I’m not too sure what the benefits of belonging to the European Union are for the small businessman.
Easier travel, certainly. I was in Rome last week and didn’t have to change my pounds into lira. I was able to use the euros I’d accumulated in Frankfurt at the Bookfair. But, apart from that, it’s difficult to see tangible rewards.
At a higher level it’s fairly obvious that the opportunities afforded by a free (?) market are there, but for us small fry all we get is extra regulation. There isn’t even a standard VAT position across the Union.
And I am sure that each reader who runs a small business will have a horror story about belonging to the Europe-wide club. Mine occurred to me only last week. Before I jetted off to Rome for a book launch, I was at a seminar on selling in Europe and one of the speakers, the excellent Diane Spivey of Little Brown, flagged up a concern which is taxing the publishing world but which has implications whether you publish books or manufacture widgets.
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It is a situation which has been highlighted by the weakness of the dollar and concerns the publishing convention of acquiring UK rights for books. Say, for instance, there is an American book which deserves to be published in the UK. Normally a UK publisher would buy the book from its US counterpart and acquire the UK rights. French publishers would buy the French rights and German publishers... well, you get the picture.
I imagine it’s the same if you manufacture widgets. The American company signs the contract and you are the only person allowed to produce and sell those widgets in the UK. But be careful. It didn’t occur to me until Ms Spivey spelled it out but there is nothing to stop the US firm importing their books into Europe, selling them to the UK and European bookshops and wholesalers.
It’s a free market and you can buy anything in Europe and sell it here.
I had to gulp because that very morning I’d signed a contract with an Indian publisher to bring out the UK version of a book on the great Indian cricketer Lala Amarnath. I rushed home and asked could I have European rights as well? Bless them, they said it was no problem.
It hasn’t worked like that in the past – at least not in the book trade – because it wasn’t economic for US publishers (I use the US as an example but it could be any English speaking country) to send their books to Europe in bulk.
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But now that the dollar is around 1.90 to the pound, and books are usually the same amount in dollars in the US as they are in pounds in the UK, it means they are nearly half as expensive. So it’s a “no brainer” if you are a European distributor and you can get the US version much cheaper than the UK version.
Of course there will be a funny ISBN on the US edition and some of the words will be spelled badly but who worries if some of the ‘u’s are missing from words like ‘honour’ and glamour’ if you can get a cheaper edition?
It’s unlikely that the UK bookshops would bring in a US edition at least if the UK edition was published by one of the big boys. Why risk not getting the next Harry Potter to make a few quid on a book by a foreign author?
But there is a big market for English language books in Europe and there’s no reason why a European bookseller or wholesaler should feel they are bound by a UK publisher’s contract. So UK publishers are asking for European-wide rights (which presents another problem: are these EU rights or rights for Europe as a geographic region and is Turkey in Europe?) and are being resisted.
Of course when the dollar recovers the problem will go away unless cheap goods flood in from China and India – and what are the chances of that happening?