How's Business?

by Don Blyly
Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore


While the major chains were down by double digits for the fourth quarter, we were slightly up for the fourth quarter. Amazingly, in spite of the extremely cold January, we were also up slightly in January, although many days we lost money by being open. Some customers commented about being more concerned about helping local businesses stay in business during hard economic times. (I’ve noticed the same thing about my purchasing habits, especially regarding restaurants that I would hate to see go out of business during the recession.) But several other customers commented that the chains had cut back their stock of books so drastically that the customers had to come to us instead of buying from their local chain stores. In early December, after reading several industry reports on how severely Borders had cut back their inventory, I drove out to one of the local Borders. At first glance, they seemed to have a lot of books; but then I notice that they only had one title from our hardcover top ten science fiction/fantasy bestsellers of the month before, and only three of our top ten mass market science fiction/fantasy bestsellers. I’ve heard from several people that the chains have cut back their inventory even more since Christmas, but I haven’t had time to drive around and form my own opinion.

As sales dropped like crazy at the chains, they didn’t have the cash to pay their bills to the publishers, so they started returning books to a greater extent than ever before and trimming back the quantities they had previously ordered of forthcoming books. The publishers still have to meet their payrolls and pay their printing bills, so they’ve become more aggressive at trying to squeeze more money out of the little guys (like the Uncles) and have canceled some books, increased the prices on other books, and pushed the release dates of others farther into the future, so that their printing expenses will be more in line with their expected cash flows. As the number of titles released per month goes down, it takes longer to clear the inventory of purchased manuscripts, so they are buying fewer new manuscripts and probably offering smaller advances on average. All of this makes good business sense, but makes life rough on everybody, including authors who are not bestsellers and readers waiting for the next book in a series.

The information about new titles for the newsletter comes primarily from the publishers’ catalogs, although sometimes we also go to websites for smaller publishers that don’t send catalogs to us. Usually we also check a few of the titles against the website of our national book wholesaler, Baker & Taylor, where there’s reason to think that our information might be questionable. For the last issue of the newsletter, we started checking a few titles and found so many changes that we eventually checked every single title against the Baker & Taylor website. Nearly 20% of the titles had either a price change or a release date change or both after the publishers sent out the catalogs, and many more titles were changed or canceled after the newsletter was published. This issue we are also checking every title against the wholesaler’s website, but expect that there will be more changes after we go to press.

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Don Blyly is the owner of Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore, the oldest surviving science fiction specialty bookstore in the United States. This excerpt is posted by the kind permission of Mr. Blyly. If you would like to read the remainder of this editorial, which goes into some detail about Mr. Blyly's recent adventures with the Minneapolis property tax assessor, fire marshal, and anti-graffiti squad, you'll find it here.

Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore shares its building with Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore. For more information about upcoming events or to inquire about the availability of signed, rare, or out-of-print SF, Fantasy, or Mystery books, visit their web site.