Rocket Bomber

First:

Do Not – *DO NOT* – spend any money with either of these turkeys. That’s not why I’m providing the links. There is no affiliate kickback, I’m not advocating either product, and I’m hesitant to directly link to either site because, you know, spam.

But what beautiful spam:

https://www.crisiseducation.com/landing/reports/4foot-farm-blueprint/video/

• “this video may disappear”
• “sneaky”, “simple food secrets”, “ancient, but with this special twist”
• Just enough truth.
• boogeymen: not just the gov’t (described as and conflated with “Washington”) but also Monsanto. dude.
• “I’ve uncovered the secret”
• Personalizing the pitch – “Sam McCoy” introduces himself, and he’s a down-home guy just like you. (from Texas!)
• “I’ve cut out all the junk and theory” – you mean, the science?
• “over 206 hours of research and writing” – oh, really? 3 whole weeks of reading? Why did I waste time at college.
• “7 measly dollars” – wait, who uses ‘measly’ as a word anymore? I bet more than 206 hours of research went into the use of that adjective.
• “no fluff and no BS” – except the sales pitch, you mean.

The damn thing is a syllabus for a course on psychology in advertising. I could almost do an hour lecture on each slide in the deck, not to mention the delivery.

But wait, there’s more! [sorry, couldn’t help myself.]

I was looking for a way to link/embed this caustic lump without actually benefiting the shill, so I right clicked on the vid; amazingly, the scammer site uses a plug-in video tool and clicking through led me to another 6 minute sales pitch:

http://easyvideosuite.com/launch/

• oooo… bonus points for an announcer with a Brit accent. (not posh Brit but working-man Brit but I doubt any American can tell you the difference)
• “This saves you time and will easily integrate to Make You Money”
• “save hours when you use the platform”
• oh boy, “online and mobile” – not one but both buzzwords!

These are both so polished, I have to ask: Who is writing these delicious scripts? Does the pitch writer have a website, where I can watch a six minute video on how their “expert team” can “distill your thoughts into a simple, but compelling presentation” “guaranteed to get you both the links, and the sales, you deserve”?

Once again, if you visit either site above (for education or edification) please DO NOT BUY OR SIGN UP FOR ANYTHING. But damn, what a work of art. Appreciate them ironically. Haul out your bingo cards and start clicking off boxes.

Today, apparently, is National Beer Can Appreciation Day [see also], celebrating the first cans sold (or at least 1st delivered) by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company on this date in 1935.

Here’s All the Beer Can Knowledge You Might Ever Need, at least, that’s the headline used on a gif-heavy Foodbeast post from six months ago — but if that only whets your appetite, here are 24* more links on canned beer.

“Koch, a self-proclaimed purist, at first ‘stubbornly resisted’ putting Sam Adams in cans. But after spending more than two years and $1 million developing a couple dozen prototypes, the ‘Sam Can’ was born. Koch says that with a bigger lid and a more defined lip, the redesigned can forces your mouth open more and puts your nose closer to the opening, creating a better flavor experience.”
Craft Brewers Are Reinventing The Beer Can To Improve Taste : Michael Felberbaum, 3 July 2013, AP news wire via Business Insider

“So, why are craft brewers suddenly switching to cans? For starers, beer tastes better in cans. Sunlight, an enemy to beer that can give it a ‘skunky’ flavor, can’t piece [sic] through an aluminum can like it can through a clear or light-colored bottle. Some also believe that cans will keep less oxygen out [sic], which is another factor in ruining the taste of beer. Also, aluminum cools down the brew much faster than a bottle, are lighter in weight, are easier to stack and easier to transport.”
Aluminum Cans: The Next Big Thing For Craft Beer? : Albert Costill, 19 June 2013, amog.com [note: Link included, with the original typo and the blatant factual error, because behind that they kinda-sorta make a good point for me. Also, now I get to publicly make fun of AMOG. Don’t Google the acronym they use as their name as it might offend you. —M.]

“While cans even began to outsell bottles in the late ’60s, the number of breweries producing canned beer dropped significantly over time. Bottles were more marketable and the stigma that the taste of beer would be distorted by metallic cans made it a more difficult sell.”
10 Craft Beers Now In Cans (And Why You Should Drink Them) : Jonathan Katz, 11 April 2013, Food Republic

“‘Bottle color ranges from clear (Corona) to green (Heineken) to brown (pretty much any craft beer). Colored glass makes a huge difference because it protects the liquid from the sun, which can lead to skunkiness.’ As for beer bottles with no color? ‘Clear bottles are honestly a marketing trick. There is no benefit to a clear bottle except to say, hey, look at our pee-colored swill.’”
Why Does Canned Beer Stay Fresher Than Bottled? : 25 April 2013, Food Republic

“‘By and large, the macro brewers tend to innovate more in packaging than they do in product simply because they can’t do too much to a Bud or Miller Lite,’ he said. ‘They can create line extensions like a Lime-a-Rita or a Bud Light Lime, but in terms of Bud Light there’s only so much they can do to draw consumer interest to the product.’”
The Once-Lowly Can Is Boosting the Beer Biz : Tom Rotunno, 6 June 2013, Consumer Nation cnbc.com

“In my youth, canned beer was king, though there was the one guy on the block whose recycling buckets were always overflowing with empty Rolling Rock bottles. But then came the craft beer revolution of the ’90s and slowly but surely cans gave way to bottles and draft beer. For seven years starting in 2002, bottled and draft beers equaled or outpaced the canned stuff in the U.S., but ever since the economy took a nose dive, a growing number of Americans have been cracking open cold cans for their beer-based “
We Are Apparently In The Midst Of A Canned Beer Renaissance : Chris Morran, 20 June 2012, Consumerist

“There is little doubt that canned beer has some very practical advantages: it’s more portable and doesn’t break. It can be taken places glass is prohibited. It is also much lighter and thus cheaper and greener to ship and distribute. I can’t say cans are better, but I’m betting we will soon see a whole lot more of them.”
Craft Beers Say Hello Cans, Goodbye Bottles: An Aluminum Revolution : Larry Olmstead, 1 May 2013, Forbes

“Craft beer in cans could be perceived as unique, distinctive and a specialized niche market. Their challenge will be to overcome the negative image of beer in cans perceived by many beer enthusiasts. Canned beer is commonly associated with mass marketed light American lager beer, budget beer and perceived inferior quality. Small brewers will endeavor to put full flavored and quality beer into cans and depend on the beer drinkers’ experience”
52 Small Craft Brewers Put Beer in a Can : 18 September 2009, Brewer’s Association

“Why Now? A major impetus behind the recent microcanning trend is a change in canning technology, which for decades was geared toward large producers. The Buds and Millers of the world utilize massive industrial canning machinery and purchase blank aluminum cans by the billions every year, according to Hoover. The landscape changed, however, in 2001 when Canadian company Cask Brewing Systems began offering a manual, two-at-a-time canning system designed specifically for small brewers; Cask also worked out a deal with the Ball Corporation to make Cask’s cans available in smaller quantities”
Canned Beer That’s Actually Good : Kurt Wolff, 6 October 2008, Chow.com

“But canned beer’s benefits don’t stop at freshness. Cans are easier on the environment: They are nearly 50 percent lighter to ship than bottles, which greatly reduces their carbon footprint. Jamie Gordon at Cask Brewing Systems, the Canadian company that invented the craft canning system in 1999 and sold its first U.S. model to Oskar Blues several years later, says the number one reason brewers call him is environmental concerns. Creating a more eco-friendly product is what led Marrero to put his craft brews exclusively in cans, a decision that helped earn him a ‘Who’s Keeping Hawaii Green’ award in 2008.”
The Beer Can Revolution : Heather John, 19 November 2009, Bon Appetit

“A week ago I confessed my bias against beer that came out of cans, rather than from a tap or one of the brown glass bottles that have come to be associated with America’s craft-brew renaissance. Reminder, on the counting-our-blessings principle: for us Yanks this truly is the Golden Age of Beer. I have the additional blessing of being able to rely on the reading public to set me straight.”
It Appears That I Was Very, Very Wrong About Canned Beer : James Fallows, 12 February 2012, The Atlantic

“No matter the niche, there is a blogger ready to occupy it,” said a Wise Man on Twitter. Of course there is a blog at CraftCans.com; The most recent article is a 8 Decade Timeline of Canned Beer, posted earlier today.

That’s one 12 pack of links, have another:

• An Amazing batch of beers (and beer reporting) under the “Canned Craft Beer” tag at Beer Street Journal
• The 33 Best Craft Beers in a Can : Bradley Foster, 12 May 2013, Thrillist
• Awesome Canned Craft Beer : Ray Isle, 6 March 2013, Tasting Room foodandwine.com blog
• Top 5 Myths About Craft Beer in Cans – Debunked! : Jaime Schier (QA/QC Manager), 5 March 2013, Harpoon Brewery
• Craft Beer Canning Goes Mobile with the Can Van : Matt Canter, 7 March 2013, americancraftbeer.com
• Microbrewers Canning Craft Beer for Quality : Michelle Klug, undated article in the Wine and Beer Guide, cookinglight.com
• Sly Fox Announces Removable Lid Beer Cans : Andrew Kaczmarek, 12 August 2013, craftbeer.com [note: I ‘invented’ these in 2005 by taking a can opener to a tallboy. Sadly, I didn’t think to patent it. I might still open an etsy store selling “hand crafted aluminium pint glasses”, though. —M.]
• Budweiser’s New Package Design: Can Do, or Can Don’t? : Rain Noe, 19 April 2013, Core77.com
• More Americans Drinking BPA in Canned Beer, Thanks to Economy and Pabst Drinking Hipsters : Lloyd Alter, 20 June 2012, treehugger.com
• What’s the Deal with BPA in Craft Beer Cans? : Anne Vickman, 22 July 2013, craftbeercellar.com
• In Brazil, Brewery Lets Party-Goers Pay For The Subway With Empty Beer Cans : Leah Gonzalez, 15 May 2013, psfk.com
• …and don’t forget the Canned Craft Beer Festival.

~~

…of course I can’t stop at just 24. A few more links came up that are just a shade off topic: Here’s an obligatory link on Beer Can Chicken, “Debunking Beer Can Chicken: A Waste Of Good Beer (And It Is Dangerous)“, and one on Canned Wine.

I also particularly liked this PolicyMic story [22 April 2013, Jeff Guertin], “Craft Beer Astroturfing is a Beer Snob’s Worst Nightmare“. It’s not about canned beer, per se, but it seems like a much more pressing issue (to beer snobs) than a few loose molecules of BPA.

Analyzing my hit logs, it seems that about 40-50% of my “readership” are bots checking rss feeds (either the straight rss feed or atom – this blog supports both) and coming up empty.

Not surprising, as I’ve never been able to keep to a consistent (or prolific) posting schedule. Indeed, adding me (well, the blog) to an rss reader is the best way to keep up with updates here. You’ll forget to stop by, you only check in once a month, and by that time I might have written five really long thought-pieces — or I might have written nothing. If you use rss I just become part of your larger media diet, “Oh, RocketBomber. I’d almost forgotten about that guy. What drunken rant did he post this time?”

Still, about 400 times a week, some poor bot is tasked with loading my rss feed and comparing it to the last check, and coming up empty 90% of the time.

I thought I might give those hard working bots something to chew on. Not that they care. (But who knows, they might — maybe some day they will). Thanks, bots, for keeping that last lifeline open, a cable anchoring just another blog from sliding down the long slope into irrelevance.

I have about 15 items in my drafts folder; I’ll see what I can do about getting something into a postable form by Monday.

—M.

“The IAC-owned video site will scour crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo for movies to license, and then offer creators free Pro accounts as well as some money to promote their films”
…
“But the initiative nonetheless goes to show that crowdfunding can be used in all kinds of interesting ways, and it makes me wonder when we are going to hear about the first major music label using Kickstarter for artist discovery.”
Vimeo turns to Kickstarter and Indiegogo to find and fund movies : Janko Roettgers, 16 January 2013, GigaOm

Previously:
Original Projection : 1st update September 2012 : 2nd update December 2012 : 3rd update April 2013

With the introduction of the joint AAP/BISG BookStats program, the reporting that used to be available in free press releases is now locked behind a paywall. It still leaks out, in dribs and drabs, but getting numbers to plug into this graph is difficult, to the point where I don’t even want to bother with it.

The other fun fact is that AAP sales numbers are only those from the 1000+ publishers who voluntarily submit their data to the surveys, and as such are not complete. Most glaringly, and a fact noted over and over again by others, the ebook sales numbers do not include Amazon or other self-publishing.

[click for larger]

If you really want to know about the math, click through (up top) to some of the previous updates. [tl;dr the projected sigmoid growth curve is a tanh(t) function which ticks off monthly t-for-time in teeny fractions of π.] Needless to say, the projections I made in 2011 haven’t quite held up to the test of time.

And there’s that chunk, unreported, invisible, of self-published books that make up a small? large? portion of ebook sales each month.

Follow me along through this thought experiment:

What if self-published ebooks had their own growth curve? Separate from the major publishers (and other AAP members) and reflecting a different time frame, adoption rate, and limiting factors. Would this explain “the drop” we noted with glee (or skepticism) this time last year?

I think it does. I think we can even pinpoint the moment this independent market began to grow and while the total numbers were initially small, after a couple of years the “interference” this introduced was enough to move the “official” sales reported by the AAP. On the graph below, check what happened around and after July of 2012:

[click for larger]

Of course, since Amazon holds tight to any actualsales numbers that might illuminate the issue, my guess (educated, inspired, or otherwise) is still just a guess. If anyone at Amazon has the numbers and can see if my projection is close, then of course please contact via email and we can discuss my future employment at your fine company.

For everyone else: I see a market for ebooks currently at $150 Million a month—and slowly growing—for the orthodox publishing companies, and a smaller (related, but separate) self-published ebook market that currently stands at about $75 Million a month and will likely be double that at year’s end. Self-publishing is smaller and will remain smaller than the output of the orthodox publishers until mid 2015. (in ebooks; the impact on print books and text books are still great big question marks and beyond the scope of this little thought exercise.)

So far, I don’t think I’m wrong. Even my first chart 30 months ago wasn’t wrong — I was just waiting for more data. Given the data we now have, I like this version well enough.

What say you? Do you think self-published ebooks are clearing $75 Million a month? What is their growth potential?

Interesting: the “American Dream” wasn’t really a thing until after mass immigration — and the 1929 crash. Have we always been nostalgic for an America that never really existed?

[Google Ngram]

The first generation’s dream was America. Only the subsequent generations start talking about “the American Dream”.

This won’t change anyone’s mind; that assumes rational discourse where long-held beliefs can be challenged by evidence. But it’s so damn interesting…

“World building, in its purest form, is the creation of a new, fictitious world made from the little details that collectively form history, geography, and culture. Whether those details come directly from the writer’s personal experiences, their own mind, or some mix of the two, world building allows the writer to present a new set of circumstances to their audience that, hopefully, encourages them to take part in its creation. Although the writer will generally have more knowledge about the world than initially let on, successful world building avoids info-dumping and, instead, offers just enough info to point the viewer in the right direction before allowing them to explore on their own. It’s this guided interaction between viewer and the created world that immerses the viewer, endears the characters to them, and ultimately creates a memorable experience.”

World Building in Animation: The Scene Behind the Scene : Jessica Koroll, 28 December 2013, The Artiface

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The linked essay is on world/background story in recent animation, but it presents a viewpoint (and some writing tips!) that would be useful no matter the work, media, or intended audience. Well worth a read.

If B&N will not compete on price (or cannot) what can it compete on? A true luxury brand relies on exclusivity, rarity and the Veblen effect. The Veblen effect says that a reduced price reduces the status of the product. (There is some Veblen effect occurring for readers at the 99¢ price point). A purveyor of mass marketed goods can almost by definition not be a luxury brand.

In the Best Buy article, the new CEO says that they are trying to eliminate price as an obstacle for purchasing. This weekend at Barnes & Noble, the lines were enormous. People love buying books for other people but I also was with someone who wanted to buy a particular book for a friend and it wasn’t in stock. The exact conversation went like this.

BN: We can order it for you.

Person: It’s $16 here and $12 on Amazon. Why don’t I just order it myself?

The aforementioned conversation is what Best Buy wants to avoid. A brick and mortar retail store that can’t compete on price or selection has to offer something else. What else can Barnes & Noble offer? Better service?

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These are two very different types of transactions: the “item in store, let me buy this” experience, and the “I have a *very* specific item I need” expectation.

The reality for bookstores, poor things, is that customers conflate these two all the time.

Customers don’t even realize what they are asking. Even some booksellers don’t recognize the difference anymore.

How can Barnes & Noble compete in 2014, and beyond?

Let’s ask the one guy who had answers:

1 July 2012

I can’t compete with Amazon on price, so the primary advantage of the physical storefront is convenience: a book, in-stock, down the street and available for pickup today. That’s why I say the bookstore (even the big box bookstore) is too small. 100,000 titles doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, and for a customer base now accustomed to finding books on the internet, my 100,000 books might as well be 10,000. Every hour of every working day, we get a call from a customer asking for a book [a particular book, as this title was specifically blogged about or came up as the #1 result in a keyword search] that there is no way in hell I’d bother to stock. [*]

The customer who calls with an exact title, or ISBN, doesn’t need a bookstore; she could care less about the coffee or the comfy chair, all she wants is the damn book and a bare minimum of time spent in the car or in the store in the process of buying it. Today.

I think what this customer wants is a book distributor, a warehouse with a sales counter. The ‘big box’ was just a reasonable substitute so long as the economics worked out: A reasonably-large mini-distributor that could be easily duplicated in many communities — good enough for the 1990s, self-supporting at 1990s levels of consumer demand for books, and nice places to hang out in besides.

Obviously the landscape for book retail has changed, but despite what you hear from tech bloggers & clueless financial analysts the market for print books is *not* shrinking — it’s growing from a small core of bestsellers, genre fiction, & general interest titles into the long tail of millions of books published (a number growing each year, and accelerating in growth).

The mistake that many make is to call the Long Tail an internet phenomenon. The internet is a discovery tool, but the Long Tail is a change in customer Demand. Come, work the phones at my bookstore for a week: you can learn this first hand. My inability to meet this demand is because my bookstore-cum-distribution-center is too small, not because customer demand can ‘only’ be met by internet retail.

The very first question a customer asks when I say I don’t have a book is, “Well, does one of your other stores have it?” (You might even have asked this question of a bookseller yourself.) This tells me two things: first that the convenience of a book, available today, *now*, is more important than how far away the bookstore is — and second, that the unnecessary duplication of bookstores in every neighborhood is a burden on bookstore chains, not a desirable outcome.

A single, truly epic bookstore that stocked even more books would be able to serve a city-sized community better (and be a better investment) than 15 stores spread across a metroplex, each stocking more-or-less the same 50,000 books plus a truly random and pathetic sampling of everything else.

2 July 2012

Don’t just rethink the box, rethink the chain. Instead of opening up a smaller, pale imitation of a New York 5th Avenue bookstore everywhere, open up just 50-80 landmark bookstores. That might mean just one each for many cities – or one in a nearby city for some. Why dilute your single best selling point: stacks packed from one end to the other and to the ceilings, chock full of books. Double down on that bet – forget the ‘standard big box retail’ model and think big.

Sure, right now I can special order books for customers from the warehouse. Takes about a week, down here where I’m currently located. (I’m sure it’s better up at corporate HQ, since they built the damn warehouse in the state next door — fine for you, sucks for 200 million of your potential customers.)

Let me turn it around though: If all the books are in the warehouse, why not throw in a coffee shop right there inside the distribution center and open it to the public?

I would aver that the bookstore chain is too big, too spread out, and also played out: our customers don’t care enough anymore to support neighborhood bookstores at that scale. We need to open a truly humongous bookstore. Much like amusement parks (Six Flags, Sea World, Disney, et al.) maybe each US Census MSA would only support one – or rarely two or three. While we all love a neighborhood bookstore [& there is a place for such; I personally could generate business plans for bookstores on a sliding scale from bistro to Strand] the real need of most communities is for a single Landmark bookstore like the Tattered Cover in Denver or Powell’s in Portland — or yes, the Strand in New York.

I’m looking beyond books, however.

The future of retail depends on managing inventory, especially in the face of internet competition. Let’s consider a new model, a truly humongous bookstore that doubles as a distribution center: with a little advance planning you could open up a very small chain that covers hundreds of millions.

…

Not everyone would be willing to drive to a bookstore just to pick up a book — even if that bookstore was 4 acres of bookshelves under a single roof (about the size of a large IKEA, for scale). But if you could pick up a phone and call [or use a website] and know the book you need is there, that might change your mind. If you could know they had 20 copies of the book, and you needed 20 copies for your employees or clients, you’d be sending some lackey driving the 2 hours before he could sit down at his desk in the morning.

If this huge bookstore had not just a coffee bar, but also a pub, sit-down restaurant, hot dog cart, and ice cream shop — you’d plan your weekend around a trip.

There would be other ways to maximize the investment and key into “bookstore tourists” — topics I hope to cover in other posts. My point here was to build on yesterday’s column and show that there is a future for bookstores past the Big Box chain model. Additionally, if you chose to compete with Amazon on the internet, your massive bookstores are also fulfillment centers.

You don’t have to compete nationwide. Pick a market, serve that market. A single store in the right place can be the best bookstore for 30 Million customers — in person or with guaranteed 1-day delivery (at UPS ground rates, or via the post). A small chain of just 3 stores could easily serve 50 Million.

The 10 stores outlined above are within a 1-day delivery zone for 220 Million people, and within 2 days of another 70 Million customers. Looking at the map, a nice store in Denver would certainly plug in most of the rest to your network.

So, you want a nationwide brand that makes the most of internet searchability, access to customers, and that also features truly amazing bookstores that have the potential to be not just storefronts, but destinations?

Do we need a chain of 500 stores or do we just need 50? Or do we just need 10?

25 August 2012

Stick with me for a bit longer: IF the bookstore is a social space AND our sales depend, at least in part, on foot traffic in stores AND we have to put up with all you people anyway: why not go with it? Make the bookstore a destination — not an errand but a day-trip. Capitalize on what people are already doing, increase our site traffic, make a major impression on public consciousness — and then innovate to make the most of each customer, and each customer visit.

Sure, we currently run a café (can’t sell books without coffee these days) but the cafe shouldn’t be just a sideline — or more accurately, it won’t be the only sideline. Our coffee shop would stand to one side of the main seating area, now a spacious lobby: a nirvana of tables with outlets built into each column, a brace of comfy chairs on the inside wall, a row of patio tables just inside (and perhaps also just outside) the sunny windows, with a semi-detached space that just might be configured for an impromptu class or book group — and a separate 2nd floor lounge that would be even better for both. Set up the social space first, and put it in the center of your retail empire.

Immediately adjacent to the central seating [I could call it a ‘food court’ — ‘cause that’s what it is — but I hope the customers don’t dismiss it as such] in addition to the de rigueur coffee shop, we’d have a quick lunch counter, or maybe 2-3 concessionaires: Subway? Bagels? Ice cream? Starbucks or Dunkin’, even, instead of in-house coffee? (If I win the lottery, I’m setting aside a couple million to entice Tim Horton.) I’m proposing a monstrous bookstore with daily traffic that is going to exceed all-but-December-retail numbers, and our December is going to be absolutely nuts. As a landlord, I could make a nice chunk on rent.

Just off the central seating area, we’d have a full service restaurant & a first rate pub. These also directly support our ‘social space’ nexus: come in for a quick nosh and check your email while you wait for friends to get off of work, and then transition to the bar or to a table for dinner. Once again, we could run these ourselves or rent out the space; either works, and depends on how you want to collect your profits: guaranteed rent, or less reliable profits-from-food-service operations.

— I’ll understand if you’re not really comfortable with either. It’s a rare bookseller who has experience in facilities management AND hospitality & bar operations. Why, I think there may only be one person with this particular skill set. [*smirk*]

Keeping with the ‘mall food court’ model: once we’re past scone-throwing-distance from the coffee shop and our central seating area, well, that’s where the rest of our retail operation goes.

In this case, the rest of the retail operation is a big effing bookstore.

Now, let’s just assume for a moment that the commercial real estate market is so depressed that not only are a number of shopping malls all-but-closed, they’re even available for purchase — with no current tenants, falling into disrepair as we speak, and ripe for radical remodeling.

[I know: so unlikely, if it weren’t actually true. Once in a lifetime opportunity here]

We could buy a small regional mall — special bonus: the older and smaller malls are all closer to city centers, not further out in the suburbs — close down half of it to use as our warehouse/book distributor space, and reallocate the rest, building out from the food court, to sell books.

The wonderful thing (from the booksellers’ point of view) is that we could set up a window where 50% of our customers could just walk up and ask for, oh I don’t know, Organic Ostrich Farming, and then we go back into the stacks, find it, and hand it to them. We’ll set up this special order window with its own [small] seating space and register

…

Past this order window, we’d have the sales floor. Yes, I’m advocating that we separate “the stacks” from “the sales floor” — as 50% of our paying customers and 98% of the rest are either browsing bestsellers, browsing a specific genre [& we can accommodate that], or just hanging out for the free wifi and reading magazines. There is no need to make every shelf in every category available to the public. If the customers who already know the title and will buy it (if we have it in stock) can just walk up to the register closest to the main entrance and do so — that is a win-win-win. This call-ahead and pick-up may in fact be more than 50% of our business. We can stock as many titles as we can get our hands on, put them ‘in the back’ where they are immediately ready for sale, even if they aren’t necessarily ‘on the shelf’. We can take that part of the business and really streamline it.

What about the folks who don’t or won’t buy books? Well, we’ve already set aside quite a bit of dedicated space for social butterflies & campers — and this space will pay for itself with food service, I think.

And what about the grazers & browsers — who love to linger over tables & displays, and want to see what’s new – the readers, the book lovers — The other half of my book-buying customer base?

That’s the whole point of the bookstore. And now we look at how to really run a bookstore:

If I were in fact repurposing a shopping mall, then one “storefront” would be a newsstand with newspapers & magazines. Another might be a newsstand with comics. One storefront could easily be turned over to just the New York Times bestsellers & other mass market paperbacks — the direct equivalent of an airport bookstore. These could easily be the closest “stores” to our central-seating-area-slash-lobby-slash-food-court and there’s little thought or bookselling expertise required here, past keeping shelves full. We’re just meeting demand.

Just past the obvious though: If I can hire someone who loves romance novels, why not give her 3000sq.ft. and full reign to order in titles, stock shelves, merchandise tables, and above all sell books. We can keep the overstock in our warehouse [adjacent, on site] and face out a full “bookstore’s” worth of genre titles.

And do the same for mystery

And the same for sci-fi

And the same for history

And the same for biography [say, does A&E want to do a co-branded bookstore, with DVDs?]

And the same for design, or architecture, or gardening(from May-Sept), or cookbooks, or travel, or all of the above and more…

And most specifically, for kids: in the less-and-less-hypothetical case where I was taking over a shopping mall, put the kids shop [picture books, beginning reader, plush, games, et al.] in the last remaining ‘anchor’ location and put both Young Reader [10-12] and Teen Lit [12-16] in the two locations just outside – close enough that kids can wander away from parents but far enough so neither set has to shop the ‘kids’ dept. [*ack*, gag me]

[And even if it’s also in the teen section, there’s a chunk of ‘YA’ & ‘Teen’ lit that needs to be mixed in with the adult stuff – easy to hand, no judgements, cash at the register, thank you]

While I’ve used the shopping mall as my touchstone [as that is what I, as a child of the 80s, am familiar with] [and damn but the commercial real estate market is depressed: I’ve run numbers. I think I could actually buy a mall] this Concept would work even better with repurposed industrial or office space. I can only imagine what DC’s Old Post Office or an art space like Le Lieu Unique (in Nantes, France) would look like if they were turned over to books.

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The future of retail depends on managing inventory, especially in the face of internet competition. Still, it is easy to open a huge bookstore that doubles as a distribution center; in fact, with a little advance planning you could open up a very small chain that covers hundreds of millions. […which I’ve already posted]

There are are at least two ways to flatten verticals in retail: Amazon figured out one – sell direct from a warehouse & ship it. You cut out two layers—distributors & retailers—and make it possible to sell direct to customers from a massive inventory.

IKEA has figured out a second path: sell direct from your warehouse to visiting customers. This also cuts out two layers — a distributor/warehouse (as the store is your warehouse) and shipping via post or parcel service. Amazon’s model is not the only way to lower costs. From point of manufacture to customer fulfillment: physical retail space is not the only or even obvious thing to cut.

At IKEA, customers go home today with fine, flatpacked Scandinavian designed furniture & housewares. IKEA does so well with this model that their web site, actually (and intentionally) kind of sucks – and more often than not sends you into the store to buy.

Let me go back to the “massive inventory available direct to customers” part – Chris Anderson called this The Long Tail and characterizes it as an internet phenomenon. However, the long tail is a change not in available books but in customer demand – this new demand is enabled by internet search but not restricted to internet retail. If I, as a retailer, can meet that demand today, then there is no need for a customer to order from the internet. So we need a bigger storefront. Or even a warehouse. This is a logistics problem, and one I can solve.

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B&N spent $450-500 Million trying to launch and leverage the Nook. (maybe more; I haven’t followed this end of their business for a while)

I’d estimate a “Truly Massive Landmark Book Destination” would cost a tenth of that — or even less, considering B&N already owns the book inventory and has been closing stores at a pretty fair clip. Shifting a few books around the chain has got to be cheaper than buying new.

I’d call what is currently happening at B&N a failure of imagination, more than anything else. And complacency. Some hubris in there as well.

“Yesterday we had our best sales day in the history of 86 years at the store. So thankful for all of you.”
Strand Book Store record Christmas shopping holiday sales say print not dead : Michael Walsh, 25 December 2013, New York Daily News

“But again, this is a bad comparison. Royalties to authors aren’t the same as profits to publishers. We are the publisher when we self-publish. So start comparing our 70% take to a publishers’ 60% take when they deliver a book to a bookstore — keeping in mind that we don’t have a physical location to lease, shipping costs, or employee wages — and you’ll see that this is a very fair, sustainable, and permanent rate. If anything, there’s room for it to be more generous.
“Just like the sky, this rate isn’t coming down. And I’m not afraid to put a public declaration on this. Because hey, the chicken littles and the Jeremiads are wrong every single time. Yes, even tomorrow. Especially tomorrow.” [emphasis in original]
The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling! : Hugh C. Howey, 20 December 2013, hughhowey.com

Mr. Howey was responding to this Kindleboards post: A thought on how it could get much tougher, which I saw first via The Passive Voice

— Hugh Howey deserves credit, kudos, and all due respect for what he has been able to accomplish as an author and businessperson (in that he makes money; that’s how business-types keep score) but I can’t say I see any improvement in a market where there were once 50 different players, and now there is functionally only one.

Hugh casts his relationship to Amazon in one light: He, acting as his own publisher, provides the books to Amazon’s bookstore — selling to Amazon wholesale for 30% of the retail price. When put this way, Amazon appears to be Howey’s customer (and we maintain the illusion that Amazon is a “bookseller” and “bookstore”).

If allowed, I’d like to re-phrase Hugh’s main point: Actually, Amazon is allowing Hugh to use their app store to sell downloads, for which they take a 30% commission on sales. Amazon doesn’t need to collect more than 30% because they aren’t really doing anything except listing the book and facilitating downloads (just like Apple does with their App store, for example – and Apple also charges software developers 30%).

Hugh is right: the sky isn’t falling, Amazon is likely just fine paying authors 70% and hell, over time, they might even be willing to pay more. But Amazon is not the customer in the current KDP program: The Authors are. Authors give up that 30% to use the Amazon website to facilitate their own sales. Amazon makes commissions off the sales, but isn’t ‘publishing’ them, and certainly isn’t buying the virtual books to put on virtual shelves. It’s a listing; Amazon isn’t a bookstore, just like the old Books In Print wasn’t a bookstore.

Amazon and the Kindle ecosystem they’ve built are great tools for authors, but the things that make them great are also the things that make Amazon so very different from the old publisher-bookstore pipeline. To gloss over the differences with bold declarations that We are the publisher is, dare I say it, attempting to blind people to the real truth by shouting.

As “author” or “publisher”, where else do you go that isn’t Amazon? I don’t care how good the rates are, he kind of skims over the fact that Amazon set the rate for him: Hugh did not negotiate it. The Sky isn’t falling. There is no sky, when we all have to live under Amazon’s dome.

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I’d like to point out that Hugh Howey is a New York Times Bestselling author, and is making lots of money, and also managed both feats starting out as a self-published author on Kindle so maybe he knows something I don’t about how this all works. And now that he’s famous with an established fanbase, he could easily go it alone and sell direct to readers outside of Amazon, so maybe his perspective from his current position is correct. But for the rest of us? I don’t know.

I do think that self-publishing in 2014 is different than it was in 2011. If nothing else, the field is more crowded — plus Amazon continually tweaks their listings to make it harder to ‘game’ their system, so breaking out of the ebook pack like Hugh did is much tougher. This idea that Kindle authors are ‘publishers’ and not clients using Amazon services isn’t going to help anyone navigate that system.