The more things change, the more people stick their heads in the sand.

[onyxhawke]

Sometimes the human capacity for ignoring things amazes me. Usually it just disgusts me. Statistics have shown the number of men who never get married has steadily risen over the last half century. This means there are more and more men every year with no wife, mother, girlfriend or whoever to do their shopping for them. Studies have also shown the

Comments

[eneit]

Try watching s woman buy science fiction from a traditional bookseller sometime. If you can convince them you really do want to buy one of 'those' books, then they assume you are only buying it for your partner or male relative.

My personal favourite moment was having bought a Douglas Adams novel, one of the Freer/Flint collaborations and Sinon Haynes first Hal Spacejock novel in the one spree, the female assistant looked at the covers and said, "Oh, I can never get into science fiction - it's all too serious."

[aqeldroma]

A pretty large chunk of the science-fiction reading (and writing! Le Guin, McCaffrey) audience is and has been women for a looong time...

[eneit]

I know, being something of a fan of the genre for four decades, but I'm far more likely to find Le Guin and McCaffrey in the fantasy section. I can not count the sheer number of times booksellers have assured me women don't buy science fiction. Quite often as I am buying science fiction from them.

[onyxhawke]

:-D

Yes, I can see where she'd get that idea from those titles.

[aqeldroma]

Writers and editors have nothing to do with putting books out in the supermarket, or Walmart/Target--that's strictly the bookbuyer on the retail side's responsibility as to what books they stock. And trust me, editors and writers WANT to be there. They just don't have a say in that decision.

[onyxhawke]

Me thinks the sales critters for the publishers aren't using the right approach/set of tools for over coming objections

[davefreer]

methinks reality is the publishers have been pushed into a corner by distributors. It is going to kill them, bookstores and yeah, distributors. It's time they started their own distribution instead or at the very least, a parallel one, which boxed clever, not one size fits all.

[onyxhawke]

This too is true, otoh... nothing as dynamic as the writer to publisher to distributor to retailer to consumer chain was ever designed, it had to have grown.

[djonn]

A couple of notes:

One of the problems with the supermarket/superstore (the latter meaning Costco/Walmart, not Borders/B&N) book distribution chain is that it's not actually managed by publishers, but by a network of IDs (aka Independent Distributors) that has -- like much of New York publishing -- consolidated itself from a lot of small players into a handful of big players in recent years. Tom Doherty of Tor has, I'm told, a long spiel about this; Ray Feist has also been known to discuss the matter at length. [These are also the IDs through which virtually all newsstand magazine distribution runs, including magazine distribution into the book chains; many people will tell you that magazine distribution nowadays is even more broken than ID distribution of mass market paperbacks. But we digress.]

Anyhow. This is indeed the major reason why you no longer see paperback spinners in most small convenience stores, as you once did, and why the book displays in most supermarkets look so much like each other.

OTOH, some of the larger

[davefreer]

Well, I was about to say this. Distribution is a vast VAST problem. It's hurt the midlist worst - approx (Eric said and I think he got it from Tom Doherty) 50% of paperback sales were once 'rack'sales - in everything from mom-n-pop corner shops to supermarkets. There were something like 500 distributors and they knew their locl markets - not putting Michael Moore on the rack in a 95% Republican voting district - but the sort of things people there would have interest in. With the distrubution now down to IIRC 5? only bestsellers (judged on national scale, and with fairly shaky methodolgy) get to the racks. Then with the staff 'savings' in the book-chains... it got worse. Only the Indies - who just don't have much muscle or market share, still actually try to match what local readers might want with any skill at all.

[mmegaera]

Yeah, but that's Fred Meyer. They're noticeably more in contact with their markets than the nationwide chains.

Look at their garden department, for instance. They have Real Plants [tm], not just a few flats of generic annuals.

[djonn]

Admittedly, Fred Meyer is unique. For non-Northwesterners: a Fred Meyer store is, essentially, a full-service supermarket and a broad-based department/variety store combined -- essentially, an old-school general store that never stopped being general. (Fred Meyer may well constitute a major reason that WalMart has been relatively slow in expanding into the Northwest.)

That said, some years back Fred Meyer -- which had itself bought out a number of smaller Western regional grocery chains -- was itself bought by Kroger, and so is now part of a very sizeable national empire. Interestingly, Kroger's made very few visible changes in the Fred Meyer operating model, though on the flip side it's hard to tell how much influence the Fred Meyer generalist sensibility has had on Kroger's other divisions....

[sartorias]

Excellent observations, occasionally shared by my spouse, who does all the family grocery shopping. (He's willing to go to two or more stores to price compare. I'm not.)

That's interesting about the books; I'm surprised Target carries books, but apparently they do.