The future doesn’t look rosy for the big bookstores. Less than three out of every ten books sold last year were rung up on the tills of chain stores like Waterstone’s. And that’s print books. When you factor in the accelerating rise of digital books and comics, online book sales are whittling away at those meager profits that have so far kept booksellers on the high street.
As the Economist put it recently:
“Publishers rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But [Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins] says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.”
So book publishers are getting squeezed? As an author, one of a group accustomed to being shoved around by the often rather bullying might of publishers, I might be expected to say cry me a river. Except that the river in question is Amazon, which owns the dominant e-reader, publishes its own books, runs a print-on-demand company widely used by small and self-publishers, and is pretty much uncontested in online book sales. That dearth of competition is bad for a lot of people, most especially the reading public.
Over the last few years, as online stores and supermarkets have chipped away at the dedicated retail bookstores, the high street browsing experience has diminished. Publishers respond with ghostwritten celebrity books and genre works of dubious quality. It is the mid-list, backed by editors with experience and gut feeling, where we traditionally find quality writing and interesting surprises. Strip that away and the future of fiction is pulp. But mid-list titles are the least likely to sell away from the high street. Online shopping pushes you ever-tighter into genre-based recommendations, supermarket shopping favors easily recognizable trash.
If bookstores close, how will publishers catch the passing trade?
Tesco, a grocery company, have recently been trying an interesting experiment in South Korea. Faced with the problem of fewer stores than their competitors – and aware, as Mr Murray is, that people don’t shop so enthusiastically or so eclectically in front of a computer – Tesco put up display boards on the subway that replicated the look of grocery display cabinets. While waiting for their train, commuters can fill a virtual shopping trolley by scanning the
QR codes of the products they like. Impulse buying has never been so painless.
Online stores so far have focused very much on a Microsoft (desk) rather than Apple (roving) model. Yet the exciting thing about where personal computing has been going in the last few years is that it’s out of the study and in your pocket. People like to shop out in the world, but they don’t like to lug heavy bags home. Imagine a world (it’s not far off) where the high street bookstores and comic shops have gone. Instead, at a much lower cost, publishers and booksellers put up posters and virtual bookshelves with QR codes that direct us to where we can browse, discuss and buy the books.
Publishers have done a little in this direction so far, but they don’t seem to grasp the full potential. One recent book poster on a London railway platform sported a QR code that directed customers to the book’s trailer on YouTube. Dumb, dumb, dumb. The moment I took out my phone to scan the code, the publisher should have been closing the deal – not directing me to yet more publicity material designed to hook my interest.
I’ll tell you who the QR selling model would benefit most: a would-be rival to Amazon like Britain’s
Book Depository or
Barnes & Noble in the USA. Currently Amazon have a Herculean grip on the Nemean lion of online book sales. But the online book market is set to more than double in size over the next ten years, so there’s a lot still to play for. Also, there really is no good reason for rivals to be scared of taking Amazon on. None of the technology involved is untried; all that is wanting is vision and ambition.
Admittedly those are not qualities often associated with book publishing, which in the last year or two has looked increasingly paralyzed by present shock. But booksellers are traditionally a nimbler breed. For the sake of the quality and variety of the books and comics we read as much as their price and availability, it’s time for the booksellers to get out there and pitch their QR-emblazoned virtual stalls in the high street space. Because that’s where the readers are in a mood to buy, whether it's a pint of milk or
War & Peace.
Amazon, I don't know. They're ever so convenient and all, but they do do some loopy things - and I can't imagine it'll get any better when they're the only bookstore in the world. The latest oddity is that they have removed the price and pre-ordering details from Mirabilis Volume 2. However, the Book Depository (which Amazon of course bought this summer) are listing the book, which they correctly state will be released in just 12 days. So ample time to order it for Christmas - but only if you live in the UK and go to the Book Depository website. 
...for the time being, anyway. The first volume of Spring will go on sale in (appropriately) March next year. In the meantime, you can catch up on what happened in Winter with Print Media's gorgeous hardback edition, going for a pretty amazing price on Amazon. It's actually cheaper than the imported US trade paperbacks - and way more collectible - so grab it while the offer lasts:
Two of my favorite fantasy novels are Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell and Jack Vance's The Green Pearl. Both are very weighty tomes that suck you into richly detailed, immersive universes, and one of the techniques the authors use to do that is the liberal sprinkling of footnotes. These serve as little asides, often mini-stories in their own right, that you can dip into to get a sense of the broader world behind the action of the novel.
After the app and epub versions, of course the Kindle had to be next on our list. So here is the first issue of Mirabilis in MOBI format. Creating this version meant chopping the pages of issue #1 into two hundred separate images (one panel per page in most cases) and then converting them to grayscale and crunching them down to a size the device can handle. Yet, as the picture above shows, the spark of genius in Leo's, Martin's and Nikos's work still shines through.
No need to fight, there are plenty of copies to go round. I'm talking about the long-awaited Mirabilis trade paperbacks, two fabulous volumes each with 112 pages of thrills, spills, wonder and chills.
nd undersea kingdoms. And still the year has hardly begun.
And, as promised, here it is (just) in time for Christmas: the trade paperback edition of Mirabilis: Winter. The first book was so long that we had to split it into two 112-page volumes that between them collect the entire first season. The perfect stocking filler if you have two oblong stockings measuring 7" x 10" - which, by the way, is a little bit bigger and more deluxe than regular tp format. The production is very nice, with sharp colors on good quality paper stock with a silky finish. If you're used to the glossy, highly reflective pages of something like Buffy or Hellboy, it's nothing like that. It's more of a matt feel, but on somewhat better grade of paper than a typical comic book. All in all, a pretty classy item if I do have to say it myself.
As if the news about the upcoming Mirabilis graphic novel on iPad wasn't exciting enough, we are just about to put ink on a deal that will see Mirabilis: Winter, the first 200-page instalment in our fantasy saga, released in early 2011 as two glorious album-sized hardbacks by PrintMedia Productions.
In the run-up to last Christmas, I posted a bunch of mock-up comic book covers - y'know, just for fun. The covers here are a little different. These are eight full-size, full-color comic books that will be on sale in the USA early next year - the first wave of a 32-issue run comprising the whole of the Jack and Estelle story. (But not necessarily the whole of Mirabilis: Year of Wonders, as we have plenty of other plotlines up our sleeves.)
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