By Joel Thurtell
Some independent bookstores are — gasp!! — charging admission to book signings.
What nerve!
Book signings are cultural events.
Book signings give regular people a chance to mix with a famous or maybe not-so-famous author, hear the wise person speak and maybe express some thoughts of their own. They are part of the social fabric!
Charge admission?
Holy temerity!
What do I think of the practice?
Great idea.
Except it doesn’t go far enough.
I read the June 22, 2011 New York Times article about book event fees without getting any sense that the bookstores who are selling tickets to author events are sharing the fee with authors.
Oh, the bookstore people complain about people who shop their stories, heft the books, chat up the sales people and then in plain view comparison price shop on their cell phones. They watch people enter their book events with books already bought online, or leave the event without buying a book so they can order it online.
I commiserate with the bookstore owners. Their patrons are not patrons at all, but freeloaders.
But I still want to know why they’re pocketing the fee without sharing any of it with the author.
I know the answer. The bookstore owners are no different than their freeloading customers. Like their don’t-wannabe-customers, the stores want their cake and eat it, too.
No doubt, they will argue that the author gets compensated through royalties paid by the publisher.
I’ll tell you how that works in the case of a book I wrote with photos by my friend and co-author, Patricia Beck. UP THE ROUGE! PADDLING DETROIT’S HIDDEN RIVER was published two years ago by Wayne State University Press.
When it comes to book events, our high water mark occurred when the Library of Michigan named UP THE ROUGE! a Michigan Notable Book for 2010. The state library awarded grants to local libraries, which allowed them to pay us Notable Book authors $300 (Pat and I split the fee) for appearing at a library-sponsored book signing. Libraries have been great about paying fees. And the fees, while not huge, at least compensate us in case we sell few or no books.
But there is another aspect of selling our book at libraries that most people don’t understand. We purchase quantities of our books from the publisher at a 40 percent discount. That is to say, we buy them wholesale, at the same price a retail book store would pay. We get to charge the difference between wholesale and retail, which in the case of UP THE ROUGE! is $14. So, if Pat and I sell a book at a library, we split $14. That’s seven bucks apiece.
But if our book is sold at a bookstore event, guess how much we make? The terms of our contract with the publisher don’t allow us to sell books from our private stash. All we get are royalties, which amount to 63 cents each per book.
Sixty-three cents for Pat.
Sixty-three cents for me.
Gasoline right now is priced somewhere around four bucks a gallon.
Recently, a friend excitedly told me that he’d seen UP THE ROUGE! for sale in a store. He spoke to the manager, told her he knows one of the authors and the manager said she’d love to schedule a book signing for us.
Wow! A chance to meet the public, talk about the book, maybe sell a few copies.
But wait.
Let’s say the event is 25 miles away. My Honda CR-V gets 25 miles to the gallon if conditions are just right. That’s a 50-mile round trip. Two gallons of gas @ $4 means I’ll spend eight bucks on gas.
Divide eight bucks by 63 cents a book in royalties.
The store will have to sell 13 copies of the book just to cover our gas.
What if I get hungry from all that talking and signing? The hamburger and shake are on me.
My name is not Joan Didion.
People don’t stand in line to see me.
I have gone to book signings where the room was packed with “fans,” and no books were sold.
If that happened where the store was charging admission, I would be pretty bitter.
I’d be reaping the “short” profit of 63 cents per book, assuming somebody bought a copy.
Meantime, the bookseller is pocketing the proceeds of ticket sales along with the 40-percent markup on the book.
See what I mean? The store gets $14 for each book sold, plus the admission fee of five or 10 bucks per person. Some stores let the customer apply the fee to the purchase of a book. But whose book? Mine or some other author’s?
Where is my share?
I understand the anger of book vendors who watch people enter their store to kick tires, then buy the books online.
But bookstore owners need to kick the freeloading habit, too.
To be really fair, booksellers ought to share not just the admission fee, but part of their 40 or 50 or 60 percent markup with authors.
Otherwise, how are the booksellers any different than the tire-kicking leeches who so offend them?
Bookstores need to make sure the authors who make their events possible get a share of the take.
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