The Shatzkin Files

Today Peter McCarthy and I are formally announcing a new business which is a partnership between us: The Logical Marketing Agency. What we’re doing is applying the most modern and sophisticated digital marketing techniques and capabilities to the challenges faced by book publishers and authors — and therefore agents — and, because the same techniques apply — also by brands.

This business has been in gestation for about 18 months, since Pete and I first started working together on other projects. We are building on what he learned during nearly two decades in publishing, first working for The Reader’s Catalog and then The New York Review of Books, followed by six years at Penguin very early in the digital transition, and then six years at Random House. At Random House Pete’s job was, explicitly, to figure out how books would be sold in the future. So for several years he was tasked with experimentation, using the books from publishing’s most extensive and diverse commercial list and the resources of the world’s biggest trade publisher.

As my Idea Logical colleague Jess Johns and I came to realize how much Pete knew about the digital marketing challenge all publishers are aware is important but woefully under-equipped to tackle, we saw the great opportunity in “scaling” him. The Logical Marketing Agency is our vehicle to make Pete’s knowledge available and useful to every publisher or author who wants to make use of it.

Over the past six months or so, we have done initial, relatively small small digital marketing jobs for more than a dozen clients. They have included both major and smaller publishers in the US and the UK, authors, literary agents, and brands that aren’t publishers. By working with this initial group of beta clients, we have learned how to shape our offerings to directly apply what we know to publishers’ and authors’ and agents’ perceived needs and pain points.

First we thought about the two key elements that need optimizing: titles and authors. Titles need easy discoverability; they need to be found in the right places, at the right time, by the people who are likely to be interested in them. This often involves a nuanced understanding of search as it exists in environments like Google, Amazon, Apple, and others but can also encompass other means of enhancing a book’s reach into its likely audience(s). Authors need optimized web presences, so that their credibility and personal networks are grown and enhanced regularly and so that their reputation as authorities on the subjects that matter is confirmed on the Internet.

Of course, the key for titles is the metadata: the long and short descriptions of the book that are accessed by all the retailers and search engines and the BISAC (or, in the UK, BIC) codes that identify the book’s subject matter (and, therefore, its audiences).

Pete’s key insight about title metadata — one that is very hard for most publishers to accept, frankly — is that it can’t be done properly without research. You start by positing what the audiences for a book are or, in the absence of hypotheses, how to figure out what they are. Then you look for them online and find out more about the makeup of those audiences: who those people are, where they hang out online, what they’re interested in and what they believe, and what words and phrases they use when talking about the author or the subject(s) in the book. Then you have to research the search terms that matter, to find out which ones are used most frequently and by whom. It is probably not surprising to learn that the “right” search terms might not be identical in Google and Amazon. And from there, one can keep going, analyzing what Pete calls the “meaningful back end data” that results from good outbound social media marketing. You can learn who it is that is engaging with and what their beliefs are, where they live, and other attributes that can be used to properly position each piece of marketing collateral. And, that’s a process that can keep going for a long time if the vein is rich.

How long does this research take? If you know what you’re doing, it can be done in an hour or two. How many publishers have the know-how and the staff to spend a couple of hours researching before writing descriptions of all their new titles? According to what we’ve found over the past few months, the answer is “not many”. Or “almost none”.

Getting the descriptions and metadata right is what Pete (and the Logical Marketing Agency) calls “foundational”. You must do it or everything else you do afterwards sits on a shaky base.

But there’s another level of knowledge that can be helpful beyond the foundation. What can you do to further promote a title beyond getting its core discoverability right? Well, there are potential paid media opportunities (keywords you might buy or audiences you might target through well-placed banners or other ads). There are other books or other things that have audiences to whom the book would appeal that give keys to other potential promotions. Each of these can lead to further SEO efforts around an author or title web site, new social media tactics to employ and more. You can take what is gleaned in the original research to find new ways to target the audience and that chain, in some cases, can be extended productively many times. The research that turns up those opportunities is something Logical Marketing will also offer, through “comprehensive” title analysis, a deeper drive than “foundational”.

We are doing the same for authors, offering a “foundational” author audit and a “comprehensive” one. But for authors we have found demand for even more research and analysis. Major publishers have bought customized author audits from us for authors they wanted to poach from other houses and for authors of their own they wanted to do a better job for and, often, compare with other authors’ efforts. These are really in-depth reports, 50 to 100 pages in length and filled with data, interpretation, and actionable insights. They often require an execution team to handle implementing the suggestions, though, increasingly we will be offering those services as well. The more complex an author’s online footprint — whether from many books or from many other things in their career — the more work this takes, but the more value there is. A long career and a long list of prior books can bury the messaging to surface and focus on the current book. It is ironic that authors with the biggest online presence can be the most complex to maximize for a particular project.

Recently, we have had two of New York’s biggest literary agencies try us out. One of them was looking for a picture of how one of their biggest authors was doing. The other had specific objectives in mind for their authors and asked us to look at the online footprints of three of them — two very big, one a little less so — to recommend how to achieve those objectives.

There are two additional elements we have only dabbled with so far, but which could become a big part of our business and service suite in the future: backlist and running campaigns.

Getting the most sales out of the backlist requires two things working in tandem. First of all, the backlist metadata has to be optimized. That requires research too, although a bit different research than for a forthcoming title because people have read it and people have talked about it. That gives clues to audience and nomenclature that are much more reliable than what one can discern for a yet-to-appear book. If publishers don’t have the staff time to do by-title research for their new books, imagine how hard it would be for most of them to do it for their whole backlist. It is safe to say that no house is staffed to do this.

The other necessary piece to optimize backlist sales is a tool that will chart the news and social graph — trend analysis — that then can bounce each day’s developments off the backlist metadata to find titles that can benefit from current attention. Of course, that opens up the question of “what attention?” Sometimes a change in metadata will produce a big result, tying the title to current interest. But sometimes more effort will make sense, like a digital media campaign. This has, of course, been tried by certain houses and has sometimes been successful. But it is our belief that this kind of work has not been executed optimally. Paradoxically, often the problem is that it is done too broadly. But it is important work we have some new ideas about how to do it well and at a cost-effective scale and pricing.

And that brings us to the final component of our suite of services, for now. We will run digital marketing campaigns for publishers. We did one of these last Fall for a live event, rather than a book. Since our conversations with publishers and self-publishing authors repeatedly confirm that running campaigns is a real pain point — they know they don’t have the staff for it and they sometimes know they don’t have the skills or experience either — we see that as a big part of our business going forward.

Brands are like authors. They have online presences; they have reputations; they have audiences that have characteristics that, once understood, enable you to reach them better and to find them in other venues. In fact, authors are brands. Publishers know that and we believe that what we do for authors would work for many other brands.

So it is with high expectations and great confidence that we can be helpful that we launch this new business.

One thing we’re going to add shortly is a self-service offering for independent authors. The service organizations we know who do the tech and distribution work for self-publishing authors all say they need marketing. That looks like an opportunity to us. If you want to get ahold of us, you can email us at [email protected] A web site with more about our services has gone up at that address as well.

The London Book Fair is an every-second-or-third-year thing for me, going back many decades. From an English-centric perspective, it is like a mini-Frankfurt. All the UK players are there and a lot of US senior executives. But because it is so accessible to the Continent, you can get a taste of how things look to the rest of the world.

In the US, we look to me to be in a period when two dominant giants — Amazon for online bookselling and Penguin Random House for general trade publishing — are consolidating their positions. Amazon’s enormous market share is growing, both for print and ebooks. It is too early to draw the same conclusion about PRH, but my guess is that a year or two from now we’ll have seen them taking share from their biggest competitors just like Amazon is from theirs.

(Dominant giants will be part of a conversation I’ll be taking part in on a stage in London. I’ve been asked to participate in The Great Debate, where this year the proposition is ”It’s all about size. Bigger is always better.” I’m arguing the affirmative with Ken Brooks of McGraw-Hill Education as my teammate. We’re opposed by Stephen Page, the CEO of Faber, and Scott Waxman, who is both an experienced literary agent and the entrepreneur behind Diversion Books, a digital-first publisher. It should be fun. And friendly. We’re all nice guys.)

The dominant US brick-and-mortar retailer, Barnes & Noble, appears to be fairly healthy in its traditional business. It is shrinking, but the store operations are still profitable and well run. They appear to have benefited from the demise of its erstwhile competitor, Borders (as have the independents). From across the Pond, one does not get the same impression about UK’s Waterstones chain. However, in the UK, there are forces we don’t have in the US: not just the ubiquitous newsstand-type WHSmith stores, but also two supermarket chains, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, which are each ambitiously trying to build a book business and their own ebook channel. One thing I’ll be asking everybody about is the impact these retailers have in the book marketplace, particularly when we get beyond the top sellers. Perhaps if they’re doing well, it would encourage Walmart to get serious about bookselling. Certainly Walmart would like to do anything they can to poke Amazon in the eye.

Without serious competition from new players who are well-funded, like the UK supermarkets, it is hard to see what stands in the way of the global ebook giants: Amazon and Apple and, to a lesser degree, Google and Kobo. Perhaps I can get a sense in London of how Barnes & Noble’s multi-territory expansion for Nook is faring. But, however they do, there is a so-far little-noted effect beginning to become evident that could tilt the global book business to the English-language marketplace, and to the US in particular.

In a recent conversation, an executive at a Big Five company told me of a recent development. His company had licensed a few titles for Russian language rights to a publisher in Moscow. But by which retailers would most of those ebooks be sold? The answer is Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo and Barnes & Noble! And the Russian publisher, really just breaking into the ebook business, has far more limited access to these retailing giants than the US publisher which had licensed them the rights.

So the US publisher, in a suggestion that seemed in everybody’s interests, offered to be the “distributor” of those Russian ebooks to the major accounts. The deal was made and it worked. I said to the executive who explained this to me, “You could be helpful in distributing all their books, not just the ones you licensed them.” “Exactly,” he said.

But then we took the conversation a little further. This house is wondering whether, in an ebook-dominant world, it wouldn’t make more sense for them to publish books themselves in Spanish, Mandarin, and French (the first three languages they are thinking about). After all, the translations are done by freelancers. Anybody can hire them no matter where they are. And if most of the books sold are ebooks, and if the publishers of English, especially those in the US, have multiple daily contacts with the big ebook retailers and others don’t, then what is the point to licensing away those rights?

That approach would mean that publishers in at least some non-English territories would, at best, be able to license the print rights for the local geography they really cover. And it would mean that the biggest publishers with the biggest checkbooks to sign the biggest authors and titles will be able to benefit from an even larger share of the book’s global market while paying the author more than they could earn with a local publisher sharing in the other-language rights.

If this is more than one company’s inspiration right now, I should be able to find evidence of that at the London Book Fair.

The other thing for me to learn, of course, is how digital marketing of books looks from the UK. In our fledgling new business with Peter McCarthy (take a look at his new post) we have already done some title optimization work for two UK-based publishers, one large and one medium-sized. So we’ve learned how to do the work using UK-based Google and Amazon and putting BIC codes rather than BISAC codes into the metadata. We’ll be formally announcing the new business and opening our web site the day before the London Book Fair opens. I expect to find a lot of interest in what we can offer, just as we have in the US. There is no doubt that the London Book Fair presents the best possible opportunity to find out very quickly what our own opportunity is outside the US as the need for sophisticated marketing naturally follows the growth and increasing complexity of the overall digital environment.

One person I will be sad not to see at London Book Fair is my longtime friend Bruce Robertson, a founder of the pioneering packagers The Diagram Group, who died a little over a week ago at the age of 79. Bruce was sui generis: a brilliant man with a unique gift for visualization that was the guiding spirit behind dozens of global bestselling illustrated books. Forty years ago, I had the opportunity to sell three of Diagram’s greatest books, “Rules of the Game”, “The Way to Play”, and “Man’s Body” when Bruce’s publisher at that time, Paddington Press, was distributed in the US by my family’s distribution company, Two Continents. I always enjoyed seeing him and hearing his witty, insightful, and often cutting take on the people and practices in our business. Fortunately, there were many opportunities to see Bruce and his endlessly good-natured wife, Pat, over the years, at industry events or when he was in NY or I was in London. We are all one of a kind, but some of us are more obviously so than the rest of us. Bruce was like nobody else. He’ll be missed by many friends from all over the world.

Doing business development for my Logical Marketing partnership with Peter McCarthy (we are on the verge of formally announcing our new business) gives me repeated and continuing confirmation that Pete just knows more about digital marketing than anybody else in publishing. This is partly because he’s a damn smart geek with a marketing-oriented brain who grew up in publishing. It is also because he had the good fortune to be effectively running a marketing experiments lab for the world’s largest publisher for six years.

We recently had three examples from three different Very Big Publishers with Very Smart People of mistakes, or misunderstandings, or structural paralysis, that seem almost generic. All of them involve challenges that every publisher faces on a daily basis.

The first is from a publisher which is among the first to take a step that all publishers must take eventually: optimizing the metadata for their backlist. (Backlist is a topic that has interested us for a long time.) This is a mammoth challenge for every publisher of considerable size. They have tens of thousands of titles and, often, many of the ones selling best will have been published years — or even decades — ago so that nobody among the editors or imprint marketers have read it or thought through the markets for it, except when traditional reissuing activities have occurred or an exceptionally sharp marketer saw an opportunity.

There really are two distinctly separate problems inherent if you want to maximize backlist sales in the digital age. One is the one they are tackling: to get the foundational metadata — the book descriptions and their placement in the information chain — solid so that the titles are called up in response to the searches suggesting a possible customer for them. The other is to build a mechanism to observe the news and social graph each day and to identify the titles that can benefit from new developments. And then, of course, to couple the two in order to optimize a given title or series for the most appropriate semantics to drive both discoverability and conversion in different environments. SEO, yes. But really nuanced and real-time SEO which accounts for fundamental changes in how all the engines work and subtle differences inherent in each. We have our ideas about that engine (and have developed a proposal to address it) but, for now, like that publisher, let’s just worry about the first challenge: getting the backlist metadata foundations right.

The pioneering publisher we encountered is addressing the question across the many imprints in their large organization by asking each one to work on the metadata for their top-selling backlist. What this means, in practice, is that fuzzy-cheeked editorial or marketing assistants — most operating with little direction from senior people and, frankly, mostly working with senior people who wouldn’t really know exactly what to tell them to do (this stuff has gotten very technical in nature) — are the ones looking at what is there now (if anything) and fixing or updating it. This house will inevitably find that they get very uneven results and, because most of the work will be done by low-level people who turn over (or get promoted) quickly, it will be hard to generate training or processes that will show steady improvement of this work in the future.

Unless some great care is being exercised to introduce procedures most of these people would be unlikely to know about, this also runs afoul of Pete’s repeated mandate that research must be done for each and every title before a marketer can create optimized metadata. For backlist, in Pete’s methodology, this starts with finding out who the people are who have already read the book and commented on it and what words they use when they describe it. LibraryThing tags and GoodReads reviews are key sources for that, but for us LT fits into an overall workflow and orchestrated use of tools that Pete has developed and trained our team to to employ to thoroughly crack this particular problem of “how readers think about, talk about, and feel about” a given work or author or brand. LT and GoodReads provide critical insight to cement or alter the context in which a book sits.

So, aside from the massive distraction created by asking each imprint to take on such a substantial additional chore, the chances are good, actually overwhelming, that the results — the new metadata foundations that will be created — will not be thoroughly applied and optimal in the best cases and that most imprints won’t be as good as the best. And, in a problem that repeatedly bedevils publishers in the age of digital media (as we will see again below), the staff time to do this exercise is not readily available. Everybody doing this work already has a fulltime job, largely jobs managing author talent and frontlist, jobs which must be done.

In another case, the Chief Marketing Officer of a large publisher — one who has heard Pete speak, knows me, and is firmly committed to trying our services — talked with me about what he presumed would be Pete’s many ideas about how to apply a full-text search of a book to improve the marketing. I thought he would fall down when I told him, “Pete doesn’t believe in reading the book so I don’t think he’ll want to apply a full-text search.” My CMO friend was immediately skeptical so I told him what Pete has told me. “I’m marketing to people who haven’t read the book.”

There are definitely some situations in which you’ll want to pull things out of a book’s text, although I think they’re almost always about proper nouns. If you’ve got a biography of a baseball star and there are stories about teammates and opponents, you’ll want those names in the metadata to signal to searchers on those people that there is relevant material for them in the book. But, in general, full text doesn’t help.

You hone marketing metadata by looking hard at the markets, not at the text. The task begins by describing the audiences as precisely as you can: “teachers” is good, “high school science teachers” is better, and “high school science teachers with kids of their own” is better still. Then you find those people, learn where they cluster, and how they talk, and how they seek information. You apply the knowledge of what semantics they use and bump that against the terms that are searched in different venues to hone your pitch. There are shortcuts to get this work done (and we try to use them) but the application of a full-text search of the book is not one of them.

Experimenting with what is known as A/B testing, whenever you can do it, is critical. (It is admittedly difficult, though not impossible, to do it effectively in advance of publication.) Any media outreach campaign that is not utilizing A/B testing is doomed. Any digital marketing that is done without A/B testing is amateur hour.

And that brings us to the third time this month that we found with pretty near certainty that a big house was proceeding without knowledge Pete has.

We did an online audit for an author who is in the news. We found some circumstances which seemed to call for “paid media”: the purchase of search terms and phrases (ones on which major retailers had not bid and for which the book was not surfacing organically) or contextual display ads around news breaks to call attention to this author and his book in particular cases where we (really, Pete) believed it would do some real good.

So we made the suggestion to the top digital marketing thinker at this big publisher. He reported back that this kind of campaign had never worked for them, even tried on a big scale. Once again, Pete’s experience suggested to him possible reasons why it hadn’t worked for them and how it might. Pete told me:

The houses (almost to a one) do not know how to run these promotions, track their efficacy properly (they do broad “last-click” attribution, which is likely to capture a third of the actual effect, or so), and they make them amazingly expensive for themselves by not optimizing for the goals or for the platform, which at once benefits the platform and them.

Despite nearly infinite inventory, these places (the online venues) prefer that users click on ads when they see them. The better you are at it the cheaper those clicks are. Then you track the clicks and augment your attribution model with the known amplification effect (conservatively apply a % applied across outlets and formats per studies or in-house knowledge).

Drive a nice conversion percentage at Amazon and the book begins to rise. By rising, it gets better “placement” on Amazon via algorithmic store optimization (e.g. merchandised in the cart). That’s a virtuous circle that has momentum of its own.

So, once again, the problem seems to be that the targeting is too generic, using broad matches in AdWords and not applying negative keywords and the like. There is an outright lack of — or too little — A/B testing and segmentation, and there is no constant adjustment of the media buy reacting to the response. It turned out that a further conversation with this publisher revealed that their particular problem was around clearing the staff time to gain expertise and actively research and run these paid digital media campaigns, which, we agree, is not trivial.

Digital media is cheap to buy but expensive to manage.

The net effect of this is that potential consumers are in essence seeking the book but publishers are not putting the book in front of them because it is too inefficient to do so. The answer would seem to be to make the process more efficient rather than missing the opportunity. That’s why we’re training capable but less-expensive help to deliver that service as well.

All of these examples are real and all of them are recent. All of the people laboring under what looks to Pete (and therefore “to us”) as erroneous understandings of how best to apply digital marketing are smart and sophisticated. And I wouldn’t have been able to provide better answers, or discern any problems with their answers, a year ago. But what Pete McCarthy knows was learned during six years working alongside many forward-looking colleagues (and a management) who remain at the Random House part of PRH, and much of what we’re planning to deliver is almost certainly already baked into their workflow to a certain extent, although (like most big publishers) largely at the imprint level and therefore with varying levels of focus and capability.

Many of the obstacles to competing effectively with the World’s Largest Trade Publisher are obvious. But not all of them. It would also appear that they also have the hidden advantage of already having incorporated much of what Pete McCarthy has learned into their digital marketing practices. This will not be evident to other publishers. It will be evident in PRH’s sales and in the (lower) cost of getting them.

And what I’ve described above are merely a few of the marketing principles of Pete’s as we see their importance in specific examples. The ramifications of applying the broader set of capabilities implied by these principles, and what could be built or taught to scale, are massive. Just think of what a 5% increase in backlist sales can mean when a house’s backlist consists of tens of thousands of titles!

We are building the Logical Marketing web site right now and will formally announce the business, with services tailored to publishers, agents, authors, and brands very shortly. It will include a self-service portal for self-publishing authors. But we are already applying Pete’s knowledge on behalf of publishers large and small, two prominent literary agencies, and several independent authors. If you’re interested in getting more information about these services, an email sent to [email protected] is the way to let us know.

Since the merger that has created Penguin Random House, there has been precious little speculation (except by me, as far as I can tell) about what this new behemoth in trade book publishing could do to exploit their scale in new and innovative ways.

Their scale advantage is huge. PRH has something in the neighborhood of half the commercial trade books published, bestsellers and below. (You see numbers as low as 25% for this and most of the time estimates put it around 40%.) For several decades, the big US book clubs — Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild — demonstrated that having about half the books was “enough” for very large numbers of people to feel comfortable that their choices of what to read from within that group of titles would be sufficient for most of their needs.

My initial hunches, still totally unrealized, were that PRH would launch a subscription service with just their own books and, through the use of vendor-managed inventory, create exclusive channels of store distribution that wouldn’t be available to any of their competitors. (One senior executive from a competitor to whom I described this scenario said candidly, “we’d make our best books available to them for their proprietary channel if it were the only way for us to get the distribution”.)

One PRH executive kindly explained to me the company’s inherent resistance to the subscription model, which would seem to appeal most to the heaviest readers looking for a bargain. As the largest player in the market, PRH isn’t looking to reduce the spending by the people who are the biggest sources of industry revenue, which a successful subscription offer would inevitably do. (That subscription model, or “Netflix for ebooks”, is complex in ways that are often ignored, but which Joe Esposito spells out very clearly.) Of course, that doesn’t mean the company wouldn’t consider it in an environment where subscription services were taking a big part of the audience (certainly not the case yet, but watch what happens if Scribd or Oyster or Entitle or the new Rooster succeed). It does seem to say that they won’t be pioneers in this field. And there is no sign yet that they’re taking up my idea to use VMI to create their own bookstores, either.

But PRH UK — echoing what was said to me by RH US CEO Markus Dohle some years ago — has now announced it is becoming a consumer-focused publisher. Hannah Telfer, who was made “group director, consumer and digital development” in January, says discoverability depends on “building a direct relationship with consumers”. And she claims “our scale” is a key enabler of doing this “properly”. This is refreshing, since most of the industry thinking about how they would use scale seems to be more about consolidating warehouses than getting smarter about talking to consumers.

One article in The Bookseller details staff changes and initiatives around this goal. (And another expresses some skepticism about whether their plans are adequate to the task. That second piece suggests they need to think about selling direct, a recommendation I have expressed some reservations about.) On the one hand, the first article suggests some really broad, company-wide objectives, including “the potential for Penguin Random House to be a cultural and entertainment powerhouse; a home for all audiences”. At their recent sales conference. CEO Tom Weldon described the opportunity for PRH “to create the blueprint for a publisher brand as a consumer brand and, in doing so, capture the attention of the world for the stories, ideas and writing that matters”. That sounds like one big brand.

At the same time, there was clear acknowledgment of the importance of what we call “verticality”, or “audience-centricity”. An “audience segmentation project” was announced. So was cross-imprint attention to specific subjects, with “cookery” and “crime” cited. One tool that it is clear Penguin Random House has and will use is called Bookmarks, described as “the Random House readers’ panel”. New plans call for it to “become a PRH resource, giving all parts of the business access to over 3,500 readers through surveys and focus groups”.

Of course, the more different ways the company wants to use that panel, the more difficult it will be to get meaningful data from it. In fact, it would seem that what is really called for is an ongoing “panelization” process, by which new people are being added all the time to a number of panels that can answer questions about different communities of interest. One panel can’t serve all purposes.

This brings two topics into bold relief that have not historically been part of a book publisher’s thinking or skill sets.

1. It calls for new and nuanced thinking about brands.

2. It calls for a multi-faceted plan for engagement with individual consumers.

Advice directing publishers to think about branding for consumers is plentiful these days. Since I first started thinking and writing about publishing and brands, something disruptive occurred which I wasn’t thinking about at the time: self-publishing. My original notion was that the challenge was establishing brands with clear vertical, audience-centric identities. Probably the best example of doing that successfully in the big US houses has been Macmillan’s establishing of Tor as a brand for science fiction and tor.com as a destination site for science fiction devotees. It is well over two years since I wrote about tor.com having hundreds of thousands of email addresses that they could address with promotions that got very high open rates.

Tor.com gives Macmillan’s science fiction list a clear label of not-self-publishing. But outside Tor, for their general list, Macmillan uses many imprint names. A novel might be published as St. Martin’s, Holt, Farrar Straus, or Thomas Dunne Books (among others), each of which probably has “meaning” to buyers at major accounts, big libraries, and major book reviewers, but which means precious little to the general public. Does the average person know those names better than they know, let’s say, Thomas & Mercer (the new imprint of Amazon) or Mike & Martha Books (a name I just made up)?

(Please note that Macmillan is being used here for illustrative purposes; every major house has the same issues with imprint brands that are really intended as B2B signals, not for the consumer.)

But ultimately, it is important for Macmillan, and for every publisher, to stamp “major publisher” on their books to let the public know “this is from a long-standing and established book publisher” on the assumption, which I would share, that people who don’t know the names would still trust an institution rather than a self-interested individual to “pick” their books.

(Obviously, most people choose their books because of the author, the subject matter, a recommendation from a friend, or even based on some combination of the cover, the description, and the price. How much of the audience would be influenced by knowing that a major publisher was behind the book? We don’t know that, and we don’t know whether that number will grow or shrink based on the always-increasing output of self-published material that has not gone through a publisher’s editing and formatting rigor. And, by the way, doing aggressive branding means the publishers need to pay even more attention to their editing and formatting. Each instance of an inferior branded product hitting the marketplace will weaken the value of the brand.)

So here’s the rule about branding. Each major house should pick one name that is an umbrella. It goes on every book to establish the company as a major source of quality literature, enjoyable reading, and book-packaged information.Trying to target more precisely than that should be the job of the “imprint” brand under the umbrella brand. And that brand should be vertical, identifying subject or audience. That’s Tor in the Macmillan example above. Note that right now Macmillan is not a brand being used by any of the US companies in the Macmillan family.

The plan for engagement with consumers is much more complicated and has many components. One is simply collecting email addresses and permissions to ping people and then utilizing them. Turning almost all the marketing efforts you can into components of an email-gathering machine is a big part of this. This is a game everybody should be playing: all the retailers, all the publishers, and all the authors. We know from recent assignments at our digital marketing business that the smartest literary agents are figuring out how to help their authors do this. We can’t be far from the day when an agent will routinely ask a publisher “how many relevant email names do you have to promote my author’s next book to?”

But email lists, as the PRH UK statements suggest, are just one aspect of consumer engagement. And the statements from PRH also implicitly claim that a much bigger company has advantages in pursuing it. Aside from their ability to analyze existing email addresses among their signups or that they find through other means (hitting their web sites, self-identified in social media) to understand and reach audiences better, large companies can create special interest verticals to pull traffic (driving email signups) and give themselves a range of promotional opportunities. We see Simon & Schuster doing a lot of that kind of work. I’ve become a daily fan of “250 Words”, an email from their new business book web vertical that summarizes the core proposition of a business book every day. Whether that, or other vertical efforts of this type the house is trying, can turn into a remunerative web community or even a good place to get a book launched, is still an open question. But it is the kind of experiment that could produce a launching pad that could really help S&S with business books.

We touched on the notion that creating dynamic panels of consumers to tell you things — things you can ask all the time — is also a real value. We are aware of a niche magazine which routinely uses Twitter to ask its readers for opinions about various things, like what angle to take on a story. They get very fast responses that way. We know that Osprey, the military history publisher, routinely asks its audience for opinions when they are choosing among subjects for development of a book. (And it is relevant to note that Random House UK has hired Osprey’s energetic and visionary CEO, Rebecca Smart, to run their Ebury imprint. That’s another way to employ scale: hire away the best smaller-company executive talent!)

A good approach for a big house that can harvest large numbers of email addresses would be to routinely ask consumers whether they would like to be polled about questions that will guide the house’s publishing and marketing strategies. Doing that would give them fresh names all the time. What Osprey does with their specialist audience could become routine practice to a house with a big enough email list. Consumers could be asked about whether a topic is a good one to sign up before the house makes a commitment. They could also be asked about packaging and pricing. And if that kind of interaction were built into the house’s practice, over time they’d learn when consumer opinions are a good guide to follow and when they’re not (because they won’t always be!)

We are in the earliest days of big publishers changing from near-total dependence on intermediaries to reach their markets to having direct relationships with consumers. For now, most houses are pretty quiet about what they’re doing, partly because they think they’re inventing something and partly because they don’t know how well any of this will work. But relative silence shouldn’t be interpreted as relative inaction or inattention. It isn’t news to the big publishers that they need to talk to audiences directly. Penguin Random House has advantages of size relative to the others in the Big Five, but the rest of them have advantages of size relative to everybody else.

Note to readers: because of glitches and fiddling not worth detailing, the last two posts didn’t go out through our normal email distribution (which makes some people refer to this blog as my “newsletter”!) If you didn’t receive posts entitled “Getting Mark Coker Right This Time…” and “Sometimes One More Calculation…” they are linked here for your convenience.

On Tuesday, for the first time in the five years I have been writing this blog, I did a post I would like to take back. (But in the interest of the public record, and because there were several comments of value, I’m leaving it up.) This is the post that I should have written the first time.

Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, wrote a Huffington Post piece in which he asserted that indies are now responsible for 15% of the ebook market in dollars and on their way to 50% by 2020. The initial post of mine misread Mark, and assumed that the 15 percent and 50 percent claim were about units, not dollars. Mark set me straight, but, unfortunately, that other post focused on trying to translate what I thought were unit shares into dollar shares. Sorry…

At first I had thought I agreed with Coker’s overall numbers, because I thought an estimate that indie ebooks were 15 percent of the total units was reasonable, rising to 50 percent in six years. But dollars are another story. (Note: Michael Cader’s independent examination of the numbers determined that indie/self-published ebooks were, at most, 11 percent of the ebook dollars and probably less. Cader’s generous calculations put the unit share percentage at about double that, in the low 20s. I believe his logic and numbers would also support my view that it is something less than that, which would put me near to Coker’s dollar estimate for my units estimate: about 15%.)

If indie ebooks were 15 percent in dollars today, then they would be 30 or 40 percent of units because they are priced so much lower than publishers’ ebooks. Is that possible? I suppose it is. I thought in the middle of last year that in the aggregate indies sold the number of units equivalent to one Big Six publisher, but not anything like 30+% of unit sales (even though Howey’s examination of 50,000 Kindle titles led him to assign 27% of the units sold to indies.)

If they are 30 or 40 percent of units, and nobody I know has read any, does that suggest a cohort of people who really prefer indie ebooks and read them in big numbers? And if indie readers form a “separate” market, is it growing or is it static? In other words, do indie ebooks draw on a particular pool of readers, so that we have two separate competitions going on for eyeballs and ebook sales?

We note a piece this morning at Good EReader that calls for the segregation of the self-published titles at ebook stores, because their sheer number interfere with discoverability for publishers’ books. That’s bound to be an unpopular idea in many quarters, but it is something that could happen if any one retailer offers it as a choice to consumers (which is the way to do it: as a filtering choice, not a hard-wired default). If consumers liked it in one place, the practice could spread.

Regardless of whether there is one competition for readers for all books or separate ones for indies and publishers, wouldn’t we expect the flood of titles to make it harder for everybody to make sales? (This is a point that Peter Turner brought up in the comment string to the prior post.) Chances are, yes. And that could mean even more authors will be forced to go indie because publishers are likely to respond to a shrinking market and more challenging discovery by reducing their outputs.

But it is also true that more challenging discovery means more skill doing it and more tools to reach customers have value. So the ability of established publishers to have “better odds”, to get their books to rise above the “noise” of a large title output, should improve (relatively) over time.

Coker did a great service to all of us putting the ebook sales indies achieve into a larger perspective. And, in doing that, he might even have understated the current case for their importance.

What Coker did was point out that the 15% ebook dollar share for indies was within the estimated 30% of the market that is ebooks, 70% still being print. Doing math with his share number, he concludes that self-published ebooks are taking 4.5% of the dollars in the overall market. I’d put them at somewhere between half and two-thirds of that.

But, in fact, the 70% of the market that remains print contains a lot of titles that have very little, even no, ebook sales at all. These are illustrated books or reference books or even kids’ books that have not worked commercially in a digital version. We don’t know how much of the 70% of books that are print are “readerly” books that are equivalent to the 30% that sell in ebooks, but it isn’t nearly all of them. I think it would be conservative to assume that non-readerly books constitute 25% or more of the 70% of the market that is print, which would divide that portion of the market to be 52.5% books that have commercially viable ebooks (the 30%) and 17.5% books that don’t.

So the 30% ebooks overall is really more than 35% for the books that are real ebook candidates (and probably nearer 100% for most of the indie ebooks which would have limited or no print sales). In other words, the ebook share for the books that can work as ebooks is already a bit bigger than an overall summary would suggest. But, despite that, indie ebooks are somewhere in the low single digits as a percentage of industry revenue.

I think that’s very important to keep in mind. Indie ebooks are not yet commercially important if we think about consumer dollars. (But, of course, as Hugh Howey and Coker point out, the author keeps a lot more of those dollars.)

There are two big questions going forward.

1. How fast will the indie self-publishing ebook market continue to grow at the expense of publishers who do it for profit? (All of the calculations from Coker and Howey about the benefits to indie authors assume they do it themselves, not through some new-fangled indie-first publisher or aggregator. If they do it through anybody else, new or old, the author share will decline. Every participant takes a cut.)

2. For any individual author, how does the decision of whether to do it themselves or sign with a publisher look?

On the first, I think one key question is whether we now have a bifurcated market: one group of people reading the bulk of indie books and another group reading the bulk of published books. There is certainly reason to believe that we do, although this is something that only the retailers really can know for sure.

I believe we do have two markets. Part of that is genre-driven. Many readers who habitually consume romance, thrillers, and sci-fi have found less expensive digital-first and author-published alternatives perfectly satisfying. They read lots of units. So it is likely that a concentrated cohort of readers is responsible for a big chunk of the indie books.

(There is probably a third market because we know there are also bargain shoppers. Though traditionally-published titles are discounted, there are still price bands where the indies largely own the marketplace.)

If that is the case, then indies compete with indies more than they do with publishers. And since we believe that a big part of indie sales growth will be driven by indie title growth, it could be that the sales will have trouble keeping up with the titles. That would mean the path to success for each individual indie author would get harder.

Note that this would not affect a self-published author who had built a name and a brand by being published first, except to the degree that self-publishing gets handled differently by retailers or that discovery metadata is not as professionally produced. In general, the distinction between authors who had publisher help building their brand before going indie and those who created success from a standing start has not been underscored as much as it should be in these discussions.

And that leads us to the second point. As Coker has pointed out in his piece and in the comment section of my previous post, some authors like to have “control” of their process. As print books become less and less important, those authors have more and more inherent reason to be attracted to a self-publishing model.

I believe that those authors who like “control” are already more ubiquitous in the self-publishing world than in the overall population of commercially-capable writers. It stands to reason that they would be early adopters of the digital self-publishing opportunity. My hunch is that most authors want to write, and to let publishers handle their business. They don’t want to do the administration and marketing work necessary to self-publish. And that’s even before they get to the difference between getting paid in advance for a book and having to spend money to put a book out.

But it is also true that the deals we see today are not necessarily forever. Publishers have held the line on 25% of their revenue as the author ebook share (apparently with some limited exceptions and, of course, situations for big authors where unearned advances effectively deliver higher royalty rates on everything). If they have to raise royalty rates to keep authors, they probably will. E-only publishers and digital-first imprints at traditional houses are already establishing new standards. Amazon just reduced the author take through their Audible subsidiary. Will the day come when they decide to take a bigger share of indie author ebook sales? Why not?

Authors will have a shifting set of commercial propositions to consider, along with their personal preferences for “control” or “help”. And that’s before we get to other things not reflected in any comparison of what they earn from a self-published ebook versus a publisher’s ebook: print revenue, unearned advances, and having somebody else doing a lot of work on your behalf.

So while I largely agree with Coker’s 10 trends that will lead to enormous growth in the number of indie-published ebooks we will see, I think a grain of salt is needed about how economically significant they will be either for the industry at large or for the vast majority of individual authors following that path even though they are bound to grow quickly. It turns out that the previous post started out with a misunderstanding that led me (and therefore my readers) on a wild goose chase but, in the end, the headline message was right. Even over the next few years, the changes we’ll see around how authors get their work to their readers are more about evolution than revolution.

As it happens, The Great Debate at the London Book Fair is about whether big publishers or small publishers will “win” over time. Ken Brooks of McGraw Hill Education and I have the “big” side; Stephen Page of Faber and Scott Waxman, who is both a literary agent and owner of an ebook publishing house called Diversion, tout the “small”. Michael Healy of CCC moderates. If you’ll be at LBF, check this out.

Author’s warning: this post is largely wrong! The following post was written based on a fundamental misunderstanding, assuming that Mark Coker’s post was talking about ebook sales in units when he was talking about dollars. 

Mark Coker, the creator and owner of Smashwords, very likely the biggest service-provider (after Amazon) for ebook creation and distribution for the self-publishing community, wrote an article on Huffington Post today with the headline prediction that independent publishing could be responsible for 50 percent of ebook sales in 2020.

While Coker does engage in some red meat slinging that will please the indie author and publisher cohort that is his bread and butter (painting a Manichean view of heroic indies on one side who believe their growth is inevitable and the blinkered establishment on the other side that considers the indie view “delusional”), his methodology is sound and his predictions are pretty reasonable.

But, unfortunately, Coker’s analysis stops one calculation short of painting a meaningful picture. And that calculation is the one that counts. Literally.

Coker figures that the current share in 2013 of ebook sales garnered by indies is 15 percent. He posits that print is 70 percent, so the indie ebook share gives them about 4.5 percent of the total market. That’s correct, if you are talking about units sold. And that’s where he stopped, but shouldn’t have.

Because indie ebooks generally are priced between $0.99 and $2.99 (although some have pushed that to $3.99 lately), and publishers’ ebooks are generally priced from $7.99 to $14.99, what Coker calculates omits an important reality. We’d have to guess what the multiple should be to translate unit share into dollar share, with publishers’ books listed anywhere from three to ten times, or even more, over where indie ebooks are priced. I’ll guess that a multiple of three times is a conservative estimate, taking into account that publishers’ prices are often discounted by retailers. (And I hope Coker would agree with me which I think is possible because on the numbers he stated, I agree with him!)

If 3x is the right multiple (and it is a lot less than the 5 to 1 ratio Hugh Howey found at Amazon for traditional publisher dollars over indie dollars), then indie ebooks really amount to around one-and-a-half percent of the book market by consumer spend. More than six years into the ebook revolution (if dated from Kindle, which is where I’d begin), that’s not a number that would justify the strutting of the indie ebook advocates and the slamming (and frequently predicted demise) of the publishers.

Of course, Howey and others have insisted that calculating consumer spend is getting the question the wrong way around from the authors’ perspective. What matters, they would say, is what share of author earnings fall to independent authors. And it is, indeed, likely that the well less than 2 percent share of consumer dollars would be a poor proxy for author earnings because sometimes (but not nearly always) authors make more money on a lower-priced ebook than they would have from a publisher’s sale of a higher-priced ebook (or a print book.)

The problem is that we have no way to make that comparison. We can’t actually calculate published authors’ earnings from sales and contractual percentages because we know that published authors get a lot of money in unearned advances. And we don’t know what indie authors earn either; it isn’t the frequently-bandied 70 percent of the consumer dollar all the time. (In fact, it isn’t 70 percent all the time even on Amazon.) With the price differential and many indie ebooks selling at 99 cents with the author getting about 35 cents of that, my hunch is that published authors actually average more cents per unit sold than the self-published do. At the same time, published authors are getting their take calculated on the price from which the retailer discounted, a higher price than the selling price. That means their royalty on the selling price is higher than even knowing the contractual terms would lead you to guess. And that is before you even get to accounting for unearned advances. So even getting 4.5 percent of the units would probably give them no more than 2 or 3 percent of the royalty dollars. And almost certainly that 2 or 3 percent is divided among far more authors than the 98 percent that goes to the published.

The heart of Coker’s piece is a checklist of reasons why the indie ebook share will increase. Most of those make a lot of sense. And his ultimate conclusion and prognostication, which is that ebook unit sales will be 50 percent indie by 2020, is not crazy. Maybe it will be 40 percent. Maybe 50 percent will come in 2023. But surely over the next few years the indie share of the total is likely to get bigger and the publisher share is likely to get smaller, even though publishers and other big players will increasingly be providing services to indies and alternative ways for them to work with established publishers on something other than the advance-against-royalties basis that has been the industry standard for many years.

But even then, we’re probably looking at something that is more like evolution than revolution. If indie authors have 50 percent of the ebook units by 2020, they’ll probably have half of 50 to 60 percent of the total market, assuming that print sales slip from 70 percent today to 40–to-50 percent in six years. If indies sold half of what might be a 60 percent ebook share of the market, they’d have 30 percent of the unit sales. But the pricing differential will still exist. (If it goes away, then indie sales won’t grow so fast.)

That means that, even by 2020, and even accepting indie champion Coker’s calculations, indie ebook sales will be around 10 percent of the dollar volume of the book business. And their share of total author revenue will be more impressive, perhaps in the teens, but still divided among far more authors than the much bigger number going to the published.

These calculations are not intended to disparage the indie writing and publishing community (most of whom get significant help from very big companies, starting with Amazon, to make them possible). It is intended to provide a reality check. The industry is still run by the establishment, and it will be for the foreseeable future. There are expanding opportunities for independent action and it is the right course for many authors, but the idea that we’re about to see some total reversal of fortune can be, and often is, wildly overstated.

As it happens, The Great Debate at the London Book Fair is about whether big publishers or small publishers will “win” over time. Ken Brooks of McGraw Hill Education and I have the “big” side; Stephen Page of Faber and Scott Waxman, who is both a literary agent and owner of an ebook publishing house called Diversion, tout the “small”. Michael Healy of CCC moderates. If you’ll be at LBF, check this out.

A recent post here that incited a long comment string and another on FutureBook that was quite unrelated from the estimable Brian O’Leary have helped me formulate some thinking which I hope can be helpful in evaluating any “Great Change” post that arises about publishing. And they do, indeed, arise often.

O’Leary’s post builds on a theme he is persistent about pursuing, which is that communication, which in his writing seems to conflate with publishing, is moving to a linked-and-continuous conversation rather than a set-content-package (like a book or a magazine). The post suggests that the “books”, such as they are, will emerge from the conversations.

This recalls for me a comment I heard a few years ago from the father of digital publishing, David Worlock. David told me, “surely, in time, the number of books created within the network must exceed the number of books created outside the network”. By “network”, David meant “Internet”.

I don’t know how long “in time” was intended to be in David’s mind, but I figured “decades”. And in that time frame, I agree.

The other long-ago wisdom I keep recalling as I read predictions about our digital reading future is what was always said by Mark Bide when we began our “Publishing in the 21st Century” conferences for VISTA (now Publishing Technology) in the 1990s. Mark always reminded the audience that “book publishing is many different businesses” so that everybody would keep in mind that what we said about trade might not apply to sci-tech and what we said about books for lawyers and accountants doesn’t apply to publishers of college textbooks. What brought everybody together was the form of the “book”, which was already then a weak unifying principle for what were really many very different businesses.

This is now more true than it was when Mark used to say it 15 or 20 years ago. In trade, which is the part of book publishing I know best, we are seeing that the business of publishing genre fiction is different from kids books, which is different from serious non-fiction, which is different from illustrated how-to, which is different from serious fiction. Travel books and computer how-to have suffered serious erosion, and some of us would expect to see cookbooks do the same, if they haven’t already. I base that notion on my belief that cookbooks, like travel and computer how-to, are books where “the unit of appreciation doesn’t equal the unit of sale”. O’Leary put it differently but makes a similar point:

The use of bundled media as the dominant form of shared content is ending. This trend has already affected newspaper, magazine and some types of book publishing. As readers look to customize their own content consumption, it will continue.

This makes me confess that I confidently and erroneously predicted in the 1990s to a close friend deeply involved with newspapers that they’d be “dead in five years”. I saw what Brian is talking about: that the bundled media idea meets its match when people can bundle their own. And I was directionally correct about the trouble the newspaper business was heading toward. But The New York Times is still dropped off at my door each morning (although I have often read a lot of it in bed on my iPhone before I cross the apartment to pick up the paper version) and most American cities still have a daily paper, even though many of them have bitten the dust in this century.

The extended discussion in the comment string of the prior post had to do with to what extent publishers serve authors, and to what extent authors are better off eschewing publishers and working on their own. Unless and until publishers turn digital marketing at scale into a clearly compelling proposition, their power to serve authors effectively diminishes with each closing bookstore. The less bookstore- (or brick-and-mortar retailer-) dependent any book is, the less additional benefit in sales and exposure can be delivered by a publisher (although a cash advance and somebody to handle all the business aspects of putting a book out will still be both helpful and persuasive to many authors). Bookstore shelf space, and printed books, seem to be suffering slower erosion over the past year or two than they did in the several years before that. Michael Cader has made a convincing case that we actually know that for a fact. But, even if we accept the fact, whatever erosion continues will affect different books and authors to different degrees.

As I was reading Brian’s post, which advocates delivering information with plentiful links that would allow reader-controlled exploration of the topic at hand, I thought about the book I am reading right now. That is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent “The Bully Pulpit”. It’s complex and the web is loaded with material (about Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and a cast of characters who were the muckraking journalists of the time) that could provide additional facts, depth, and color. But the valuable deliverable here is that Goodwin has sorted through all of that and more and delivered a masterful telling of a complex holistic story. That’s what I’m buying and enjoying. “Enhancements” would almost certainly undercut its core value to me as a reader. Links would just be distractions that would make me lose the thread of the coherent story.

Nonetheless, what Brian is saying might be true for me if I were reading a book explaining some aspect of economics or technology. And it might be true for a history scholar who was reading “The Bully Pulpit”.

So generalizations about the book business, whether they come from a self-published author or an industry expert like O’Leary, really require us to do a little parsing to make them useful. We’d be steering toward a more constructive conversation if we posed three questions every time somebody posits a Great Change we will see in the book business.

1. Which books, exactly, should we expect to be affected by this particular Great Change? This is necessary to specify now that most people would agree that “books” has become a pretty worthless generalization.

2. How soon can we expect a meaningful change in the perceived utility, and therefore the demand, for the affected books? That is, are we talking about a change that is already happening and evident and having a commercial impact (travel books are suffering and have been for years) or one we expect to see in the future (readers abandoning longer form books for shorter content choices) for which we might have only the scantiest evidence is affecting commercial reality today?

3. How likely is it that whatever the Great Change is going to be that publishers are well-positioned to affect or control or accommodate it? Brian suggested, and I wholeheartedly agree, the answer is “often not”. That being the case, the prediction of the Great Change should not necessarily be accompanied by the prescription that the publisher should change behavior to address it, although it seems to me they almost always are.

That last point is a very important one. Publishers, like all businesses, succeed on the strength of their expertise and their commercial network. Many would agree that the function of children’s books and craft how-to books could be better served if they utilized elements that are possible digitally — animation, video, interactivity, audio — and that would improve the utility of a digital version over a printed book. But does that mean that today’s book publishers can “own” that future business, if both the creative requirements and the marketing and distribution are well outside their prior experience?

Could a publisher of travel books have created Trip Advisor? Does the publisher-created Cookstr do the job of digital assistance for a cook better than allrecipes.com or cookbooks.com or betterrecipes.com? It doesn’t take a lot of deep thinking to see that a publisher’s skill sets are not the best match for building an interactive internet business where content is a component of the strategy but everything else about it is different from publishing books.

Over time, I expect the book business is going to get smaller, whether the number of books consumed goes down or not. Among the reasons for that is that, over time, the intrusion of self-publishing entities will be even more disruptive than self-publishing authors have been. Another reason is that wome information dissemination that has taken place in books will move away from books. It might also be true that the overall public appetite for reading longer forms will diminish, although any publisher with digital distribution can address that by changing the mix of what they publish.

Whether “book publishing” or “book retailing” shrinks, disappears, or changes form depends on how widespread across the various silos of interest and utility we call “books” today are the many disruptions that will affect those verticals in different ways and at different speeds. And generalizing about what these changes mean, let alone delivering advice that isn’t informed and bounded by an understanding of how any particular book or author or publishing program fits into the time and scale of any particular change, is as likely to be wrong and harmful as it is to be correct and illuminating.

So remember Bide’s decades-old admonition that the book business is not one business. It is the one generalization about books and commerce that has been true for well over a century and will continue to be true as long as books — printed or conceptual — continue to be something worth discussing.

The new Common Core standards, which are essentially descriptions of things kids should have learned and know by various ages and grades, are now being adopted and adjusted to by elementary and secondary schools across the country. Common Core, besides providing the standards, encourages the practice of educating kids using content not created expressly for an educational purpose. In other words, teach kids with regular books, newspapers, magazines, videos; not just with books and educational materials prepared by textbook publishers.

So Common Core is a new reality that would tend to encourage greater use of books from trade publishers in school settings.

The other new reality producing change in the school market for publishers is ubiquity approaching universality of devices for digital reading. More and more kids of all ages and economic backgrounds have smartphones, tablets, and game devices that can be used to read ebooks.

Changing commercial environments create digital opportunities and they’re being seen in this arena. Our clients at Copyright Clearance Center are working diligently to get content made available to be found within the Smarter Balanced multi-state assessment (one of two multi-state, high-stakes assessments funded through Race to the Top grants from the US Department of Education), which enables the inclusion of that content in assessments that could lead to years of discovery by teachers and adoption by schools. (The assessment tool requires the student — for example — to read a poem or a passage. In order to use that assessment, the poem or passage would have to be licensed.) Another initiative we have become aware of is Biblionasium, which is a new community trying to bring together students, teachers, and parents around kids reading.

(Biblionasium helped us make a great discovery. They published recommended reading from each of their three constituencies. We noticed that only one title was in the top three recommendations for all three groups: students, teachers, and parents. The book is called “Wonder” and it is extraordinary. It seems to be written for pre-teens, but I couldn’t put it down. The world will be a better place if every kid reads this book whenever their skill level permits. It has a simple stated moral: “be kinder than necessary”. And it delivers it very persuasively.)

Amazon took a stab at a school marketplace play two years ago, trying to make it easy to enable teachers to load ebooks on Kindles across a class and then “taking them off” when the class was over.

That’s a nod toward a solution, but it falls far short. Teachers need tools and capabilities in and around the content and in and around its consumption that even go beyond what a parent needs to monitor a kid. And, regardless of what the platform can do, there’s still a pricing problem. Although publishers would like to get full ebook prices for every single copy placed on each new student’s device, that can’t work for schools. Buying books is cash-demanding enough, but at least the books can be reused by class after class, semester after semester, until each copy wears out.

Enter Curriculet, whose co-founder, Jason Singer, visited our office last week.

Singer has been a teacher and KIPP charter school administrator. He has designed the Curriculet platform for leading a class through reading a book (or anything else) that gives students additional information and help right in line with their reading. Curriculet also gives teachers both the ability to add direction (quizzes, videos) and to monitor what their kids are doing. The enhancements a teacher adds to text are the “curriculets”; there can be one or many for any book or piece of content.

Speaking as an educator, Singer told me something in our meeting that startled me. Apparently, among 5th grade kids, 75 percent do a chunk of pleasure reading at least twice a week. By 12th grade, that number has dropped to 20 percent. So we lose two-thirds of the kids who are pleasure readers over the course of their junior high and high school educations. This is not only a great failure of our educational system, it is a big loss to publishers. They have an enormous collective interest in collaborating with schools in every way they can to make their books available in an environment where kids will be encouraged to read and enjoy them.

But, again, we come back to the challenges of book prices and school budgets. Singer told us a story about a teacher who wanted to teach “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001. But buying 150 copies of the printed book was a non-starter. Schools can’t afford to make that investment except in books that they are absolutely confident will be taught year after year. So the same books continue to be taught. Each year they replace some fraction of the copies of “Scarlet Letter” or “Huckleberry Finn” that have worn out, but they never have to replace them all. And they know each new teacher will be comfortable teaching those books. So they continue and, as Singer explained, that’s why today’s kids read many of the same books in school that their parents and grandparents read.

So far, the digital book business for schools has only really been penetrable by companies with enough content of their own to make a license make sense, namely Pearson and McGraw-Hill. Because Penguin Random House is about half the trade market, they could conceivably do the same as ebook use matures. But just about everybody else depends on aggregators to deliver a selection of books large enough to make it make sense for a school district (let alone a classroom) to purchase a license. Consensus around trading terms for ebooks in schools has been slow to develop because of the fear publishers have that the digital copies in such a community setting (loaded with smart kids who might be aspiring — or extremely capable — hackers) could be dangerous to the future sales of that title in digital form.

But at the same time that Curriculet is offering a big advantage to the teachers with the capabilities of its platform, it also offers great comfort to the publishers whose ebooks it wants to use. Part of publishers’ motivation in charging standard (or even higher) prices to schools than to individuals is the (misplaced or not) fear of rampant piracy. Aside from the danger of them being hacked and broadly distributed, they could end up on a kid’s device for lifetime use even if they aren’t spread around.

None of these problems arise with the Curriculet platform. The book lives there; it isn’t taken off it. The student can read it as long as Curriculet allows them to read it; beyond that, they can’t. So publishers can be a bit more adventurous about what they allow into the platform and about the pricing models they explore. The good news for them is that teachers will be convening on Curriculet to share data and teaching insights; there’s a good chance they’ll be telling each other about books and sharing the teaching materials they’ve developed around the books (so they can find things the way I found “Wonder”). That means publishers will find being on Curriculet provides marketing impetus for a book. The better news is that the resulting discovery will turn into sales, not pass-alongs, because access to the content is controlled through the platform.

It’s a long way from a reality because Curriculet, now in beta, will only really hit the market later this spring. But this is a helpful development for schools and for publishers and it, or something like it, is promising for the future of publishers’ revenues from the school market.

I have a certain pride of discovery in super-successful indie author Hugh Howey. It was nearly two years ago that I learned about him on a trip to LA to organize a conference that didn’t happen. The Hollywood grapevine told me about his novel-of-assembled-novellas, Wool, which was a sudden major self-publishing bestseller and that he had a movie deal. I got in touch with him and his agent, Kristin Nelson, and learned that he was making $50,000 a month in royalties, and had a host of foreign deals as well as the movie deal. Meanwhile, the publishing establishment couldn’t come up with an offer that would sensibly entice him to give up his indie revenues. I read his book and loved it and then had many interesting exchanges with Hugh and Kristin, which resulted in them appearing on the Digital Book World program in 2013, 13 months ago.

He’s a terrific guy who has achieved a phenomenal success and maximized it in a very clever way. But I think he’s a much better author and self-promoter than he is a business analyst.

At the beginning of the year, Howey offered his advice for publishers which reminded me of an old saw of my Dad’s, which was “when I was a kid, everybody wished their father owned a candy store.” Hugh’s advice for publishers is to eliminate things that annoy him (non-compete clauses, length-of-copyright licenses, New York City offices) and to lower prices, give away ebooks with hardcover purchases, and pay authors monthly.

Now, none of these things is necessarily a bad idea, and some of them will almost certainly come to pass, at least for some authors in some contracts. And I remember when Wiley moved from 3rd Avenue to Hoboken that they figured they got a competitive advantage of permanently lower rent at very little sacrifice of efficiency. But none of them are things a publisher would do just for the hell of it; they’d have to see a competitive advantage or a competitive necessity. The piece he wrote advising the publishers (which he addressed to HarperCollins but which he meant to be generic) didn’t even attempt to prove that these changes were either commercially advantageous or necessary.

But giving this advice to HarperCollins or any other big publisher is not dangerous to anybody’s health. Unfortunately, Hugh’s latest business inspiration — a call to arms suggesting to independent authors that they should just eschew traditional publishing or demand it pay them like indie publishing — is potentially much more toxic to consume. (The agenda here is unclear. Is Hugh most interested in getting more authors self-publishing or in organizing authors to demand better terms from publishers? It’s hard to tell, but there is an agenda, it would seem.)

The long story short is that Howey analyzed a bunch of Amazon rank data (apparently a single day’s worth, 1/28-29/2014, which has so many obvious problems associated with it that all by itself it raises questions about what of value can be gleaned) and from that extrapolated some breathtaking (and breathless) conclusions that go way beyond what the data could possibly tell anybody. The analysis purports to compare how authors do self-publishing versus how they’d do with a publisher and comes to the conclusions that they make more per copy on average self-publishing and maybe even sell more and make better books to boot. (For much more and better analysis of the data biases, I’d check Dana Beth Weinberg’s post on this subject. Her objections and my objections have very little overlap.)

My problem with the whole exercise is that there is a long list of relevant facts not included in the data and therefore ignored in the subsequent analysis:

1. Author revenue from print sales.
2. Getting an advance before publication versus having costs before publication.
3. Unearned advances and their impact on author earnings.
4. Getting paid for doing the work of publishing which goes beyond authoring.
5. Current indie successes where the author name or even the book itself was “made” by traditional publishers.
6. Rights deals.
7. How well Amazon data “maps” to what happens elsewhere. Is it really projectable?
8. The apparent reality: flow of authors is self- to traditionally-published, not the other way around.
9. Publishers can raise royalty rates (or lower prices) when it becomes compelling to do so.

Each of these could be a big or small part of the story, but every one is relevant.

1. Author revenue from print sales. Authors not only make a lot of money on print sales, but print in stores (as opposed to printed copies available through Amazon) is also a marketing element. This all still matters. In a comment on Howey’s site, one author estimates her Amazon sales as anywhere from 10% to 30% of her total sales. Obviously, for some other authors it is a lot more than that, maybe north of 70% of their sales. Which kind of author are you? And if you’re the kind selling mostly on Amazon, is that an inherent characteristic of your appeal or a deficiency in your non-Amazon distribution?

2. Getting an advance before publication versus having costs before publication. Although Howey cites one author who turned down an advance to self-publish, those stories appear to be few and far between. I was really struck by one such author announcing nearly two years ago that he was doing this, but, in the end, that author took a publishing deal — not a self-publishing deal — from Amazon. And the size of the advance is also a consideration that Howey’s analysis doesn’t touch on. It can’t, because that data — however relevant — isn’t available. (But then, can you draw valid conclusions without it?)

 3. Unearned advances and their impact on author earnings. Unearned advances are a substantial part of author compensation. I know of one Big Five house that calculates that they pay more than 40% of their revenue to authors and another which says that number is in the high 30s. That’s not all digital, some of that is print with manufacturing and warehousing and shipping costs associated with the revenue. How can you compare how authors are compensated if you don’t calculate the benefits to authors, meaning the resulting higher percentage of the revenue they’ve taken, of unearned advances? That relevant data is also not available.

4. Getting paid for doing the work of publishing which goes beyond authoring. Frankly, the biggest omission to me is the eliding of the costs — in time and money — of doing the work the house does for an author. Howey mentions that editors and cover designers can be hired. That’s true, and good and competent ones too. But is a good writer necessarily a wise chooser of an editor or of a cover design? How much does it cost if you don’t get the right one the first time? (We know publishers aren’t perfect at these jobs either, but they’re bound to be better most of the time than somebody who hasn’t ever done it before.) And is that how you want to spend your time? Authoring is a job but doing the work of self-publishing is also a job. And it entails real risk. Advising a writer to self-publish without considering these things is like telling somebody who’s a good cook that they might as well just open a restaurant.

5. Current indie successes where the author name or even the book itself was “made” by traditional publishers. Another factor any author self-publishing has to consider is the likelihood of success, which is much greater if the books are backlist (have some fame in the marketplace) or even if just the author has been previously published. Successes like Howey’s, from a total standing start with no prior writing track record, are quite different from others who have reclaimed their backlists and used them as a platform to build a self-publishing career. Now, that data could be obtained. Wouldn’t you like to know how many of the “indie authors” at various income levels were cashing in on what was originally publisher-sponsored IP and how many started from scratch? (It’s more challenging, of course, to assemble the data by the author rather than by the book.) But I sure think it would be necessary to understand before drawing conclusions about who should self-publish.

6. Rights deals. Howey himself has benefited from having a stellar agent who has made foreign and movie rights deals for him across the globe. (She even made a print-only deal for Wool with S&S.) Yes, you can (if you’re lucky) do this like Howey did: finding an agent to represent his self-published material. But that’s another thing to find and manage that comes with the deal (and the advance check you get to cash) if you do a deal with a traditional publisher (although, admittedly, you would probably have had to find the agent in the first place, and self-publishing could be a way to do that.) Nonetheless, you get more rights-selling firepower on your side if you’re with a publisher.

7. How well Amazon data “maps” to what happens elsewhere. Is it really projectable? A massive flaw in the analysis is the biased nature of the data. Amazon’s sales profile is not the same as the market as a whole. (One day of data isn’t a projectable sample either.) One agent pointed out to me that they are weak at selling mass-market fiction, for example, and that their ebook sales tend to the fresh and new, so they don’t get a bump when a mass-market paperback comes out. But we can be pretty sure that Amazon sells ebooks more successfully than the market as a whole, because Kindle has the biggest installed base and Amazon has the most book customers. This bias of sample is compounded by the focus on genre fiction. No matter how big a percentage of those niches is served by Amazon, it is important to remember that it is where they are relatively strongest in relation to the big publishers. If we were comparing literary fiction or biographies — both of which have lots of worthy authors too — the chances are the cost of an Amazon-only distribution strategy, or an ebook-only distribution strategy, would be far higher. And the chances of success would be far lower.

8. The apparent reality: flow of authors is self- to traditionally-published, not the other way around. But I think part of the motivation for this piece was frustration in the indie author community at the fact that many of the best ones get signed up by traditional houses, who view indie publishing as a farm system, and very few established authors will actually turn down an advance to go indie. They’ll reclaim their backlist and self-publish it, or do a short ebook on a subject that is timely and can’t wait for print or be made longer. But there has been very little evidence that I am aware of that publishers are having wholesale difficulties getting authors to come aboard with them on a traditional deal.

9. Publishers can raise royalty rates (or lower prices) when it becomes compelling to do so. Which brings us to the final point that I think is relevant and ignored. As Howey and others have pointed out, the early days of ebook publishing appear to have been good for publisher margins. They can afford to give authors more. (In fact, I encouraged them to do that before their accounts come after them for the extra margin in a post nearly three years old.) But they’re not going to give it out of some spirit of generosity or because Hugh Howey (or Mike Shatzkin) thinks it would be a good idea. They’ll give it when it is a competitive necessity to do so.

So my advice about Hugh Howey’s advice is simple. Totally ignore it if you’re not a genre fiction author; there’s precious little evidence or thinking in it that applies to you. And if you are a genre author, be very clear about the extra work and extra risk you take on in order to get some extra margin. Both will be required for sure whether the extra margin materializes or not.

Self-publishing is definitely an incredible boon to commercial writers and they should all understand how it works. Increasingly, literary agencies see it as their job to provide that knowledge.. It is almost certainly a good idea to self-publish for many writers who have reclaimed a backlist that has consumer equity. It is a perfectly sensible way to launch a career, either before going after the commercial establishment or as a part of the strategy to engage with them. (Editors in the big houses are well aware of the self-publishing successes; it’s a new farm system.) If an author has access to markets, it can be a better way to get short or very timely material to them faster. But to say it has its advantages and applications is a far cry from saying that it is a preferable path for a large number of authors who could get publishing deals.

I can’t “prove” this so I won’t try, but it bears further emphasis that it still looks like the number of authors who start as self-published and then get “discovered” by the establishment and switch over is still larger than the number of authors who say “keep your stinking advance” and turn down a deal to do the publishing themselves. None of the parties involved is stupid — not the traditionally-published authors, nor the self-published authors, nor the hybrids — not even the publishers. And they might not be evil, either. As for self-interested debaters, they exist on all sides.

PS: I HATE long comments. If you disagree with me and want to use my space to make your case, please be concise. (And frankly, although I also prefer you to be concise if you agree with me, I’m made less cranky when I get long-winded support.)

Sony has thrown in the towel on the ebook business and turned its customers over to Kobo. This has unleashed speculation that Nook will soon do the same. If B&N were really forced to choose between the investments they need to make in their stores and the investments required to compete in digital delivery, it would be hard to see them making any other choice but to save the stores. The notion of another retailer, perhaps Walmart, buying the whole thing seems eminently logical, but one can’t account for the role that a sentimental attachment to the stores by B&N’s principal owner, Len Riggio, might play in these decisions.

Despite the hopes and expectations of upstarts like Zola Books (which itself made an acquisition lately, taking Bookish off the hands of the three publishers that started it) and Baker & Taylor’s Blio or longtime competitor Copia or the originally phone-based txtr, it feels to me like we’re seeing the beginning of consolidation of the ebook business. Verticalization may work, as it has seemed to for Allromanceebooks but just being “indie-curated” wasn’t enough for Books on Board, a pretty longtime player that expired last year. (So far, Diesel, a comparable indie, is hanging in there.)

Sony is a big company with a very tiny ebook business. They were also really the “first mover” in the modern era ebook device space. The e-ink Sony Reader is more like the Kindle and Nook than any other thing that came before. But if the ebook play ever fit into a larger objective for Sony, it is not clear what that was.

Apple opened their ebook store because they thought they had a suitable device for book consumption (the iPad), but they also had experience with selling content before (iTunes). They also see potential for iPads in the school and university markets, so they have developed technology to enable more complex books — the kind that haven’t been successful commercially yet — to be developed for their platform. Establishing their devices and the iOS ecosystem in the education market would be a big win for them.

Google recognized over a decade ago that books, being repositories of information that contained the best response to many searches, were a world they wanted to be in. With their growing position in devices — the Nexus 7 phone and Chromebook computers — and as the developers of the Android ecosystem that competes with iOS in the app market, there are many ways that being in the ebook business complements other endeavors, including, perhaps, competing with Apple and iOS in the schools.

In the last post here, I posited (among other things) that ebook retailing just wouldn’t work as a stand-alone business; it has to be a complement to other objectives and activities to make commercial sense. Sony has found that it doesn’t fit for them, almost certainly because it doesn’t add value to any of their other businesses.

Of course, ebooks definitely complement Barnes & Noble’s core business. You have a pretty obvious deficiency if you run a bookstore and don’t sell ebooks, so everybody manages to do it somehow or other. Among the mistakes Borders is accused of having made before they disappeared was turning their ebook business over to Kobo. Doubts about the future of Waterstones in the UK include whether it was wise to turn their ebook business over to Amazon. If Barnes & Noble didn’t have Nook, they’d have to make a deal with whoever did have Nook, or with somebody else.

I’m sure Apple or Kobo or Google would be just delighted to have their ebooks integrated into Barnes & Noble’s suite of offerings, and probably Amazon would too, although they would almost certainly never be asked. All of them have shown interest in affiliating with indie stores, with Google having gone in and out, Kobo now trying hard with them, and, even Amazon, which can’t penetrate indies effectively with their own published books now offering them an affiliate program to sell Kindle ebooks called Amazon Source. But surely all of them would jump at the chance to expand their distribution to Barnes & Noble customers.

It is likely that B&N believes that the Nook business can only be truly successful if they keep investing in improved devices and create a global presence. That may be true, but it also might be that Nook can be a useful adjunct to their store business without continually adding devices or creating a presence outside the US where there are no B&N stores. More and more people are comfortable reading on multi-function devices through apps. Maybe B&N could profitably hold on to a core Nook audience by emphasizing synergies with the stores more (bundling print and ebooks, like Amazon does with its Matchbook initiative and as has been tried on a smaller scale by some publishers, would be one such way) and not worrying so much about making Nook competitive with the other ebook retailers as a stand-alone business.

The wild card here is if some big outside player — Walmart being the most frequently mentioned — saw benefits to having the ebook business (or even the whole book business) in its portfolio. That’s happened in the UK, where supermarket chain Sainsbury’s bought a majority stake in Anobii (a UK-publishers-backed startup, analogous to Bookish in the US) and Tesco bought Mobcast because the ebook business was one that they thought fit in well with their offerings and customer base. (Both Sainsbury’s and Tesco made statements about strengthening their “digital entertainment” and online retailing propositions. Tesco is investing in devices as well.) Kobo has made it a pillar of their strategy to find brick-and-mortar partners all over the world.

On a global basis outside the English-language world, the ebook business is still in its infancy. But it is hard to see how any player without a strong English-language presence could develop the scale to compete with those who have it. Every nation and language will have local bookstore players who have “first claim” on the book-readers in their locality. Some might harbor ambitions to also own their local ebook business, particularly as it becomes increasingly clear that ebooks cannibalize bookstore shelf space. But the cost in cash and time of doing it, combined with the competitive advantage of having English-language books in the offering no matter what language your target market reads, will make a build-it-yourself strategy increasingly unattractive. So it would seem that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Kobo are positioned to grow organically and partner ubiquitously. And it will require some seriously disruptive event, like Walmart buying Barnes & Noble, to break the hold that quartet will have on the global ebook market over the next decade.

A potential disruptive development which this piece ignores is the possibility that ebooks become largely a subscription business over the next decade. I have two overarching thoughts on that.

One is that the book-by-book purchasing habit is sufficiently ingrained that it will not be changed drastically around ebooks in the next ten years. I have no idea what percentage of the ebook market is now subscription, but I think it is safe to say “far less than 1%”. So my instinct is that it would take wild success for it to get to as much as 10% in the next ten years.

The other thing to remember is that any ebook retailer can always develop a subscription offering. Amazon effectively started already that with Kindle Owners Lending Library. You can be sure that if Oyster or 24Symbols starts gathering a substantial share of the market, all of the Big Four as we see them here will find a way to compete for that segment. (It is considerably harder to go the other way around; it is much less likely that Oyster or 24Symbols will open regular stores.)

So whether subscription grows faster or not, the giants of ebook retailing will remain the same.