The World we Deserve

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On the banks of the Seine, in the shadow of Notre-Dame, sits Shakespeare & Co., Paris’s world-famous English language bookshop. There’s a queue on the door and a bouncer standing guard to check bags, and once you enter there are signs everywhere begging visitors not to take photographs, so as not to spoil the experience for future guests.

You can see why they want to guard it: Shakespeare & Co. is beautiful, with books floor-to-ceiling, all of them carefully curated and obscure. They have their own cat, Aggie, with her reading chair, and for years they’ve let young writers come and sleep in their upstairs rooms among the books. When you buy something there you can get your book stamped by the staff, as a souvenir of your experience.

A few weeks ago, visiting Shakespeare & Co. while on holiday in Paris, my wife bought me a copy of Preti Taneja’s prize-winning book “We that were Young” – a retelling of King Lear set in modern-day India, published by the proudly independent Galley Beggars Press. It was a signed copy, and a birthday present, and so really the price was irrelevant.

Nevertheless, at €16 it was the most expensive book of fiction I have bought in nearly a decade. And that’s not to say that the price Shakespeare & Co. are asking is unreasonable: far from it, in fact. Accounting for the exchange rate, what I paid there is what a book costs.

But there’s another thing that you need to know to make sense of this story: I think anything more than £2 is expensive for a book.

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For a long time I’ve claimed to love books, and in my love of books I’ve tried to accumulate as many as I possibly can. The shelves of my lounge are jammed with novels, and almost all of them are second-hand – or, to put it differently, almost none of them are new.

What that means is, although the UK’s charities have made a lot of money from me, the creators of those books made almost nothing. Sure, I love the work of David Peace, Emily St. John Mandel, Celeste Ng, but not one of them has made a penny from me – unless, perhaps, my recommendation has persuaded somebody to buy one of their novels. But frankly, that’s unlikely, as I’d probably have just lent them the book instead.

When I think about the problems with publishing today – and make no mistake, there are plenty of them, from shrinking advances, to the tiny sales of literary fiction, to the multitude of other distractions now available to potential readers – none of those problems loom as large as the one that’s right in front of me.

I am the problem with publishing.

I am the one killing it.

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If you go to Tesco today and browse the book selection, you can find Celeste Ng’s book Little Fires Everywhere new on the shelves for £4. That’s not the price on the back, though. The price on the back is £7.99. Same as Stephen King’s new book The Outsider: £10 sale price, £20 on the back.

Somewhere in the chain, someone’s made a decision to sell those books at half price in massive volumes, across the United Kingdom. Of course, those decisions are invisible: we just see a book that’s cheaper there than it is elsewhere, and buy it in Tesco.

It has to make you wonder what the consequences are for the author, though. The publisher. It might look like you’re buying a book new, for a reasonable price – but somebody, somewhere, is paying the cost for your savings, and it’s probably not Tesco.

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Last week I was looking to buy a book from Dead Ink, a Liverpool-based independent press – Know Your Place, a book of essays about the working-class, by working-class writers. On Amazon it was £9.18, and on Dead Ink’s website it was £9.99, but I’d other things in my Amazon basket and who doesn’t love super saver delivery?

I was just about to click ‘buy now’ when a thought struck me: I jumped on Twitter and asked Dead Ink what the difference in their takings would be between the two options (read the thread here).

In short, this is what they told me: to buy from their website meant they took almost all the money from my sale. To buy from Amazon meant they took just £4.

 

It’s easy to bemoan the difficulty and cost of buying books, especially when the consequences of buying from Amazon seem invisible. You can tell yourself, ‘people are still making money, no matter where I buy it from’ but when the difference in takings is so dramatic, that argument doesn’t wash. How does a publisher stay afloat when the balance is rigged like that? How does a bookshop like Shakespeare & Co. stay open when Amazon sells books so much cheaper than them?

The answer is this: mostly, they don’t.

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For several years, when I’ve gone into a beautiful bookshop like Shakespeare & Co. and not bought any books because of the cost, I’ve felt guilty. At the moment of leaving I’ve looked the owner in the eye and known that I’m killing their bookshop.

Now I mostly don’t go into places like that. It’s easier not to look at the consequences of your actions, after all.

Lately, though, I have come to realise that my actions are affecting not only bookshops but creators too. There’s a lot of discussion about the shrinking sales in literary fiction, the tiny advances that writers are paid – the median salary for a UK author last year was £3000 – and I have to reluctantly recognise that I am hurting the people whose work I care deeply about.

I am talking here about books that have changed the way I see the world, that have made me more empathetic, that have made my breath catch in my throat; books that make life worth living, really. If I continue shopping as I currently do, then my favourite authors will be paid less, will have less stability, will be less able to take risks with their fiction.

That is no way to treat the people you love.

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It is hard to change your shopping habits. I know that, in my case at least, it probably won’t happen overnight. Amazon has infiltrated my life, tricked me into thinking that £4 is an acceptable price for a new book. It takes a long time to rewire that belief, particularly when Tesco reinforces it.

But there are things I can do, and that you can too. If everyone who reads this article were to set aside a monthly budget of £20 to spend on buying new, full-price books – directly from the publisher, if you want to support artists, or from a bookshop, if you want to support the publishing ecosystem – then even that cumulative impact would be substantial.

Small publishers like Influx Press and Galley Beggars offer subscription services, allowing you to support independent publishing and also receive special pre-release copes of their books. And there’s a mindset shift to be made, too, thinking of books in terms of the value they offer – an £8.99 book might offer seven or eight hours of enjoyment, making it far more reasonable than the cinema, and miles cheaper than two expensive cups of coffee.

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We get the world that we deserve. If we continue thinking that bookshops like Shakespeare & Co. are just showrooms for books that we can buy cheaper elsewhere, then the bookshops will close. And if we continue thinking that the only acceptable price for a book that an author has spent months working on, and that provides hours of entertainment, is 99p, then we will drive authors out of the writing game.

For a long time, we’ve wanted cheap books and incredible convenience, and we’ve got Amazon, with all of its related issues – with its Victorian working conditions and its enormous market share and its refusal to pay tax and its political clout.

At the moment, at least, there are alternative options available.

We should use them while we still can.