Reporter | Chen Jiajing Edit | Yellow Moon
On September 27, a live broadcast of books exceeding 100 million made Liu Yuanyuan, the head anchor of Douyin, become the target of public criticism overnight.
Doing book live streaming in Douyin is not a new thing, but Liu Yuanyuan's live broadcast has a lot of propaganda words that sting the practitioners in the publishing industry. Before the start of the broadcast, Liu Yuanyuan declared that "this time I called half of the publishing house", "prepared 500,000 books to break the price to less than 10 yuan, 100,000 books of 1 yuan, and the explosive books broke through the double eleven price", her goal is to "revitalize the book industry". For publishing houses, dumping books in large quantities far below the cost price is simply unprofitable, which will not only not revitalize the book industry, but also make the entire industry further involved in the vicious circle of low-price competition and destroy the ecology of the entire industry. Many publishers bluntly said that this is a "stranglehold" of the book industry, which is already thinly profitable.
Someone counted the leading selling books in Liu Yuanyuan's live broadcast afterwards, and the sales of the first 45 kinds of yards alone exceeded 100 million yuan, most of which were children's books. In recent years, the rapid growth of the children's book market has attracted a large number of publishing houses to join this track, but behind the seemingly prosperous market, the quality of children's books in different categories is uneven, the inventory backlog is serious, and the vicious competition is fierce, which has also caused serious industry chaos. Under the influence of the new crown epidemic, short video live streaming has gradually become a popular model for online sales of books, and the low-price strategy that dominates this model has also extended from cosmetics, clothing, food and other fields to the book field.
What impact will low-price dumping have on the development of the publishing industry? How is the live streaming of a book different from other products? More importantly, how should publishers, anchors and live broadcasting platforms jointly build a sustainable industry ecology and better serve readers? In response to the above problems, Interface Culture launched a dialogue with Bai Bing, editor-in-chief of Jieli Publishing House, and Xiao Xin, a senior publisher.
Since the era of new media, the marketing network and sales channels of publishing houses have undergone great changes. Bai Bing introduced that "decentralized integrated network" is the biggest feature of the current publishing house marketing network, from offline physical bookstores, to the later dangdang, Jingdong and other traditional e-commerce, community e-commerce, and then to the emerging douyin, Taobao and other short video marketing and live broadcast platforms, a variety of channels exist in parallel, no one is the absolute center. The diversification of platforms has also prompted publishing houses to pay more and more attention to sub-channel and sub-platform planning, and to hand over different products to different platforms for sale. According to the "2020 China Book Retail Market Report" released by "Beijing Open Volume", the online sales scale of books in 2020 accounted for nearly 80%, and under the impact of the new crown epidemic, physical bookstores have been greatly impacted, and many businesses have to shift to online channels, making the online scale further expand. In The Relay Publishing House where Bai Bing is located, online sales have risen to more than 80% of the total sales scale, among which the short video marketing and live streaming sales business based on Douyin are also growing continuously.
With the popularity of the live e-commerce model, a large number of publishing houses have poured into the live broadcast track. Judging from the data of the Douyin platform, the popular book category in 2020 is mainly concentrated in children's books, and the proportion of yards accounts for nearly 50%, followed by psychological self-help and life books. In the special live broadcast made by Liu Yuanyuan, most of the categories with leading sales are children's books, which shows that the market demand for children's books on the Douyin platform is huge. Xiaoxin believes that this shows that the live broadcast of books in the head of Douyin does match the needs of platform users, but it does not mean that other categories of books are not suitable for live streaming. In fact, the well-known anchor Wei Ya once sold the Mao Dun Literature Award winner Mai Jia's "Life Sea Sea", and the writer Mo Yan also held a new book launch of the novel collection "Late Ripening People" through live broadcast, which directly drove the sales of 35,000 copies in more than 2 hours.
Although the expansion of the online scale of books has epidemic reasons, the large discount is also an important factor in attracting customers to pay. The data shows that in 2020, the overall online store channel price discount is 60% off, but the full reduction activities and promotions cover almost the whole year, while the physical bookstore channel price discount is 90% off, and there is a big difference between the two channels. Bai Bing pointed out that the publishing house is priced according to the cost, usually a book will be shipped at 60% discount, 52-55% settlement, the middle 8-5% as the underwriter's sales expenses, so that the final profit margin of the publishing house is about 8-5%, and the publishing house that operates very well may reach 10%. However, in emerging models such as live streaming with goods and short video book sales, some Internet celebrity anchors will require publishers to settle with a 40% discount or even lower, which has approached the direct cost of normal book products. After deducting the anchor's pit fee and commission, the publishing house is almost unprofitable, and it is likely to lose money. In the long run, this is bound to have an adverse impact on the development of publishing houses.
The reason why Liu Yuanyuan's live broadcast has caused controversy in the publishing industry is that she uses "breaking the price" as a gimmick to publicize, and many books that are originally cheap and profitable are "sold" to less than 10 yuan, and the cheapest price is only 1 yuan, which is far lower than the cost price of a book, which is equivalent to disrupting the book market and challenging the bottom line of the publishing industry in the eyes of many practitioners. In this regard, Liu Yuanyuan responded in an article on her WeChat public account "Against Liu" that the so-called "one-dollar book grab" is not the publisher posting money to supply her, but she subsidizes herself as an anchor, and the live broadcast platform also has subsidies, and she personally does not charge a pit fee. She stressed that her subsidy for a dollar book is to attract popularity and stimulate sales, "Books are very weak on Douyin, and you can only prove that it can also generate sales like cosmetics and food, so that the platform can pay attention to it, and then give the book industry greater subsidies and support." ”
For such an explanation, Bai Bing and Xiao Xin both believe that it is not convincing enough. In Xiaoxin's view, the key to the problem is not whether the anchor has provided subsidies and whether it has taken the pit fee, but whether this kind of one-dollar price-breaking and low-price dumping model should be used in the field of books. Can the overall ecology continue to operate for a long time? According to Liu Yuanyuan, books are price-oriented like cosmetics, food and other products, but this is not the case. "The biggest difference between a book and a cosmetics or clothing is that it is a content product, and each variety needs to be developed separately, such as the same novel, each novel is completely different, which also makes the cost and profit of the book industry completely different from cosmetics or clothing." Xiaoxin believes that there is no problem with short video live streaming itself, but the logic of carrying goods of other products should not be directly applied to books. The really good book should be to pick a good book for readers, teach them how to choose books, explain the characteristics of the content level of the book clearly, and let the readers pay for the content, rather than simply and rudely use "one dollar a book" and "sold a hundred million" to attract attention.
If it is difficult to make money with live books, why do publishing houses continue to participate?
Bai Bing believes that this is related to the prominent vicious competition in the children's book market. According to his observation, in the past 20 years, the children's book market has developed rapidly, children's books have become a market demand, and more than 500 publishing houses across the country have published children's books, precisely because everyone has taken a fancy to the growth of the market. However, from a professional point of view, there are uneven children's publications on the market. "Some publishing houses have a professional editorial team and have many years of experience in publishing children's books, so they have done a lot of best-selling books that can meet the needs of the market, such as "The Little Bean by the Window" and "The Cat Who Lived 1 Million Times", etc. These books are not worried about selling. There are also some publishing houses that do not have a professional team and no experience in the industry, but they make money from reading children's books, so they desperately try to get on the variety, and finally these books cannot be sold, resulting in a large inventory backlog. "On the other hand, the competent departments of some publishing houses have relatively high indicator requirements for business development, in order to expand the scale and achieve growth, the publishing houses will also desperately go up the varieties, resulting in inventory backlogs." In order to digest the excess inventory, the publishing house had to find a big v live stream to bring goods and sell books at low prices.
In the short term, low-price promotions may solve the inventory problem and help some unsalable books to increase sales, but in the long run, this strategy may "lead the whole body", causing the overall pricing of the book industry to be "inflated". When JD Books was just launched in 2010, the two major e-commerce platforms of JD.com and Dangdang launched a price war for the book market. Although the flag was over after the fierce battle, various e-commerce platforms have risen in the following decade, and the promotion methods for books have become more diverse and the discounts have been increasing. The live streaming of short video platforms can be said to further exacerbate such price wars, forcing publishing houses to give greater discounts, and publishing houses have to increase book prices in order to continue to occupy a place in the market and obtain certain benefits.
Can readers really buy affordable from low prices? In Bai Bing's view, the answer is no. "Readers think they've gotten benefits from discounted sales of children's books, but they don't. Low-price sales force publishers to increase book prices, and publishers and underwriters settle with normal and reasonable settlement discounts, so that book pricing can be lowered. In addition, Bai Bing believes that only using low prices as the only means of promotion will also bring bad guidance to readers' consumption habits, so that readers will become more and more "only recognize the price and not recognize the book". "If this continues in China – our readers only use discounts or prices to measure the value of a book – I think it may not only have an impact on reading, but also have a great negative impact on the quality of our readers and the quality of our citizens."
In fact, books as content products need more creative marketing. On short video and live broadcast platforms, anchors can promote good books at normal prices, do reading guidance and value-added services, such as allowing writers and readers to have the desire to buy in the process of communication, or allowing children to have reading interest in reading games. In Xiaoxin's view, books are difficult to "adulterate" products, and in the end, they cannot be sold, and they cannot be achieved by relying on low prices. In other words, if the content of a slow-selling book is not good, even if 1 yuan sells 100,000 copies, it does not mean that it can turn bad content into good content, let alone revitalize the book industry.
It should be pointed out that books are not a naturally high-priced product, nor is it a naturally low-priced product. Xiaoxin believes that behind the books are people's spiritual needs or content needs, and there are many use scenarios for such needs. In some scenarios, low-priced books are more appropriate, such as the British Penguin Book, which emerged as a paperback with a popular publishing price. At the time, most of the books in European bookstores were beautifully framed and expensive hardcover books, but Penguin Books founder Alan Lane noticed that many people wanted to read on the train, but could not find convenient, affordable reading. So he made the classics into a paperback that was easy to carry, and put it on sale at the newspaper kiosk at the train station, and each book was priced at 6 pence, which was exactly the price of 10 cigarettes. From a publishing perspective, this example also reminds practitioners to think about what is the real need behind the "1 yuan book"? Can you break down these needs and develop products accordingly to match the needs of readers for content consumption?
In the field of short video live broadcasting, the situation of "cheap selling" of books is not an isolated case, nor does it occur only in the live broadcast room of the head anchor. Liu Yuanyuan's live broadcast incident only exposed the problems in the long-term book live broadcasting ecosystem. What needs to be solved more urgently is how will the book industry develop next? How can publishers break the vicious competitive circle of low-price dumping and work with underwriters, online sales platforms and readers to create a healthy ecology?
Bai Bing believes that publishing houses need to bear responsibilities in many ways. First of all, we must be self-disciplined, only for readers to produce good books, to meet the rigid needs of the market, so as to avoid the flood of low-quality publications caused by the backlog of inventory, there is no need to "kneel" underwriters low-price dumping. Secondly, on the basis of publishing good books, publishing houses should also adhere to cultural conscience, resist vicious competition, and consider the long-term development of the industry and the cultural welfare of readers, rather than blindly pursuing sales performance and scale growth. In addition, relevant government departments and industry associations should also strengthen the supervision of the book industry, promote the book price protection system such as the "discount restriction order", and fundamentally solve the risk of "bad money expelling good money", which is also a point that a large number of publishing industry practitioners strongly call for.
In terms of policy, foreign book pricing systems may provide us with lessons learned. At present, 13 European countries such as Germany, France, Spain, as well as Mexico, Argentina, and Japan, implement a book pricing system, that is, new books on the market can only be sold to consumers at a fixed price or a very limited discount (usually 5%-20%) for a certain period of time. From the perspective of practical effects, the book pricing system has indeed helped German and French publishing houses to introduce more diversified book varieties, rather than best-selling books like the United Kingdom and the United States, and has also effectively solved the problem of offline and online discounts and vicious competition.
Xiaoxin believes that the controversy caused by the live broadcast of books is not entirely a bad thing, and publishing practitioners can also reflect on the development of the industry through existing problems and find future opportunities. For example, from Liu Yuanyuan's sales performance list, we can see that the market demand for children's books is huge, and it is likely to be the most promising track among many book categories. In her view, the reason why any enterprise in a popular industry track has developed well is to rely on continuous optimization and improvement of its own technology and products, and ultimately improve the well-being of the public, which is also the responsibility they need to shoulder. "Looking at our children's books, have they solved the needs of the public? For example, have you introduced better foreign documents and made Chinese editions? Is there a way to inspire the creation of local original works, or to launch works that enhance everyone's spiritual needs? "These are all questions that publishing practitioners should reflect on from the events.
Xiaoxin also suggested that publishing practitioners should have an open mind in the face of new changes in the market and focus on solving problems, rather than emotionally boycotting anchors with live streaming or requiring all publishing houses not to participate in one-dollar book sales activities. "From the anchor to the platform to the publication, we can truly face the needs of readers, and then build a new ecology, what kind of commissions, discounts and content should be, the ultimate goal is actually to make a better product, so that the product to drive us forward." We are in one boat, not opposites. ”
Resources:
"Piracy is rampant, good books are difficult to sell, is the price of domestic genuine books really too expensive?" Interface News,
https://www.jiemian.com/article/5842529.html
"Open Volume Release: Research Report on Fragmented Book Sales Channels and Online Sub-platforms", Beijing Open Volume,
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/a8vyc9cgkncwjahefqfe2q
Interpretation: The Crisis and Change of the Book Market, People's Daily Overseas Edition,
https://m.gmw.cn/baijia/2021-01/28/1302075966.html
"Opening a live broadcast, I became a "sinner" in the book industry, against Liu,
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