Booksellers: activate your countdown to Rugby World Cup celebrations

As booksellers, we are all a little bit jaundiced when an event is hailed as creating opportunities to sell books. But there is reason to be cautiously optimistic about trade possibilities with the influx of Rugby World Cup (RWC) tourists – 85,000 of them from overseas and around 50,000 New Zealanders who will travel within the country.

Make Rugby World Cup good for business
New and favourite books to recommend to rugby fans
What are the rules around Rugby World Cup activities?

IMAGE: 'Our luxury seating' by Jodie Wilson on Flickr.com

Make Rugby World Cup good for business

The Booksellers NZ board brainstormed at a recent meeting as to how booksellers could get the best mileage out of RWC tourists.

Make it easy to post books home
Mary Sangster is credited with coming up with the idea that bookstores should make it easy for fans to post home. Keep a supply or padded bags of various sizes at the counter, with a note of the postage rates that apply - usually only three rates; Australia, USA, Rest of the World.

The bookseller can then make themselves a one stop shop for sending books home, supplying the bag, calculating the postage and then physically posting the item for the customer.

(IMAGE: By Gerard O'Brien/Otago Daily Times)

What’s more, you can advertise duty free for tourists. Providing the store does the postage, books can be sold to travellers GST free. (Booksellers NZ will be releasing “how to’ information on handling GST procedures shortly.)

A little extra work setting it up, but what a fantastic service experience for the customer.

Adopt an All Black
Lincoln Gould suggests bookshops “adopt an All Black.” The current ones might be a bit busy around the time, but you could contact any former All Black that lives in your community. (The Read discovered recently that Colin Meads will happily drop into his local PaperPlus Te Kuiti so there are always signed copies of The A-Z of Meads in stock.)

Make the ex All Black a guest of honour for an event promoting the new rugby titles. Have a leaflet on the counter with his comments of the new books, or make photographic book toppers of the legend with “so and so recommends...” on them. It’s not that hard – and it doesn’t break any rules...

Adopt a nation’s team (see the full list of teams)
Ashburton’s already making much of the fact that Romania will use the town as their base, so if there is a team in your neighbourhood, make them welcome. A window display with the nation’s flag is a good starting point.

Staff members fluent in other languages?
Make a sign that lets tourists know.

It's important to make sure your events and activities comply with the Rugby World Cup rules - see what's allowed and what's not.

New books to recommend

There’s the chance to sell tourists not only rugby titles but also tourist-oriented books about New Zealand. Locally, the slew of new rugby offerings should kick off for Father’s Day and keep momentum through to Cup Fever.

From a survey of major publisher’s offerings, it looks as though both sports books and tourist offerings have a range of good new titles as well as established backlist.

IMAGE: One of Penguin's two licenced books for Rugby World Cup.

Rugby fanatics may like....
Leading the rugby books charge is Union, the PQ Blackwell-packaged Penguin NZ offering. ‘The most ambitious collection of rugby photographs ever assembled’.

Text is by Paul Thomas and the book features interviews with five legendary rugby players from as many countries. The quality and value should be high for the book which retails at $60.

Random offers humour with The Stickmen Book of Rugby $19.99 and Rugby Speak 2011 $26.99.

HarperCollins has more comedy with Rugby Shorts by Mark Lynch and Four More Years: an entertaining collection of facts, foibles, oddities and quotations relating to the Rugby World Cup, both $19.99.

They also have a new rugby bio, Sonny Bill Williams: the story of Rugby’s New Superstar by John Matheson, $39.99.

Hachette’s Kevin Chapman reckons the Rugby World Cup is ‘over published’, so they have taken a conservative, and again humorous, approach with just Ali’s Utterly Unreliable Guide to the 2011 Rugby World Cup, $44.99 and a Stars of the All Blacks Poster Book at $24.99.

They are also releasing rugby legend Sir Fred Allen’s authorised biography Fred the Needle, $49.99, aimed at the Kiwi market.

New Holland’s idiosyncratic offering is Fay Looney’s photographs of New Zealand through the Goalposts, $19.99.

Penguin also has two ‘licensed’ (and this is important) books for children, Rugby World Cup 2011 Team Guide $14.99 and Rugby World Cup Sticker Activity Book 2011 $12.99.

Rugby fans wives and girlfriends (WAGS) may fall for…
Switching to tourist books, the new entries to the market timed for RWC include the Great Kiwi Motorhome Guide $45.00 from Random and HarperCollins’ completely updated and revised new editions of The Lord of the Rings Pocket Guide and the LOTR Guide Extended Edition.

Appealing to cookbook fans and hopefully rugby ones are Penguin’s Country Calendar Cookbook with Allyson Gofton, combing rural travel experiences with regional recipes $50.00 and The Soul Cookbook from Random with the cooking of Judith Tabron’s restaurant and lavish photographs of the Auckland waterfront, $60.

Don’t forget our local backlist tourism titles are all new to overseas visitors. Random have worked to provide special promotion - Celebrate New Zealand - of their visitor-appealing titles for the occasion and will supply a colourful poster of the books for in-store use.

The rules of Rugby World Cup

Rugby World Cup: what you can’t do
As a recent feature in New Zealand Retail made clear, you can’t make any unauthorised commercial exploitation for RWC 2011. That means “Any advertising anywhere and any time that suggests any association with RWC 2011.”

Don’t think “unofficial” or “unauthorised” words used will excuse you. “An association is not avoided by the use of these words,” we are told.

So forget about “ambush” marketing – you will be prosecuted.

You can still capture a slice of the action by dressing up premises and running sales or promotions says New Zealand Retail “as long as you do not attempt to suggest an association with the tournament.”

Presumably that means you can still advertise “Bloggs Books loves rugby”; just forget about “Bloggs Books loves RWC 2011”.

Should your store be located in the “clean zones” around stadiums, best check the regulations. You can’t set up a stall outside your shop (or home) selling t-shirts or drinks for instance.

To put this in context, Union is accompanied by a display of blown up photographs from the book at the Auckland Town Hall’s Concert Chamber from September 4 to October 29. There will be major signage on the Town Hall (shown right), a chance for visitors to see the gallery style exhibition and the promoters are offering corporate event packages. Yet the email accompanying the brochure warns: “please note this isn’t an official RWC project so you’ll note that we don’t refer to RWC in any of our collateral.”
 

Rugby World Cup: What you can do within these constraints
There are still plenty of good promotional ideas you can use without breaking any rules.

• Have a staff member – one who knows something about the sport and the books. Wear a club or provincial rugby shirt while tourists are in town.
• Support the All Blacks – show your allegiance with black and white decorations.
• Fly flags – one of the visiting team’s national flags in the window before a game should get your store noticed.
• Be friendly. Suggest local restaurants, quirky shops, lesser known tourist attractions to visitors.

And don’t forget visitors will want advice on kids’ books for the grandchildren, books about different aspects of New Zealand and some good reads as well as the best rugby books.

In other words, just be your active, amiable, people-centred bookseller selves.

The RWC will create a festival atmosphere in our cities and towns as matches are played around the country, so let bookstores be a part of the celebration.

By Jillian Ewart, writer for The Read weekly e-newsletter 

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