A somewhat bleak report on the current state of New Zealand booksellers has identified the biggest threat to bookstores—that they are unable to get in stock fast enough to satisfy customer demand because most books, even New Zealand titles, are held in warehouses across the ditch in Australia.
It’s a grim and actually kind of pathetic arrangement. “Witi Ihimaera is in Australia,” as Carole Beu of the Women’s Bookshop puts it. “Patricia Grace is in Australia. Even Hairy Maclary is in Australia.” New Zealand, branch office of Australia.
All of the multinational publishing firms based in New Zealand have stock sitting in sheds on the Australian continent. Penguin are in Melbourne. Hachette is on the central coast of Sydney. HarperCollins are based in the Southern Highlands towards Canberra. Orders are shipped instead of flown, and bookstores are forced to wait for the slow boat to tie up on this side of the Tasman.
The Booksellers Industry Report states, “The primary threat is recognised as the supply chain / speed to market, reflecting a fundamental structural disadvantage for booksellers.”
The report is based on data gathered from 49 bookstores, and features angry comments from unnamed booksellers. One said, “The Australian distributors need to get supply to New Zealand better — they don’t care that they are hurting our business by their lack of urgency to supply NZ.”
Another registered their frustration in melodramatic terms: “I think the international publishers who choose to publish NZ books are self-sabotaging their own market by keeping their books offshore. I want to ask them what’s the point? Do you care about your authors? Because you certainly don’t care about NZ bookshops.”
The report, which comes ahead of this week’s annual conference of NZ Booksellers, suggests that smaller traders are only just hanging on in the book trade. Among the most dismal statistics:
- 79 percent of bookstores earn subsistence profits
- 54 percent report net profits under $25,000
- Revenue growth 2-3 percent annually while costs rise 3-5 percent
The issue of having to ship books from Australia is presented as the number 1 problem. It lists the supply chain / speed to market challenges:
- Long lead times for new releases
- Stock unavailability during peak demand
- Unpredictable delivery schedules
- Perception of allocation favouring large accounts
- International shipping delays
“It’s very, very hard,” said NZ Booksellers associate manager Renee Rowland, who owns a bookstore in Geraldine. “It ultimately creates a defensive buying behaviour. Unless you’ve got really deep pockets like the big guys do, like Unity and Scorpio, you can’t always order proactively.
“There are books that come out and do a lot better than expected, like Toni Street’s memoir. And all of a sudden no one in New Zealand can buy it even though it’s a New Zealand book.
“Or if a book does well and gets the promotion that kicks into sales, like it’s on Seven Sharp or there’s a good review on Newsroom, it can sometimes catch the publishers sort of on the hop. They don’t have stock locally, and they have to ship it over.
“As well, when there’s a big release internationally, let’s say like Lena Dunham, we’ll often get it about a month after publication date. So we’ve lost a month of sales to ebooks and audiobooks.”
The problem dates back to the early 2000s, when multinational publishers withdrew their New Zealand distribution warehouses to invest in Australia. Kevin Chapman of Upstart Press was with Hachette at the time, and tried to save the day when he joined forces with other publishers and presented a plan to create one single great big megashed in New Zealand.
He said, “The Australians were investing quite heavily in their own sheds and were deciding to move New Zealand stock out of New Zealand. We had a counter proposal, on the principle that in a small industry, the spread of distribution across multiple warehouses in Australia is pretty inefficient. So we came up with a fully funded series of options, and then took them to our bosses in Australia and that’s when it got shot down.”
Chapman moved on from Hachette and created his own publishing and distribution firm, Upstart. “I started it because I believed that a publisher as far as possible should be in control of their entire destiny, given that publishing is such a high risky business.”
*
The great migration of book warehouses from New Zealand to Australia was, at first, considered no big deal for publishers and booksellers. Books were commonly airfreighted at the low, low price of about 50 cents per kilo. The delivery was fast, and bookstores only had to wait a few days for orders to arrive. That all changed with the coming of the plague.
Kevin Chapman from Upstart: “Covid buggered it because suddenly there were no planes flying or the few planes that were flying were deeply expensive. So they started to sea freight a lot more. And I suspect that what happened was they realised how much money they were saving by sea freighting, so they decided that they would keep doing it.”
But the crisis led to an interesting attempt by publishers Allen & Unwin to subvert the model of NZ books sitting in Australian sheds, and return to local distribution. When lockdowns began, managing director Mel Laville-Moore set up a deal with PDL to handle NZ books from its warehouse in Northcote. The partnership lasted four years, ending in 2025. Asked her whether it was an experiment, and she said, “It wasn’t an experiment, it was a solution. We needed to be able to put our hands on our books more quickly. I was able to kind of maneuver it so that we could. We started with about 50 books and it went up to maybe 100. They were our New Zealand books and our New Zealand writers that we wanted to be able to service and have their books easily available. Something like Ruby Tui [her memoir was the biggest-selling local book for two years], it was a lifesaver because the books were straight out the door the same day. Not gonna lie, it was fantastic, an absolute lifesaver in those dark, dark days.”
Great speech, and great that NZ books were being sent to NZ bookstores hither and yon from a NZ location. But Laville-Moore said it created too many problems to have two distribution warehouses, one here and the other in Australia, for international books.
“It had been a temporary solution to try and ease the pressure, especially for our New Zealand titles. But once it became very clear that seafreighting books is now the new normal and it’s not going back, we had to make the decision to pull the pin on our local warehouse.”
There had been a happy lilt to her voice when she was talking about the success of local distribution. Was she sad that the concept ended? “Yeah, I was actually,” she sighed. “But it had achieved what it needed to do and then it was time to move on.”
She said that the only way around seafreight orders was to spend the extra money on air. Allen & Unwin took that option for its recent book on the Christchurch terrorist, He Told Us. Laville-Moore said it was a book that urgently needed to get to market, so the publisher absorbed the cost of flying in the entire stock.
Some bookstores also take the plunge and order in books by air. Carole Beu from the Women’s Bookshop on Ponsonby Rd in Auckland said, “The length of time to get books here by sea—that’s sailing time plus ordering time—is about a month, basically. It’s outrageous. And it’s worse at Christmas. So I will regularly airfreight at my own cost. It takes only two or three days, but it costs me. On average it’s an extra $3 to get that book by air. We’re still debating whether we should charge the customer that extra $3.”
Her shop is in the fortunate position of having the cashflow to make aggressive orders. Beu said, “These days I’ll order 80 copies instead of 40 of a really hot book because I know if it runs out in the first two weeks, it’s going to take me a month to get some more. So I’m required to stock hold more than I used to be. In the old days I couldn’t have afforded to do that. I can afford to stockhold more now than I could have when we were really struggling.”
Asked how well the shop was performing she said, “Extremely well.”
Asked how the past 12 months of these recessionary times had been for the Women’s Bookshop, she said, “We wouldn’t even know there’s a recession on, really. But we’ve been in business for 37 years and we’ve got a good reputation and we provide brilliant service.”
Susana Andrew, manager at Unity Wellington, also runs a successful bookstore, but still faces difficulties because of the supply chain from Australia. She came up with an example: Maurice Gee is in Australia. “When Maurice died, we couldn’t get any of his backlist from Australia for about six to seven weeks.”
These are good times for Unity. It will open its expansion when Wellington mayor Andrew Little officially launches it at the Willis St store on Wednesday. The new space has been built following a near-disastrous fire at Christmas 2025. Andrew said, “I got a call from the landlord early in morning, I think it was 5, to say, ‘Um, you better come in. There’s been a fire out the back.’ A woman had lit a fire where we store our cardboard boxes in Victoria Street. They found her a couple of hours later in McDonald’s eating an ice cream and she seemed quite happy.”
The new expansion means more room for science fiction, music, film, poetry, horror, “and probably a bay of romance. Romantasy, that’s what it’s called. But that’s a trial.” Unity Wellington has a staff of 32. Turnover is at the upper end of the New Zealand market. As for having to order in books from Australia, Andrew said, “We airfreight direct a lot of things and suck up the costs because we need the speed to market.”
Since the Booksellers Industry Report was commissioned, a new threat has arrived in the form of “local predatory online discounters”, as Renee Rowland darkly describes it.
“So all of a sudden we are now in a discount market. Basically the average sale price of books in New Zealand has dropped 30 percent, rather than closer to RRP as it used to be. A bookshop relies on a certain volume sold at RRP which is already a tiny margin, so if all of a sudden that margin is wiped out because consumers expect book prices to be 30 percent less than they are, that’s going to ultimately impact the survival of bookshops.”
Discount wars, the slow boats from Australia—and yet, as Rowland said, new bookstores continue to open, and booksellers remain in love with their trade. “A bookseller is by their nature a hopeful beast, an optimistic beast,” she said. “And there are some amazing books coming out later this year. We can’t wait for them to get into the hands of people.”
The problem is that they are sometimes going to have to wait.
