Booktopia is the largest online bookseller in Australia. My research shows that it pre-dates Amazon selling in Australia and its sales focus on one thing, books. Amazon sells anything and everything but Booktopia only sells books. If you’re selling only one type of item online you only have to worry about packaging for that style of item, and books don’t need enormous amounts of packing to ensure they arrive safely. At one stage in my selling career I was trying to branch out and managed to sell a glass coffee pot. It took three times as long to pack that and much more packing than the same size and weight of books. I seem to recall I packed it twice, whereas after the first couple of books I got fairly quick at packing them and only needed one attempt for most sales. One of the things you need to worry about with selling things by post is that the staff are likely to throw the parcels around and there’s a chance your parcel might end up underneath another parcel weighing 20kgs. And it took much more worry, I’m sure I developed some grey hairs waiting to see if the coffee pot got to its destination safely. But books are easy, shove them inside some cardboard, seal it well and you’re home and hosed. I used to go the extra mile (kilometre, mile, one of those) and seal it in a plastic bag to keep the book dry, but then I was selling pre-loved books and they’re harder to source than another brand new book of the same title. If the brand new book arrives with water damage the buyer can complain and receive another copy, if the pre-loved book arrives with water damage the chances of having the exact same edition in your inventory is very slender. Having multiple copes of the exact same edition of a book only happened for me a couple of times and I had thousands of books. A summary of that is that books are easier to pack safely than the myriad of items you can buy at Amazon.
Although the profit margins are much smaller in book selling than in many other products. You might look at a bookshop and think they’re being really successful because they have a lot of people browsing in the shop but they’re not making much profit per book. Having said that, I think the bookshops might make more profit per book than the writer. Sorry, I’m rambling. I think there’s another topic up for discussion there and I’m not the one to write it.
It really looks as if Booktopia will close for good. Unless I win Tattslotto and have enough money to buy it and also invest some money into paying creditors and boosting sales etc. I do have a ticket in Tattslotto, so I’m part way there, now chance will do its thing.
I know I’ve made the title of this article about me, but before I go there I’d like to look at some people who are affected by this closure. In October last year I was delighted to attend the Book Fair Australia in Sydney. I was even more delighted to find that my hotel was near Booktopia, or possibly one of its warehouses. Having spoken to some staff wearing Booktopia clothing I took a wander down the street and found the warehouse. I took a selfie at their signage, wandered around at speed…well, whatever speed I could do on a hot day with my walking stick…and had another delightful conversation with another staff member. All three people told me they loved working there, whether that was true or they were just telling me what I wanted to hear is something I don’t know. But these people will now be out of a job, not just them, but all the other staff members as well.
One conversation I read in a forum was from the viewpoint of indie authors. People who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into their books. Until now Booktopia was the major place where their books could be listed to be bought by regular buyers. In fact, Booktopia is the first place I look for photos of books, and where I’ve found the bulk of them. If you look through my reviews you’ll find probably 90 – 98% of the photos have come from Booktopia. This will totally reduce sales for indie authors. They’ll have to do a lot more marketing to find new readers.
When a business fails there are always creditors. I can’t do more than begin to even consider who their creditors are and how much they’re owed. Yes, there are people who have bought books that the staff are trying to fulfill, but some of those buyers will end up being creditors. Then there are suppliers of books, packing supplies, electricity, gas, water and the list goes on and on. There you go, that’s the beginning of my thinking about which creditors there are. It’ll be interesting to see how many cents in the dollar people receive and whether their business survives the lack of cash. There’s always a domino effect.
But for me, let me make it personal to me, for a few words. I’ve been buying from Booktopia for some time. I have a lovely Wish List stored there…note to self, download my Wish List so I can actually remember to buy them some day. It was lovely to have somewhere reliable and trustworthy to have a Wish List of books so on a day when I have a little money I could just click through and buy. I’ve got a few ebooks I’ve bought through them which I’ve been reading through Kobo. I have no idea if I’ll lose access to them when they pull the plug on the Booktopia website. In order to reduce the chance of losing them completely I’ve downloaded each title and made sure to save them on my computer.
From a financial point of view I’ll be losing out. Not heaps of money, but the potential to make some money, enough to cover the costs of this website. When you’ve clicked through to a Booktopia book using one of my links, it gave me the chance to earn 7% of each of your purchases. I can’t remember when I first started using Booktopia for Affiliate links, but I did make the conscious decision to use Booktopia and not Amazon. That did reduce any possible earnings for me as Amazon is world wide and Booktopia is Australia only, and I have readers world wide. I’ve made the grand sum total of $8.99, it’s a huge amount, I can get a payout when I reach $10. Sadly, that will never happen so my small amount may potentially be listed under creditors and so low down on the list that I’ll be lucky to get 1c. So, as of today I’ll be pulling all of my Affiliate Listing links. This will mean going back to the beginning of my blog and deleting them all. Bearing in mind I have over two thousand articles here this will take some time. I will endeavour to resist the urge to rewrite things. It’s funny, but my writing is much better than it used to be. I’m more confident and I use many more words which will help when I actually get back to writing books. I might end up being one of those indie authors looking for readers. Readers, are there readers around? Wooohooo, readers….
I’d like to finish with one last point. Nicola Moriarty mentions in this article how exciting it was to attend Booktopia to sign books. Someone would bring in home made biscuits and there would be a production line to help Moriarty sign her books in the most time efficient way. At the end she would sign the table and read all the other signatures of other authors who had been through the same process. What happens to this table? It’s a piece of priceless artwork. Who gets to keep it? Or will it go up for auction? So many questions, in reality, I want the table but I have nowhere to put it. I have real feelings for a table I’ve never seen and will never be able to own. And I never try to collect author’s autographs, just not something on my radar.