That's One Way of Doing Business

A number of places are abuzz about Australian bookstore chain Angus & Robertson’s new “pay to play” policy requiring small- and mid-sized Australian publishers and distributors to pay between $2,500 and $100,000 (that’s in Aussie dollars, FYI) in order to have their books stocked.

The Sydney Morning Herald ran a copy of the letter sent from A&R to Tower Books, which contains such choice bits as this:

We have recently completed a piece of work to rank our suppliers in terms of the net profit they generate for our business. We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers, and over 40% of our supplier agreements fall below our requirements in terms of profit earned. [. . .]

Accordingly, we will be rationalizing our supplier numbers and setting a minimum earnings ratio of income to trade purchases that we expect to achieve from our suppliers.

I am writing to you because TOWER BOOKS falls into this category of unacceptable profitability.

As a consequence we would invite you to pay the attached invoice by Aug 17th, 2007. The payment represents the gap for your business, and moves it from an unacceptable level of profitability, to above our minimum threshold.

OK, there are a few things I want to point out. First off, although the U.S. should never follow a trend originating in Australia, I wouldn’t be surprised if this idea comes up in future meetings with B&N or Amazon or some other U.S. chain. And I hope U.S. publishers won’t stand for this. The book availability at B&N is already pretty damn questionable . . . and it’s frightening to think this could get even worse.

Also, I love the insertion of “TOWER BOOKS” in all caps. Really thoughtful. And the bold italics (in the original!) of the demand for payment is pretty classy as well. Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to misrepresent this . . . it’s an “invitation to pay.” I guess that is classy.