Superstores Charge Publishing Houses Display Fees

One way to help a title stand out is by giving it good display.

But whereas the independents gave good display to a book because they liked it, anyone in the publishing business will tell you, as Michael Naumann, the head of the medium-size New York house Henry Holt, does, that in the superstores “the placement is not always automatically a reflection of the quality of the books, but of the money being spent on the publishers’ side. There are some small chains where you can buy practically everything, including the praise of the owner.”

He’s referring to Books-A-Million, whose $278.6 million in sales last year put it just behind Crown as the fourth-largest chain. Earlier this year Publishers Weekly added up what cost what in Books-A-Million. A partial list:

To be featured in the New and Notable section cost $750 for hardcovers or large paperbacks, $500 for rack-size paperbacks. Books that the stores’ employees must read and promote cost $7,500; books on which the company president put his “stamp of approval” cost $12,000. Inclusion in “product knowledge videos” cost $600 for a 60-second spot and $900 for a 90-second spot, while a five-minute spot on a “training video” was $2,500. Placement in the Christmas catalog was $3,000; ads on the sides of the chain’s trucks were $1,500 for one truck, $3,500 for four and $6,200 for eight. A publisher’s logo or book title on 100,000 paper bags was $3,500, while welcome mats with information cost $150 per store for three months. Even something as apparently benign as children’s story hour is relentlessly commercialized, to the tune of $450 per book.

Despite extremely innovative ways of making money, Books-A-Million is not doing particularly well. Net income in the first half of the year was only about 60 percent of what it was in 1996.