Canadian Booksellers See Late Holiday Rally

by Joshua Kerbel -- Publishers Weekly, 1/6/2009 11:39:00 AM

The turn in the value of the Canadian dollar helped to make for a smoother holiday season in 2008 compared to 2007 for many Canadian booksellers. “We had a real problem with price perception in the fall 2007 season as the Canadian dollar reached it's peak, we ended up selling a lot of our books at the U.S. cover price, even when it meant taking a cut on our margin,” said Joseph Stewart, owner of Blackberry Books in Vancouver, British Columbia. “This fall, on the other, hand with a much weaker Canadian dollar people were only to happy to pay the Canadian cover price.”

In terms of Christmas traffic, smaller book retailers, meaning everyone in Canada but Indigo, said that things started off slow, owing to the ongoing financial crisis, but picked up. “December started out slow overall as expected due to all the doom and gloom, “ said Dave Hill, manager of Munro's Books in Victoria, British Columbia. “But the last 10 days traffic returned pretty well to normal and the week after Christmas has been particularly strong. We’ll probably end up almost equal to last year.”

With a few exceptions, like industry stalwart Ben McNally, owner of Ben McNally Books in Toronto, discounting seem to play a large role in driving sales this year. “We always discount but we made sure that we had a large number of discounted titles on the bench this year,” said Tory McNally, director of operations for McNally Robinson in Winnipeg, Manitoba. “We made a table with books under C$20 and sign saying 'A big screen TV never changed anyone's life' - It worked” According to chief merchant Joel Silver, Indigo Books & Music Inc used a combination of traditional discounting and value added promotions to drive sales. ”For the first holiday season, we’ve offered exclusive value added opportunities at Indigo and Chapters to purchase great additions to a booklovers lifestyle” such as blankets and leather bags, said Silver. Munro's Books used a mix of discounting and remainders to drive traffic and sales. “We ran a big remainder ad at the beginning of the month, which drove a good traffic flow for a few days. Other than that, we discounted quite a bit of our frontlist by 20% as we usually do, possibly a slightly higher percentage than usual. But not as much as last year when we discounted all international hardcover frontlist to deal with the whole exchange rate controversy/madness,” said Hill.

Retailers large and small were unanimous in their opinion that books proved to be an excellent recession gift, with the value proposition of books being improved in part by fact that the actual price of books have fallen relative to U.S. prices. Additionally, there were a number of trends retailers noticed about Christmas sales this year. Ben McNally pointed out that the political and financial events in the U.S. generated a lot of interest, while Munro's Books felt that the Internet continued to erode the sales of reference items like dictionaries and travel guides.

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