Beast Books: a sign of times to come

Posted by Mike Shatzkin on September 29, 2009 at 2:25 pm · Under Community, General Trade Publishing, New Models, Print-On-Demand, Publishing, Supply-Chain, Vertical, eBooks


The story in today’s New York Times about the new Daily Beast publishing imprint created by Perseus obviously didn’t hit everybody else the way it hit me. I think it is really important news. It is also a smart approach. And I think it is a harbinger of many things to come.

The two things that struck Michael Cader about this initiative were not the things that struck me. What he said in Lunch:

The Daily Beast is the latest entrant in the shouldn’t books be written shorter and issued faster sweepstakes, launching Beast Books and focusing on current events. They plan to publish ebook editions first, followed by traditional print editions. The site has partnered with Perseus for sales, distribution and other services, represented in the deal by Larry Kirshbaum and Ed Victor.

Aiming to publish just three to five titles a year, the line begins with John Avlon’s ATTACK OF THE WINGNUTS: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, with a foreword by Tina Brown. The ebook will be available in December 2009; the trade paperback in January 2010.

“Written shorter” and “issued faster” are definitely part of the offer here, but I don’t think they’re the most significant news and, as Michael reminded me when I asked, people have been talking about shorter and faster for a long time. I share Michael’s interest in noting that the ebook will come out first and the print book will follow, which only follows the reality of what is available when! But even that isn’t the most noteworthy aspect of this announcement; as The Times’s story makes clear, publishers have issued ebooks ahead of print before.

What struck me about this initiative is that it shows the publishing power moving from the book publishers whose model is to own content to the website entrepreneurs whose model is to own eyeballs. It shows that online brands with regular around-the-clock followings can do books more efficiently and effectively than publishers with a big apparatus.

The reason that publishers have not shortened publishing schedules in general (they all know that it would be better to accelerate the recovery of the cash invested in author advances and title origination) is because of the marketing requirements that have become standard and part of the landscape. Publishers Weekly, perhaps still the single most powerful pre-publication review (but declining), wants to see galleys for a book four months before publication. Some major accounts want books presented to them as far as six months before publication. If you ask most experienced publishing marketers, I believe they would still tell you that anything less than six months’ lead time to market a book means marketing will both cost more and be less effective.

But The Daily Beast has announced that they will routinely go from a concept to an ebook in the marketplace in six months or less.

This kind of publishing is not primarily made possible by short books, or even ebooks, as much as it is because The Daily Beast has a big online audience and, in addition, serious chops at the practice of getting a story they publish going round and round on the Web. They can get the core audience aware of and talking about a book with their own proprietary engine, so if PW wants to skip reviewing the book they don’t care. And the retailers will know that there’s going to be demand for a book they’re hearing about less than six months in advance, so they’ll break their own rules and stock it on shorter notice.

Now, that is power. How much power? The Times reports (suggesting, but not explicitly saying, that this comes from Brown) that Daily Beast has 3 million unique users a month!

The financial model aspects of this are interesting. The report says that Perseus is financing the publication, signing the author and paying Daily Beast for editing and design. Then Perseus splits profits robustly enough so that their CEO, David Steinberger, can say that authors will get “meaningfully more” than traditional book contracts pay. Obviously, Perseus believes that the marketing that Daily Beast can provide is worth giving away margin for, and that surely seems sensible to me.

The takeaway from this for the industry is that owners of eyeballs are moving into the driver’s seat. The world isn’t completely upside down yet; the owner of the copyright is still paying the owner of the eyeballs for the content and, ostensibly, dictating the terms of the deal. But as more and more web brands develop this kind of audience, publishers are going to get some hard lessons about where the power really will lie as the shift continues to take hold. Remember that what Perseus is bringing to deal is a commodity: lots of other publishers can offer the same suite of capabilities. What the Daily Beast brings is unique. Dollars flow to scarcity.

The one comment worth making on the substance of this is a relatively minor one. Why not enable a print-0n-demand edition to be offered simultaneously with the ebook, at a higher price, of course, which is pulled off the market when the print book’s pressrun arrives? There’s no reason to make somebody wait to read timely information just because they haven’t switched over to ebooks yet. A bit complicated and messy for the retailers; probably have to go to a separate ISBN that isn’t returnable. I’ll bet they’ll get there; this whole idea reflects people who are making total sense and thinking about their community!


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  • Karen Cooper
    As publisher for Adams Media, where we have been actively publishing "crash" books for the past year or so, what suprised me most by the article was that a "one to three month writing schedule" was heralded as "speeding up the process." One to three months? We've completed the full publishing cycle--from idea generation to delivering a highly marketable product to stores--in a shorter time frame. Example? Go Tweet Yourself--written in 2 weeks (for far less than a "low five figure advance") and just released. As far as marketing goes, no problem securing co-op placement, author working on a tweeting campaign, and CNN just called yesterday to cover. On this end we've found that given the efficiencies of social media and online media in general, we're no longer beholden to the traditional 6 month lead time--allowing us to be far more responsive to the marketplace. This, of course, becomes exponentially more efficient with online partnerships, where we can leverage partner eyeballs--and desire for "offline" exposure vis a vis book product for mutual marketing benefit. Looking forward to launching two books with SheKnows.com (Top 10 Women's site, 3 million monthly uniques) this spring.



  • Thanks for this, Karen. You're definitely demonstrating what a publisher can
    do when it owns an online vertical audience!
    Mike
  • jondale
    "What struck me about this initiative is that it shows the publishing power moving from the book publishers whose model is to own content to the website entrepreneurs whose model is to own eyeballs."

    I couldn't agree more.

    And I think that we'll begin to see smart publishers shift their focus from the content business to the eyeball (attention) business.
  • Jon, I hope you're right. But I know this. The publishers who will have
    thriving businesses 15 years from now will have moved into the eyeballs
    business. The rest of them will be working for the ones that did.
    Mike
  • coopertj
    Mike,
    while some of the comments below note similarities between this Beast deal and the more traditional newspaper/publisher distribution deals, I think this could be another harbinger of a definite trend--that major publishers are "outsourcing" imprint editorial and development functions of subordinate brands to other media entities (Beast), people (talented editors w their own imprints), or just 3rd parties. I think the motivation for this is a biz dev one, to get more sources of revenue that can help corporate publishers leverage w scale their their "shared service" department expenses and investments.
    A player like Perseus apparently has the flexibility of being able to work with accelerated timelines more routinely than the majors, who rush a small percentage of their lists, but maintain long cycles for the remaining 90%.
  • Tim, I think you've put your finger on another aspect of this. You're right:
    outsourcing some of what the overhead usually does (developing the books) is
    part of the new reality. This is, in a way, a return to the use of
    "packagers" which was much more common in the trade 10 and 20 years ago than
    it is now.
    Mike
  • As someone who’s worked in PR and marketing for most of the big houses in NYC for over 12 years—and now with small presses for 4—I can say most of what you say is not new. Again, publishers have always looked for authors with platforms—or built-in "eyeballs" as you would describe it--whether it’s Anderson Cooper (HarperCollins) with a huge CNN audience or FOX’s Bill O’Reilly (S&S—first book in 1999) audience or an author with a huge lecture schedule who’s already out there a ton and known. Many publishers have for years aligned with media properties to publish books—Perseus has the Nation Books imprint and Holt I think still works with Times Books (as in the NYT)—and Harper has an arrangement I believe with the Smithsonian (they have a magazine, too, but of course are more known as just a huge cultural name and public brand more than a media property). Random House has a relationship going back to Sy Newhouse’s era of publishing New Yorker books. This is nothing new—it’s just smart marketing/publishing. Publishers have always wanted to work with entities that own eyeballs and have built in PR resources ---and have not been afraid to profit share to exploit these opportunities (I think Nation Books is not wholly owned by Perseus for example). What’s new is that this is the first, as far as I know, digital media outlet to partner with a publisher. And because it’s digital with a digitally-interested savvy audience, it makes sense to put books for this audience out digitally. People who know and read The Beast are probably statistically more likely to own Kindle’s or Sony Readers.

    So I pose to you that the marketing strategy is tried and true—and nothing wrong with that! The partner’s medium—and audience-- is different and therefore the product has been adapted to reflect that.

    Best wishes, Jennifer
  • Jennifer,
    You're absolutely right. What we're seeing is platform moving from print to
    digital and publishers, who always want to work with platform, seeing that
    switch and moving with it.

    There are two things that are different than busines-as-usual here. One is
    that the publisher is willing to accept a cost structure that apparently
    eats into normal margins, which is an explicit recognition of the value of
    the marketing platform. That wouldn't be unprecedented, but it is certainly
    not common. The other thing is that the publishing schedule is being
    completely changed. My experience with publishers when they work with
    platforms is that, if anything, they want to build in *more* time for
    publication because you have *two* bureaucracies that have to approve things
    rather than one.

    Mike
  • dedifelman
    Thanks for the thoughtful post. The Beast Books model is breathtakingly similar to the Magabooks model that I began to propose late last year (thanks to your and many others' input.) See www.nyrm.org under "Features" and then "Introducing the Magabook."

    I agree that traditional book publishers have fewer advantages in this model as direct-to-consumer marketing favors those entities that have cultivated direct relationships with their readers rather than those that support large sales forces that focus on concentrated retail relationships. A partnership between companies that bring both sets of relationships to the table has always struck me as the right way to go. I disagree that the Daily Beast has a unique advantage and can see many other partnerships of this type arising. I have proposed some of them myself and I'm sure we'll soon see others in play.

    Dedi
  • Dedi,
    You caught me on what was really a poor choice of words. When I said that
    Beast was unique and Perseus offering commodity, what I meant was that only
    Beast could deliver Beast's audience, but that the suite of services
    provided by Perseus could be provided by a variety of other players. I agree
    with you that there are many other players that can offer up their own
    unique audiences, and, echoing what was said by Guy (above) among others,
    some of them might offer a stronger unique proposition than Beast can offer.

    We completely agree that there will be many other deals like this to come.
    That actually was what motivated me to write the piece.

    Mike
  • dedifelman
    Ah yes, should have read the answer to Guy a bit more clearly, which does clarify. Sounds like we agree more than I thought from my initial reading of the post. I suspect my sense of which sites could generate fruitful partnerships is a bit more catholic. I don't think the possibilities lie strictly with the more vertical sites like HuffPo, TPM etc. In fact, in many ways, I feel that the more horizontal sites generate many more possibilities. And I'm not sure you can tell which site attracts book buyers from the content on the site. In fact, I might argue that the readers of genre works or bestsellers are as likely to be found on TMZ or Entertainment Weekly as they are on Daily Kos. As with all partnerships, the key is that the match up balances each partner's strengths with each partner's weaknesses, whether they be editorial, sales, marketing, tech etc. Beyond that, I think we could see a lot of interesting pairings. As always, the key will be which model finds the key to profitability, a matter on which the jury is, as you and I are painfully aware, still very much out. Here's to editors and publishers with the backing to experiment and who succeed in the marketplace!
  • If more horizontal sites work better in general, it will be a surprise to
    me.
    The experimentation will happen, partly because the experiments don't have
    to be high-risk. I suspect that Perseus has many investments going on that
    are far more risky than the advances and fees they're going to pay to do the
    Beast list.

    Mike
  • margobaldwin
    Mike, we've been doing short, fast books for the past 5 years and have managed to make 3 of them NY Times bestsellers. Also, if you remember, we used print-on-demand a part of our Obama's Challenge launch last year when we crashed the book at the Democratic convention and gave Amazon a 3 week exclusive deal via their Booksurge division, in order to fill the gap for the regular print run. For doing this we were tarred and feathered by the rest of the book retailers and B&N actually cancelled their order. Most recently we published Howard Dean's book, written in a month and released as a bound book in 5 weeks. In this case we aimed to have ebooks and an iphone app ready before the print edition but the iphone app ended up sitting in Apple review for 2 months, coming out well after the printed book (shows the pitfalls of some of these digital initiatives). I agree that certain kinds of books need to come out much faster and that the traditional lead times are increasingly dysfunctional in a fast-moving, current-events focused world. It's time that the rest of the book publishing to wake up and follow suit. Whether or not the Daily Beast platform will actually help to sell books is unclear. We published Markos Moulitsas's book (founder of DailyKos), who had an enormous blog platform, but that did not translate into enormous book sales. Online blog readers are not necessarily book buyers, as we found out.
  • Margo,
    As Cader said, faster and shorter HAS been done before and I know Chelsea
    Green has been a leader in doing it to support the timeliness of important
    publications.

    What you say about Kos's book is interesting and and certainly cautionary.
    It is hard to imagine that Beast's audience is more book-interested than
    Kos's. But, as always in our business, it does come down to the specific
    title. The first book out of the Beast box certainly looks like a must-buy
    to me personally; Kos's book wouldn't have been (even though it was
    published by one of my favorite publishers!)

    As for that early release, I'd still advocate doing the POD at Ingram rather
    than Amazon so all retailers can play, but I recall that at the time there
    were timing-of-delivery issues that dictated your choice.

    Mike
  • margobaldwin
    I agree, the specific title is key. Sometimes the issue is covered so completely online that there is little interest left over for a book about it. This seems to be true on the healthcare front, as we're finding out. And yes, next time we would do POD through both Lightning Source and Booksurge so all retailers could get the book but for the Obama book only Booksurge was able to meet the deadline.
  • The only unique thing about The Daily Beast is Tina Brown's ability to generate press. 3M uniques (a questionable figure) isn't really that notable online, for old or new media brands. According to Compete, they're a bit behind The Atlantic Monthly, half of TechCrunch, and far behind the Huffington Post, TMZ and the New York Times.(http://bit.ly/8YMWA)

    The Daily Beast has yet to profitably monetize its eyeballs via advertising, and while the deal with Perseus is a smart one, it's a pretty straightforward licensing deal with a new media spin.
  • Tina Brown certainly does sow resentment as well as publicity. Guy, you're
    not the only person I've encountered today who has expressed that sentiment
    I would imagine that HuffPo and others -- Politico, Kos, etc. -- will be
    doing deals like this soon. The Times is too horizontal to be comparable.
    And TMZ's audience wouldn't be as likely to be book buyers as Beasts's.
    Don't know as much about how TechCrunch's audience segments and how their
    writer relationships work but they might be doing something like this soon
    too. A lot of well-trafficked web sites with clear vertical identities will.

    It may be a "straightforward" licensing deal, but it doesn't seem to be a
    conventional one. Perseus is taking on all the capital risks, including
    giving the authors better than a standard royalty, and paying an override to
    Beast on top of it. So they're paying something extra. Part of that may be
    for Brown's curation and editing. Part of it may be for Brown's publicizing
    skills. But maybe some of it is for access to the X million people likely to
    read these books that they can deliver.

    There is no doubt that PR and dealmaking skills are a component of what
    happened here but Perseus is paying extra for Beast to deliver eyeballs. I
    see that as significant; you may not. And that they're willing to do it for
    books that break the conventional models of publishing timetables, which, as
    you know, would put additional stress on the production, sales, and
    marketing people who have to do the work (all Perseus people), is something
    else that is not run of the mill.

    Mike
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