What was begun as an online journal of the books I read evolved...or maybe it devolved...to also feature behind the scenes goings-on at All About Romance from my perspective (mostly based on my personal feelings - okay, it's a personal pity party); topics I've gone over ad nauseum in commentary at AAR, including the nature of reviews and online behavior; and my non-cyber life (including family and items in pop culture that capture my interest, which is just about everything).

Please do not violate my trust. I restricted certain AAR-related and personal entries for a reason...to keep them as private as possible. Now that my blog is read-only, to access restricted entries you must already have a password; if you do, hold onto it so that you can continue to read restricted entries.

This blog is not part of All About Romance. I ask that you keep comments or questions regarding restricted blog content off of AAR.

Below you'll find the blogs I visit, broken out in my own odd little system of categories.

Wal-Mart

« H E Personal/Political :: email
posted Friday, 10 January 2003
Yesterday I read an article about Wal-Mart in Time magazine. Something I read in it struck a chord. Last month an author posted on one of our message boards the results of a survey done by RWA that indicated 20% of readers buy their books at discount stores such as Wal-Mart. The author was trying to make the point that rather than some authors getting upset about negative reviews and reader comments, they ought to be more concerned about the influence of stores such as Wal-Mart in terms of which books they stock and therefore sell.

This author said it far batter than I, so I'm pasting most of her post here:

I'm an author and a member of RWA. I don't mean to insult anyone here by posting anonymously. I want to comment on ______ belief that comments on online message boards and online reviews hurt her sales to the point she had to write Pat Holt a letter.

I'm always one to say that if you can't take the heat, don't come over here and read the message boards. But to address the fear that bad online buzz hurts sales--RWA just sent all of us a survey, where they'd tabulated the results of a poll of romance readers. I don't have it in front of me, but it was a significant number of readers. Of those, only 4 percent buy their books online. I would guess many of those are the same consumers who use online sites such as this one to make buying decisions. Four percent! If you slice that down by the number who'd actually buy or not buy based on a message board flame war *at this site* you've cut that down even further. I'm not a statistician but that's a very small number. And yet, the "threat" of online sites such as AAR has aroused so much passion.

In the same survey, it says that 20% of readers buy their books at big discount stores like WalMart. Twenty percent! And yet when recently Anderson, who is WalMart's sole supplier of books, decided not to carry a romance because they didn't like the subject matter, it didn't even rate one line in the RWR, which is supposed to be an industry magazine. All I heard at my local chapter meeting of authors was a sniffy, "I don't see what all the fuss is about. WalMart doesn't carry my books either." (for the non-industry types here, their books weren't declined because of content, mind you, but because of typical marketing factors, which is a very different issue indeed.)

So, authors, what's the bigger threat: A huge chain with enormous impact sanitizing our reading choices? Or some passionate posters on a message board on a single website with, according to RWA, very little impact on sales? I know we women are emotional, but I think we're battling the mouse when we really need to be battling the mammoth, and that's really, really dumb.

But getting back to the Time article itself. Most of you no doubt know how successful Wal-Mart is; indeed, during the just-finished holiday shopping season, Wal-Mart sales were up while other retailers were down. So its influence cannot be denied, and according to a retail analyst, Wal-Mart's "goal is to have a 30% share of every major business they are in."

Interesting, huh?

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit


comments (1)