I own a company that sells educational games and toys through schools and direct mail. Recently I decided to try adding some beginner go books to our catalog. I'm not a strong go player, but I've always liked the game and I wanted to help spread it in North America. A friend told me to contact Kiseido, Slate & Shell and Yutopian, who are supposedly the big three publishers. That was back in January.

Slate & Shell declined to sell me any books, claiming that giving a wholesale discount would erode their profits. That's not been my experience in many years of business (otherwise why would anyone wholesale?) and reading through these forums it sounds like their current approach is not going well for them, but there seems to be no changing their minds (I actually found this site after Googling Slate & Shell). Next I contacted Kiseido's US office and received a cryptic reply about how they are "cutting down wholesaler". When I tried to seek clarification they ignored my emails. Kiseido's head office in Japan also ignored my inquiries. So next I contacted Yutopian and found out that they are the same useless people from Kiseido's US 'office'. No luck there either.

To be honest, it's been awhile since I've encountered such incompetence and unprofessional behavior. So I'm left wondering what's wrong with these publishers and how do they stay in business? More importantly are there any other companies I could contact for go books who might have a little more business acumen? I'd appreciate any suggestions.

You can always try to contact the Chinese go book publishers. They seem to offer discounts to distributors. Unfortunately their go books are in Chinese language though.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

Because their circumstances are different from the people you've dealt with in the past?

I don't even know if that's true or not. But it might be. And the people who would know are the publishers themselves. If I were in your shoes, I hope I'd consider it before calling potential suppliers "useless" on a public forum (they turned you down today, but you never know how the future will go).

You must lead a charmed existence. I see it everywhere. In fact, I just now sat down on my couch and ran across some.

Edit: I had forgotten to delete a word from the penultimate sentence.

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Occupy Babel!

The only English book publisher which I know offers a discount for quantity is RJ
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/payment.html

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

I don't know, hyperpape. It is true that people in the go book industry complain a decent amount about how rapidly the sky is falling, so clearly they haven't unlocked a business model that works wonders. And it's true that the go book industry is one of the last branches of the publishing industry that clings to the quaint early modern tradition of publishers hawking their own folios, hot off the presses. So you would assume that the relevant people would at least show some self-doubt.

I know that there are several times in the last two years when I wanted a go book or number of go books; was (of course) unable to find them in a retail outlet, or from an online retailer that understands how to ship a small rectangle of wood pulp quickly and efficiently; and subsequently lost interest in the purchase.

Please contact me by email at jasiek@snafu.de and ask for retail discounts for my self-published books!

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/books.html

If any publishers are listening, since I started playing go over 4 years ago, only once have I seen go books for sale in a store, and I promptly bought several. You shouldn't underestimate how seductive a physical book can be. It is much more enticing to hold a book in your hand and leaf through it than to see a picture of the cover and read a publisher's advertising blurb on a website. The only other time I have seen books for sale that I could leaf through before buying was at a go congress, where I bought about a quarter of the books I now own.

Just out of curiosity, how does book reselling work? Does the book store buy the books from the publisher (at a reduced rate) or does the store get them on commission? If the store buys them, I can't imagine how it would not be to the publisher's advantage to utilize this opportunity.

Edit: I just re-read the OP's post, and realized that he doesn't have a physical book store either, so I guess my argument doesn't apply to his case.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Interesting discussion. Being involved in publishing for a long time (not currently in the book business, but writing for magazines), and having worked as a bookseller and buyer in a bookstore, I'm actually not at all surprised by what the original poster is describing. Go book publishers are _very small presses_ and, as such, don't work the same way as others. I don't know if PeterB's experience with other companies includes companies this small - Slate & Shell is just two people, a husband and wife - but I'm not surprised that they don't want to sell at a loss. In addition, if you are asking for the ability to return unsold copies, that would be even more problematic for them, given the sizes of their print runs.

I don't see it us unprofessional. My guess is that they think that you wouldn't really be able to sell many of their books, and that it's not worth the hassle. If there were enough schools interested, then maybe you could convince them, but it's obviously a chicken-and-egg problem.

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The issues concerning go book publishing have been aired many times on these boards. Slate and Shell is barely able to operate and must sell enough (full price) copies of any new book to cover its costs before it can publish the next book. I imagine circumstances are not much different for Kiseido or Yutopian. Furthermore, the market for go books is very small and, by my observation, interest in buying books may actually be diminishing. As for placing books in stores to be sold, it is likely that there is a real risk that the books so placed will end up being a loss for the company, especially when the work required to place the books and keep track of what has been placed, and the work of accepting returns is taken into account. I understand that it is fun to find go books in stores. I got my first real go books, Haruyama and Nagahara's Basic Techniques of Go and Nagahara's Strategic Concepts of Go, from a retail store in the mid 1970's. The thing is, they were quite dusty and the store's inventory marks indicated that they had been on the shelf for three years before I bought them. And this was in a university town which could reasonably be expected to have more go players per capita than the vast majority of towns.

I don't think it is a matter of not having a good business model, it is just a matter of go being a small niche market in the West. The situation has improved a lot since the 1970's, at least in one respect. The internet has made marketing go books much easier. 40 years ago you had to belong to a go organization or subscribe to something like Go Review or later Go World to even find out that books existed. The internet has also had a negative effect on book publishing because there is so much free material available online that people don't seem to want to buy books.

The OP should not despair, however. Teaching go in schools, etc., is a noble endeavor. The American Go Foundation (http://senseis.xmp.net/?AmericanGoFoundation) does a lot to help in spreading go through schools and libraries and has a lot of material available a little or no cost.

Hmm, I do wonder if ebooks like SmartGo Books will see a definite improvement in things for the likes of Slate and Shell. They've definitely committed themselves to it and have plenty of books in the system already at very good prices. I really hope it works well for them and that it helps the smaller players in the industry turn a profit for themselves.

1) Your statement is an over-generalisation. That some people don't buy books does not prevent an increasing number of available books.

2) There is a great difference in quality between average online material and average books. The books' quality is much higher.

Indeed, the existing joseki sites are excellent but none of them in my experience compares to a full Joseki Dictionary if you are doing more than memorising the moves. The online stuff is great but it doesn't remove the need for or replace books.

Which sites do you have in mind? E.g., Kogo is pretty detailed but, when looking into the details, I noticed that it contains some doubtful comments and relevant gaps. (And it is ONLY a variations dictionary.) First I hoped I could also rely on it for my book, but then I replaced it by GoGod/Kombilo research and my own study.

If a level of quality like Kogo is your reference, then I have to disagree strongly with your "excellent" comment.

Eidogo is my reference. I find it decent enough for my level.

Eidogo uses Kogo's. There's also josekipedia, which I go to once in awhile.

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Occupy Babel!

Thanks for the correction.

Have you considered contacting Janice Kim, at www.samarkand.net? Her "Learn To Play Go" series (currently five volumes) might actually be more suitable for children new to the game.

The main problem I see, though, is that Amazon currently carries her books. I wonder if it is possible to offer much of a savings compared to their price.

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And the go-fever which is more real than many doctors’ diseases, waked and raged...
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Tundra, thank you. That's exactly what I'm looking for. I'll contact Samarkand.

Robert, thank you for the offer. Unfortunately I'm only looking for books for absolute beginners at the moment. I'll make a note of your site for future reference.

Daal, there are different approaches, but normally you would buy a product in bulk and ship it to your storage facility. After that you own it and it's your responsibility to move it. That's what I intended to do in this case. Most people would be happy to move stock off their own books and get the money in the bank. I don't have a physical store, but I have a large list of existing customers. The internet is where most of the excitement is, but direct mail is still going strong for people who know what they're doing.

Hyperpape et al, I should clear something up about Slate & Shell. The discount thing was just a made up excuse they gave. I never asked for a discount from any of the publishers because I never got as far as discussing price with any of them. I contacted them, let them know my plans, asked for suggestions for beginner books and a price for a case of each. After Slate & Shell said this I told them to name their price, they still refused point blank. It goes without saying that they should price the books to make a profit.

They didn't ask any of the questions that you'd normally expect from someone who knows what they're doing and proceeded to lecture me on how I could improve my own business by cutting off all my distributors for my own products. That's a mentality that loses money and leaves stock to depreciate in storage for years. No wonder they're up against the wall.

I deal in other products that are just as niche as go and don't have a problem moving them. And I do believe that someone who takes three months to respond to a simple inquiry (with multiple followups) is unprofessional, incompetent or both. Over the years I've found that trying to work with people like this is always a costly mistake, so I don't care if they read my comments. I'm happy that they let me know how useless they are right at the outset. I have no plans to ever contact them again and I believe that people who operate like this and then complain that business is bad deserve to be outed. This is partly what's wrong with our economy at the moment.

If that's how it went, it does defeat my ability to come up with an explanation and I don't know what they could have been thinking.

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Occupy Babel!

I just thought of another publisher which might be big enough to do deals with your company: Tuttle Publishing

They have a couple of books by Peter Shotwell which could perhaps be a nice progression for beginners to mid-kyu+.
Beginning Go
Go! More Than a Game
Go Basics
Winning Go: Successful Moves from the Opening to the Endgame

Peter Shotwell is also a member of L19 so maybe he can give you some advice as well.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.