Last week, Australia's Sydney Morning Herald published a jaw-dropping exchange of correspondence between Charlie Rimmer, the commercial manager of Angus & Robertson, Australia's largest bookstore chain, and Michael Rakusin, from Tower Books, a mid-sized Australian press.
The substance of the exchange was this: Angus and Robertson has decided to demand that publishers pay them thousands of dollars for the privilege of having their books sold in their stores. The chain has been churning through management shakeups, unsuccessful SAP implementations, and other foul-ups, and now they want publishers to pay them for the money they're losing by not ordering the publishers' books in a profitable way.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who has worked in New York publishing for decades, has done a masterful job in annotating both letters, giving needed context for people unfamiliar with publishing. I worked as a bookseller for years and I have a lot of patience and respect for anyone willing to take books to the public, but some booksellers are so dumb, so evil, so ridiculous — they deserve to crash and burn.
I am writing to inform you of some changes in the way we manage our business.
We have recently completed a piece of work to rank our suppliers in terms of the net profit they generate for our business.
Malarkey. If you're a bookstore chain, doing business with a publisher doesn't mean that you automatically carry a standard number of all the titles they publish. You order the books you want, in the quantities you judge appropriate. Whatever doesn't sell gets returned to the publishers at their own expense. If A&R hasn't been making a suitable profit off these publishers, it's not the publishers' fault. Booksellers make money by recognizing the books their customers will want to buy, ordering them in appropriate quantities, and selling them well.
