AN INITIATIVE aimed at promoting Scottish literature online has failed to meet its aims and is "bleeding cash" that could be used for other arts projects, it has been claimed.
The booksfromscotland.com site was launched in December 2005 with £100,000 from the Scottish Arts Council. It was billed as a "one-stop shop" for Scottish writing.
And this week its owner, Publishing Scotland, saw its SAC annual grant increased
from about £200,000 to £260,000 for "further development" of the site.
But The Scotsman has learned that despite its reported target to sell 15,000 books annually, the site has sold books at only a fifth of that rate.
The news comes just days after dozens of arts groups were left disappointed when the Scottish Arts Council cut their funding.
Critics say money spent on booksfromscotland.com could have been better directed to struggling Scottish publishers.
Hugh Andrew, the managing director of Scotland's largest publisher, Birlinn, called the sales figure "pitiful" and said the site was "bleeding cash".
"I look at the costs to achieve a particular result, and I am staggered, and I just ask 'why?'" he said. He said Birlinn's website sold "at least twice" as many books, "and it didn't cost £120,000".
Marion Sinclair, Publishing Scotland's business development manager, said in the first year, booksfromscotland.com notched up no more than £12,000 in sales.
She insisted it is now selling "more, but not substantially more than £15,000" worth of books a year in between 200 and 250 transactions a month.
Ms Sinclair insisted booksfromscotland.com was more an information site than a sales site.
"We never said sales were going to be a prime aspect," she said. "As long as sales have been made of books by Scottish publishers, then we have done our job."
Publishing Scotland primarily set up the site for its 75 member firms. On its launch, it was said the site hoped to become self-supporting in its first year.
Ms Sinclair conceded: "We may have got our budgeting and our forecasting wrong."
Scottish publishers are already sensitive over the SAC's move to end direct grants to their firms and cut the pot of money available for publishing subsidies by £50,000.
Hugh Andrew said: "Was this, given the sums involved, in any way an intelligent use of publishing money? It is clearly bleeding cash."
The website of the Welsh Books Council, gwales.com, last year notched up £776,000 of individual item sales.
A major high street bookshop in Glasgow or Edinburgh could expect to sell £2 million to £4 million worth of books a year, one industry insider said.
Gavin Wallace, head of literature at the Scottish Arts Council, said it would be "folly" to expect the site to succeed commercially against international big-hitters. It had given "a national and international boost to the profile of Scottish writing", he said.
The full article contains 494 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
