Methuen, the independent general and drama publisher, have announced their figures and they saw losses in 2002. Peter Tummons, their managing director, said in The Bookseller “It was not a good year for us.” The company, in common with many independent general publishers, says it had faced the challenge of attracting attention from chain booksellers. “The retail trade in the UK was tough for us. We’re fighting for the same shelf space as Penguin, Random House and Harry Potter.” The cause has been the movement to look for stock turn, and to focus on bestsellers, which has made it hard to complete, and he added “Epos rules now - reputations and sales histories count for so much.” An interview with Victoria Barnsley, Chief Executive Officer of Harper Collins, UK, was recently featured in Publishing News and she refers to the current state of the book trade: ‘Books’, Victoria Barnsley argues, ‘are now a “a devalued currency” as retailers endlessly emphasise 50% off and three-for-two. “We are creating a whole generation of book buyers who see books as very cheap. We do the reverse of so many industries: when we have a valuable brand, we tend to discount it more: elsewhere, they put up the price. What we’re facing is retailers fighting for market share and using discounting as a way to do that, and we publishers have to protect our authors’ position and our own position. The US board, on which I sit, is staggered at our level of discounts - in the States the average is well below 50% and the 60%-plus discounts that have recently been demanded here by some supermarkets are unheard of.” Peter Mayer, the indefatigable and idiosyncratic publisher, is quoted in the trade press as saying “It’s a bad time in publishing; of all my years in the business this really is a bad time for both big and small companies” and at the AGM of the Society of Authors Tim Hely Hutchinson, c.e.o. of the Hodder Headline group, said: “The supermarkets are driving prices down throughout the trade. It is devaluing books that don’t get into the big promotions and suddenly look awfully expensive.” We seem to be living in interesting times!our Web Site Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 126 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2003 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com