Books Down Under

Lots and lots and lots of bookstores visited during my trip to Australia in September. Finally getting around to sharing some thoughts about the book market Down Under...

For better or worse and probably both, the retail scene in Australia is a few decades behind ours. For one, and for what I'm used to not a plus, it's one of those places that still believes shopping should only be done during the day. Stores open from 9-5, 10-6, Thursday is the one day when places open late, at least they're as generous with their shopping hours on Sunday as they are the other days of the week. This also effects restaurants, most of which close by 10PM. And in Sydney, enforced; one of those Bald Guy chocolate places I walked by on a fancy boutique street full of shops shuttering 6ish had a sign in window that the local council was forcing them to close early because they weren't in a part of town suitable for a later closing.

But as far as the book business goes, there are some pluses to having a country that's stuck three or four decades behind. For one, they still have mall stores. The big mall in Cheltenham had two Angus & Robertson outlets besides the Dymocks where Peter V. Brett was was signing my first full day in country. Downtown Sydney had Dymocks outlets of kind of like the way NYC used to be dotted with little Barnes & Noble stores and little Waldenbooks and a Dalton or two. The shopping strip at Glenelg, the beach suburb of Adelaide, has one of each. Even more surprising than the presence of all of these mall stores is the fact that the two major department stores, Myer and David Jones, all have book departments, the Myer a bit bigger than the David Jones. So there are more books closer to more people.

There are some retail names like Woolworth, Target and KMart that are familiar to people from the US, but not owned by the US companies. So in the US, Target has a solid book department, in Australia the Target book departments were rather small. K-Mart had a big book department, as did Big W, which is owned by the Australian Woolworths. And then there are smaller news agents throughout the country that have smatterings of books.

Borders started to open superstores in the late 1990s, on my last trip to Melbourne in 1999 their store at the Jam Factory in Melbourne was new and fresh and very exciting to them. A couple of years ago the outlets in the Southern Hemisphere were sold off to the company that also owns Angus & Robertson. Like the Borders here at home in Westwood, the Jam Factory Borders seemed old and faded, a dowager. Too big for today, designed at a time when people purchased music and videos. The newer stores seemed a little peppier. In the UK, one mistake of Borders ownership was to make their Books Etc. mall stores too much like the superstores, here there's still some distinction in merchandising between an Angus & Robertson and a Borders.

And as to be expected in a behind-the-times place, there are still some specialty bookshops. Melbourne has a big place called Minotaur that's like the larger Titan-owned Forbidden Planets in the UK and a smaller but decently stocked Of Science & Swords up the streets. There was a romance specialty store on a quiet block in Melbourne. And Sydney has the wonderful Galaxy Books, which has pretty much any sf/f book you might possibly want to find.

What did all this mean for JABberwocky? Well, a small mall store in Australia might have the "selection" that a small Waldenbooks had for JABberwocky books ten years ago, which is to say hardly anything at all. I mean, there was lots of Charlaine Harris everywhere. She's one of the top-selling authors in Australia, the little news agents might have a book or two in their little sections. Target had the most recent book in their small sections. The stores that sold lots of books would have dozens of copies, even hundreds of copies, of Charlaine's books. But after that, there would be some Peter V. Brett at most of even the smaller stores, some Brandon Sanderson, some Elizabeth Moon, maybe not all three of those, and maybe not a full set. The Desert Spear but not The Warded Man, a Deed of Paksenarrion omnibus or an Oath of Fealty but not both, one or two Mistborn books but not all three. The best selection in an Australian Borders was maybe 40-50 of our non-Charlaine titles, while here in the US the worst B&N or Borders has a few more than that and the better-stocked stores may carry 80-100 titles. Here or there, in part depending on the size of the paranormal section or the size of the store, maybe some UK editions of Kat Richardson, Tanya Huff or Simon Green.

Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings had just gone on sale in Australia, and that was carried pretty much everywhere and in decent quantity. Front table at KMart, Fathers Day promos (in Australia, it's in early September) at the chains. That being said, the positioning of Brent Weeks vs. Brandon Sanderson is the opposite there of what it is here, and as happy as I was to see lots of Brandon, I was very jealous of Brent Weeks, not a client, for his Black Prism was out there in quantities twice that or more of Brandon's Way of Kings.

Dymocks are franchised locations with considerably more buying discretion than most other chain stores, so those selections could be much more variable even adjusting for store space. The Cheltenham store isn't teeny-tiny but not particularly big either but had lots more JABberwocky books because the owner and staff wish it to. The Dymocks in downtown Adelaide is much smaller than the flagship Dymocks in downtown Sydney, but much more aggressive about looking for appropriate US imports. So the smaller store in Adelaide had the largest chain store selection of JABberwocky titles, while the flagship outlet might have 38 copies of a big book from an Australian publisher but didn't put much effort or energy into stocking imports and overall had a disappointing selection.

And then there was Galaxy Books. They took British editions where they could get British editions, American editions where they could get those, Australian where they could get them. They had everything. In the neighborhood of 120 JABberwocky titles, three times the selection of the best of any of the other stores I could have visited.

I should also mention the Sydney outlet of Kinokinuya. I'd never heard of them before, but they were recommended to me by my hosts in Adelaide. These stores stock books in Japanese, Chinese, English, and of course generous assortments of manga. Their selection of English language books was excellent, about equal to what I'd found at the Dymocks in Adelaide, but then they also had all of those other books. I somehow managed to find Taiwanese editions of some Brandon Sanderson in that section of the store and if I knew what I was looking for could no doubt have found more exotic foreign editions. I will have to remember to visit some of their US locations to see now they compare with Sydney.

Buying books in Australia is an expensive habit. A lot of the books sold in Australia are printed in and imported from the UK or the US, and the freight can add to what a book has to cost. And then books are subject to the Australian GST, and that is embedded in the price as well. Add all of that together, and a US mass market can easily sell for $20+ Australian, trade paperbacks for $30AU, and then don't ask about hardcovers. Which is why for a lot of the books I've sold in the UK, there's an Australian trade paperback done simultaneous with the British hardcover, because there's just no way to put out a book that has to carry a $50 cover price and expect anyone to buy it. No joking, check out Booktopia and see the official list price for some of the books on the home page. The cheapest price I could find on books in Australia were at Dirt Cheap Books. Their warehouse location in Collingwood was depressing and cheery. Upstairs you'll find cartons and cartons and cartons of remainder books for "only" $5AU, I purchased a Richard Morgan in case I needed more reading for the trip home, but when it's your client and you're seeing scores and scores of copies of Blood Lines by Tanya Huff, you kind of wish you were someplace else.

And the price of the import editions establishes the market price for books. There's no particular reason for a copy of Peter Brett's Desert Spear that is printed in Australia at the Griffin Press to cost the same as a similarly sized book by Simon Green that is printed in and imported from the UK, except that there's no reason to charge $22 because you can, when you know that people will happily pay $28 for the same book. So even though the market does include little used book shops on many neighborhood main streets just like once upon a time was the case here in the United States (John Berlyne and I stumbled across a wonderful one in Carlton one night) I couldn't bring myself to support these quaint little neighborhood shops by actually buying even the used books because they were so godawful expensive considering that in a week or two I'd be back in the US where you can easily find a $3 book at Barnes & Noble or a $1 book at the Strand.

Some lessons learned:

My store visits reinforced the importance of having a British or Australian publisher in order to actually have books widely available for sale in the Australian market. Even Borders was inconsistent in carrying even the more popular JABberwocky books, the Lost Fleet series let's say, that weren't available from UK publishers. I can talk about this topic at much more length since it ties into the entire question of whether you have a US (or UK) publisher with World English rights to your book instead of just their own market, but for now I'll just leave at saying if you want to maximize US visibility you need a US publisher, UK or Australia you need publishers active in those markets. [Side note, under Australian copyright law the British publisher can't claim Australia as an exclusive market from the POV of the Australian government if it doesn't release its edition in Australia within a month or two of US release.]

British publishers do not play nice when it comes to paying bestselling authors for copies sold in Australia. If you're a run of the mill author with a British publisher, they will do one print run and ship cartons to Australia. This gives them some wiggle room for royalty purposes on how much money the British arm charges the Australian arm for the books, which allows them to move money from one subsidiary to another and to reduce author royalty by charging a smaller price. On balance, it looks like these copies are sold at a nicer discount than a US publisher will charge for its sales to Canada. But the real gamesmanship comes on the major authors, for me a Peter Brett or Charlaine Harris or Brandon Sanderson, whose books are being printed in Australia. Those are "sold" to the Australian publisher by the British publisher on similar terms to the books that are being printed in the UK and shipped Down Under. Hence, the author's royalty rate, which is based on that "sale" price to the Australian publisher, is much less than it would be if the book were treated as being the Australian book sold by an Australian publisher that it actually is. For our bestselling authors, can we find a way to get those Australian books printed in Australia reported at full royalty rates based on the extremely high Australian cover price instead of as British export sales based on the easily manipulated price for selling a physical book from the British subsidiary of the publishing conglomerate to the Australian subsidiary?

movies down under

I saw five movies while I was in Australia in September.

Four Lions is a British black satire about Islamic terrorism, very droll and very sardonic, in the tradition of but much better than last year's In the Loop.  I saw this at a classic art multiplex, four small sloped floor screens at the Palace Kino on the eastern edge of Collins St. in downtown Melbourne, and in that bad time during the mid-afternoon when the body can want to be in siesta mode. I wasn't able to resist the siren call of the siesta but liked what I did see enough to wish I had been awake for more of it, yet not so much that I wanted to see again when it opened in New York in November. In part because I could see the same thing happening again.  It's just awfully hard to make droll work for ninety minutes. And can you really stretch a joke about inept terrorists for this long. And it is one joke, slowly building to a planned suicide bomb attack on a London marathon by men dressed in animal suits. Which, if you think sounds at all funny,might be occasion enough to rent.

The next evening I went to the Greater Union Russell Street 6 to see Going the Distance.  Appealing cast but mediocre movie, hardly worth talking about. The theatre is quite nice, a teardown and rebuild where even the small screens are nice and two larger screens very nice indeed, and very creative in it's use of space. That there is such a huge screen hiding above the lobby and another one in the basement.  However, on the night I was there, there was no sound out of the left surround speakers and sitting on the left side of the theater this was very distracting.

But there are few theaters of any sort to compare to the Astor, where I saw Grindhouse the next night. This is a beautiful huge old theatre about to celebrate it's 75th birthday. With a massive screen.  A lobby with three different lounge areas.  A major league balcony. A modern and powerful sound system. And different movies six nights a week, sometimes even a double feature. And with the original coming attractions for some of the forthcoming films. . My one night to go they were showing Grindhouse in the roadshow version with both parts and an intermission.  The movie isn't very good, and I stayed for only the first of the two parts, but even if I didn't like the movie much I loved the experience of seeing it.  Words can't describe the size of the screen. If you are in Melbourne, I suggest this as a must see. Look at the schedule for any week, and it's reason enough to move to Melbourne.  

In Adelaide, I visited the Greater Union Arndale for Despicable Me and had another negative experience with them. Huge single line for both tickets and concessions, and two people plus manager chipping in to handle all the ticket sales and all the concessions. So even though we got to the theatre with a few minutes to spare we barely made it to our movie before the trailers ended.  But it was another nice theatre, modern stadium seating with even the smallest auditoriums having nice sized screens. The movie was good. It had a little more heart and a little less wisecrackery than a lot of other current animated movies. We saw it in 3D and that was a waste. The movie would have been just as good in 2D. 

The final movie was something called Boy that I saw at the Hoyts Paris in the Entertainment Quarter. This is an area southeast of downtown Sydney adjacent to the Fox studios that has a huge Hoyts multiplex with the smaller Paris around the quarter for art films, and then an assortment of uninteresting eateries. It was pretty close to dead on a Wednesday evening. And the movie was a plotless bore that I happily slept through.