There is much gnashing of teeth in the trade press about the future of independent bookselling. Indeed, whenever I write anything about sales of books in the UK I get a lot of comments and correspondence attacking us (and other publishers) for undermining independent booksellers by granting too high discounts to chains, supermarkets and Amazon. The Bookseller magazine has carried many excellent articles on the subject but I think this angry and forthright letter published by them yesterday deserves to be widely debated and I've appended a few paragraphs from it. I don't agree with Mr Foster's conclusions (nor his views on the Booksellers Association)  but I do think we need to address the issue more formally than through the Bookseller or this blog:

Independents are the key

I refer to Jonathan Spencer-Payne's recent letter (The Bookseller, 1st December) in which he forecast that there would be no independent bookshops in 20 years. While I agree with most of what he says, I do think he's being rather optimistic. I know of three which have closed relatively recently and two that are in difficulty in our region...

...The independents are the seedbeds of the business and the custodians of our literary culture. They subsidise the discounts given so generously by the publishers to the chains, supermarkets and internet booksellers. They are the de facto agents (unpaid) for Book Tokens, which are hidden by the chains (which prefer to sell their own vouchers), and they keep the wholesalers in business.

They are run in the main by sensible people who do not owe the banks hundreds of millions of dollars. They support a comatose and ineffectual trade organisation whose chief executive is never heard or seen promoting bookshops in the media.

When the independents go, the lot goes, and it'll be sooner than you think. The chains will never, ever be able to compete with the supermarkets and the internet. Happy New Year.

Philip Foster
Owner, The Tolsey Bookshop & Stationers
Tetbury, Glos GL8 8JG

I'm indebted to Peter Collingridge for pointing me to a cost-free solution to analysis of visitors to this blog. I'm also grateful to Google and the Macmillan IT department for making it possible. Here are a couple of the charts available.

The surprise here is that I'd assumed a significant proportion of visitors were coming from India but the pattern is very similar to the standard geographical distribution of sales of an academic monograph.

What can I say about this one? Thank you Susan Hill and thank you Grumpy.

On a very sad note I have just heard of the death of William Armstrong, formerly Managing Director of Sidgwick and Jackson and a great publisher and mentor to many. There will be in-depth obituaries in the trade press by people who knew him intimately. All I can say is that he never once lost his enthusiasm for publishing good books well and commercially. As a result of William's retiring style, there are no pictures of him on Google Images so I'll have to wait for the Bookseller archives to dig something up.

And finally, Publishers Weekly has reported on the AMS Chapter 11 which I wrote about last week. What I hadn't realised was the quantum of potential damage. Random House is owed $43m and the next four (Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins) around $80m between them. I'm not sure what the total profitability of these top five businesses in the USA is but I'd be surprised if it exceeded the sum of these liabilities. Let's hope that AMS keep their word and allow the non-US parts of the business to trade without depriving them of cash to pay suppliers.

At this time of year the media world is awash with predictions. The Booksellers Association runs a blog authored by (I prefer 'written by') Martyn Daniels. It's well worth investigating but just in case you're not up to clicking post holiday celebrations here are his predictions for our industry in 2007:

• Macmillan’s audio MP3 player. Whether it is a promotional gimmick or the next audio format is immaterial as it will certainly create noise and stir others into action in this obvious format area.
• 508 compliance which may seem a million miles away to us Brits but signals a new impetus to audio, web site design and will help bodies such as the RNIB in its cause.
• New technology, in the form of OLED screens, or the Hearst reader.
• The announcement and initial roll out of a new distribution environment and services to support digital content within the existing channel.
• The start of real POD services based not on short print runs but distributed printing at affordable prices. Maybe a BOD (bind on demand) model to support customised printing.
• Richer and richer bibliographic services and the need for every publisher to engage in its provision, even if they don’t sell digital content.
• Increased importance of Internet sales, emarketing and community engagement and participation. Success will be achieved increasingly by engagement and word of mouth than wallpapering web pages with books and offers.
• Omnivore fears will stoke more publishers to join their ranks but major publishers will continue to build their repositories and control their digital assets.
• Booksellers will increasingly sell old, used, new and digital side by side. Currency is only one aspect of selection and selection is what booksellers have always done best.

Change in publishing is definitely in the air but some things change more slowly than others. This photo of our Basingstoke offices dates from the 1980s and nothing has changed.

In my January 1 entry I published our blog statistics for 2006 including a challenge for our IT department:

This blog has now completed a full year. In December we had 60,400 visits down from 63,375 in November (the effect of the holiday season I hope rather than anything sinister). This brings the total for the year to 399,947, tantalisingly close to a milestone. With the statistics software I have I cannot tell how many of these are unique, nor how many are from Macmillan employees. Maybe next year our IT department can come up with a zero-cost way of answering these questions.

IT have now responded and it turns out that during the year we served 46,327 distinct hosts. Some hosts will represent many unique visitors but at least I now know that there have been a significant number of 'uniques'.

This is the scene outside the Pan Bookshop. It wasn't just the trees which were selling like hot cakes. The list below is their top ten books sold by volume in the last four weeks of the 2006.It doesn't tally very well with the bestseller lists in the papers but neither, I guess, does the clientele.

1. Dangerous Book for Boys - Conn and Hal Iggulden

2. Previous Convictions - A.A.Gill

3. Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky

4. North Face of Soho (volume 4 of Unreliable Memoirs) - Clive James

5. Amo Amas Amat - Harry Mount

6. Debrett's Etiquette for Girls - Fleur Britten

7. God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

8. The Kensington Book - Carolyn Starren

9. Made in Italy - Giorgio Locatelli

10. Daughter of the Desert (Gertrude Bell) - Georgina Howell

And the manager wanted me to mention two distinguished also rans:

Sorrows of the Moon - Iqbal Ahmed -- privately published in 2004 but sold 100 copies in the shop this year.

Concorde - Frederic Beniada - at £40 this was in the top five revenue generators for the shop.

I have deliberately not linked any of these titles in order to encourage you to visit (at 158 Fulham Road SW10 9PR) or order by post or e-mail (panbookshop@btclick.com) from the Pan Bookshop.

On the blog transparency front I can now report that up to 31 December Macmillan has earned $109.73 from the ads carried on this site. The cash will apparently be arriving on 5 February, so look out for a major splurge.

And finally last week I wrote about Trinity, Cambridge, my entrance interview and subsequent undistinguished career. Someone has sent me this photo of the intake of 1967 which has me just two rows below my fellow new boy Prince Charles. His university career wasn't much more distinguished than mine but he's certainly got more press coverage.

This blog has now completed a full year. In December we had 60,400 visits down from 63,375 in November (the effect of the holiday season I hope rather than anything sinister). This brings the total for the year to 399,947, tantalisingly close to a milestone. With the statistics software I have I cannot tell how many of these are unique, nor how many are from Macmillan employees. Maybe next year our IT department can come up with a zero-cost way of answering these questions.

Nonetheless I am amazed and gratified by the volume of visitors and the amount of (usually) kind and constructive correspondence. The paucity of comments is a shame but I guess people have better things to do than populating this blog. I also wish more Macmillan people would contribute. There are some regular commentators, some of whom I've enjoyed arguing with. There have been only two comments which I've had to edit away for reasons of taste. It's worrying that the entries which generate the most and the most heated debate are those concerned with the British book trade and the relationship between publishers and independent booksellers. I accept that there are important issues here. I cannot accept, however, that these are more important than the impact of the digital revolution on publishing as a whole or the need to develop new structures for publishing to take account of globalisation and new reader tastes.

And while on the subject of literary taste I came across the following quote in a BBC report.

'It entertains, as sport must do, but it is without heft, or any substance, it is like a book picked up at an AH Wheeler & Co bookstand at Calcutta's Howrah Station and discarded on arrival in Delhi.'

I do not know the bookshop in question and I have never been to Calcutta. The sport in question is also irrelevant. You know exactly what the writer is trying to convey. The sport in question is, of course, cricket (the one-day version) and the journalist is Rohit Brijnath. His style of sports writing is hardly ever found in the British media. It is correct, old-fashioned English with falir and substance. It is discoveries like this which make me so enthusiastic about our investments in India. This is not a just a country for outsourcing or manufacture. This is a place of creativity, insight and literary adventure. Fortunately it is also complex and its rules of engagement will bamboozle all but the most determined would-be investors.

Macmillan has been part of Indian publishing since 1892 and we intend to make 2007 the best year ever with Macmillan India leading the rest of the group in growth and innovation. January will see our Gurgaon-based MPS Technologies launch of BookStore for the German Boersenverein and for Macmillan companies in the UK and Australia. More customers and more functionality are lined up for implementation throughout the year as we build on our lead over competitors. ScholarlyStats goes from strength to strength as librarians around the world discover the efficiencies and cost savings of using the system. On the text processing end of the business we are investing heavily in enhanced systems for all our clients and have built formidable resources for book as well as journal activities in Charon Tec and ICC Macmillan. On the publishing side we shall be publishing more and better than ever and investing in new markets in education both school and college, scholarship and science, Internet, fiction and non-fiction, in English and the vernacular languages. It will take the all the ingenuity and efforts of our 3000 people in India to make all this work and I have no doubt they will succeed.

And as a change from the usual pictures of the Taj Mahal here's my favourite spot in India the interior of the Cochin synagogue - a very strange and wonderful cultural mix.

It's a grey day here in London as 2006 comes to an end. I've been back through a few of the emails people have sent me during the year to share with you.

When you're in deep SHIT, say nothing, and try to look like you know what you're doing. 

Happy New Year everyone.

This press release arrived yesterday morning in the USA.

This letter was published in yesterday's Times.

Sir, It is time for the Society of Authors to discuss with the Publishers Association the payment of huge sums to celebrities, television reporters, sportsmen and politicians, whose books prove to be flops. Advance fees, which should be going to bona fide authors and young literary people who need financial help as they attempt to enter a difficult profession, are being flushed away. There should be a limit on these advances, and earnings should come only from sales.

British publishers appear to be bent on ruining English literature with this profligacy and poor judgment.

I don't know Peter Kinsley and I don't know whether or not he is a writer, publisher, or reviewer. I sympathise with his irritation that large advances distort the market and draw funds away from young (and indeed not so young) writers. At Macmillan we have two experiments running where we pay no advances but do pay very decent royalties - Macmillan Science  and Macmillan New Writing. We do, of course, pay advances and sometimes big ones (and sometimes to 'celebrities') in other parts of the organisation.

The problem with the Kinsley letter is his proposed solution and the consequences of the Society of Authors and the Publishers' Association meeting to limit advances.

1. Such a meeting is probably illegal and the participants might end up in jail for collusion (arguably a reasonable place for some publishers to be but not a first choice for most).

2. If 1 could be fixed here would the limit be set and who would decide who was a bona fide writer as opposed to a celebrity?

3. If 1 and 2 could be fixed who would monitor compliance and what sanctions would the group be granted? Can you imagine the Society of Authors discovering that a publisher had paid an author more than the stipulated limit and then having to take the publisher to court for being kind to authors?

4. If 1,2, and 3 could be fixed what would happen to authors and publishers who are not members of their respective asssociations? Presumably they would be free to negotiate whatever terms they like. This would defnitely lead to the demise of the two associations as their members deserted.

5. If 1,2,3, and 4 could be fixed what would we do about foreign authors or deals struck in foreign lands (e.g. USA)? Presumably we'd have to ensure the arrangement was global and would therefore require global monitoring and compliance.

6. If 1,2,3,4 and 5 could be fixed who would ensure compliance? I imagine we'd have to call on the services of the United Nations which would divert their attention from trying to solve the problems of the world.

QED

Incidentally, it's strange that people actually think publishers are bent on ruining English literature and that they deliberately exhibit poor judgement and profligacy. We're a pretty useless lot but I promise everyone it's not deliberate - it's just another unintended consequence.

PS I see that Susan Hill has also picked up on this letter and written a much better piece than this one. Do check it out.

And because it's the holiday season here is  photo of our team in Argentina wishing everyone a very happy new year. Please note the very smart white van in the background.