Chapter 11: Looking Back at 2023
…and forward to big changes
Hello readers! In this post, I’ll be crunching the numbers at Buffalo Street Books for 2023—they’re a bit surprising—and comparing them to what I know about the industry as a whole. Then I’ll look ahead to envision structural changes in bookselling and publishing that could juice those numbers for future years.
But first a note to my generous and discerning subscribers: next month will be the one-year anniversary for Open Book, which means those of you who signed up for an Annual or Founding subscription will be asked to renew. This summer I will be rotating off the executive board of BSB after six years and two terms, and this fall I will be publishing my second book. That means that I cannot promise a full year of posts and might need to bring this newsletter to a close in the summer. Please consider renewing with a monthly subscription so that you are only paying for the posts that I will write, though I heartily thank anyone who does renew with an annual subscription. As always, every cent goes directly to Buffalo Street Books. This newsletter has raised almost $2000 for one struggling bookstore, and I am so grateful to everyone who is reading this. Onward!
2023 at BSB
Starting with December, the big surprise is that sales were nearly identical to December 2022—they were within a single percent. This was not a good surprise, because sales were down in 2022 so they’ve stayed suppressed. December constituted 18.2% of annual sales in 2022, and 17.17% of annual sales in 2023. Another figure that sunk: donations at the register were up 20% for the year, but down almost 14% for the month of December. We’d been cautiously optimistic that this year we’d see a small but helpful holiday boost, and that did not materialize.
Turning now to the entire year, another surprise—or rather, the same surprise. Book sales were nearly identical between 2022 and 2023, within a single percentage: $443,400 in 2023 against $444,100 in 2022. Our online sales have continued to decrease since 2021, but this year we made up that deficit with in-store sales. Interestingly and surprisingly, sideline sales (everything except books, including stationery, calendars, candles, and puzzles) soared by almost 50%. Used books and event income were both up, but neither are huge line items for us (yet!).
The surprise stems, in part, from the expectation that the numbers would be different because we’ve changed up some of our operations to meet the challenge and invitation of having a dedicated reading room for events. General Manager Lisa Swayze has worked hard to keep costs down and we saved about $5000 in cost of goods (payments to publishers and distributors). Unfortunately, we were up by about that same amount in payroll, because the labor to keep the register and the back office and events rolling forward is intensive.
Industry-wide, the trend was similar but not identical. As Publishers Weekly wrote, “Helped by a 1.7% increase in the fourth quarter, unit sales of print books fell only 2.6% in 2023 from 2022.” The structure of this sentence is dispiritingly familiar to those of us on the executive board; “we’re down by less!” is the only win we can expect in a given month or year. The overall story for 2023 is that book sales were down by more than 4% at the third-quarter mark but then recovered a bit over the holiday. Adult fiction sales were helped by blockbusters from Colleen Hoover and Rebecca Yarrow, while adult nonfiction got a boost from Prince Harry and Britney Spears. Children’s books took a dive downward—who could be surprised by that in this age of screens? One bright note: independent publishers have made gains on the Big Five publishers, for the second year in a row, in the race up the bestseller list, comprising 15.2% of the hardcover bestsellers, and increase over 2022’s figure of 12%. But overall, hardcover, paperback and mass market were all down.
As I write this in mid-February, we already know that 2024 has started slowly for Buffalo Street Books. January sales, always low, were much lower than usual.
This feels like a good moment to remind everyone why it is so hard to keep a beloved bookstore alive. Jeff Deutsch, Executive Director of Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, argues this counterintuitive point (scroll to about halfway, though the entire speech is eminently worth reading):
“[W]hen it comes to paying for our work – which means putting books on the shelves, covering operational costs, and paying booksellers a wage that allows them to live where they work – booksellers are not retailers.”
Sure, on the face of it, Deutsch says, bookselling looks like retail, but peer behind the scenes and you’ll see that it is obdurately resistant to any of the measures a traditional retail consultant would suggest for staying alive. If your product is too expensive to obtain, find another supplier—but books are unique and if you don’t like one publisher’s terms, you can’t get their books from another publisher. Well, how about negotiating with your supplier on price—but anti-trust laws prohibit publishers from treating brick-and-mortar stores differently from each other. Okay, try increasing the price to increase your margin—but list prices are determined by publishers and they form a price ceiling that booksellers cannot exceed.
You’ve heard it before, but Jeff will say it again: “because the margins are so slim on new books and the cost of operating a bookstore so high, bookstores cannot make a living selling new books; in fact, selling books in a good bookstore doesn’t make money – it costs money.” It costs money for the privilege of running a bookstore. So bookstores will only be operated by those with privilege—unless something major changes in a hurry.
Structural Change in the Future
Let us not forget that the Federal Trade Commission and seventeen state attorneys general have sued Amazon for monopolistic practices. This hasn’t been in the news much since the suit was filed last September, but a judge recently announced a trial date of October 2026 and depositions are set to begin this summer. Cory Doctorow applied his famous “enshittification” theory of social media decline to Amazon in a New York Times op-ed last September that describes the insidious creep of its anti-capitalist practices. The lawsuit could have hugely consequential ramifications for booksellers—or the FTC could lose and Amazon could charge ahead unscathed.
(Incidentally, Doctorow just published a riveting post about a billionaire author’s success at buying a slot on the New York Times bestseller list. He makes a fantastic connection between how easy this is for the mega-rich with how hard it is to sell books out here in the real world:
“This may be the golden age of scams, but it's the dark age of publishing. Consolidation in distribution has gutted the power of the sales force to convince booksellers to stock books that the publisher believes in. Consolidation in publishing – especially Amazon, which is both a publisher and the largest retailer in the country – has stacked the deck against books looking for readers and vice-versa (Goodreads, a service founded for that purpose, is now just another tentacle on the Amazon shoggoth). The rapid enshittification of social media has clobbered the one semi-reliable channel publicists and authors had to reach readers directly.”
But this is a digression.)
According to the FTC, one of Amazon’s sins is punishing retailers (by pulling their listings or plunging them down to the bottom of search results) for selling their goods on other sites at lower prices. Oh the irony. But oh the solution! Let’s do this.
Let’s institute a price floor for books, a number below which they cannot be discounted. Maybe this is a percentage of the list price; maybe this expires after the book has been available for a certain amount of time. But let’s decide as a culture that books are too valuable to function as loss leaders for monopoly behemoths, and let’s punish anyone whose algorithm violates this rule. What is illegal when a single corporation secretly does it becomes entirely legal when a government or industry does it. After all, a price floor in labor is called a minimum wage.
France has already done this. They have a law dating back to 1981 that stipulates a maximum discount of 5% for books, and in 2022, they similarly mandated a minimum shipping price of €3. This is part of an explicit designation of “cultural exceptionalism” given to books. France has around 3500 independent bookstores (which support 12,000 jobs), compared to around 2200 in the United States. Once again, the numbers tell the story.
Other structural changes forthcoming or about which to daydream:
The American Booksellers Association is asking members to support the Credit Card Competition Act, currently in the Senate. According to them: “The CCCA would require the largest banks in the U.S. to enable a second processing network on credit cards they issue, creating competition over fees, security and service that would save retailers – and their customers – an estimated $15 billion a year. Today, Visa and Mastercard control over 83 percent of the U.S. credit card market.” In an industry where profits routine fail to break the 2% ceiling, a reduction in swipe fees could make a difference, though this is hardly the structural realignment that bookselling needs. What else could the ABA advocate for their members?!
Bookshop.org has been working on a platform for e-books so indie bookstores can sell them and readers can purchase and read them in their web browser or in the dedicated app. They also launched a publishing arm, Bookshop Editions, which published its first book in 2023, Lydia Davis’s Our Strangers, which is only available at indie bookstores and Bookshop.org.
Last month when I was writing about lesbian feminist booksellers in the 1970s and 1980s, I learned that part of the rationale for the fairly tight margins that publishers offer booksellers is that the small discounts offset the huge privilege of the right to return books after they have sat on the shelves for many months. But what if a bookstore doesn’t want that privilege? What if they refuse the extreme fungibility of books as widgets that expire in a few short months when the reviews have stopped coming, preferring instead to curate a store with a deep backlist of titles that sit on the shelves for as long as needed until readers discover them? Publishers might perhaps offer two tiers of discounts, one that allows returns and one that prioritizes the best possible price for indie booksellers. It is in publishers’ interest to foster the midlist and the backlist, though they often act as if only the explosive bestsellers matter.
Book Recommendations
You know what book should be an explosive bestseller? Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. Holy hell is this book phenomenal, such a page-turner and far smarter than it needs to be. Naomi Klein, the deeply analytical writer from the progressive left, has consistently been confused with Naomi Wolf, the once-liberal feminist writer turned batshit-crazy, anti-vaxxing conspiracy theorist who is a regular on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room. Klein holds her nose and plunges into Wolf’s world (she calls her Other Naomi). Along the way to explaining the source of the confusion, she manages heroically to explain Wolf’s baffling transformation, to note the proliferation of doubling and mirroring in our political world, and to draw an astonishing map of patterns and affinities in contemporary culture, far too many of them trending toward fascism. Seriously, you have to read this book.