Another one bites the dust! Times Bookstore shut its outlets in Plaza Singapura and Waterway Point in February. The number of physical bookstores in Singapore continues to dwindle. I agree with writer Ng Yi-Sheng that the outlets’ demise was really nothing to mourn. They were marginally more interesting than the average airport bookstore.
When the news broke, writer Daryl Lim suggested that Singapore’s high retail rents were killing bookstores. High rent isn’t just affecting bookstores. Our retail environment is so boring. The Telok Ayer area is a revolving door of “F&B concepts”.
I was once the buyer for an independent bookstore in Singapore. Here’s what I know about bookstores as a business model.
Bookstores generally only keep 35-40% of a title’s sticker price. On a $30 paperback that’s around $11. That $11 isn’t pure profit. It needs to cover labour and overheads like rent. Let’s assume, very conservatively, that our hypothetical bookstore has one proprietor (who doesn’t draw a salary) and only employs part-time workers. These workers make $10 an hour (what I made as a part-time bookseller in 2019) and don’t come with additional costs like health insurance – roughly $2,500 a month if you have someone for 8 hours every day. A unit currently available in Plaza Sing, where Times just closed its outlet, is listed at $19,000 a month. There are cheaper units elsewhere, like a smaller space in Rochor at $6,000 a month. Your bookstore would need to sell at least 780 books a month to cover only one worker and rent.
Rent is hardly the only challenge. Bookstores have more expenses (utilities, marketing, taxes etc) and you’d need initial capital outlay to renovate the space and fill the shelves in the first place. These margins are punishing.
I’ve only described a bog-standard bookstore. What about a good one? One that has a loyal customer base and feels integral to the local literary scene?
The $6,000/month space isn’t large enough to carry a wide variety of titles so you’ve got to hope that your customers will like your specific selection. This probably means choosing a niche and narrowing your pool of customers. If you focused on literature, then you wouldn’t necessarily stock textbooks or business guides. You would need to provide excellent customer service to stay afloat. There are structural difficulties to that.
I was a buyer during the height of the pandemic so my experiences with shipping may have been more onerous than most. There were many instances when I knew a title would interest our customers but couldn’t really act on my instincts. Singapore is physically far away from the centres of publishing. The distribution companies here try to keep a large number of titles in their warehouses. These tend to be popular titles and recent releases. Any order from the backlist usually took 3 to 10 weeks to arrive. If a title did unexpectedly well and sold out, a restock could take as long too. Titles from smaller publishers or with smaller print runs (most things that weren’t bestsellers, basically) usually cost more per unit because of economies of scale. I only ordered 3 to 6 copies of each title, unless demand was guaranteed, because the back room was too small to hold lots of additional stock and we didn’t have the cash to spend on too many titles that didn’t move. A talented bookseller can mitigate some of these conditions but remember that you can only demand so much effort and skill from your staff at $10 an hour.
I can tell you that 1,000 books a month was considered decent where I worked. The business model also included a café, events, and venue rental, but I’m not sure the place ever turned a profit. It reportedly shut due to rental costs. So, bookstores don’t make sense as business enterprises. Do they make sense for readers? Writer Joshua Ip doesn’t think so, he believes libraries serve the same purpose and are killing bookstores. I agree that the National Library Board does an excellent job giving members access to physical books as well as audiobooks and eBooks – offerings that independent bookstores rarely provide. And when you do want to spend money on a book, it’s hard to beat online juggernaut Amazon’s product range, prices, and speed. Times Bookstore and Kinokuniya can’t be described as small or independent but they’ve both had to shut outlets in recent years. After the news about Times broke, The Straits Times’ Opinion Desk approached me for an op-ed on why bookstores are closing and “how it's not logical or practical to expect them to survive”. (I declined because of an administrative conflict. They ran this op-ed from another writer.) But even they include affiliate links to Amazon in their book reviews to generate revenue.
So how do we save bookstores? Reporter Clement Yong captured some of the discussion that took place online for the Straits Times. The story quotes me saying that Singapore residents don’t read books at a high enough volume to sustain bookstores at Singapore rent prices. Referencing the National Library Board’s 2021 National Reading Habits Study, I pointed out that only 33% of respondents read 6 or more books a year. (I had to do a little digging to get that number, the report is framed more optimistically.) We have a chicken and egg situation, then. Singaporeans don’t read enough to support bookstores. The disappearance of bookstores probably doesn’t help with that.
What’s the case for bookstores? As much as I love the library, it’s important to have literary space that isn’t state-funded. I’m not even referring to political censorship here; I think there will always be work that is more suited to the state’s requirements, and that literature at large will be worse off if only those projects are financially viable. Government institutions also move much more slowly and have more red tape. A bookstore is in a better position to programme a poetry reading that features non-citizen writers or to launch a book that contains adult themes. Bookstores are allowed to have personality. (The library’s should remain staid.) They can host wine tastings, run irreverent social media campaigns, or make political statements. This is a good thing! The Moon wasn’t open for very long but I had multiple customers come back to tell me that they loved the book I sold them. My own perspective on writing changed the day I bought a copy of The Lifted Brow at Books Actually. None of these institutions exist anymore, partly because of their own mistakes, but I have hope that new ones will have more staying power.
Book Bar on Duxton Road is a fairly new independent bookstore. They have a full calendar of readings and book launches and will, fingers crossed, become a mainstay in the literary scene. (I’ve heard Book Bar’s owner Alex lament about rent too. I’m not surprised because Duxton is an expensive neighbourhood. So if you want to see it succeed, spend money there if you can.)
Online bookstore Wormhole doesn’t have a permanent physical space but does pop-ups and is trying some really interesting things with their social media presence. One of them is called Surprise Your Shelf, a mystery shopping service where a guest curator picks a secret title. It’s a coincidence of timing that I’m the guest curator this time around. I think I was originally scheduled for February but things got delayed. I don’t make a cut from sales of the surprise book, I am happily doing this for free. Initiatives like this are exactly what I mean when I say that bookstores can have personality! I believe preorders end tomorrow, 14 April, but you can probably still buy the book after the title is revealed. (Disclosure: Times Publishing Group, which owns Times Bookstore, also owns Times Distribution and Pansing Books. They’re two of Singapore’s biggest book distributors. Times Distribution occasionally sends me free books with no expectation of a review. The title I picked was one Times sent me because I think it’s very good!!!)
I don’t know if Book Bar or Wormhole will go the distance, though I sincerely hope they do. If they don’t, it won’t be for a lack of effort. It is genuinely so expensive to do literature. Everyone – writers, publishers, booksellers – does stuff for free because we really want to put good work in the hands of readers.
Rent subsidies would be great. Even better, someone rich should buy bookstores shopfronts as a vanity project. Bring back patronage! Literature has never been commercially viable. Life would be very boring if everything had to be.
Other Links
I read Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature to try to understand more about the financial life of publishing. It is very interesting though I’m not sure I agree with all the writer’s conclusions.
I recommend this review in the Los Angeles Review of Books as complementary reading if you decided to read Big Fiction. Or actually, you can just read the review. It’s good.
I am also slowly working my way through Merve Emre’s Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. I picked it up with the same intentions but it is much more a scholarly book than one that can answer my forever question: “how words make money?” For what it’s worth, I think the book is very interesting.
I would also like to recommend Merve Emre’s new podcast The Critic and Her Publics. It’s been worth listening to just for me to learn that the K in Knopf is not silent.
You make a good argument for the existence of indepdent literary spaces but I don't think the book store model is really the best way to achieve it. All the examples you point out are about bookstores pivoting to something else as a profit center; I personaly think Book bar is the way to go but generaly I think we need a new form of a literary space that doesn't revolve around having to buy books. Singlit station is the model of what could happen; but with spaces that are more open to public.
I think what should happen is a revival in traditional organised socities with initation dues that can rent spaces dedicated to literature. Recently I found a copy of the Tesseract which was a product of Singapore's now defunct Science ficition and fantasy association. Formal groups like that need a revival.