{"id":233,"date":"2010-08-28T00:09:05","date_gmt":"2010-08-28T00:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=233"},"modified":"2010-08-28T00:09:05","modified_gmt":"2010-08-28T00:09:05","slug":"bookshop-payola","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=233","title":{"rendered":"Bookshop Payola"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is commonly believed that the books on promotion in bookshops (for example those on the 3-for-2 deals at the front of bookshops) are not chosen by the bookshops themselves, but are the result of payments from publishers to the shops. I can imagine that this is realistic. This is commonly seen as being a problem.<\/p>\n<p>Is it a problem of significance? I would argue that it isn&#8217;t, because there is no motivation for the publishers to put out anything other than their best books. Why spend money on this form of advertising for something that you consider mediocre, when that money could be spent just as well on something that is better?<\/p>\n<p>There are a number of caveats here, some with merit, some with less:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The system becomes conservative, because publishers will put this kind of support behind established authors, or only established publishers will have the money to put this kind of investment up front. This criticism has some merit.<\/li>\n<li>Publishers are using this to promote material that isn&#8217;t selling very well. Whilst this is fine in theory, in practice, the dominance of the 3-for-2 section by newly published books provides some evidence against this.<\/li>\n<li>A more sophisticated version of the previous argument is that this acts as a kind of triage process. Good books that would sell well anyway don&#8217;t end up going on the 3-for-2; by contrast, at the other end special interest books and books that have been struggling don&#8217;t get this kind of promotion. As a result the 3-for-2 ends up being the mediocre middle that need this support to sell in a decent quantity.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is commonly believed that the books on promotion in bookshops (for example those on the 3-for-2 deals at the front of bookshops) are not chosen by the bookshops themselves, but are the result of payments from publishers to the shops. I can imagine that this is realistic. This is commonly seen as being a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,12,13],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":235,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions\/235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}