Industry | 2010.01.15
Waterstone's boss brought to book
• Christmas sales slump brings MD\'s departure
• Critics accuse owner HMV of neglecting chain
Compared with many professions, it probably remains the most gentlemanly. But life can be brutal in books too, especially when there is a sales slump to contend with.
Today, the world of publishing was left reeling when Gerry Johnson, the managing director of bookseller Waterstone\'s, was pushed out of his post after sales slumped amid a string of celebrity flops and fierce competition from the internet and the supermarkets.
Muted interest in autobiographies – such as television presenters Ant & Dec\'s Ooh! What a Lovely Pair and comedian Peter Kay\'s follow-up book Saturday Night Peter – dented the book market over Waterstone\'s key Christmas trading period, when the chain also suffered additional pressures from closing down sales at its collapsed rival Borders.
The struggling bookseller\'s parent company, HMV Group, admitted the problems went deeper than that, however, and analysts said the retail group was paying the price for neglecting Waterstone\'s as it focused on revamping its entertainment stores with smoothie bars, concert ticket sales and live music deals.
Speaking after Waterstone\'s revealed a 8.5% fall in like-for-like sales in the five weeks covering the Christmas period, the chief executive of HMV Group, Simon Fox, said he and Johnson had "agreed it was time for a change".
But Fox, credited with turning around the group\'s eponymous stores in a torrid media market, conceded he too must take some of the blame for Waterstone\'s woes over his three years at the helm.
"I take full responsibility. We had a good year the first year and the performance has been unsatisfactory over the last two years. I take full responsibility for sorting it out," he said.
Turning around the last large specialist chain of bookstores in Britain was a matter of "urgency", said Fox, as he pledged to focus more on what customers want, to tailor stores to local markets and to accelerate online and digital book growth as customers\' habits change.
He added that long and much-publicised delays in setting up a distribution hub for Waterstone\'s had also taken focus away from what customers wanted in the chain\'s high street stores.
The business once credited with revitalising bookselling around Britain when it launched 25 years ago, Fox continued, would now streamline its "front of store offer" in which tables of piled-high books greet customers. However, Fox said, Waterstone\'s would at the same time deepen its range under the new leadership of his right-hand man, Dominic Myers.
"It\'s reflecting our roots in a 21st-century world," said Fox. "It\'s not about going back and going back to dusty old bookshops. This is about building a specialist chain that is relevant in a Google, Amazon world."
The chain of more than 300 bookstores will also carry fewer copies of the big celebrity titles after a Christmas when stars\' literary endeavours disappointed, Fox added.
Neill Denny, the editor-in-chief of the Bookseller magazine, confirmed that the celebrity memoir had a poor Christmas, partly owing to recession-hit readers losing their appetite for tales of glitz and glamour.
In 2008, a memoir by the chatshow host and comedian Paul O\'Grady sold 664,000 copies in hardback whereas this Christmas the celebrity top-seller, by Ant & Dec, sold less than half that at 309,000.
But Denny stressed that Waterstone\'s performance under Johnson needed to be put into context, saying: "The high street book market [Nielsen\'s General Retail Market] was down 8.6% in the 10 weeks to 2 January, while Waterstone\'s was down 8.9% – so he was tracking a declining market. What Simon Fox wanted him to do was outperform that as the only national specialist chain, and whether that is a realistic goal or not is a different question.
"Johnson was also a trifle unlucky in that the collapse of Borders led to a month-long closing down sale at the chain, with massive discounts of up to 90%."
Within the publishing and bookselling industry, few are willing to go on record and risk unsettling the last man standing in the book chains market. But there was a general feeling that today\'s dire trading figures confirmed long-held concerns that the HMV Group had focused so much on turning around its own entertainment stores that Waterstone\'s became what one unnamed source called "an also-ran".
Despite the claims of neglect, Fox said Waterstone\'s would survive: "I think it would be a tragedy if this country didn\'t have a chain of specialist bookshops."
Most evidence from Britain\'s traditionally vibrant publishing industry suggests that consumer appetite for books remains strong. The publisher Bloomsbury today trumpeted "excellent" sales in 2009 driven by a strong publishing programme featuring the chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the novelist William Boyd.
Though the figures will not be announced until 30 March, Nigel Newton, its founder, said the publishing house behind the Harry Potter series had been resilient to the rise of other media and growing time pressures on consumers.
"The place for books in people\'s lives remains robust and vigorous and people are continuing to read books at a rate of knots," he said.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan[...]tones-books-retail-boss-leaves
