Presenting: Gilmour's Scots Language Bookshop

Frustrated with the Scots language offerings of Amazon and Waterstones, I have created my own bookshop

Here it is, please take a look.

https://www.chrisgilmour.co.uk/shop/index.php

There are about 324 books listed, which can be sorted by price, best-sellingness and date of publication, and filtered by regional dialect or genre.

I don’t actually sell anything, its all Amazon Affiliate image links and links to Waterstones, Abebooks and eBay, or in the cases where the books are only available from the publisher there’s a link to the publisher’s site.

Expertise

I’ve been researching and diving into Scots language stuff for about three years now, one of the first things I did when I was doing Scots wikipedia stuff, was pull together a list of modern books written in Scots. To be fair I have neglected the list as the Scots corpus and rhyming dictionaries took my attention, but I have a bit of knowledge about books written.

When searching on Amazon or the Waterstones websites, I’m often disappointed that you can’t just filter by Scots language. Or if you look at the Scots Gruffalo, it doesn’t naturally offer you the Dundee Gruffalo or the Shetland, Orkney or Doric varieties, only variations of the English version. Same with Alice in Wonderland, you look at one Scots version and it just offers you other English editions rather than the half dozen Scots dialect.

A lot of the problems are due to the ISBN data for the books not recording the language correctly and incorrectly have some Scots books listed as English or Scottish Gaelic. It shouldn’t be my problem, I’m not employed by the bookshop to tell them what it is they’re selling, they should have someone with that expertise employed.

Don't get me wrong, its perfectly reasonable to have English as the standard default assumed language in the UK, but there ought to be other options which can then take the default position, rather than rocking back to English at every opportunity.

We might expect that in another country, France for example, the popular Furet du Nord chain of bookstores would have French as the default language.

But for languages like Gaelic, Welsh and Scots, which country do you have to go to?

I completely understand that there are only a handful of books written and published in Scots each year, but they all have to compete with English book sales.

There's no publicly available "best-sellers" list for Scots books, there's no department or individual shelf that's just Scots fiction or Scots non-fiction. The infrastructure doesn't exist within those companies to sell Scots books in an active manner. Scots books are hidden away behind English books.

It shouldn't be difficult to browse for Scots / Welsh / Gaelic language books on bookshop websites.

It ought to be almost as easy as it is to browse for English language books.

The UK is explicitly, by definition, a United Kingdom of several distinct states. Its not the "English Federation" or some kind of "Greater England" - England and some conquered territories.

And yet the bookshops are just like that : English with other languages hidden away.

Customer service

I got in touch with the Customer services team on the Waterstones website. What I want is some way to search for "books in Scots" and then the search results to be all the Scots books that Waterstones have in stock or listed.

It ought to be simple.

https://www.waterstones.com/books/bestsellers/sort/bestselling/facet/397

But it says there's only twenty books written in Scots.

No sign of Duck Feet, Working Class State of Mind, The Tongue She Speaks, Young Team or the full range of Scots Gruffalo books.

Infrastructure

"Linguistic Infrastructure" is a term which usually means dictionaries and corpora, but I guess it could stretch to include things like translations of the Bible and Shakespeare, academic and linguistic organisations, educational awards, writing competitions, libraries and bookshops...

You know... the trapping of a modern language, outwith speech and writing, these are the things people need to use the language.

This lack of enthusiasm at Waterstones and Amazon for Scots literature might be related to a thing I teased out of the 2011 census data a few months ago, where there is a strong inverse correlation between "social grade" or "education level" and Scots literacy

https://chrisgilmour.substack.com/p/correlation-between-social-grade

The more highly paid you are, the less likely you are to be literate in Scots. The people who make stock buying decisions and data cleaning at Waterstones are just illiterate in Scots and don't realise it.

I need to state for the record that I don't like mint chocolate and I can't stand bananas, I don't instinctively think anyone else likes them either.

If you send me to the shops to buy snacks, I'm unlikely to get mint chocolate Club biscuits or bananas, I have a natural blindspot for them, these things don’t count as ‘food’ for right-minded people. I will fill my basket with Orange Club Biscuits and apples, everyone loves those.

Sure, if you give me a shopping list for mint chocolate and banana, I will buy them, but I'll think its a bit weird.

I reckon its the same for the buyers at Waterstones and Scots books, the buyers are illiterate and think its a bit weird, not realising that they are disproportionately less likely to understand Scots than the general population.

And because its a blindspot, they don't even realise their shortcomings enough to compensate for it.

Gilmour’s Scots Language Bookshop

It’s not feasible for me to set up my own bookshop in competition, I’m hundreds of miles away from Scotland. Selling up and renting a retail space is too expensive, the wife and kids would be furious.

But I have skills and knowledge, so setting up a pretend shop on the internet will do instead, with affiliate links to Amazon, or boring links Waterstones, Abebooks and eBay.

I have the knowledge of the current Scots publishing scene that Amazon, Waterstones and the others don’t have, and I have the php programming skills to make it happen.

Will it be lucrative? Will it be useful or successful? Dunno. But if I keep my investments low then it will be no great loss.

Technical bits

To start with I knocked up a csv spreadsheet listing every Scots book I could think of, and then hungrily searched out more and more, going through the back catalogues of any publishers that had shown any interest in Scots.

It took three days to find 300 books. I grabbed the ISBN numbers, categories and SalesRank from Amazon, then knocked out a php script that would display some of the spreadsheet columns on a webpage.

Then I looked up how to arrange the list of books as ‘tiles’ that regroup themselves to fit on the screen, and held images of the book covers from Amazon Affiliate links. Then figured out how to make the list sortable and filterable, and finally added little sales rank flags and funky different sized text for the prices.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be slightly better at handling Scots language stuff than Amazon and Waterstones.

https://chrisgilmour.co.uk/shop/index.php?sort=best&filter=Childrens

The site is now online, it has “meta tags” so that when you share it on Social Media there should be a little picture and description. I’m reluctant to share it on the Facebook Scots Language Forum because they have rules against promotion and selling things.

Market intelligence

Sometimes I take things too far, make too much use of the data I have at my fingertips. I have written a Scots Rhyming Dictionary, the proof copies should be coming back from the printers soon and then I’ll have to decide how many copies to get printed to sell and distribute.

Realistically I can only afford to get 100 copies done as a first batch. But I have this spreadsheet of almost every book written in Scots and their Amazon SalesRank. A few months ago I did a wee experiment to figure out how the SalesRank relates to the actual number of copies sold on Amazon.

The children’s book “You Choose” is marketed as having sold 2 million copies over the last twenty years, this averages out to 100,000 copies per year and it currently has a sales rank of 142.

I looked at the book “Grey’s Anatomy” and checked it’s SalesRank over a two week period.

A rank of 475,000 is broadly equivalent to one sale every two weeks, perhaps 25 copies per year.

From a handful of books I found these datapoints

• Rank 142 implies 100,000 sales per year

• Rank 50,000 - 175 sales

• Rank 200,000 - 75 sales

• Rank 400,000 - 30 sales

• Rank 3,000,000 - 2 sales

Plotting them with logarithmic axis’s gives a linear sort of graph:-

Now if we run these estimated Amazon sales figures back into my list of Scots language books, we can estimate that in total Amazon sells about 11,000 books written in Scots each year.

The median price listed is £7.61, which would give Amazon a turnover of about £85,000 for Scots books, and if they take a cut of 40% to 50%, its about £33,000 to £42,000 of profit.

I read somewhere that Amazon has about 60% of the UK books market, which would suggest that the Scots language print book market in the UK is currently worth a total of about £140,000, or maybe a maximum of £250,000.

After all these sums, we could look at that figure £250,000 and wonder if its about right, is it too high or too low, are my sum and assumptions right? Perhaps physical bookshops, independent bookshops and tourist gift shops make up a disproportionate number of Scots books sales and the Amazon proportion is only 20% of the market. This would change the calculations to have the market being around £500,000.

Should the book “Shuggie Bain” be considered a Scots book? I don’t consider it to be, but I can understand if other people might, there is a lot of Scottish vernacular dialog although the narrative is English. It has an Amazon SalesRank of 127, and has sold around 2 million copies over the last three years, adding perhaps £400,000 to the market size in the last twelve months.

The median book, right in the middle of the list of 320 Scots language books, has a SalesRank of 1,150,000, which implies about 10 sales per year. For my Scots Rhyming Dictionary I’m going to stick with a first print run of a hundred copies.