March, 2009

Richard C. Wade is credited with inventing urban history as a field of American history. He taught at the University of Rochester in the 1950s, at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, and became — along with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. — one of two Distinguished Professors of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1971. He died last July.

I delivered this eulogy to Dick to a small group of historians who were in New York for a convention in early January. These were the people in his field, some of whom hadn’t met him; they just knew him as a titan in his field. Many knew nothing, or very little, about what you’ll read in my eulogy. I found that stunning.

But when I bumped into PBS pundit Mark Shields at the newsstand on Sunday morning and asked him, “Did you know my friend Professor Wade?”, Shields lit up and said “yes, wonderful man.” I think if you could ask George McGovern, Ted Kennedy, Hugh Carey, and Mario Cuomo, among those still alive, they’d tell you the same thing.

St. Patrick’s Day is the right day to do this post.

I met Professor Wade in August 1968 at the Democratic convention in Chicago. George McGovern had become the replacement candidate for Robert Kennedy, who had been assassinated in June. McGovern had three heavyweight political operatives working for him there. I was working as an assistant to Pierre Salinger; of course everybody knew Frank Mankiewicz, who had been Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary. And then I met Dick Wade, at the time a Housing Commissioner in Chicago under Mayor Daley and a historian on the faculty of the University of Chcago.

In March of 1971, the 1972 McGovern campaign kicked off with a full-page ad in the New York Times with the headline: “I’m tired of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.” And one of the four signers of the ad was Professor Wade, who had just become a Distinguished Professor at City University Graduate Center in NY. I went to work as a volunteer on that campaign and began a friendship with Dick Wade that was one of the most important in my life until his passing last summer.

Dick and I shared love for American history, liberal politics, baseball, and urban living. I was his eager acolyte, lending a hand to any political effort he tapped me for and constantly interviewing him about his own life. I want to share a few of the things I learned about him FROM him over our nearly four decades of conversation. Dick was very modest about his involvement in history, almost as if he felt it would compromise his credentials as a historian to write himself into the story. Well, I have no credentials as a historian to sully; I’m just Dick’s friend. This is what I know.

Dick grew up near Chicago, a White Sox fan because Democrats were White Sox fans. William Wrigley, who owned the Cubs, was both a Republican and a Klan sympathizer. Dick was also a superior athlete, a Junior Davis Cupper in tennis and a football player. He enrolled at the University of Rochester just before World War II; I don’t know if Dick was pulling my leg when he told me that HE thought he was going to Rochester, Minnesota right up until he got his train ticket to go to college.

The way Dick told it, he wasn’t much of a student his first three years. But in his senior year, he suffered a serious football injury. He never actually said so, but he led me to believe that injury turned his hair gray and made him unable to father children (although he did a great job with two he adopted.) While he was recovering, he had to sit around for the first time in his life. “First I taught myself to smoke a pipe,” he told me. “After that, I was looking for something to do while I smoked the pipe and I read the first book I had ever read without it being required of me. I loved it.” And that, he would have had me believe, was how he discovered that he wanted to be a scholar.

In 1946, Dick was a graduate assistant at Harvard when young John F. Kennedy came by looking for support in his first race for Congress. That began a friendship which lasted until JFK’s tragic death and an association with the Kennedy family that was one of the defining aspects of Dick’s life.

Dick had two fabulous stories about 1948. I can’t remember all the details, but at an ADA convention, he ended up being put up in an extra room in Eleanor Roosevelt’s suite. His story about that was he was awakened by the sound of the typewriter well before dawn, as she wrote her daily newspaper column. That same year, Dick wrote the famous civil rights speech delivered by then-Mayor of Minneapolis Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic Convention. Dick said that if that speech had been delivered at a time other than the middle of the night, it would have been the end of his political career. As it was, it was the start.

Dick was at the University of Rochester in the 1950s, deeply involved in the New York Stevenson campaigns in 1952 and 1956. In 1954, Dick collaborated on the history brief for the historic Brown versus the Board civil rights case.

In 1960, he was an important player in JFK’s successful run for the White House. Dick had a story about working in West Virginia and complaining at one point to Robert Kennedy about the lack of contact between the West Virginia campaign and the national office. RFK’s response was to give Dick a roll of dimes and to tell him to call whenever he needed to check in.

What proved to be one of the most dazzling demonstrations of Dick’s insight and prescience came at a Yankee-White Sox doubleheader we went to during the summer of 1971. While we watched the full two games, Dick laid out the McGovern strategy to get the 1972 nomination. Dick said we would come close in New Hampshire which would take the shine off Muskie’s inevitability; New Hampshire was a home state for a Maine senator. Then we’d win the Wisconsin primary, which would knock Muskie out because his top-down campaign couldn’t run without a constant flow of money.

The key to understanding how this could work, the Professor explained, was to know that polls were meaningless in primaries because of low turnouts — 10% or 15% was not uncommon — and that, with our superior canvassing and volunteer operation, we could drive up the turnout among OUR supporters to achieve what we needed in New Hampshire. We needed about 20,000 votes to do it. This was in July, and the New Hampshire primary was eight months away. McGovern at that point ranked last or near last in every national poll, registering about 2% support. But Dick’s explanation made the challenge seem manageable, which it was. And his scenario played out precisely. 

What I think was the most sensational achievement of Dick’s political career came in 1974. Howard Samuels had co-chaired McGovern’s post-convention NY State Campaign, alongside Dick’s good friend, ex-Mayor Robert Wagner. I don’t know exactly what the root of the problem was, but I do know Dick and Samuels didn’t like each other. This was a unique situation; I am not aware of Dick having animus like that for anybody else, but he didn’t like Howard Samuels.

In 1974, Samuels had an apparent hammerlock on the Democratic nomination for Governor. He had the designation of the State Democratic Party. There was a challenge from Brooklyn Congressman Hugh Carey, but the polls showed Samuels in the lead by 30 points or more and, with Carey having no money or statewide name recognition, it looked like Samuels would coast to the nomination.

Dick had always told me that he’d never lost a contested Democratic primary. In July of 1974, with the primary about 8 weeks away, he called me and asked for the phone numbers of a couple of people upstate, which had been my territory during the 1972 McGovern campaign. I gave him the information he needed and asked him “does this count?”, meaning “does this count as a contested primary? Are you risking your perfect record?” He knew what I meant and said, “I’ll tell you after the weekend.”

And after the weekend, he said “yes, it counts.” He had engineered a coalition among Carey, attorney-general candidate Robert Abrams, and lieutenant-governor candidate Maryann Krupsak to share poll coverage on election day. And all three of them swept to victory; Howard Samuels never had any power in state politics again.

One lesson Dick taught me, applied in 1974, was that in a statewide Democratic primary in New York, if you can establish that one candidate is clearly the liberal and another the moderate, the liberal will always win. I used that knowledge to win quite a few bets in 1982, when Mario Cuomo, again with Dick’s help, defeated Ed Koch for the gubernatorial nominantion in a result not expected by anybody except Dick Wade and the people who learned their politics from him.

For the last several years, even though his health had been in a gradual decline for more than a decade, we kept up having lunch every few months. Most of the recent times, I would go visit Dick with Ed Rogoff, whom I met on the NY McGovern campaign. Our last visit with the Professor was in June when we discussed the happy prospect of an Obama presidency. Dick’s comment on Obama was the hushed, almost reverent observation: “he has made so FEW mistakes!”

Right after we saw Dick, I read two books, both called “The Last Campaign.” The first one was about Truman’s 1948 race and in it were a lot of things I needed to ask Dick about. The book reported that it was the ADA that did the work for Truman of painting Wallace as too close to the communists, and Dick was a charter ADAer. I know he would have had interesting things to say about that.

But the second one was about Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, and Dick was all over it. I had known that Dick had a lot to do with Richard Hatcher’s election as mayor of Gary. But I did not know that Dick had — according to this book — led a faction in the RFK campaign that said “keep campaigning among the black voters and keep talking about civil rights” that was opposed by another faction that said “we have the black vote wrapped up; let’s just go after the white voters and not take chances alienating them.” According to this book, Ted Kennedy was the leader of the cautious faction.

I was reading this book in London. I emailed Ed and said, “we have to go visit the Professor as soon as possible. We have to ask him about the things in this book.” Ed reached out immediately, but was told by Dick’s wife, Liane, that he was not up to a visit. We should try again next week. And the next week he died.

Dick Wade was a great man. He spent decades close to power and the powerful, but he never wanted anything except what was right for the country. For him, race was America’s exceptional challenge and devotion to civil rights was every citizen’s greatest responsibility. He was also fun, witty, kind, and a great storyteller. His loss is irreplaceable. It was an enormous privilege and joy to have been his friend.

Share this post

One of the great thinkers about digital change is NYU professor Clay Shirky. I have been reading posts and articles from him for years and he is always cogent and sensible. He has just posted a very insightful piece about the challenges faced by newspapers.

Shirky doesn’t explictly say that he’s exploring the “vertical/horizontal” dichotomy (that is at the core of my own analysis of media and digital change), but he is. This piece explains that “Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau” within the context of horizontal newspapers. Wal-Mart is actually a bad example in this case, because they don’t advertise with many publications that have a Baghdad bureau. But if he said Bloomingdale’s or General Motors, he could accurately be talking about the Times. They want the Times’s overall audience, and they trust the Times to create the balance of content that attracts it. They’re choosing from aggregations because that’s all there is to choose from. So, as Shirkey compresses it:

The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.

Thre is analogous with paying our taxes and what happens with the government. Your taxes go to fund some things you like and some things you don’t. You don’t get “line item veto.” You take the package. As Shirky points out, it was the cost of printing (and, he might have added, distributing what is printed) that kept the number of choices for Wal-Mart and other advertisers limited. Until digital disruption, that is.

It is the in the nature of  horizontal media that they make their own decisions about the basket of content that constitutes their offering. Most newspapers attract readers with a comics page; the New York Times established its brand for seriousness by not having them. CBS News may have been subsidized by Gunsmoke or All in the Family, but the network made the decisions “on balance.” The idea really was to appeal to almost everybody over time, if not all at one time.

It has been widely observed that Internet advertising revenue is not replacing print revenue for newspapers. One reason for that is that the paper can’t sell advertising for what an online “reader” might look at, only for what they do actually look at. Purchasers of ads in print do so based on some notional number of readers, even though many of them will not ever see the page on  which the ad appears. It isn’t that way on the Internet.

When I talk about the rise of verticality, I am referring to sites like Politico.com or 538.com replacing (or at least challenging) the political pages of the Times, WaPo, or Newsweek as a trusted source  for the interested. But the natural verticality of audience plays out differently in print than it does on the horizontal sites themselves. What percentage of a newspaper’s print readers will actually turn many of the pages of the paper, “looking through it”? Answer: a lot more than the number of site visitors that will load each page of the site to see what’s on it!

Web sites have two kinds of visitors: those that come to the site and those that come to a single story or post. That latter group may be sent by a link from elsewhere, like their My Yahoo home page, and not even be particularly aware of where they went to read the story even after they click the back button or close the tab in their browser to leave after they’ve read it. The Times, WaPo, and Newsweek need to understand that distinction because for the first group, their brand counts and for the second only the story counts!

One thing to really like about Shirky is that he doesn’t mind saying “I don’t know.” This is sometimes hard for those of us who like to express ourselves about what we think will happen in the future. It is often easier to see what can’t work going forward than it is to know what will replace it. As Shirky said:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Department stores went through a similar process of destruction. In the 1960s and before, they sold everything. Then, when shopping malls began, department stores became their “anchors”, but the rest of the mall was populated by specialty stores that, product category after product category, became national chains competing with the department stores for their business and ultimately driving them out of it. So department stores don’t much sell shoes, books, recorded music, and many other things they once did. There are such things called department stores today, but there are far fewer and they are shadows of their former selves.

Some observations unrelated to the substance of today’s discussion:

As brilliant as is Shirky’s writing, his blog structure is shockingly bad. He uses block justification, which, along with a pretty wide line, makes reading his text pretty damn challenging. Justification (making everything line up evenly on the right as well as on the left) is accomplished either by varying the space between letters or the space between words, or both. That’s inherently unfriendly to the eye and brain trying to take in the material. In addition, Shirky has no tags for his post, so he is really handicapping discovery, making Google’s job of getting him “found” a lot harder. Clay, if you see this post and I haven’t insulted you beyond conversation, let me know and I’ll refer you to the mighty SEO team of Tess and Hamid who, I guarantee, will make your blog look better and bring you much more audience!

Share this post

Len Vlahos of the ABA is the latest to take on  the noble but very difficult  task of encouraging independent booksellers in the digital age. Independent booksellers face a challenge similar to that of publishers  adjusting to the change we’re facing: the skill sets and predelictions that are useful for what they’ve been doing don’t necessarily map to what needs to be done in a digital world. But none of us wants to hear that.

Vlahos’s piece reviews the history of books and music and devices. Most of it is good history. He comes to the conclusion that ebooks could well be about to take off and be a meaningful part of the business. That takes him to the hard part: figuring out what a bookseller can do to benefit from it. I’ll let you read what he’s thinking.

I’d say the right digital strategy for a bookseller is pretty simple:

1. Set yourself up (probably with Ingram) in the simplest way you can to be able to sell as many titles in as many formats as you can. That is, get the maximum choice you can for your customers with the minimum hassle and investment for you.

2. Don’t expect to make money selling ebooks: consider it an accommodation to your customers to keep them buying physical books from you. Restrain yourself from investing large amounts of labor improving your ebook presentation past the point of acceptable. If the sales start to amount to something, you can do it then.

3. Spend all of energy that you might have wasted perfecting the sale of ebooks on social networking, trying to be in direct contact with your customers through Facebook, Twitter, and through postings on popular and well-read blogs in subject matters your store specializes in. Particularly focus on the opportunities to promote to specific groups, such as through hashtags (#s) on Twitter, which identify groups of people interested in a particular thing.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. What I wanted to write about is “the book business ain’t the music book.” And the subtitle is “anything you think you learned about media consumption through the iPod doesn’t necessarily apply to the Kindle.”

As Vlahos acknowledges, the “unit of appreciation” in music is “the song.” But the record companies were selling “the album.” This is not often the case  in our business, and the books to which it applies  (soft reference) have declined in commercial appeal as a result. Most book-length narrative reading: not so much. (My first use of a brand new cliche! How long have we had “not so much”?)

But that’s not nearly the most important difference.

There is almost no benefit to carrying every book you’ve ever read around with you in your pocket. There is, obviously, enormous benefit to having all the music you own in a single device. On top of  that, the iPod came out after the music business had stocked you with what are known as “gold masters”, infinitely copyable digital copies, of all your music. If CDs hadn’t come before the iPod, the barrier to adoption would have been much higher. You ever try to “rip” a cassette? or a record? 

So from the day the iPod came out, anybody could — with the investment of a little bit of time — listen to all the music one owned on it. That was much more important to the spread of the device than their ability to buy more music at the iTunes store, even though their sales have always been impressive. I had three thousand songs on my iPod before I bought anything I didn’t already own. 

So here are the two ways the book business is different than the music business.

1. We can’t just put all our already-owned content on a book-reading device.

2. We wouldn’t want to if we could.

Anytime you hear the iPod invoked in a Kindle conversation, the first thing to check is whether any comparison is relevant. Usually it isn’t.

Share this post

I just want to riff briefly on a challenge; I am still thinking about what might be a solution, or even an approach to a solution.

Here’s the challenge. We need some creative dealmaking between authors and publishers. The partnership is getting more complicated.

Publishers (will always) need authors and (most) authors (still) need publishers. They have to work together in a way where their interests are aligned.

In the world we grew up in, the royalty and rights-sharing book contract mostly accomplished that, although not perfectly. International rights and sales of the English language edition  are a challenge, for example, because standard deal terms and practice have often  made it more profitable for authors to have their rights sold to local publishers  in each market (whether they do it themselves or have it done by the originating publisher and share the royalties) while it is more profitable for publishers to keep the book within their company if they have a global presence, even if they sell fewer copies in many markets. 

There’s also an “end of life” issue where publishers’ and authors’ interests don’t match. Because publishers extend almost all of their marketing efforts to about-to-be or just-published titles, a book that has slowed down to a crawl after it has had its run is very seldom going to get back up and run again at the publisher that owns it. But a new publisher, with new interest — even if it were a smaller and less powerful one — can sometimes  generate new sales.

For years we’ve had as a default an out-of-stock trigger, by which an author can notify a publisher if the book is out of stock (which in and of itself seems a bit crazy) and then, if the publisher doesn’t put it back into stock, it is considered out of print and rights will revert. If a publisher is holding substantial stock on a book, they might remainder it and put it out of print themselves. (The remaindering seldom yields any revenue for an author, by the way.) Or they might not. And if the publisher is holding very limited stock, there’s no incentive to kill the book and the publisher might happily fill 10 or 20 orders a year until the stock runs out.

Over the years, savvy agents have negotiated more stringent arrangements, such as a reversion of rights when sales go below a certain number, say 200 a year. Big publishers have often agreed to something like that because those sales would be insigificant to them. But there’s an increasing reluctance to do that now because print-on-demand offers the ability to keep every book available forever without inventory and the long tail and electronic life online present the possibility of even more revenue. This is probably going to become an increasingly contentious “small point”. 

This is complicating life from what it was before, but it’s not a sea change, it’s a tweak. Here’s the real challenge.

Publishers are in the process of discovering that we’re in a shift from a product-centric world to a community-centric one. The new challenge arises from the fact that it is simple to pay royalties for sales of a product; it is a lot harder to pay somebody for their contribution to a community. Here’s a real-life example.

A publishing friend asked me a couple of years ago how to make the best possible digital use of a science fiction encyclopedia he was publishing. Since I am (self-)”trained” to think “content is bait to attract community and community is what you need to survive”, I had a ready answer:

“Put the encyclopedia on a dedicated science fiction community web site for free. That will bring you the traffic you want regularly. Then turn the encyclopedia into a wiki available only at a registration layer. Those who register can improve and grow your encyclopedia. Material can ‘graduate’ to the openly-available free layer either by vote of the community or by decision of the editors. And, by the way, you’ll get lots of great content for the next edition.”

Great idea, don’t you think? But it couldn’t work. The publisher had secured online rights to the content by agreeing on a revenue split with the authors for it. So if it was to go on the web, it had to be a “subscription” product, with attributable revenue, or they couldn’t do it.  Of course, a subscription to a static web product is not likely to be the most commercial proposition. 

This really requires a new kind of deal for the authors, giving them a piece of the developing sci-fi community. I am not sure how else you could reward them fairly, because the publisher really would be using their content as bait to create something larger. But since the publisher himself wouldn’t yet have a clear view of how the community will be monetized (and neither do I, by the way), that’s a hard deal to make. But it would defnitely be in the author and publisher’s best interest to find a way to collaborate this way.

The end of this story is pretty predictable; only the timetable is in doubt. There will be a sci-fi community on the web (there are many right now, some built around book publishing imprints) that will create its own crowd-sourced sci-fi encyclopedia, perhaps springboarding off work wikipedia has already done. When that happens, not only will that site get the benefits I was suggesting my friend’s house could get, the published encyclopedia will stop selling nearly as well in book form too. And if there is still a market for such a product as a book, they’ll suddenly have strong competition from something that can be created from the website. In fact, people would be making SharedBook copies of it.

We need to work out a better answer. Maybe dividing the profits on the SharedBook edition(s) could be a start.

Share this post

This is the third and final post of a series which spells out a new ebook strategy for trade publishers, expressed in the form of a letter from the publisher to its authors. The first post — the beginning of the letter — expressed the publisher’s intention to invest in a database of digital assets to enhance all their ebooks, and to take advantage of the different opportunities presented by different ebook formats. It also was candid about how little the publisher really knows about what the revenue potential will be for ebooks. The second post covered the first item we anticipate the author will want to know: “what is an “enhanced ebook.”

This post covers the second and third items: what’s required of the author to get this done and what is the deal between the author and our imaginary entity, National Trade Publishing (NTP).

Obviously, there is only a limited amount National Trade Publishing can do to enhance an ebook without help from you and our other authors. So what do we need from you to really make this happen?

That answer breaks into two parts: things of value we think you have from the process of creating the book and value we think you can add after publication.

Do you have bibliographic material or sourcenotes that we won’t be including in the book? Have you archived links to source or related material on the Web? Did you write descriptions of characters or places in your book that you wouldn’t mind revealing, and which would be of interest as extra material to some of the people who will read your book?

We will give you the opportunity to contribute to each ebook’s underlying dictionary. Will you use it?

Video and audio material are welcome. You can talk to your audience about this book, or the next book you are working on, or even another book you’d recommend to them. We’ll give you guidelines for what we think will work best (brief, in a word) and we’ll be screening for adequate quality and appropriateness, but we want to give buyers a “From the Author” section of an enhanced ebook that gives you a lot of leeway.

We want to use the “space” we have in an ebook to tell readers more about the book you’ve written, about the world of the story (if fiction) or to give them a broader or deeper drive into the subject matter (if non-fiction). That can be done through your writing or by things you can refer us to, through things on which we can get the necessary rights to embed them or through things we can only link to. And through any media.

Which brings us to the trickiest part of all this: what’s the deal? (Blogger’s note: I am going to put some numbers in here. The numbers aren’t as important as the conditons and circumstances around the numbers.)

Our standard deal for ebook sales is to give the author 25% of the net amount received by National Trade Publishing.We’re not going to change that. We’ll pay the same on these enhanced ebooks, even though some of the material, such as the dictionary, will be provided by us.

In addition, we will ask only non-exclusive rights to the enhanced ebook material. If you write something original for this purpose, you can give it to us and then re-sell it as part of something else, as long as our rights to sell the ebook we’ve created are undisturbed. Although we certainly can “pull” material from an ebook much more readily than we could from a book we are storing in print in our warehouse, the administrative cost of doing such a thing across our list would be uncontrollable. (Hint: we can negotiate an ability to pull material if you pay us something to do so.)

We recognize the potential for advertising in an enhanced ebook, or for promoting another book and benefiting by referral revenue from its sale. We will give authors veto power over accepting these revenue enhancements in their ebooks, and we will share 25% of the value of that advertising or referral revenue. If you bring us the advertiser, we’ll pay you an extra 10% of the revenue.

We will be entirely in control of the pricing of the enhanced ebooks, of course. Our strategic desire is to drive UP the price we can get for them, but, tactically, we may price them anywhere, or give them away in a promotion, or give them away as part of the ebook sale.

We’ll want to allow TTS use of the ebook wherever it is available, but we’ll block its use where we have that option at an author’s request.

So the “deal” we’re looking for is that we’ll each put forth extra effort to promote our still-primary product, your book, and to develop a better understanding of what the future primary product, the enhanced ebook, might be. We expect many of our authors to be enthusiastic about this idea from the beginning, and for many of the others to join with us gradually as we develop this concept. We hope you’ll be our partner in this effort from the start.

PS: Since I started this series of blog p0sts, I learned about a peer-reviewed study of ebooks created by John Warren of the Rand Corporation. John’s article is very thorough and reviews important points about ebook capabilities, including hyperlinking and multimedia, and about pricing experimentation that are not covered in my series of posts. However, it does not cover what I consider to be the central point of my pieces: which is that a publisher needs to set up a database and a new interaction with authors to really move into the ebook era. The book-by-book approach, which is normal and which is what the Warren piece also assumes, will not be cost-effective for consumer ebooks for some time, perhaps years.

Share this post

We (Ted Hill of THA Consulting and I) are working with BISG again this year on their Making Information Pay conference. Last year we did a project on “Experimentation and Innovation” where we used both an online survey and interviews to surface the issues we captured in a research paper and then formed the backbone of the program at the MIP conference itself.

This year’s theme, taking the same approach, is “Shifting Sales Channels: How the Sources of Revenue are Changing and What Publishers Are Doing About It.” We’re trying to find the outlying practices: the things a few people are learning or doing that could be of great benefit if more widely employed. The big question going into something this is “will people talk? Will people tell us anything that might benefit a competitor?” The answer, after the first few interviews (just completed) and the first 100 survey results is, clearly, yes.

We really want everybody in consumer publishing to participate in our survey. More than 100 people have done so already but if you’re not one of them, please do so after you finish reading this piece.

Here is a preliminary list of things we have learned already. We have a lot of survey results and further interviews coming to add to this. It looks pretty certain that we’ll have a Making Information Pay conference on May 7 that will be packed with useful information.

1. Opportunity arises when competitors cut back. One publisher told us a story about a direct competitor of theirs cutting back the staff covering a major account. Our interviewee responded to this by stepping up their efforts with the same account with the result that their sales are up at that account when sales elsewhere are declining.

2. Strong brands matter more to consumers and buyers in a downturn. Despite the fact they are pretty challenged at creating consumer brands themselves, publishers have always appreciated the marketing lift that comes from a brand that validates a book to an audience. It turns out that in the recession, the branded material seems to hold up better, particularly in challenged areas like cooking and gardening.

3. Publishers should constantly reshuffle sales resources to pursue opportunity. One publisher we spoke to said they re-evaluate their sales personnel deployment every 12 to 18 months. They have created dedicated efforts where they didn’t have them before and they have reduced the sales hours dedicated to declining areas. The idea that sales deployment should be under constant review is one that more companies should take on board.

4. Reps in the field need to cover more than bookstores. We first got this thought from a niche publisher that has a focused list and therefore a focused batch of non-book accounts to go after. But then we heard again from a larger publisher, which is now in certain territories experimenting with having reps cover accounts beyond bookstores, particularly specialty retailers and libraries. It just makes sense to us that the product and company knowledge a rep has, once “loaded” and deployed in the field, should be directed at any opportunity to produce sales, not just a particular kind of store. This observation has challenging implications for publishers still relying primarily on commission reps to cover bookstores.

5. There are lots of online sales accounts besides Amazon and BN.com and Borders.com that are worth a publisher’s sales effort to cover. This one came out of left field to us. One publisher said with total confidence that there are many online booksellers, some effectively operating as extensions of Amazon, that can be built into significant accounts with attention from a publisher’s sales organization.

6. The right subjects still matter more than the economic circumstances: books with timely appeal will sell. “Gardening” might be troubled, but “growing your own organic food” is a book subject that will work in these green and economically troubled times. Business might be a softening category, but books about job hunting or creating cash flow from a new business are perfect for the moment that we’re in.  The converse is also true, so it could be that overall book sales, which actually aren’t doing so badly compared to other things, will further strengthen as titles and subjects which pretty suddenly became inappropriate over the past 12 months cycle out of the system in favor of books aimed at the new times we’re in. Maybe books are recession-proof.

7. Direct mail still works, but the sales come online. This was another one that was a big surprise to us. One publisher reported that sending out printed niche catalogs still worked well in professional markets, but the orders don’t come back with stamps. They say it is really fascinating to watch the direct online orders spike after they put a piece into the mail.

8. Catalogs and sales conferences are being aggressively rethought. We have found three publishers so far that only hold one full company sales conference a year, and they’re always reviewing whether that one — largely about company morale — is worth it. The first few publishers we spoke with all are looking for ways to cut back, if not eliminate, the full-line print catalog. The new wisdom is that PDFs should be the catalog format of choice, enabling targeted groups of books to be printed as leave-behinds customized to the account.

9. Custom publishing is a growth area. This one was good to hear  me because it confirms the “end of trade” idea, which says that publishers have to (and can) create new channels to replace the time-honored ones that are fading away. One publisher reported to us that they had started a custom publishing operation three years ago with one person and that group now has six! Custom publishing can be about selling in bulk to a corporation, but it also can be about creating a special package for a book chain or mass merchant.

Share this post

The question asked on an email list of digerati-types was:

“On the trade side of the business, what are some of the unmet challenges, the unsolved conundrums, at the intersection of books & technology? If you could fix something, what would you fix?”

Share this post

Before the early 1970s, wholesalers to the trade were local and carried a relatively small number of titles. Their main job was to back up bestsellers and local booksellers went direct to the publishers for just about everything else. Baker & Taylor was national, but focused on the library market. And Ingram was a small and pretty insignificant player. Harry Hoffman was their president.

Here was the wholesaler’s problem: they couldn’t carry everything and for anything except the top titles there was no assurance of any demand.

Here was the retailer’s problem: most of what they ordered from a wholealer wouldn’t get delivered. The “fill rate” (percentage of what’s ordered that is delivered) was terrible. On average, it was well below 50%. 

Here was the wholesaler’s next problem: most of the orders they got from stores couldn’t be filled, but required some level of processing and communication. So, cumulatively, they spent a lot of money on the orders they couldn’t make a nickel on.

Here was everybody’s problem: all of this took a lot of time.

One day in about 1972 (I could be a year off with some of this…) a former colleague of Hoffman’s from his tenure at Bell & Howell brought in a new gadget called a microfiche reader. The reader enabled one to see what was on a piece of film that was about 3″ by 5″ and was literally packed with information. What somebody saw in that meeting (and Michael Zibart, who did the buying at Ingram then and is now owner and publisher of BookPage, thinks it was Harry) was that Ingram could put its inventory on it. So if somehow the stores could have a reader, they could get the inventory of Ingram’s books mailed to them each week.

And then they’d stop ordering books Ingram didn’t have! And they’d know, with reasonable certainty, what they were going to get when they placed an order! And Ingram would not have to process orders they couldnt’ fill!

The challenge for Ingram was to get the readers, which were not inexpensive, into the stores’ hands. They decided to do that by renting them, asking the stores to pay a monthly fee to have them. So they went to the ABA Convention (American Booksellers Association, which sold the convention to Reed Exhibitions in the 1990s and which  Reed turned into BEA) in Los Angeles in 1973  to peddle the readers. They had no idea what reaction they’d get.

It was overwhelmingly positive. The stores, many of which didn’t really know Ingram, were enthusiastic about the concept and willing to pay for the reader. Ingram was able to charge the publishers for the cost of creating the microfiche (I think that started at $1 per month per title listed.) So they created self-liquidating efficiencies which immediately supercharged their fill rate (into the 90s), boosted their volume and customer base, and eliminated lots of wasted cost processing orders they couldn’t fill. As a bonus, Ingram was able to put their unique title number, which they needed to fill an order, on the microfiche so the stores did the “coding” for them. More costs eliminated.

Within a year or two, Ingram was a national trade wholesaler. Baker & Taylor copied the microfiche innovation later in the 1970s. Stores were able to stock backlist much more efficiently because they could single-source multiple publishers and order with much greater frequency.

This change, along with B. Dalton’s pioneering, at the same time, of POS capture and the model stock concept, fueled a huge growth in bookstore sales nationwide. But that’s an old publishing story for another post.

Share this post

HarperCollins announced a new imprint yesterday. And once again, we see no evidence that the big general trade publishers understand how to attack their new challenges in the 21st century.

The difficulty for publishers, as readers of mine know, because I’ve written and spoken about it repeatedly, is that the “horizontal” infrastructure that has supported a general, subject-non-specific book publishing program for decades  is disintegrating.  General trade publishers have thrived for years on a “book-centric” ecosystem of intermediaries that reached the audiences with information about their books and the books themselves. The most important component of the ecosystem was, of course, bookstores. When I came into the business in the 1970s, there were easily 1500 or 2000 stops worth making to sell a general trade list besides the two big national chains and two big national wholesalers. Now there might not be 200. And the number is not growing.

What that means is that publishers increasingly have to reach their audiences directly through the Internet or through other channels that are not book -specific, but are subject-specific. Despite the growth of book-conversation-centric sites like Shelfari, Goodreads, and LibraryThing, that means finding people through niches of interest. Those niches might even be literary genres. But the promotion mechanisms aren’t for “books” so much anymore as they are for very specific genres of books or for subjects, and books are just part of the conversation. It’s hard work finding the subject-specific conversations in which a book can be promoted; we doubt most general trade publishers have the resources to locate them for each book, one at a time.

And what all that means is that the imprints that matter in the 21st century have to mean something to consumers, not to intermediaries. Which brings us back to what HarperCollins just announced.

The new It Books imprint is not defined by its subject matter so much as by its attitude and its approach. The subject matter is “pop culture, sports, style and content derived from the Internet”, broad classifications (like “crafts”, or “business”, or  ”photography”) that make sense in the B2B world. No doubt the buyers at B&N, the collection builders at major public libraries, and the newspaper book editors that remain on their jobs, will “get” the connection among the books. They’ll expect Twittering, and smart use of Facebook, and, in general, books with “attitude.” But this isn’t focused enough to be marketed efficiently in an internet world . Pop culture is many niches. Sports is many niches. Style is many niches.

And “content derived from the internet”? It’s cool, and it comes with its own net platform (presumably.) But any four of these opportunities would not make one brand. They’d probably make four.

So this new imprint can’t gather a coherent and enduring web community. One book’s audience will not lead naturally to the next. The web sites publicists find to post on, the “followers” they get from Twitter, the email addresses they get from a book promotion, will not translate into “equity” that can be used on the next book and the one after that.

There is clearly something about being a big general trade publisher that makes this hard to see, just as there is something about being a focused small publisher that makes it come naturally.  For example, see Chelsea Green, a publisher based in Vermont whose focus is “the politics and practice of sustainable living.” Their marketing costs per book will go down over time as they gather larger and larger audiences that will be interested in most of what they publish. Another good example is Hay House, a mind-body-spirit publisher. These publishers, like Harlequin, have brands that  mean something clear to consumers. And the same consumers can be sold book after book from these houses.

General trade publishers need to see, and apparently don’t,  that their legacy brands are B2B. They should be exploited that way. They need brands that can work B2C, but it will require discipline, focus, and an audience-first picture of what to publish to accomplish that. This new imprint is not a step in the right direction, toward the future. While the intent is modern, the editors are tech-savvy, and the feeling is “hip”, the strategy is past tense.

Share this post

This is the second post of a series which spells out a new ebook strategy for trade publishers, expressed in the form of a letter from the publisher to its authors. The first post — the beginning of the letter — expressed the publisher’s intention to invest in a database of digital assets to enhance all their ebooks, and to take advantage of the different opportunities presented by different ebook formats. It also was candid about how little the publisher really knows about what the revenue potential will be for ebooks. This post continues the letter.

Letter from National Trade Publishing (NTP) to its authors, continued:

With that preamble, I would anticipate three questions from you?

1. What do we at NTP mean by an “enhanced” ebook?

2. What do you as an author have to do to help NTP make this happen?

3. What’s our deal?

An enhanced ebook can be an infinite number of things, and probably will become dozens, if not hundreds, of different things over time. The only models there are so far would be the “director’s cut” DVDs of major movies: offering additional content, some of which would have been on the cutting-room floor and some of it promotional. It will take a while to think of all the things we can do with books and there is a lot of time and experimentation between us and knowing what will really work. We know we’ve got tools and it’s time to begin employing them to accomplish something useful.

The tools include internal linking, external linking, embedded video and audio, additional text-and-illustration content, and even software utilities.

Objectives surely include  more deeply engaging the reader, more fully documenting  material in the book, promoting the author,  enabling the house or the author to promote other authors, or  delivering additional content, products, or services that enhance the user experience for the reader of the book.

Ebooks are in their infancy and some of what will be part of this program of ever-improved ebooks is pretty fundamental, just blocking and tackling. Much of what we’re thinking of here is accomplished with internal links. We’ll use them to make all footnotes seamlessly accessible in all formats. As you know, they aren’t now. We’ll load a dictionary with every word in the book (and we’ll enable authors to write attributed entries for any they like, including proper nouns that are checked through the dictionary).

External links imply connecting to the Internet, and often they would. You could use links to wikipedia, to source notes, to greater detail about some person or event mentioned in a book. To allow readers to avoid the distraction of links, we’ll let them turn the color-differentiation off. But we’re convinced that readers will increasingly value the capabilities of links and we have to provide them in ebooks.

But for at least a while, we see value in pulling things that are on the Internet into the file itself, to have more control of the linking and to untether the ebook from the need to be connected.

Going from print to digital allows video and audio to be delivered with the book. We know many of our authors have made videos, or have permission to use something from a television appearance. We want to consider that material for our enhanced ebooks.

We see promoting our authors to their readers with longer author bios, pictures, and video. We know readers are interested in what their favorite authors read. So we see opportunity in that.

We don’t know where advertising will go in the ebook world, or whether it will become normal policy to get referral revenue through an affiliate program for pointing the reader to another book that then gets bought. For now our policy will be to work with the authors that want to explore those revenue opportunities, at least until the industry sorts out what will be the established practices.

So the enhanced ebook will have an internal dictionary; it will have links to additional material embedded in the book and on the Internet; it will have robust biographical material on the author; it will have video and audio and reviews or information about other authors; and, in the case of certain non-fiction books, it might have product or retailer or other vendor information in greater detail or through links that would not be possible in the printed book.

Next we need to spell out what you, the author, can do to make your enhanced ebooks as good as they can be.

(To be continued…)

Share this post