Bring home the sales

There will be much debate this Christmas about whether online booksellers are stealing market share from their terrestrial counterparts. All booksellers like to claim that sales through the Internet are mostly additional, and to point to the different profile of titles popular with online purchasers; but there is evidence, in the flat trading results on the high street at a time when overall book sales are showing some growth, that e-tailers are stealing market share. The example of one high-profile title, Bring Home the Revolution by Jonathan Freedland (Fourth Estate), suggests how Internet bookshops may take advantage of publicity that might otherwise have driven sales through the high street.

Mr Freedland, a Guardian columnist, published Bring Home the Revolution in July last year. In it, he maintained that society in the US was much more vibrant and democratic than in the UK, and argued that a republic offered a much healthier basis for a constitution than did our rigidly hierarchical Crown. The book was a bestseller in hardback.

Fourth Estate's paperback edition, which came out in April, made less impression, until the weeks leading up to the referendum on the monarchy in Australia. The Sun, campaigning for a No vote, seized Mr Freedland's book and gave it an extraordinary amount of coverage; the paper has used it as the basis for three leader columns. The Mirror weighed in against the author. Other publications, as well as radio programmes, joined the debate. It became known that the Prime Minister had read Bring Home the Revolution during his holiday, and that senior government ministers had it on their bedside tables.

The effect at the tills of all this publicity has not been dramatic. In the week ending 30th October, according to Whitaker BookTrack, Bring Home the Revolution sold 395 copies; last week, it sold 414. Fourth Estate reports that some booksellers have seized on what they regard as a selling opportunity, while others have been indifferent. The latter might argue that not all publicity generates sales; that readers seeing coverage for a book may feel that the reports they are getting are sufficient to keep them well-informed. Nevertheless, when the publicity was at its height, Mr Freedland's book went to the top of Amazon's bestseller list.

A number of high street booksellers are reported to be struggling to cope with the deluge of new titles on offer at the moment. The pressure to promote these titles, the best hope of a profitable Christmas, is immense. But there is a danger that the concentration of promotional efforts on the next big thing will make it harder for booksellers to react quickly to unexpected opportunities. Book buyers will think that if something is topical, the best place to find it will be on the Web.