I am fortunate enough to work in both bookselling and publishing. Books and bookselling are my passion but time and time again, myself and fellow booksellers are faced with this very common scenario:

Customer: have you got ………….. in stock?

Bookseller: Yes, we do, I’ll go and get it for you.

Bookseller brings the book back and the customer has a good look through. After a while the customer comes to the desk and says one of several things:

– Do you price-match?

– Thanks, I’ve had a good look, I definitely want it but I can get it cheaper online.

– Is it on offer?

Our answer is No. We don’t price-match

The customer will then discard the book and nonchalantly stroll out, no doubt thinking, great, I’ve seen the book and I’m going to save myself 75 pence (or some-such price)by buying it online (despite the fact that it just cost £5 to park the car, petrol on top, for a day of browsing). We’ve all done it. At this point I want to shout after the customer:

Wait! Do you have any idea how much work goes into the making of a book?

So, if I were to sit the customer down, I would say this:

Books are not only tangible but elemental and alchemical things. Books hold the essence of what it means to exist; they depict the human voice, the human idea and the human imagination. They help us to understand others and ourselves. So, a book is not simply a single manufactured thing like a fork or a lampshade – it holds so much more within. But not just this, the production line for a book is complex. If you take into consideration the length of time it takes for a single tree to grow from a sapling into an adult, the effort for that tree to be responsibly felled and countless others in order to make paper; to the thousands of (unpaid) hours the author spends writing, re-writing and editing the work. And then, the time comes when the work is accepted by an editor, who then takes months to edit the book into publishable standard, then it goes out to designers, proofreaders, typesetters and marketing plans are created, then, eventually the book reaches the bookshelves and the booksellers sell.

All that work for a £7.99 paperback. Not a bad price, considering.

Pricing has always been a contentious issue, both in publishing and bookselling and it has been said in both workplaces that neither side wants to create this ‘bargain culture’. Under the previous MD, Waterstones endorsed the ‘pile high, sell cheap’ model where poor booksellers were knee deep in Jeremy Clarkson autobiographies and other celebrities, which didn’t sell. This didn’t work and jeopardised the future of an already ailing company. Why? Because Waterstones is not a supermarket and the majority of its customers are more discerning (thankfully) and they want range and diversity and a decent bookshop on their high street, but in order to have these things they must understand that books are the price they are for a reason and if the corporate tax avoiding giants such as Amazon are allowed to set the bar, there will no longer be that range and diversity. We, in the bookselling industry have a duty to the public and ourselves not to price ourselves out of business altogether.

So how low should we go? And what are customers coming into bookshops to buy?

As we see the fiction section depleting to create room for ‘related products’, things which are the accessories to books: notebooks, mugs with quotes, games, tea-towels, etc. Over the birthday cards and mugs, we find our answer: A relatively new and very exciting phenomenon designed to propel any author to international status via viral bookselling – the cyber store of social media – a sometimes dirty word, a guilty pleasure or an essential (depending on your view):

The ereader

The ebook

I am told that more people are buying books than ever before thanks to this little device. The only difference being that these are electronic – virtual. Despite the resistance of those traditionalists, who want to smell the pages of a good book as they turn them (myself included). People’s reading habits have changed as well as their shopping habits and we must stay abreast of this, but we have to strike a balance – of course an eBook is a little cheaper to produce without the print costs, but they still cost time and money to produce and I would go so far as to say, they should be no cheaper than an average paperback. The publishing and bookselling industry should still be able to make a profit as those who sell the device do. After all, a kindle isn’t much without the literature to read on it

Those who still want to buy a book in a shop will still continue to do so and ebooks shouldn’t just be an alternative but an additional to the pleasures of reading. A bookshop should be of the highest quality and reflect that of its books: to be as inviting on the outside as it is on the inside. A customer said to me recently: I don’t like shopping online; I see things in here that I would never have come across had I not entered the shop.

So, when a customer comes into the bookshop they should not be expecting ‘cheaper’ but ‘quality’ and ‘choice’. I sincerely hope this is not an irreversible circumstance of our time and that we can survive the recession, the rent hikes and the undercutting by Amazon and Tesco, etc. and when I am asked, should we discount? I still say no, we should price a book at its worth otherwise those customers who so nonchalantly use our shops to browse, will come into town one day and find that we are no longer here and they have to go to Asda to browse through a choice of ten mass-market productions. A horrible thought.

Rebecca Parfitt

Call Mother a Lonely Field by Liam Carson is shortlisted for The RSL Ondaatje Prize.
The £10,000 RSL Ondaatje Prize is awarded annually to a book of the highest literary merit, evoking the spirit of a place. Seren are the only Welsh press to be placed on this fantastic shortlist.
This is a memoir of an Irish-speaking childhood in Belfast and a moving testament to growing up during the Troubles. We experience Liam’s childhood through still-present echoes of the Second World War, dystopian science fiction, American comic books and punk rock.
After years in London and Dublin, the deaths of his parents bring Liam Carson a new sense of community and understanding as he heals his fractured relationship with Irish. His rediscovery of the language as a sanctuary is central to a book exploring the potency of vanishing worlds, be they childhood, a city or a way of life.

On hearing of the book’s shortlisting, Liam Carson said
“I’m absolutely delighted to be shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize. It came as a very pleasant surprise, and I’m honoured to join a wonderful shortlist of very fine writers. The prize is for evoking a sense of place, and if my book achieves that, it is in so small way due to my late father’s deep love of the streets of Belfast, and the history of the city.”

“A tender, contemplative memoir…” – The Sunday Telegraph
“The touching description of his dying mother and then the loss of his father will draw a tear from the most hardened of readers.” – We Love This Book”…Carson’s rediscovery of the Irish language following the death of his parents is truly moving.”  – The Irish World
The judges, Julia Blackburn, Margaret Drabble and Ian Jack, said: “A place, whether it is a small room, a forest floor, or an entire continent, is defined by the limitations and freedoms it offers and by the layers of emotion and history it contains. For this prize we are trying to see where and how this elusive spirit has been best captured in a book, of poetry, fiction, biography or personal memoir.”
Now in its 10th year, the prize will be awarded at special awards ceremony on 13th May. Call Mother a Lonely Field by Liam Carson is shortlisted alongside Zadie Smith’s NW, Hensher’s Scenes from An Early Life and Francis’ Empire Antarctica. Completing the shortlist is Patrick Flanery’s Absolution and Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss.

Think you don’t like short stories? Think again. Seren have published two fantastic short story collections this Spring, you need these on your reading shelf – now!
Mary-Ann Constantine’s second collection All the Souls and Jaki McCarrick’s The Scattering are both now available to buy.

All the Souls by Mary-Ann Constantine is a collection of stories of the living and the dead.
The voices of the dead echo through these subtle, striking stories. Rooted in the landscape and traditions of Wales and Brittany – past, present and future – All the Souls draws on themes of collection, superstition and legend.
From poignant and dangerous obsessions with the iconic (a Romano-British figurine; a carved wooden Christ-child; a bronze angel) to direct, often puzzled conversations with ghosts, the characters in this book all strive to make contact with the impossible. A girl becomes obsessed with a figure she only sees through a Camera Obscura; an angry man strikes up a friendship with a sixth-century saint; a revenant mother by a mountain lake tries to explain herself to a grieving friend.
‘A considerable achievement.’ – Stevie Davies on The Breathing

Paperback £8.99

The Scattering is a collection of nineteen stories, many set on the Irish border, where this London-born author currently lives. These stories explore states of liminality: life on the Irish border, dual identities, emigration, being between states – certainty and doubt, codependency and freedom. Some explore themes of catastrophe and constraint. All explore what it means to be alive in a fraught and ever-changing world. This first collection from prizewinning author and playwright, Jaki McCarrick explores the dark side of human nature, often with a postmodern ‘Ulster gothic’ twist.
One of the stories ‘The Visit’ won the Wasafiri Prize for new fiction, and many have been published to much acclaim in literary magazines.
“…an amazing body of work…this book deserves tremendous success and a very wide readership.” – The Reading Life Blog
Paperback £8.99

Remembering R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)
Celebrate R.S. Thomas’s centenary with this excellent volume that draws together 52 poems (4 previously unpublished) by Thomas to his wife, the distinguished artist Mildred E  Eldridge – known as Elsi – from early meditations on their relationship to the elegies following her death.
This collection is edited by Damian Walford Davies. The foreword is by DR. Rowan Williams

This revelatory collection dramatises the changing dynamics of a complex and vitally creative relationship. Poems on marriage, cohabitation, birthdays, anniversaries, family and bereavement offer a candid portrait of emotional intimacy, desire, the painful process of ageing, and of loss. Elsi is a complex presence here: to the ‘to’ in the title signifies not only ‘addressed to’ but also ‘about’, ‘with an eye on’, ‘to be overheard by’, and even in one case ‘from’.

Born in Cardiff on the 29th March 1913, this year will mark the 100th birthday of R.S.Thomas. Thomas and Elsi were married in 1940 and remained together until her death in 1991. Their son, Gwydion, was born 29 August 1945.
Pre-order a copy of R.S.Thomas: Poems to Elsi now at £9.99 or £7.99 (if bookclub member)