Ground Floor: Back from another Irish booksellers' conference, this time held in Galway. When I attended conferences in my bond days I used to reluctantly attend all of the workshops even though my head was usually pounding from the night before. Nowadays all I have to do is turn up for the night before!
Perfect. Anyway, even though I didn't actually have to attend a session, the booksellers I spoke to still worried about the same things - falling margins, falling footfall (anywhere close to an under-construction Luas line), and increased competition both from within the trade and from other media.
There's always a bit of angst going on about competition with other media. This is because some people - although not usually booksellers - have a quasi-religious fervour about books as means of enrichment and enlightenment, while not necessarily acknowledging that they can also be entertainment. So it doesn't quite seem right to them that books are fighting their corner against CDs, DVDs and the smorgasbord of PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo games.
But of course they are. So books have to show that they're value for money and worth spending some of your finite disposable income on. And, as I've said before and will say again, they are great value for money.
You can pick up a book for the same price as a specialist magazine - or five for the price of a single Playstation game! But booksellers face some of the same problems as Bewley's, which I talked about last week. They need to be in good locations so that they are accessible to potential punters, but their product line is relatively low-priced and so it's costly for them to locate in a high-rental area. They also have to carry a high level of stock.
Look at it this way. A fashion retailer on Grafton Street will be selling items that probably retail at €100 minimum, with much of their stock at a considerably higher price than that. They hold on to stock for a season before slashing prices in a sale and getting rid of everything.
A bookseller, paying a similar rent, is selling stock that averages around €10. New releases and bestsellers are usually sold at a discount, or in those famous three-for-two deals. They take up the front of store area.
But behind that, the bookseller is stocking a whole range of titles that are neither new releases or bestsellers but need to hold, such as classics, educational and backlists of popular authors. It's like Brown Thomas having to keep a few rails for not only this year's Nicole Fahri range, but every skirt she's ever designed. Takes up a lot of space and cash.
Booksellers, like other entertainment retailers, need to diversify their holdings which is why so many of them do stationery, cards and other items. Eventually I can't help wondering whether they shouldn't join forces with competing media stores and hold a wider range of digital entertainment. At the moment you can pick up CDs in many bookstores but they tend to be of the mood music variety. Surely there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to pick up the number one selling CD, DVD and book all in the same shop.
WH Smith in the UK did have a flirtation with the three-for-two deal, including a CD promotion over Christmas, but it all went pear-shaped for them. However, I don't see why, with a bit more work, it couldn't be a very successful enterprise.
The book and café scene does appear to be an ideal partnership and the Borders chain seems to do remarkably well in busy retail areas like Oxford Street - its café is always crowded.
There are, of course, some wonderful bookshops in Grafton Street and the surrounding area, so perhaps the ideal solution for Bewley's is to hook up with one of them, have a bright and cheery bookstore on the ground floor and a café upstairs. Not original, I know. But quite possibly profitable.
An alternative proposition is a tie in - buy a book, get a free cup of coffee down the street while you read it it's all about synergy!
Although you won't find them on the new release shelves, there is a vast quantity of business books published every year. In a recent copy of one of the trade magazines, an incredible 82 business books were highlighted as "the best of the forthcoming titles".
For those of you who are looking for ideas on how to become bigger, better or brighter at what you do you can choose from tomes covering marketing, human resources, starting out, finance, leadership there isn't a single thing that hasn't been left unanalysed.
I haven't read any of them myself yet so I can't recommend anything in particular but there are some titles that sound interesting. Rising Tide: Lessons from 165 Years of Brand Building at Proctor & Gamble looks at the success of the superstar brands and why they've worked; The Dark Side of Behaviour at Work: How to Understand and Avoid Employees Leaving, Thieving, Deceiving and Whistle Blowing sounds utterly intriguing if not a bit Big Brother-ish (treat them with respect and don't lie to them is possibly the answer to the title but maybe that's my soft side coming out again).
Bubbles and How to Survive Them is clearly for everyone who got sucked into the last one and Anyone Can Do It: Building Coffee Republic from our Kitchen Table might help in the Bewley's restructuring but, of course, might not!
Business books are more snazzy and less worthy than they were (and obsessed with having a colon in the title!).
Which illustrates the point that books, brands and bookshops need to evolve to keep people interested. None of this is rocket science really.
And there are plenty of books available about that too!
