Royal wedding to "stimulate market"

The Bookseller - 19.11.10 - Charlotte Williams

Retailers are expecting a royal sales bonanza thanks to the already hectic publication schedule marking the engagement of Prince William to Kate Middleton.

Rachel Russell, business unit director for books at W H Smith, is confident the wedding will boost trade. She said: "Royal events always stimulate the market. This will bring people who don't typically buy books to the market. It's like the people who only come into bookshops once a year at Christmas to buy books—shoppers will want to get their hands on royal-related titles." She added that: "It's definitely going to be bigger than an event like the World Cup for us."

Waterstone's national press officer Jon Howells was also upbeat. He said: "It's lovely to have a genuinely nice good news story like that . . . It's got to translate into something [in terms of sales]—it is the biggest-scale wedding since Charles and Diana."

However, Louise Chipps, books buyer for Sainsbury's, said the impact was still too hard to predict, expressing concern that pull-outs produced by newspapers may dampen demand for books. She said: "The impact these will have on the market is hard to call, what with the extensive media coverage that has already speculated on the royal engagement over the past year, and the inevitable Sunday pull-outs and glossy magazine splashes that will be thrust upon us over the coming weeks.
"Without a recent comparable I'm not sure what size of market we're looking at for wedding souvenir titles for similar reasons."

Phil Edwards, senior buying manager at wholesaler Gardners, said that publishers had "done their homework". He said: "It has to be good. I'm one of the few who can remember Fergie and Andrew's wedding, we did very well out of that." He added that the wedding may lead to an increase in tourism to the UK, meaning more footfall in stores. He also said: "Once the date [of the wedding] is set in stone [the trade] will be able to pin promotions around it. It will be good for the export market."

Currently, Anova and HarperCollins with the Sun, will be first to publish brand new titles on the couple on 26th November, with Mainstream releasing its updated biography of Kate Middleton in paperback on 25th November. John Blake will release its title on 6th December, with Hodder and Michael O'Mara both to release titles close to the date of the wedding itself next year.