The sales-and-returns convention by which most books are sold by most publishers to their retail and wholesale accounts is too often described as “consignment”. It actually isn’t. Actual consignment terms would give us a quite different supply chain, and we may be closer than most people imagine to shifting to it. Although major trade accounts […]
Seven key insights about VMI for books and why it is becoming a current concern
Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) is a supply paradigm for retailers by which the distributor makes the individual stocking decisions rather than having them determined by “orders” from an account. The most significant application of it for books was in the mass-market paperback business in its early days, when most of the books went through the magazine […]
What I was thinking when I said that wild stuff
At our Publishers Launch Conference on the Wednesday of BEA, Michael Cader and I introduced a new feature we think will become regular at our events: a candid 1-on-1 conversation between us. It went well. In fact, it went so well that what reads like a pretty damn accurate verbatim account of much of it […]
Some ideas for publishers that will help bookstores; other suggestions that make us skeptical
This is the fourth of a series of posts on bookstores and their future. The previous posts have covered the challenges of buying (proposing VMI as a possible solution), explored what we should expect for the future of Barnes & Noble, and envisioned what the world of brick-and-mortar book retail might look like in the […]