Chapters/Indigo is Edmonton’s most popular bookstore. Any given Google Maps search will provide over fifteen locations for Edmonton and surrounding area. I have no clue how to start my research. Should I just walk into a store and ask about how it all works? Not exactly. I might get lucky and find the store manager on site, but I'll mostly get short answers and a lot of generic corporate email addresses. To get around the industry initially, I have to talk with someone in person.
I luck out after Kieran Leblanc from the Book Publishers Association of Alberta puts me in contact with Dave Reynolds, who is the western procurement manager for Chapters/Indigo. “I buy all of the books in the local interest category for Western Canada stores, from Whitehorse to Winnipeg,” says Dave over the phone. “I meet with local publishers and authors to get their books into our stores where applicable. I also meet with the other category managers of fiction, health, etc., to make sure that any books they’re looking for that pertain to western cities or are authored by western writers get into our stores. Anything to do with print and trade books I also help with in a supportive role for Chapters/Indigo.”
Dave’s been with Chapters since ‘97, starting from store clerk and moving on up through managerial positions to finally regional procurement. Dave loves it there. And who doesn't love Chapters -- the endless books of hardcover and paperback? But how do those books get there? Do you ever check the inside-flap of a book and note the publisher? If you’re lucky, there may be a distributor listed on the page.
"Three times a year," Dave explains, "publisher representatives for the majority of the publishers and distributors from whom we buy books approach us with books and fleshed out book ideas.” He continues, saying that “some publishers distribute their own books to us, whereas other publishers group together and use a single distribution company, and that company might have a rep who covers all of the publishers or at least some portion of them. The reps come to me, or to trade shows (there’s one in Vancouver and Calgary yearly) or another Western rep. We meet and go through catalogues, look at advance reader copies of the books they are presenting to us. Typically these titles come up to us three or four months ahead of potentially landing in our stores, and sometimes six months before. With this timeline we can see what kinds of trends are coming, changes in book covers, get a sense of what the publisher can do--and we discuss these things with the publisher so we can hear their side of it, their market research and predictions. They eventually (hopefully) sell the book to us.”
Sometimes a small publisher will approach Dave out of the blue, but he can’t immediately take, for example, a small publisher’s History of Canada book when for five years they’ve been giving him pictorial books of the Rockies. “We are willing to try new things but behind informed decisions,” he reiterates. "Sometimes decisions are based on price, sometimes more on visuals--you have to consider all of these things when thinking about selling a book in store, even if they seem minor.”
A deal is made between Chapters and a publisher through someone like Dave, and the book is sold to Chapters. But how does the book actually get to the store? The industry's name for this process is “fulfillment,” but we would call it “distribution.” It’s no easy task. “It’s hard to write a book but it’s even harder to distribute one,” says Dave. "The difficulty is in part due to Canada’s sheer size. We’re spread out. There are distribution companies, but they’re dotted all over the country, with a slightly denser focus in Ontario, which seems to be the hub of Canada’s commercial companies for the book industry. It’s getting harder and harder for very small publishers to be their own distributors. It’s not that Chapters doesn’t want to deal with them, but it’s way easier for them to go to large distributor and have that distributor do the bulk of the work.”
Luckily for a large company like Chapters, they were able to open up their own Chapters/Indigo distribution center in Brampton, ON. Chapters/Indigo has over 3500 open accounts with suppliers (incl. publishers, distributors). 80% of the books they carry in-store are from about the top 150 suppliers, and of those 150 suppliers 80% of the product comes from their own distribution center. The center deals with the top 2-2500 titles including all the best sellers, fast-moving books, and a few smaller publishers’ niche books that sell in very high volume. “We order from the publisher,” says Dave, “and the publisher sends cases of product to our distribution center and then we distribute that product to our individual stores across the country.” That’s some large-scale shipment. So the next time you head into a Chapters store, notice how almost all the books you see on shelves get delivered by the Chapters itself. Chapters is its own distribution solution.
But there’s still room for the other distributors. “The big four distributors that aren’t us,” says Dave, “are Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Hachette, and Simon and Schuster. Then there’s a company like University of Toronto Press who distributes for maybe a 100 different publishers, so even though they may be in our top 150 as far as suppliers go. They actually supply books from many more publishers. We have 3500 open accounts--each one could mean one publisher, or in the case of UTP, it means 100 or more publishers attached to one account through UTP. So the actual amount of publishers we work with, which are many, gets filtered down to the 150 or so main suppliers we have open accounts with.”
The Chapters/Indigo stores will see little trickle orders from small publishers and their distributors throughout the day everyday of the business week but the majority of product lands in stores every two or three days. That might change for some stores that see some higher sales numbers. Think of Edmonton’s Whyte Avenue Chapters. A mall store like Coles in Edmonton City Centre gets only one major delivery each week, small publishers included.
As you’ve probably been able to guess, eBooks don’t exactly get truck delivered. Chapters/Indigo started the company that’s now called Kobo Books, which is just an anagram of “book.” A company from Japan has bought them now. “But Chapters still has a partnership with Kobo,” says Dave. “If you look up a title on the website it’ll show the paperbacks and hardcovers, but also the eBook link which will take you to the Kobo site. If you want to sell an eBook with Chapters/Indigo you have to sell to Kobo first. We don’t do anything other than put those listings on our website -- Kobo handles all of the electronic distribution or electronic aggregation.”
Because of his position in regional procurement Dave’s gotten to know pretty hands-on how these publication and distribution processes work. It seems very sprawling, but he assures me there’s a flow to it once you familiarize yourself with the terminology. His job has also allowed him to be at the forefront in obtaining some pretty cool books for Chapters.
Take The Duchess Cookbook for example, published by Edmonton’s own Duchess Bake Shop downtown on 124th street. “I heard on the radio that it was self-published by the bakery, so it wasn’t available from any distributor, wasn’t in our system,” says Dave. “I emailed one of our consignment people who deals with the authors that don’t have distributors and asked him to call Duchess. Initially they refused to distribute with us but then the Buzzfeed thing happened when they got picked up as one of the top ten bakeries in the world! Up until that point we’d managed to sell 2-300 of their books on consignment (meaning in select stores in Edmonton) but now they needed our help. We found them a distributor out of BC and now that cookbook is in every large format store across the country. The majority of sales are still happening in Edmonton but it’s even selling well here (in Calgary).”
What if you’re an author looking to sell in Chapters, and you’re not exactly as popular as the Duchess Bake Shop yet? The myth goes that you have to climb some steep walls in order to even talk to a person like Dave about your potential book. “Though a bit steeper than the average bookstore,” answers Dave, “our terms of agreement aren’t unreasonable. These are myths I try to debunk whenever I go to publisher and association meetings. I recently spoke with some romance writers and told them ‘you can get your book into our stores,’ and they said ‘oh, I had no idea. I thought I needed a publisher and a distributor off the bat in order to do that.’ Not exactly so. We’re more than willing to help authors get their completed books onto our shelves by guiding them through the steps.”
When he talks about Chapters’ distribution center, Dave mentions top sellers and fast-moving books. I probe him for what he knows about Edmonton’s other best sellers. Are they different from Calgary, and across provinces? “I ran a few reports for the Top Ten of the Edmonton region and for all of the other stores outside Edmonton, across the country combined. I found a few interesting things to mention. When it comes to the top selling: some of the top five in Edmonton are not in the national list at all--the Birds of Alberta is one of their top selling books and it’s about 20 years old; because of the world cup having games in Edmonton the FIFA Women’s World Cup book was in their top ten as well, but not the national; and if you go to fiction, the number one book across the country right now is The Girl on the Train, except in Edmonton. In Edmonton it’s number two. The number one fiction book in Edmonton is Grey. Grey is the fourth book in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, told from the male’s perspective. Nationally it’s like number five or six, but it’s number one in Edmonton. And it’s outselling Girl on the Train 2 to 1! To go along with that--in large print (normal print books made larger), all large prints of the Fifty Shades of Grey are in their top ten for Edmonton, but nowhere else. I don’t know if that says anything about your seniors in Edmonton, but there you have it.” Indeed, whoever said genres must be assigned to a particular to age groups?
Before I let him go, I throw Dave a tough one, asking him how much of an impact Chapters has had on Edmonton readers. “I know there’s some really strong independent bookstores there that have really stuck around. We don’t have it as a mandate anywhere that we’re trying to drive out independents; that’s not what we do. I think some of them know that but I know there’s also some who would disagree. The biggest concern is Amazon….But as far as ‘impact’ goes I would say it’s huge because we have a lot of stores in Edmonton. It’s a big market and there are a lot of stores to fit it, and all of them have done extremely well. We haven’t closed any large formats yet; we lost one mall store (Edmonton Coles). I know the Whyte Ave store has some pretty rabid fans because they support the Edmonton Fringe Fest, among others. Not to take away anything from the really great Edmonton independents -- I mean they have more there than we do here in Calgary. But I get a sense that the community really appreciates us (Chapters) there.”
