Or, Why Yes, That Looks Just Smashing with Your Latte!

How publishers begin moving beyond the bookstore, and, yes, beyond the Nora Roberts available at the supermarket checkout line, for retail space for books, and whether or not this is news

For those who have spent hours in front of the bookcase agonising over whether Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past (or, for the more modern and edgy youth, In Search of Lost Time) goes better with your crisp fall outfit, publishers may have inadvertantly come to the rescue. Albeit they probably won’t help you decide between those particular titles; they most likely will have suggested one of their own recently published titles, via convenient product placement.

In order to combat flagging booksales, which are down by 2.6 percent compared to the corresponding period last year, and, I might suggest, in order to find a home for this fall’s influx of books, publishers are placing titles in other retail stores. According to the New York Times article, “Selling Literature to Go with Your Lifestyle,” “publishers are pushing their books into butcher shops, carwashes, cookware stores, cheese shops, even chi-chi clothing boutiques where high-end literary titles are used to amplify the elegant lifestyle they are attempting to project.”

Yes, for years, books have been stocked in supermarket check-out lines, in clothing stores like Urban Outfitters, and a few appropriate titles were often included in hardware stores or kitchen shops, but these alternative locations are accounting for an increasingly large portion of many publishers’ sales. “It’s a way for the book business to stay alive,” explained Abby Hoffman, who serves as the vice president of sales and marketing for Chronicle Books in San Francisco. “Anyplace that sells merchandise is a place to sell books.” And indeed, Chronicle Books sells the majority of its 350 offbeat titles each year to places like high-end grocery stores, children’s clothing stores and wineries.

Grocery stores? Of course. Some examples of what the the New York Times article dubbed “the oddest places” are, in fact, not so odd. In this respect, I agree with Galleycat, who I thank for pointing me to this story; in the wittlily titled piece, Like, wow, books can be sold in other places, Sarah says, “[T]his is a news story? Because duh, books *can* be sold in other places.” But wineries? (”Yes, we find that mysteries go best with our Pinot Noir. May I suggest some recent titles?”)

With appreciation for Galleycat’s well-executed mockery, there is some news in the story (shocking as that may be). It may not be quite the news that its author, Julie Bosman, has fashioned it to be, but the breadth of the current alternative retail market and the lengths that publishers, store managers, or both, are going to in order to promote booksales in these enviroments, are both new indications of the current market. Of course, as Galleycat points out, cheese shops can sell books, and they always could, but unless my Cheese-Shop Attendance has been too sporadic to make a resonable assessment, I don’t think they always have.

Penguin Group is selling books at cattle auctions, for example. Speaking for myself, that’s news, and perhaps moreso when you consider that it’s apparently a more successful marketing plan than Penguin’s production of a serialised novel. Locations such as farm-supply stores are ideal targets because there may not be a nearby vendor whose job it is to actually sell books. Barbara O’Shea, president of nontrade sales for Penguin, explained, “There is nobody selling books, so we’ve gotten these places to sell books.”

The most striking bit of actual information is the coordination of books to merchandise, hence the title of this post and introductory persiflage. In Anthropologie, the black-and-white “A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005″ is paired with a sleek black ensemble, a pop-up book named “One Red Dot” corresponds to polka-dotted sneakers, and a yellow sweater is not complete without the book “The Persistence of Yellow.” Meanwhile, Time Warner Book Group changes the color and design of its book jackets to coordinate with a store’s merchandise or display, and HarperCollins has done some advance research to discover the shades that other stores are planning to decorate in for spring, so that they can apply the same delicate tints of “margarita and sangria” to their own book design. (”But my book is called ‘The Blue Cafe!’” “Tough! Blue isn’t in for spring!”)

Topical organization is logical—the cookbooks in Williams-Sonoma, or even the Jean-Paul Sartre with the skinny black pants—but I contend that with pure aesthetic correlation, the marketing campaign has reached a new level. Under this scheme, the clerk at the winery will say, “Yes, I recommend this book with a dark red cover to go with your Merlot.” It’s not innovative. It’s just sad.

But the fact is, the publishing companies are apparently doing very well with these “alternative retail” marketing spaces and color schemes, a fact illustrated in multiple examples. True, Starbucks’ placement of Mitch Albom’s For One More Day may have propelled it to the top of the lists, but it probably would have been a bestseller, anyway. But 4,500 of the 12,500 total copies of Ann Vokwein’s Arthur Avenue Cookbook were sold through Mike’s Deli in the Bronx.

And at Simon & Schuster, these “special market sales” have grown by 50 percent in the last four years. “The publisher now has a responsibility to put books in front of more eyeballs,” said Jack Ramanos, the president and chief executive of the publishing company. “The market was always there, but I don’t know that most publishers were as aggressive about trying to develop it 10 years ago as they are today.”

Is it news? I offer the closing paragraph of Julie Bosman’s NY Times piece:

“You walk into Restoration Hardware and you want the couch and the vase and the nightstand, and then you want the two books that are on the nightstand,” Ms. Rosen said. “The books complete the story.”

Putting aside the fact that “Ms. Rosen” is not, as far as I can tell, elsewhere identified within the piece (if I’ve missed it somewhere, please point it out), let me respectfully disagree with the honourable members from Galleycat and PersonaNonData (whose nice thoughts on the piece I came across halfway through this post), and vote that yes, it is news. However, I would not file it under “Innovative and Exciting New Marketing Ideas” so much as “Evidence That the Second Coming is at Hand, or, at Least, We Are Propelling Towards a Kind of Cultural Doom.”

The Glass-Half-Full side of Thomasina ventures to assert, however, that unless somebody buys “One Red Dot” to go with their sneakers, there will be no one to publish all the other books. Including, of course, my color-coordinated copies of Ulysses.

A couple of excellent responses to this article appear in The Phoenix. It wins extra points for saying the article “chills to the bone.” I concur. The Publisher’s Marketplace piece sums up nicely: “What if the merchandise looks like crap? Should the books blend with that, too?”