They tended to be tall, well-made men, red faced and often with moustaches which betrayed their forces backgrounds. They almost certainly, you felt, had had a good war. They were kindly and tolerant. They weren’t in any hurry. They knew what they knew.

Clue No.2

Goodness knows, by contrast, what they made of me – but they steered me and persuaded me and educated me so subtly that I often believed I was the absolute dog’s until I thought back over how I’d got from A to B.

They all stayed in the Eastgate Hotel on the High. Soon after 9 in the morning and lugging unfeasibly huge cases of samples, they would come plodding through Turl Street and into the Broad to begin the day’s subbing among the myriad BHB departments.

Most often, they represented individual publishing houses which in today’s world are mere imprints swallowed into the maw of this conglomerate or that. So Methuen was in the charge of T. Houston Fraser, a man of huge majesty and massive dignity; almost Beach the Butler come to life. Pitman was sold by Stanley Branwhite, who, I now see, displayed unmistakeable overtones of Ray Winstone. When he was President of the BPRA and presiding over the dinners which were commonplace then, Stanley would rise at regular intervals to “take wine” with each of his many cronies scattered across the room.

Reg Fisk travelled for Collins and I never met anyone more determined to repeat every word of every AI (Advance Information) in his possession (or die trying). As I later discovered, it was a Collins trait. Pat Seyd of Harrap had been in the navy on the Arctic convoys. He unfailingly wore a pinstripe and bowler hat combination in winter and a straw boater and white suit in summer. Stanley Nebel represented Macmillan and more than once brought with him a “learner” – an improbably gangly young American called Nigel Newton.

Bob Kemp carried Weidenfeld. He’d fought the Mau Mau in Kenya, so staring down Geoffrey Boycott and shutting him up in the Saraceno in Magdalen Street was a cakewalk by comparisons. Bob was a Mancunian but nobody’s perfect. John Oliver of Hamish Hamilton once asked me if he was boring me (he was). I blush with shame to think of it. Patrick Stephens, who represented his eponymous list, wore the air of an avuncular don indulging a promising student.

Alas, alas – they all (apart of course from Nigel) lie in Mellstock Churchyard now.

I am so glad that you mentioned John, the unspeakably difficult Random House rep. God forgive me for banning him from the Ottakar’s High Wycombe store in the 1990s. He had taken to wandering the back offices at will and in an inspired period had begun unpacking designated returns and putting them back on the shop selves, replacing them with other books (sometimes not his own) which he didn’t think we should be selling. I might have remembered that he was also the man who delivered a six-foot cardboard standing figure of a star author to a central London bookshop by taking it on a bus and paying its fare.

It does seem that the old race of independent ‘ornery reps who often hated their bosses but loved their customers has gone. The last vestige I remember was the fabulous gritty Yorkshireman “Dump Bin Dave,” who came in with the Arrow side of Random House to Ottakar’s in Northallerton.

Dave made all his appointments 12 months ahead and, as his nickname suggests, was fond of bulk sales. His inevitable sign-off after a subbing session was in the form of an “Ah just can’t wait…” statement, reminding me of the sheer irresistibility of his lead title. Some of these tended to be less convincing than others. I managed to restrain complete hysterics when he inflicted “Ah just can’t wait ta gerrome and start that new Oomberto Eco bewk.” This sounds snobbish as I tell it. It isn’t at all. But it was funny.

Dave is happily working on Leeds Market now. They don’t make them like that anymore."

Many thanks to Mr X for unintentionally writing this guest post. Here's a photo he might recognise:

Homage to the Sales Rep

In an earlier post I wrote about my first year in bookselling and casually mentioned that every publisher's sales rep' used to be called Brian or Keith. Naturally, this was a slight exaggeration. There was also one called Barry.

When I joined Waterstone's, over 20 years ago, I was told that one of my jobs would involve buying new titles from publishers. Surprisingly, there was no training, but in spite of this I was given a monthly budget of £5000 to spend in any way I pleased. Unsurprisingly, when the word got out that Waterstone's had delegated its new title buying to a load of chinless wonders, it was like a feeding frenzy.

One of the first things that impressed me was how many sales reps there were. HarperCollins alone had four, just for SW London (one for fiction, another for children's, one for general non-fiction, plus a dedicated rep for maps and reference), whilst most of the other major publishers had at least two.

If you only had one sales representative per region, you weren't a proper publisher.

As a result, I probably spent around 60% of my time buying new titles from sales reps, during meetings that were called 'subbing' sessions. Until I reached the dizzy heights of management, all new title buying had to take place on the shop floor, so we usually tucked ourselves away in a quiet corner where we wouldn't be bothered by customers.

Each representative turned up with at least one large suitcase containing huge files of blad (which stands for book layout and design), showing mock-ups of dustjackets, blurbs and details of how much publicity the book was going to get. My job was to decide whether the book would sell in Richmond and, if I thought it would, guess how many copies we'd need.

Initially, I had no idea what I was talking about and the whole buying process seemed farcical. Some reps saw a golden opportunity for a stitch-up, convincing me that an obscure £35 book on dolphins warranted a minimum order of five copies. The more experienced reps took a longer view, knowing that any duds would only come back as returns, which would have to be credited back to the bookseller.

The best reps effectively taught me how to do my job, gently nudging me in the right direction if I'd overestimated how many books we needed. I had the good sense to listen to them, but not everyone did. When one young bookseller stubbornly refused to accept that he needed five rather than 40 copies of a new poetry title, the rep slammed his folder shut and said "Look, I'm going to go away now. I'll come back when I can talk to a grown-up."

The second thing that impressed me about the reps was how few of them read books. You would imagine that if a publisher employed people to sell its titles, they would try to recruit bookish, literary types. However, the majority of the 'old school' reps had no interest in books and would have been just as happy selling exhaust pipes or photocopiers.

There seemed to be very strong class divisions in the traditional publishing world. The public school, university-educated types went into the editorial departments, whilst the vulgar business of actually selling the books was left to people who had mostly left school at 16.

At first it seemed absurd that publishers had a sales force made up of people who didn't know that George Eliot was a woman, but over time I came to realise that the best sales reps were frequently the Brians and Barrys, who didn't read, whilst the worst were often the bright young things who may have had English degrees, but didn't know how to sell a book.

In the early 1990s, the typical rep was a man in his mid 50s, with a bald head, moustache and a ruddy face that indicated an approaching heart attack. I lost count of the number of times I heard the phrase "Keith won't be in for a while - he's just had a heart attack" (I suppose it was all those 'Little Chef' meals). When he arrived, panting with the effort of dragging a suitcase from the car park, I never knew whether he'd make it to the end of the session.

Keith may not have been widely read, but he knew his market. He understood that X sold well in Windsor but not in Slough, whilst Y was unknown outside the M25. Sadly, the editorial departments rarely seemed to take of notice of their reps' sales reports and a large part of our buying session would be spent moaning about our respective head offices.

"Honestly Phil, you tell me, how am I going to sell this? They haven't got a clue."

It was a working-class, male-dominated world. Hours were spent on the road, so the car was king and each rep knew every service station and shortcut. If you wanted to get rid of a rep, giving them an Austin Montego was usually enough.

Some of the reps had little scams that made them feel that they were getting the upper hand over their unsympathetic employers. For example, when one rep went to get petrol, his wife followed him in her car and filled her tank during the same sesion (when someone challenged the rep about his fuel costs, he brazened it out: "It's a thirsty car mate").

Occasionally, a bright young thing at head office would try to get the reps more engaged with the titles they were representing:

"Phil, I got this fucking memo from some tosser at Head Office telling me I had to read this new novel and write a report about it! D'you know what I did? I phoned him up and said I haven't read a fucking book in 25 years and I'm not going to start now."

But not all of the reps were 'wide boys'. One was an ex-public school man in his 60s, who lived in an expensive London flat with his belligerent, alcoholic mother. In spite of his effete manner and Brian Sewell voice, he was at pains to let us know that he was heterosexual, constantly praising the feminine charms of detox guru Leslie Kenton:


When it came to Alan Hollinghurst, he was less enthusiastic:

"This is a book by a homosexual author that will only be of interest to other homosexuals".

He wasn't terribly keen on Irvine Welsh either:

"Here is another book for young people to waste their pocket money on".

It was all said with a faint twinkle in the eye, but I felt that he was a rather bitter, disappointed man, trapped in a world he despised. When he was forced to retire, he refused to accept the gold-plated fountain pen that his colleagues had bought for him.

But by the time I became a bookseller, the traditional reps' world was changing. The Keiths were increasingly being replaced, either by Sues (much to the relief of many female booksellers) or earnest young graduates and the subbing sessions - once a mixture of dirty jokes, gossip and moaning - became more businesslike in tone.

Overall I got on very well with the sales reps and came to regard some of them as friends. They were generally bright, funny people with a healthy cynicism about the publishing industry and, most important of all, a good sense of humour. When I left high-street bookselling, one of the things I really missed was having a good gossip with a rep.

I loved exchanging scurrilous anecdotes about colleagues. I learned that one Ottakar's manager regularly had pyjama-party sleepovers in her shop, whilst another had stolen enough money to buy a sports car (he ended up in prison). But my favourite gossip was about authors. I learned that Jilly Cooper was lovely but Jeffrey Archer was deeply unpleasant, whilst Terry Pratchett could be very grumpy, only turning on the charm for his fans.

If a sales rep had ever been treated badly by an author, we all knew about it. In a few cases, an author's career was effectively killed off by the rep, as we all conspired to make sure that their books were barely visible.

The rep's job has got a lot harder in recent years. Every year, redundancies and early retirement have trimmed the sales forces of publishers and the surviving reps have been expected to cover ever larger areas for little or no extra pay. The once ubiquitous HarperCollins rep is now as elusive as the natterjack toad.

With only one major book chain left, the age of the publisher's rep is almost over. I think that there should be a memorial coat of arms, depicting a full English breakfast, some blood pressure tablets and a large black suitcase on wheels. But sadly, I think their passing will be unnoticed by all but a few.

How I Would Save Waterstone's*

Last week the shareholders of HMV reached an almost unanimous decision to approve the sale of its Waterstone’s bookshop chain to the Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut. Today, the business officially changed hands and bookseller James Daunt took over as MD.

This is great news for everyone in the publishing industry, not to mention readers who value specialist booksellers with large stockholdings.

Alexander Mamut

Also, on a personal note, as it is almost five years to the day since the bookshop chain I worked for was bought by HMV, it has been hard not to to feel a certain schadenfreude at the demise of those people who thought that bookselling was no different from any other area of retail. I hope that there will be no need for the word ‘product’ in James Daunt’s Waterstone’s.

But before we put out the flags, a word of caution. HMV may have mismanaged Waterstone's for over a decade, but can a change ot ownership make that much of a difference in a market that appears to be undergoing an irreversible transformation?

However good Alexander Mamut and James Daunt are, they still might fail.

Before we look at the uphill struggle that faces James Daunt, lets focus on the positives:

• In spite of Amazon and the supermarkets, Waterstone’s is still a profitable business
• In 2010, its market share was just under 30% of total book sales
• It frequently achieves high scores in customer satisfaction surveys
• It is the only large specialist bookshop chain in Britain
• Publishers want Waterstone's to survive

Indeed, when you a visit a branch in December and see the queues, it's hard to understand how the chain almost ended up in the hands of an asset stripper.

But the reality is that Waterstone's is dying, albeit very slowly. The sales have been slowly shrinking for over five years and many shops are now making a loss, including the 'flagship' Piccadilly store. Several years of negative growth have produced an entrenched mentality in the senior management and rather than trying to increase sales (or 'grow' sales, as they now say), the emphasis is on reducing costs: the beginning of the end.**

The main management failures of Waterstone's are as follows:

• They failed to establish an strong internet presence in the mid-90s and after a half-hearted attempt, let Amazon fulfill its online orders until 2006 - a move that rivals Decca's decision not to sign the Beatles
• They became obsessed with wooing the mass market at the expense of their traditional market of 'heavy book buyers'
• They recruited too many middle managers from other areas of retail, who knew nothing about books and came from businesses that valued compliance and uniformity over creativity and passion, resulting in a chain of bland, unexciting bookshops
• The whole business was dominated by a counter-intuitive stock control system that looked and felt like a second rate MS-DOS program from 1989
• They reacted to changes in the book trade, rather than anticipating them

In short, there are a lot of things wrong with Waterstone's and even if James Daunt can fix some of them, will anyone notice?

One of the most salutary (I know this word has been out of fashion since the 1870s, but I like it) lessons I learned in the book trade was when Waterstone's took over Ottakar's, rebranding every shop in the chain. For me, it was a cataclysmic event. For my customers, it was just another day. Very few of them even noticed the huge new black sign over the door.

Getting the book buying public excited about Waterstone's again will be a huge challenge.

To make things worse, the high street is going into meltdown. Long established brands like Mothercare, Habitat, Thorntons and TJ Hughes are either going into administration or slashing the number of stores, as customers increasingly migrate to the internet.

It's not a good time to work in high street retailing.

In an ideal world, James Daunt would have a few months to get his head around the business before coming up with a plan to save the chain. Unfortunately, time is a luxury James Daunt doesn't have. The crucial Christmas promotions will have to be signed off almost immediately.

On the one hand I don't envy James Daunt, but on the other, this is a fantastic opportunity. The death of Waterstone's needn't be inevitable. Other chains have suprised their detractors by reversing their fortunes and it's possible that James Daunt and Alexander Mamut may go down in posterity as the men who saved Britain's last bookshop chain.

But how?

If I was sitting in James Daunt's chair next Monday, these would be my priorities:

1. Increase the stockholding.

There was a time when you could go into most branches of Waterstone's and expect to find all of the backlist of authors like Ian McEwan or William Boyd. Not any more. Without a decent range, Waterstone's is finished. Of course, keeping a large range of slow-moving backlist titles is expensive, but if publishers are really serious about supporting Waterstone's, they should provide the stock under more favourable terms. Surely it's in the publishers' interest to have their books in shops rather than in a warehouse?

If customers can once again feel confident that they can find the book they want today (at a competitive price), they'll be less likely to automatically default to Amazon.

2. End the blandness.

Whether you're looking at the homepage of www.waterstones.com or gazing at a shop window, the overall impression is one of blandness. Dull, safe posters with insipid, dumbed-down bylines and predictable 3 for 2 promotions that have the same titles in month after month - that's the modern Waterstone's. In Ottakar's, shops competed with each other to come up with the quirkiest, most eye-catching windows. In Waterstone's, compliance has been valued over creativity.

Waterstone's branches need to make their shops as exciting as the books: eccentric, unpredictable, magical places, buzzing with energy, otherwise what's the point of going there?

As for the website, it should be a bibliophile's paradise, with videos of author interviews, YouTube clips of signing sessions and a vast archive of author information. At Ottakar's I was on the editorial committee of an award-winning fiction microsite and we produced hundreds of author biographies. I presume that Waterstone's now own that data, so why isn't it being used on their website?

3. Embrace the e-book.

As with the internet, Waterstone's made a half-hearted attempt at competing with Amazon and squandered a vital opportunity to get on the digital bandwagon. The game isn't over yet. Thousands of backlist titles have yet to be digitised and if Waterstone's can come up with a genuinely competitive alternative to the Kindle, they may be able to stop their shops becoming showrooms for Amazon.

4. Put staff morale at the top of the agenda.

The working culture in Waterstone's has been awful. An obsession with compliance has produced a climate of fear, where disciplinary action is routinely used as a motivational tool. When shops are earmarked for closure, staff often find out from the trade press before they receive any communication from the senior management.

The key to Waterstone's recovery is the enthusiasm and passion of its booksellers. But it will be hard to improve staff morale if the store managers are stuck in the back office for most of the day, completing one spreadsheet and after another. The excessive bureacracy should be trimmed down so that managers can spend more time selling books.

Staff morale in James Daunt's own chain is good, by all accounts. I hope that he can persuade some of the more abrasive characters in Waterstone's middle management to change their approach.

5. Give power back to the shops.

When I worked on a few projects for Ottakar's head office, I had access to the company's sales data and used to love analysing the sales performance of particular titles in different shops. Why did book X sell 57 copies in one shop, but only 4 in another, when both stores had a similar turnover? Sometimes it was because one shop had sold out, but more often than not it was because the local market was very different.

There has been a lot of talk in Waterstone's about responding to the local market, but when I walk in the front door, all I see is a bland, one-size-fits all approach. Each shop should have a unique offering that reflects the passion and knowledge of its staff, along with a strong awareness of the local customers.

6. Ditch the new Waterstone's logo:

Alright, number six isn't essential (I know some people even prefer the new drooping breasts logo to the traditional, angular W). The main thing is shops with more books, and a range and pricing that reflects the local market.

I could go on. I haven't even touched on the thorny issue of closing unprofitable shops, fixing or scrapping the central distribution hub, introducing a half-decent EPOS system or paying people more money. But that's enough to be going on with.

You may completely disagree with me (indeed I hope some people do, as I like a good debate). Perhaps Waterstone's would be even worse off today if it hadn't been run on strict retail lines. I don't know. All I can say is that as an Amazon customer, the main thing that would get me back into Waterstone's is a quirky, exciting range. However good Amazon is, you can't beat real browsing.

I wish Alexander Mamut and James Daunt the best of luck (and God knows, they'll need it). If they can bring Waterstone's back from the brink of extinction, to the point where it is a viable business with a future, both readers and publishers will owe them a huge debt.***


* The title should really be 'How I Would Go About Saving Waterstone's' (I wouldn't be arrogant enough to assume that I have the answers), but I went for the punchier option.

** Since writing this post, it has been announced that during its year under Dominic Myers, Waterstone's increased its profit by £6.7 million. This is a great achievement, but doesn't alter the fact that unless the business reverses the decline in sales (last year's were nearly 4% down on the previous year), its days are numbered. Also, let's not forget that during Myers tenure, Waterstone's sales received a temporary boost from the demise of Borders.

*** Two years on, the chain appears to be trying to replicate the success of Daunt's by turning Waterstones into a collection of mini-chains, or 'clusters'. Unprofitable stores are being closed the moment their leases expire, while some of the more successful shops have undergone refits. There has been a cull of middle and senior managers. As for ebooks, after looking at all the alternatives, James Daunt reluctantly decided to embrace the Kindle rather than waste time and money on a white elephant.

I agree with most of Daunt's decisions, but I'm not convinced by his new buying structure. I would have given the shops complete autonomy, but perhaps James Daunt felt that after the HMV years, there weren't enough real booksellers around to take that risk.

The chain is now in a race against time to contract to a sustainable level at a rate that keeps pace with the declining year on year sales. I suspect that they are being outpaced by the migration of sales to Amazon's Kindle offer.

****Three years on, it looks as if Daunt has done it. Ebook sales have levelled out and Waterstones looks set to break even for the first time in years. The medicine has been bitter, for some at least, with many redundancies and the loss of some very talented people, but it was an ineluctable fact that the costs of the business were too high. I remained sceptical about Waterstones until I saw its new branch in Lewes, which is one of the best bookshops I've ever seen.

Everything Must Go

Warning! Unless you're particularly interested in the book trade, this is a long, dull post. If you are particularly interested in the book trade, then you probably already know this...

I remember visiting the first UK branch of Borders, back in the late 90s and thinking that I had seen the future.

Compared to the average Waterstone's, it was bright and airy, with an exciting range of products (I was particularly impressed by the listening posts for CDs). The buzzword in those days was "lifestyle" and the whole ethos of Borders was to create a place where people could "hang out", meeting friends for a coffee, going to a poetry reading or listening to the latest World Music CDs.

A bit like being in an episode of "Friends".

Like most people, I had no idea that I was watching a firework in its final stage, releasing one last spectacular volley of flares. The new Borders store turned out to be one of the last examples of a type of retailing - large stores with huge stockholdings - that would shortly become an anachronism. Once broadband was introduced, internet shopping quickly reached the tipping point and those lovely CD listening posts suddenly seemed ridiculously antiquated.

I was completely wrong about Borders, but I was right about the internet. In 1997, during a drink with a senior figure in Ottakar's (not James Heneage, I hasten to add), I said that it was imperative that we launched an internet site as quickly as possible. He snorted and took great delight in telling me that only 1.5% of the population shopped online and that the figure would only change slowly over time, as most people still weren't comfortable with computers. I wish we'd bet money on it.

Over a decade later, the book chains all appear to be on the brink of collapse. In the USA, Borders are about to go bankrupt and whilst some commentators have blamed years of mismanagement, the truth is that they have merely accelerated the chain's inevitable demise.

Barnes and Noble had a strong management team and embraced the digital age, but it still wasn't enough. Recently Leonard Riggio, the founder of Barnes and Noble, joked "Sometimes I want to shoot myself in the morning."

On this side of the Atlantic, British Bookshops have just gone bust and the management team of Waterstone's have been congratulating themselves for only losing 0.4% in last year's like for like sales.

Given the overall decline in high street sales, -0.4% looks quite promising - certainly much better than its ailing parent company, HMV. But considering that Borders UK ceased trading at the beginning of 2010, it's a pretty dismal result. Waterstone's should have grabbed enough of the Borders market share to come up with some positive figures.

Now that Waterstone's is the last man standing out of the high street bookselling chains, it can only survive by closing its loss-making stores (of which there are a growing number). 20 have already been ear-marked, but I suspect this is only the tip of the iceberg (particularly if HMV are forced to sell the chain).

Nice poster, shame about the dumbed-down text. And where are the books?

It's not all bad news for Waterstone's. They still have a significant share of the UK market and there is a core of thriving, profitable stores that have many years left in them if they can free themselves from the shackles of HMV and return to their roots. But overall, I can't help feeling that the age of the chain booksellers was just a brief interlude in the long history of bookselling.

In an article I read recently, someone neatly summed-up the problems facing the bookseller:

The Seven Deadly Paradoxes of Bookselling:

1. The better the bookseller and the more representative their stock, the less chance they have of selling it.

2. The harder a book is to sell, the smaller is their reward for selling it.

3. (The converse, which is more deadly than it first appears.) The easier the book to sell, the greater the reward.

4. The sooner they sell their stock, the longer they must wait before they can replace it on the same terms.

5. In buying the season's new books for stock they must recognize at sight and sometimes at the sight of the jacket only - the merits of their contents.

6. Readers are increasing; purchases are dwindling.

7. The window is their most valuable, and almost their only, advertisement; to be effective it must be in the main part of the town. Few can afford that position.

You may be surprised to learn that these words were written 75 years ago, by Basil Blackwell in a title called "The Book World - a New Survey". Conditions may have changed since 1935 (in Blackwell's day, the enemy was the public library), but the basic principles are the same: sales can rise or fall; rents only go up.

Until recently, it looked as if it was a straightforward battle, with the high street chains losing a war of attrition against the supermarkets and internet booksellers. But just as we were adjusting to the new bookselling landscape, the Kindle suddenly appeared on the scene, shortly followed by the Sony e-Reader.

A couple of years ago I was congratulating myself for swapping high street bookselling for the internet. Little did I know how soon the goalposts were going to move again.

Keen to reduce their warehousing costs and stay one step ahead of the competition, Amazon have been aggressively promoting the Kindle. When e-books started to appear on Amazon's bestseller charts, they were accused of manipulating the figures to stimulate demand. But according to Jeff Bezos, millions of people now own Kindles and the demand is growing by the day, with Amazon selling around three in every four e-books.

In the UK alone, it is estimated that several hundred thousand people received Kindles for Christmas, so the tipping point has definitely been reached, but where does that leave the rest of the book trade?

This post is all ready far too long, so I'll be brief. Here are, in my opinion, the main issues facing the book trade today:

• The decline of the high street chains will be accelerated by the advent of the e-book. However not all book formats lend themselves to the Kindle, or even the i-Pad. Children's books will contiue to thrive on the printed page, particularly books for young children. Paperback sales will dip sharply, but there will still be a market for titles with high production values. Bricks and mortar booksellers who can adapt to these niche markets stand more chance of surviving.

• If the high street chains collapse, then publishers will find it increasingly harder to develop and promote the next generation of authors. Fewer titles will be published and first-time novelists will struggle more than ever.
  

• Amazon are taking a risk with the Kindle. If the encoding of e-books is cracked, they could be downloaded and shared as easily as MP3s. If that happens, then publishers, agents, booksellers and authors will see a substantial loss of income.

• With the advent of the i-Pad and its inevitable imitators, why would anyone want to buy a device that only reads books?

Where will it all end? Basil Blackwell saw difficult times ahead in 1935, but the Penguin paperback made reading more popular than ever. I suppose that ultimately, what matters is not where we get our books, or what format they're in, but the fact that we read.

BREAKING NEWS... In the three days since I posted this, Borders are trying to negotiate a $500,000,000 refinacing package and Amazon have announced that Kindle sales are now only 20% lower than their paperback sales. Also Waterstone's have asked publishers to reduce scale-down the new title orders and their head of e-commerce has resigned.