An Open Letter to Booksellers Regarding Obama’s Challenge

Open letter to the bookselling community:

First I want to thank all of you for the big positions you have taken on Robert Kuttner’s important new book, Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. As Hendrick Hertzberg just wrote on his New Yorker blog, “Obama's Challenge is the fruit of Bob Kuttner’s lifetime of engagé reporting, analysis, and advocacy…. it is riveting, brilliant, and persuasive. Kuttner, in concise chapters written with great vigor and clarity, shows what the change could look like if Obama is bold enough to go for it and the gods continue to smile on him.”

Secondly, I want to respond to the initial reaction to our decision to launch this book by offering a special discount coupon at the Democratic National Convention, redeemable exclusively on Amazon.com via print-on-demand technology until the regular print run is available for national distribution.

According to a few of the emails our sales team has received, not only is it “a money-grubbing sellout,” a “slap in the face,” and “another blow to independent bookstores” but several stores have cancelled their orders and others have told us that they will never order from us again!

I think a little perspective is in order.

 We are headed into the most important election season in a generation that will, I believe, impact how we deal with the multiple cascading crises America confronts: the war in Iraq, the dangers of new military confrontations with Iran and Russia, escalating climate change that threatens life on earth, an economic situation as dire as the Great Depression, and a deepening energy crisis that threatens to fundamentally change our way of life.

Chelsea Green and the author, Robert Kuttner, are taking an enormous risk in publishing this book. We have two months to get it into readers’ hands before the election. If Obama wins, the book will have even more life, but if he doesn’t the book will be done. This is about a publisher’s commitment to its author to get one of a very few pro-Obama books out into the marketplace in the shortest amount of time. We are printing 75,000 copies, the largest first printing in our history, which shows how important we think this book is. But it pales in comparison to anti-Obama books flooding the market. I wonder how many booksellers are happy to sell another few thousand “abomination” books while being “outraged” by Chelsea Green’s decision to make its book available as fast as possible.

The fact is that Chelsea Green, along with many other small publishers, could not have survived and thrived without the innovations that Amazon has brought to the book marketplace, including being able to showcase our entire 350 title backlist online where it can be found by our customers. I know it’s de rigueur to consider Amazon enemy #1, but it just ain’t so. We value all our customers -- independents, national chains, wholesalers, specialty retailers, and on-line retailers -- but each is able to reach our end users in different, very specific ways. Not only do we acknowledge that fact, but we try to promote our new titles to each category of retailers and wholesalers in different ways, depending on what kind of book it is.

It’s also important for booksellers to realize that the small publisher has just as monumental a task as the small bookstore when it comes to staying in business. Compared to the big houses, we are literally microsized – with 1,000 to 10,000 times smaller annual sales and corresponding marketing and advance budgets. Yet we are expected to play the game exactly the same as the big guys when it comes to getting a book out into the world -- impossible.

Our intention is to create demand that will result in selling through all copies in the marketplace. It is a launch strategy and promotion, not an overall sales strategy. We are not Random House or Simon & Schuster. We don’t have national “lay downs” on specific dates with specific titles. We don’t embargo books. We can’t do full page ads in national media. This idea that a book has to be available in all retail outlets at exactly the same time is a tradition that the big houses created because they had the budgets to support it with national media buys and very expensive public relations budgets for their biggest books. What we hope to do is create a word of mouth buzz and demand that will end up making Obama’s Challenge into a national bestseller—perhaps countering the Corsi book -- but the idea that this is going to happen in the first few weeks is ludicrous! If we can successfully launch it with our special promotional coupon at the DNC, then your customers will be asking for the book by the time we ship the first printing. Our goal is to benefit the broadest spectrum of the bookselling marketplace by using the quickest marketing and promotional methods possible, in the two-month window available to us prior to the elections on November 4th.

Of course if all of you cancel your orders it will mean that a really good and important book on Obama will be effectively boycotted.

As I have written before, the world is changing fast, but the book business seems wedded to very traditional ways of publishing and selling. The emerging digital technologies mean we can and should be publishing much faster and to the moment. Chelsea Green may be the first publisher to try this out but we won’t be the last. I think our bookselling and book publishing community will prosper if we concentrate on reinventing ourselves to serve the changing marketplace.

Thank you all for the support you have shown us in the past. We hope you’ll stick with us and support our effort to publish quickly and forcefully Obama’s Challenge — a book that is too timely and important to be left out of the national political conversation this fall.

Sincerely,

Margo Baldwin
President and Publisher
Chelsea Green Publishing