Direct response

Amazon has three pretty powerful things going for them, and two are entirely their own doing.

Number one: Amazon is, by far, the most book-industry-focused company that is actually active in endeavors much larger than the book business. Barnes & Noble and Ingram are just as focused, but they really don’t go beyond the book business. Google and Apple are, like Amazon, leveraging their book activities into other areas and vice-versa, but they have nowhere near the presence in the book business that Amazon does. (Kobo, which is focused on the book business but has just been bought by a much larger Internet retailer, is still a bit of a wild card in this regard.)

Number two: Amazon executes. Their hardware and software and platforms and content delivery all work just about perfectly. It seems odd to me that, at this relatively late date in the ebook switchover, Amazon is still the only place I can shop for ebooks and see my choices arrayed by (highly granular) subject with the most recently published books on top. (Note to all competitive retailers: please let me know the minute your shopping experience can offer the same thing!)

Number three: Amazon is the runaway market leader in the only two segments of the book business that are growing — ebooks and the online purchasing of print — and they are cleverly leveraging the leadership position they have to make challenging them even more difficult in the future. Their willingness to take losses on some transactions to grow share, on Kindle devices to lock customers into their ecosystem and on eboooks when they can to emphasize they are the low-cost provider, is supported by the wide array of products, in media and far outside, on which they don’t need to sacrifice margin for competitive advantage.

Amazon’s industry focus is natural, since books is where they started (even though books are now a fraction of their business). Their history gives them the presence and the knowledge to be highly disruptive. They know how to go after authors directly (apparently even more effectively than Barnes & Noble, which has been signing up content on a proprietary basis for well over a decade and actually owns a publishing company). They use price as a weapon to sell books, disadvantage competitive retailers online and in stores, and to lock in customer loyalty for print (with their Prime program) and ebooks (with their proprietary Kindle platform).

Amazon’s execution has been a keystone of their success from the very beginning, from their invention (or at least early use) of a database for “discovery” even larger than their supply capabilities (they wanted the customer to know when a book they wanted was no longer available, so they could choose something else), promise dates for delivery that were almost always met, customer service that aggressively solved every problem, and intuitive navigation and execution that did for online retailing what Apple did with hardware and operating software. And when Amazon decided to do hardware, they might not have made anybody forget Steve Jobs, but they have apparently made his company address the Kindle Fire with a pricing response on their iPad.

But none of this would worry the rest of the publishing ecosystem — publishers, retailers, and agents — if it weren’t for the fact that everything in publishing seems to be flowing downhill toward a future where the vast majority of what people read as books is both found and purchased (and often consumed) online.

Actually, there are two more important components to Amazon’s success: their lack of involvement in the most capital-intensive elements of the legacy book business (press runs and returns as a publisher, brick stores as a retailer) and their brilliance at acquiring companies that might have provided platforms to cause them trouble. There have probably been many of those (and they are very graphically represented here) but I can immediately point to three:

* the acqusition of Mobi ten years ago took the one format that could have united the ebook market, then divided between the Palm and Microsoft formats, out of circulation before some other retailer (specifically: Barnes & Noble) could have served the entire marketplace and perhaps made ebooks accelerate many years before the Kindle;

* the acquisition of Lexcycle which gave them Stanza, an ebook platform that was extremely consumer-friendly and cross-platform, which could have constituted a threat to Kindle’s development when the Amazon format was in its infancy;

* the acquisition of The Book Depository, an global onliner retailer of print that had developed technology and logistics that would have made it a great foundation for competing with Amazon for global book sales, which was done at the very time that three major publishers on each side of the Atlantic were investing in competitive retailing enterprises (Bookish in the US and Anobii in the UK).

The Book Depository acquisition was very well timed, coming as it did just as there are signs that the British public would really prefer to buy its books online, that the French (like the rest of Europe, we’re sure) are beginning to seriously enter the digital book future, and that the Swiss are starting to worry about the decline of their brick book business.

It is natural that any player who has made the bet that brick-and-mortar bookstores have a future would be hostile to Amazon. It is becoming increasingly obvious that technology is enabling Amazon not just to persuade book customers to shop with them, but also to buy from them when they’ve shopped elsewhere.

I am entirely sympathetic with Tim O’Reilly’s admonition that we should “buy where we shop”. Note that Tim made this point almost a decade ago, when the suggestion being made by me (among others) that bookstores were seriously threatened by digital change was dismissed by most people in the industry.

But it being right doesn’t make it so.

Publishers have a valuable proposition to offer authors as long as Amazon is one of a diversified set of paths to the purchasing consumer. In today’s world, where print is still 70% of the sales of even most straight text books and most of the print is still sold in stores, an author who has the opportunity to work with a regular publisher makes real a sacrifice of market exposure to work directly with Amazon. Even if Amazon were to eschew its Kindle-only insistence on ebooks for titles it signs directly through its imprints (and we hear rumors from the deal-making world that they might on a selective basis), Amazon would still have a great challenge getting exposure for one of its titles through brick outlets. (Some research by Laura Hazard Owen documents the difficulty they’ve had with that so far.) And one important thing Amazon hasn’t learned from its experience is how to meter inventory into stores to maximize marketing exposure but keep returns manageable.

But the publishers’ advantage here has a shelf life. For online sales, individual authors are becoming persuaded that Amazon gets them more than the other outlets combined. Barry Eisler has expressed great satisfaction with his Amazon-only sales. Another author, Robert Niles, reports that Amazon far outsells all the other ebook retailers for his self-published work and thinks it is because Amazon promotes the self-published author more effectively.

When you read through this thread from Amazon’s online forum among authors discussing what happens when the retailer picks one of their books for a price promotion, you get a sense of the excitement they generate through the sales they can create with tools which are uniquely at their disposal.

What that probably means is that more and more authors will be available exclusively through Kindle, some because an Amazon imprint signed them and others because they don’t bother to put their books up on other sites for paltry sales. If that happens, Amazon’s natural advantages just grow.

Although Anobii’s founding CEO, Matteo Berlucchi, tells an imaginative and persuasive story about converting the social aspect of books into a commercial proposition (which has been the effort of independent start-up Copia for the past year), I think the challenge for them and for Bookish, the US version of a publisher-sponsored online book retailer, is steep. The problem for them is the same as B&N’s; Amazon brings resources and ammunition to this competition that stem from a much bigger base than the book business alone. They can use books as loss-leaders to sell more movies or computers or groceries. (By the way, this is exactly what brick book retailers coped with competing for bestseller business with mass merchants who could sacrifice margin on books that brought people into their store because they could make it up on other items.)

There is really only one way for publishers to compete with Amazon for authors in the future and that’s to find book customers Amazon doesn’t have, either by working through other retailers or by creating direct publisher-to-customer contact. The percentage of sales which go to Amazon is the single most important barometer of a book publishing company’s future. Of course, every publisher wants to make their Amazon sales grow. Their challenge is to make other sales grow faster.

Of course, the retailers are a critical focus for us at Digital Book World at the Sheraton in New York, January 23-25. We’ll have presentations from Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Google, Bookish, Anobii, Copia, and from some independent booksellers. We’ll have a panel of players talking about creating new markets, globally and locally. And we’ll have publishers talking about creating communities in genres and in topics, building their capabilities to talk directly to their customers without an intermediary’s help. 

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Obviously my day job, consulting, informs a lot of what goes into The Shatzkin Files. I guess it is just as obvious that I can’t quote everybody who tells me something or attribute everything I want to write about to a specific company or individual. I don’t make a living writing this blog and I wouldn’t make a living at all if people in the industry couldn’t trust me to keep their confidences.

But once in a while people inside competitive companies tell me things that they want the world of publishing to know about what they’re doing. That’s happened twice this week and, in both cases, publishers were making it very clear that they are doing things that will add real value to authors’ marketing efforts, things that no self-publishing author could do for themselves. Self-publishing authors could be wrong, but a read through the comment string of a recent post here makes it clear that they don’t much believe publishers add value in marketing.

On Monday, I was talking to Fritz Foy, the senior VP for Digital Publishing and Strategic Technology at Macmillan. My mission was to recruit speakers from Macmillan for Digital Book World. The conversation turned to the question of “collecting names” for marketing purposes. I had learned previously that Macmillan really has a company-wide effort to do that. That’s something I have advocated. I thought it was so important that I went to the unusual (for me) effort of learning some fundamentals of direct contact management and writing about them on the blog 14 months ago. But Macmillan is the only company I’m aware of that makes email address capture an objective across the company, although we see pockets of name-gathering activity in other majors.

Fritz emphasized that collecting names wasn’t the only priority. Using them, using them well, and tracking what happened when they used them were the keys. (I was reminded, as I was again by the next conversation I’ll describe, of the adage “you can’t improve what you don’t measure”.) To demonstrate, he pulled some October numbers from tor.com, which one would assume, based on the relatively longstanding tor.com effort, probably constitutes the company’s biggest single pool of email addresses.

And they had a lot of them, enough to have sent over 650,000 emails to their lists in the month of October. That’s impressive. But what’s positively stunning is that more than 30% of those emails got opened (that’s more than 200,000) and more than 20% of those clicked through: took the action that Macmillan asked them to take in the email. That’s in the neighborhood of 40,000 actions.

Now the actions were, for the most part, to get free access to more content. (Only 15% of the mailings were purely “marketing”.) They weren’t selling anything. But what Fritz was demonstrating was the growth of what I call “investment marketing”: marketing that produces a result that makes subsequent marketing efforts cheaper or more productive. These tor.com numbers are going to grow, inexorably. Another indication of how solid Macmillan’s lists are is that only 0.1% unsubscribed!

If I were an author (or agent) looking for a sci-fi publisher, it would impress me that Macmillan has lists that get a 30% open rate. It would make me feel they could do things to promote my book that another publisher without those lists couldn’t do. I don’t know what the growth rate is on those lists, but most things (sales, device penetration, self-publishing) in the digital publishing world have been more than doubling each year and these could well be too.

The key point to take on board here is that tor.com is a flagship; Macmillan is doing this across their company. They are building other verticals as well. If other publishers aren’t systematically taking names, getting email permissions, and testing what can be done with them, Macmillan will build up marketing capabilities that it will get increasingly expensive to compete against.

There is little doubt that Amazon’s author-recruitment efforts for their imprints include the promise to mail to known buyers in the author’s genre. They almost certainly can send more than 600,000 emails in a month for many books and genres. But can they get a 30% open rate and a 20% clickthrough?

And Amazon, a retailer, can’t get trapped into just pushing the books it signs up when their consumer brand, and their sales, depend on offering full range of selection of available titles across publishers’ lists. That conflict is compounded as they sign up more and more titles as proprietary. (But it will also be ameliorated if the titles they sign are higher profile than they’ve been so far.)

The day may not be far off when agents are going to be asking publishers “how many emails can you send in support of this book on publication day?” If I were in Amazon’s shoes, I’d be pushing that question. It looks like Macmillan is methodically building the ability to provide an answer.

But not everybody with a modern view of marketing agrees with me (and Macmillan) about the importance of name-gathering, which brings us to the second conversation this week.

We got a call from Open Road Integrated Media asking us to come down to their shop and learn a bit about what they’re doing. Open Road is an ebook publishing company founded by former Harper CEO Jane Friedman which has been an annoyance to the big publishers. Jane has been in the business for more than four decades in high positions at major houses (at Random House before Harper). She knows the agents and she knows how the game of signing up content works.

So she moved against the establishment by offering a standard deal of a 50% share of ebook revenues, when the major publishers are holding the line at 25%. (Open Road’s deal includes the ability to recoup one-half the digitization cost before paying what we usually call royalties but which they call “profit share”. ORIM says that comes to less than $500 per title. Open Road pays no advances.) She used her understanding of the ambiguities in legacy publishing contracts to sign up backlists from both living authors and estates, including Willam Styron, Lawrence Block, Carl Hiaasen, Alice Walker, and others.

Those have been the headlines about Open Road and that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of their proposition. Without any other knowledge of their economics — their ability to raise money, their burn rate, their sales — I was skeptical about the sustainability of their model, if it rested primarily on paying 50% for what others were paying 25% for and gathering high-quality backlist of titles not nailed down already for ebooks, which is a limited resource.

It turns out they have a lot more going for them than that. But they don’t gather names.

Open Road’s head marketer is Rachel Chou, who worked with Jane Friedman at Harper. Jane and Rachel, and former Scholastic CEO Barbara Marcus, who is an advisor to Open Road on children’s and YA acquisitions, made the point that Open Road is a marketing company. That’s what they do. And their bullpen with about a dozen people in cubicles working away is just about exclusively devoted to marketing. Except that, in their eyes, marketing and sales and author relations are all the same thing to them, and they see a workflow built around that perception as a key differentiator.

In fact, they see the consolidation of functions in their shop as a significant competitive advantage. In the ebook world, marketing and sales are so closely related that it is hard to see how to parse them. That’s partly because the promotions by ebook retailers could be the single most important marketing component (a point made emphatically by Diversion Books’ Scott Waxman at our eBooks for Everyone Else shows in New York and San Francisco), but it is also because all marketing efforts at Open Road are aimed at driving sales to the ebook retailers. (Their widgets all have buy buttons for the full range of retailer choices.)

But that’s not where the competitive advantage of their structure comes into play.

Rachel spelled that out. One of the major retailers came to them in the past few weeks with a big sales opportunity. They could place 15 Open Road titles in a major promotion that would sell a lot of books. One catch: they needed the titles cleared for the promotion within 24 hours.

Another catch that is characteristic of the ebook world: this was a price promotion that required clearing the participation of each book with its agent. That’s 15 agents. Rachel and her team of marketers, who have the agents of the Open Road ebooks on their own speed-dials, got the job done and got all 15 books into the promotion.

Moving that fast would be a non-starter in any significant publishing house. Whether the opportunity came in through sales or marketing, neither team would own the agent relationships. I believe in most houses it would be necessary to have the agent calls made by the editor who had signed the book. Certainly, the editor would have to be consulted before anybody from marketing or sales could make such a call. And that round of communication, which would include explaining the promotion opportunity to each of the affected editors, would never be attempted within a 24-hour window. Realistically, 24 days would be a challenge.

Open Road is organized differently than legacy publishers because there is so much they don’t have to do! There is very little in the way of a production department (there is a person who creates their covers and Pablo Defendini, who was a key player building Macmillan’s tor.com, is their “interactive producer”.) There is no sales department. There is no inventory management. Everybody works in a room that is dominated by a wall with a 2-month marketing calendar, listing all the events and anniversaries they might promote around. They have 75% or 80% of their company dedicated to marketing, which everybody — including all the big publishers who have expressed an opinion to me — agrees is the prime responsibility of the book publisher in the digital era.

But, even within that, Open Road is organized for efficiency and speed based on the realities of the value chain for ebooks. Their marketers are assigned books which “fit together”, so they are consistently going back to the same blogs and websites for promotion. They can develop relationships. They’re not really a “vertical” publisher (by genre or by topic) but they do have multiple titles from the same author, which helps.

To be fair, the other major publishers are reorganizing themselves constantly into more marketing-focused and less bureaucratic organizations. Just this past week, Simon & Schuster announced organizational changes which effectively shift resources from physical store sales to online marketing (which is admittedly an oversimplification.) The big companies all have great leadership and they’re well aware that they have to change. And I know for sure there are plenty of initiatives I haven’t heard about because the houses feel there’s competitive advantage to keeping them quiet. In fact, Rachel Chou told me about newsletters that are published readers at HarperCollins were getting open rates when she was there a couple of years ago that were even higher than Fritz’s tor.com numbers in October!

Open Road’s team would point to other distinctions between them and other publishers. (They not only claim to be different from the legacy print publishers, they don’t recognize any of the other ebook publishers as true competitors either.) They do extensive video interviews with every author (or a descendant in the case of a deceased author) which creates a rich library of video content. It’s a point of pride with ORIM that these are not fodder for video trailers, but give them real editorial material that can be made into solid programming, often combining video from several authors thematically into “mashups”. They distribute that video aggressively and claim they’ve now reached the point where they’re a recognized B2B brand by some digital media and bloggers who come to the Open Road website, unbidden, to pick up video. Of course, all the video is tagged so the Open Road marketers can track its placement, downloads, and any clickthroughs that result to the retailers.

And that leads us to metrics. Open Road is relentless about data and analytics. They make the point that they can test different covers or tag lines on Facebook or in other media and have answers within hours about what works best. The Open Road team believes that the big houses don’t give their marketers the kind of tools ORIM has to measure the impact of campaigns and that their competitors’ corporate structures don’t enable fast changes in the pitch or the artwork based on data.

These may not be sustainable advantages. Tools can be provided. Workflows can be changed to permit faster responses when that’s necessary. The established houses can raise their royalty rates. How fast things will change in the big houses is an open question (and the answer is different for every house), but it is undeniable that the decision-making structures that worked for print books readily accepted time lags that are a real handicap in the evolving ebook world.

Jane Friedman and her team claim that there is a marketing plan for every book for every quarter! (They admit there’s some ganging there; a bunch of different books might be part of the same Mother’s Day effort.) Whether that is scaleable and replicable when they are ten times their current size (approximately 1400 titles) is another question. But it is certainly a point of differentiation today.

Open Road doesn’t sell direct, only through intermediaries. And they eschew name and email address capture of end users, preferring to rely on the combination of the viral distribution of content and their always-developing relationships with bloggers and websites.

Both Macmillan and Open Road are doing things that no big trade house could have imagined five years ago. Macmillan is applying scale; Open Road is applying the speed and flexibility enabled by a smaller organization. But both of them are employing what I’d call “investment marketing”: doing things on behalf of their books that build their capabilities to do more on behalf of subsequent books. I think that’s the key for publishers who want to give authors and agents convincing reasons to publish with them in the future.

We’ll do a panel on “investment marketing” at Digital Book World in January. Of course, Open Road and Macmillan will be on it. So will F+W Media, a vertical publisher (investment marketing is much more natural for vertial publishers) and we expect to add one more Big Six house which is doing interesting things in this regard.

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One very lucky thing for those of us who are in the habit of predicting the future is that very few people keep score on us. We mostly keep score on ourselves. When I want to remind readers of something I said previously, I link back to it and call it forward it again.

But there is one belief I had and stated repeatedly early in the ebook era that was wildly wrong, hopelessly wrong, and then proven clearly to be wrong. I bring it up now because it belongs in this post identifying a more current error, one which hasn’t been proven yet but about which I’ve learned enough to want to walk back.

When I started reading ebooks in about 1999, there were a couple of dedicated ereaders just becoming available: the Rocket Book and the Softbook. Neither of them interested me or very many other people either. Both failed pretty quickly.

Just about simultaneously, ebooks were first being delivered to hand-held devices. I discovered the magic of putting books on my Palm Pilot, a device I had in my pocket all the time. I had started carrying a personal digital assistant in 1986; that was a Psion Organiser with a 2-, then a 4-line screen, which would not have worked for ebooks. But the Palm, which could carry a chunk not so different in extent from what I see now on my iPhone, worked fine.

The original dedicated devices came and went without much notice from anybody. Meanwhile, I continued to read on my Palm and its successors. The shopping experience at Palm Digital was terrible, the choice of titles was extremely limited, and the ebooks cost just about as much as the print books. But I shifted over, as much as I could, because I was hooked both on the utter convenience of always having books in my pocket and because I genuinely found it preferable to read on something so small and light and have book reading, for the first time, totally manageable with one hand.

When the Sony Reader arrived and didn’t do much, I wasn’t surprised. Sometime before it debuted, I wrote or said somewhere that if you carried a personal digital assistant, nobody should have to explain the value of ebooks to you. And if you didn’t carry a personal digital assistant, they might not actually have any value for you. At that point, most ebooks purchased were read on laptop and desktop computers.

That’s why I was pretty sure the Kindle wouldn’t work. Who wanted another device to carry around just to read books, I figured? What’s the advantage in that?

I neglected to think through that people do things for lots of different reasons. And I really underestimated the degree to which the book-sized page is a requirement for a lot of people, even though it might be a transitional one. Anyhow, I was really, really, really wrong. And even though I switched back from Kindle to iPhone reading the minute the vast selection available through Kindle (and now through Nook, Kobo, Google, and Apple) was available to me on the device I was always carrying, I fully accept that most people are willing to carry something around to do their reading on a regular-sized page. Lesson learned.

It is now clear to me that another concept that was an important part of my future view is in pretty desperate need of reassessment. It also appears to be being proved wrong.

It was evident pretty early that the Net facilitated the formation of communities around interests. Putting that together with my thinking about the distinction between the unit of sale and the unit of appreciation (shortcut to understanding: the former is the album and the latter is the song; the former is the cookbook and the latter is the recipe) made me think that the big online aggregation of content for sale would also ultimately be challenged. If you went to a web community to get advice about how to build a deck or plant a vegetable garden, I figured, you’d just pick up whatever were your content purchases — books or whatever else, physical or virtual — from that same site. You wouldn’t need a separate site to go buy content from.

In other words, I expected one of the ways to monetize a community would be that you could sell it stuff, particularly content.

Although I know that O’Reilly operates in a special marketplace, I saw the success they have had selling directly to their community — both their own publications and their subscription aggregation Safari — as a sign of what we could expect to develop in other verticals.

I don’t think so anymore.

The first rude awakening for me was when OpenSky changed its business model. OpenSky began with the proposition that they would facilitate just about any web site to sell just about anything. As I understood it, if you had a blog about cooking, you could arrange to sell your favorite pots and pans right off your own site. OpenSky would source the product and operate the back end. You’d just have to pick out what you wanted and decide how much margin you could demand.

Well, apparently that business model just didn’t work. They’ve switched OpenSky from a commerce platform for bloggers to a “social network for shopping” with celebrity, expert, and author curators. I’m not much of a shopper, online or offline, so I’m not one to judge how appealing it might be compared to competition. There is some evidence that the new model works and OpenSky feels like they are now taking off. But it isn’t any longer the perfect match for the vision that I had when I first saw it, and it probably didn’t work because my vision was wrong.

By extension, I had been figuring that publishers needed to sell direct as well. Big publishers had good reasons to resist that idea which I understood, but which in themselves make me question the idea. Big trade houses are highly dependent on the goodwill of Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well as other retailers, and going into competition with your key channels is risky and problematical. And my vision of the future wasn’t really built around general publishers, anyway.

This month, J.K. Rowling opened her Pottermore site, which is intended to be the exclusive vendor of Harry Potter ebooks. Now, there’s a vertical. It appears you won’t be able to get them at Amazon, B&N, or Google (although Google checkout is “the preferred third party payment platform”); if you want them, you’ll buy them from the Pottermore site (or, as some would point out, get them from a pirate source if that’s easier.) In a ‘d’uh” moment, I read this piece making it clear that this kind of fragmentation didn’t work for musicians and ultimately wouldn’t work for authors. (The book business isn’t the music business, but some lessons do carry over.)

So mark me much less bullish on publishers selling direct than I used to be. It can add value and margin to a vertical site if the costs of running the store can be tightly managed, but it is not likely to produce much in sales very quickly.

In fact, I’m quite sure that fewer Harry Potter ebooks will be sold by the Pottermore strategy than if they were just made available through the standing ebook retail network. The margins might be higher with no retailer to pay, assuming that advantage isn’t completely swallowed up by their own costs of infrastructure (and it probably won’t be.) But not everybody who buys a Harry Potter book from Amazon or B&N (or a Nora Roberts book or a Janet Evanovich book or a James Patterson book) is a devoted fan. Some of them are just choosing their next read and if Roberts or Evanovich or Patterson wasn’t shown to them, they would have bought something else on offer.

There is evidence out there to contravene this post and confirm my original thesis. Our friends at F+W Media, with whom we deliver the annual Digital Book World conference, report success building their retailing business through their communities. A senior executive there tells me they are selling “tens of millions” in content, product, and services through 25 stores attached to the community sites they have developed over the past few years. They achieve an average order value of $40 — not too shabby — and credit a combination of true community focus which builds them large and powerful databases of names, unique curation that includes offering things that aren’t available elsewhere, selling content in multiple forms (book-like, video, webcasts), delivery of “online learning”, and special bundled packages for their success.

F+W is not unique. A smaller company that is their competitor in some spaces, Interweave, also has a community focus and sells direct. Both companies have the content to build a number of different verticals to amortize the cost of a common merchandising and retailing platform.I don’t doubt F+W when they say they’re making it work, and apparently Interweave is too, but that still leaves the question of whether they, like O’Reilly, are sufficiently unusual cases that it would be very hard for other publishers to follow their lead.

I still have my fingers crossed that the Google ebooks program could spawn some unique shopping experiences that will make a difference to the ecosystem in the long run. (This is taking powerful faith at the moment because Google has only barely detectable sales in their first half-year of operation.) By offering the opportunity for curation with personality to be done by a large number of different entities (about 300 bookstores have already started with the program in the US), the Google initiative still offers the possibility of a wide variety of curation choices, or bookstore front ends.

Of course, none of these individual Google ebook stores will have the resources of the big retail players to apply technology to their merchandising. But perhaps they can provide selection and positioning that will create its own following. Whether they apply what they know and their own unique intellectual resource base (because every bookstore has one) to highly local subjects or other verticals with global appeal, they have the opportunity to create online stores that at least some people will prefer to shop. Thousands of such entrepreneurs around the globe might produce hundreds — or dozens — of survivors with large enough customer bases to create the kind of diversity in the ebook retail network that would offer publishers the kind of opportunity they need to add value for a long time. And to do it the way they always have, by managing intermediary opportunities, not by selling direct.

This is not to suggest that publishers don’t need to be building direct contact with as many consumers as they can. Just as authors should do. But forget the idea of a huge number of vertical purchase points for ebooks all over the net. I will.

Google also announced an affiliate program for Google ebooks. That will enable any web site to sell their ebooks and get paid, extending a concept that both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have employed successfully for print books. It looks to us like Google pays more. An affiliate can earn 6-10% from Google, 6% from B&N, and 4-8.5% from Amazon.

This isn’t the original OpenSky vision, however, because that was about all kinds of products, not particularly (or even necessarily including) books or ebooks. Of course sourcing could always have been done through Amazon, but there were differences in the merchandising and pricing opportunities in the original OpenSky model.

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Monday, July 4, was supposed to be a quiet day in the publishing business. It turns out it wasn’t. Three developments reported as special holiday bulletins by Publishers Lunch have strategic implications worth pondering that will have trade publishing people all over the world conferring with their friends and colleagues as soon as they shake the sand off their shoes and settle in to read the weekend email.

First of all: Amazon.com bought The Book Depository. What? You’ve never heard of The Book Depository? Well, then you’re almost certainly one of my US-based readers (about 60-70 percent of you.) The Book Depository is really the other global bookstore. They don’t do ebooks, but they’ve bult their global book business to more than $150 million. No, that’s not as big as BN.com, but they have built a sophisticated many-to-many supply chain (they don’t do it holding stock in distributed warehouses like Amazon), have been growing by something like 30-40% per year for several years, and might even make money.

They’ve even invested heavily in untangling the metadata challenges of global book sales, with a large team in the Middle East tackling the problem.

If anybody were going to mount a global challenge to Amazon as a single consolidated book (and content) distribution business worldwide, The Book Depository was the platform to do it from.

This move by Amazon reminds me of when they acquired Mobi-pocket early in the last decade. In the dawn of the ebook-on-devices era, there were two formats competing as pawns of a hardware competition. Microsoft pushed MS Reader, Palm pushed their own format. Mobi had the clever idea of being able to play on either.

So Amazon acquired Mobi. That meant that they owned the only single-file solution; any other retailer trying to serve the market would have to offer both Microsoft and Palm as a choice to reach all the devices. Palm quickly took that option off the table by insisting it would serve all its files itself. That’s when B&N went out of the ebook business, not to return in a serious way until after Kindle launched in late 2007.

It sure looks to me like The Book Depository would have been a great launch platform for Barnes & Noble to go global.

Second: Pearson, owner of Penguin, became a book and ebook retailer by the purchase of the relevant assets from the bankrupt REDGroup. It appears they will run the business, web sites under the Borders and Angus & Robertson brands, with a minimal staff.

Pearson is a big company whose interests go far beyond Penguin, but it is the trade implications of this that catch my trade-centric eye. Big trade publishers are caught between a rock and a hard place on direct selling and customer ownership. Whatever the future may hold or require, trade publishers today are highly dependent on their intermediaries’ good will. It would likely cause untold grief with Amazon and Barnes & Noble if a major US trade house set up a direct selling operation, despite the fact that niche publishers often have them as adjuncts to community or professional publishing efforts (Wiley, O’Reilly, McGraw-Hill, F+W Media, Interweave. In fact, Pearson owns half of Safari, a direct-to-reader subscription service pioneered and co-owned by O’Reilly. They also own part of CourseSmart, but they’re now selling books and ebooks direct to consumers, not just content-by-subscription to geeks and textbooks to students.)

It might be well down the list of reasons why Pearson Australia is now running online trade selling operations, but it will be interesting to see how Penguin Australia benefits from the association.

Third: J.K. Rowling and the agent that actually handled her business, Neil Blair, have left the Christopher Little Agency which formerly employed Blair and was the agent of record for Rowling. Lawsuits may ensue, but this is another lesson in what disintermediation can mean and it recalls to me something I learned long ago from a lawyer in the music business.

My mother, Eleanor Shatzkin, had a chunk of her consulting career when she designed billing systems for law firms. (This was in the days before personal computers; “data processing” back then was done on punch cards sent to job shops for print-outs to be created.) So she made friends with a lot of lawyers. One of them, a very nice man named Don Engel, left the large New York firm where he’d been a litigator and moved out to California and set up a practice in the music business.

What Don told me (this was in the early 1980s) was that he found a phenomenon out there that didn’t exist in New York because people could start a law firm with just one client, and they often did. (As he said, you can’t take a piece of the AT&T business and set up shop, but you can take one big recording artist.) That meant these firms had no broad capabilities, and if any real legal challenges arose, the little firm with the big client would need savvier outside counsel. Don built a substantial business suing record companies over royalties on behalf of artists, getting cases referred by these tiny “firms” with one star client because he developed a reputation for being an honest guy who wouldn’t poach the client in turn!

I don’t want to suggest that what Rowling and Blair are doing is likely to become a trend. In fact, the prevailing industry conditions at the moment would, I think, mitigate against it. Agencies are more likely to consolidate than to splinter because the capabilities they need to serve their clients effectively are growing with digital change. Whatever threat there is to publishers from disintermediation would require that agents do more and have greater organizational capabilities, not less.

On the other hand, new services being offered by agents that other agents could employ might allow unbundling of the direct client contact from the rest of the agency functions.

I hope you had a really restful 4th of July weekend. The second half of the year begins with plenty to think about.

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The experience of the most successful self-published author I know of, just described in his newest book, makes a powerful but unintended case that authors who want to really make money are still better off with a publisher.

I discovered the author John Locke a few months ago when I was learning a bit about the self-publishing world from Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler. I tried one of his 99 cent books and loved it. Now I’ve read four. He strikes me as a cross between the long-dead Jim Thompson and the very current Carl Hiaasen. More sophisticated readers than I have told me his plots are derivative. None of the books struck me that way, but it could well be that savvy acquiring editors would have dismissed him if had no track record of commercial appeal.

Locke has just published a new book explaining (and titled) “How I Sold One Million eBooks in Five Months”. It reveals a hard-working, tightly-focused, very sophisticated marketer with a clear plan and the discipline to follow it. Every self-publishing author should read it, of course, which is the market Locke identifies. One of his key tenets is to really understand whom a book is intended for so that the content itself and the marketing approach are always aimed at precise targets.

One of the problems Locke sees with publishers is that he thinks that they will always push to broaden the appeal of a book, which he thinks would diminish its appeal to the core niche audience that he sees as the key to successful author brand-building. I’m about to reinforce that stereotype because it is obvious to me that he really missed identifying a key target audience with his new book. Editors and marketers in publishing houses ought to read it. They have a lot to learn from John Locke’s insights and techniques.

His book will help them make better publishing decisions and marketing decisions. His book will help them make more money.

But if John Locke’s also interested in making the most money, he ought to rethink whether issuing his books at 99 cents without a publisher is really the best commercial strategy.

Let’s do the math. Locke has sold 1 million ebooks at 99 cents each. He gets 35% of the revenue, so that amounts to something less than $350,000 (credit card fees are deducted from the net). There are some production costs involved (he hires a cover designer and he gets help formatting his books), so knock off another ten or fifteen grand. That means his net for nine novels averages out to about $35,000 each. He’s getting no apparent revenue from print and he’s getting no print exposure in stores which would further stimulate online sales. At 35 cents per copy, he’s earning less than the per unit royalty he’d get from a publisher selling his books for about $2.99, the point at which the 70% payment from agency re-sellers would kick in, even if the publisher didn’t yield at all on the now-prevailing 25% royalty standard. And if his books were $9.99, he’d be getting $1.75 a copy from a publisher, or about five times what he’s getting now.

Of course, if Locke himself sold the ebooks at $2.99, he’d be taking in six times more per book, or about $2.10 a copy.

But, either way, he seems to be leaving a lot of money on the table. Without a publisher’s efforts, he’s certainly leaving a lot of marketing on the table too. And the print in stores is only the single most important part of it. Selling even a modest 10,000 hardcovers would net him in excess of $20,000 in royalties, or more than half of what he’s averaged so far from each of his ebooks.

It would be facile, and I think it would be mistaken, to attribute Locke’s success primarily to the fact that his books sell for 99 cents. In fact, Locke himself bristles at that notion. He points out in his new “how-to” book that there are a lot of authors selling for 99 cents that haven’t achieved the sales that he’s achieved. He downplays the degree to which that would be due to the appeal of his writing but instead attributes his sales to his thoughtful and systematic marketing efforts.

I agree that his thoughtful and systematic marketing efforts are more important than his 99 cent price. (That’s sort of the point to this whole post!) But there is nothing about what he’s done that couldn’t be just as well done to support a book from a publisher that is in hardback at $20 or more and is a $9.99 ebook. Would he sell as many as the 100,000 or so units he’s averaging per title that way?

Nobody knows for sure, but with the same effort on his part and the additional marketing, exposure, and accessibility he’d gain with a publisher, my own hunch would be that he’d sell more. I’ve read four of the books featuring his major character Donovan Creed and I’m nowhere near sick of him yet. I’m as cautious as anyone about generalizing from my own experience, but I know that if the next one were ten bucks instead of one, it wouldn’t deter me. I pay ten bucks or more for most of the ebooks I read, as do a lot of people.

One of the things that the ebook retailers know for sure but that publishers can only guess about is the degree to which the purchasers of 99 cent books are a market separate from the purchasers of “branded” books at $9.99 and up. Many believe, and I’m among them, that there are distinctly separate groups of buyers here and that people like me, who mix it up, are the exception. If that’s true, there would be some risk for Locke (and to an acquiring publisher) in switching him over to a model which requires that he get his success from a different pool of customers and makes it hard for his existing readership to come along.

But if the markets are distinct, there is also some great potential reward. If there are people who only choose from the cheap books, there are also people who want to choose from the professionally validated books, the ones from the major publishers. The more you believe the markets are distinct, the more opportunity there could be for Locke in using what he’s done to launch himself independently as the springboard to a career as a published author with a major player.

Amanda Hocking succeeded with an independent effort but then signed with a major house. Barry Eisler intended to leave publishers behind and do it himself, but quickly found that Amazon’s publishing program — how long before we start referring to the Big Seven? — actually suited him more than doing-it-himself. Now we do the quick math on Locke and find that it constitutes a weak argument for the economic benefits of self-publishing.

It is important to for us all to remember that we’re still in a world where most of the books are sold in print and in stores; that this is more true outside the US than it is here; and that it will remain true outside the US for quite a while longer than it will here. The challenges of the digital age for publishers are very real and the self-publishing option is much more viable than it was a decade ago, or even three years ago. But there’s still plenty of life in the legacy model. I’d be surprised if some big publishers aren’t preparing offers for Mr. Locke that he’d be obliged to consider seriously if his goal is to make the most money from his writing that he possibly can. If Amanda Hocking could get $2 million for four books, how well is John Locke really doing financially getting less than 20% of that for nine?

The most frequently persuasive argument I can think of for self-publishing is speed to market, particularly for an outsider who doesn’t even yet have an agent. Finding an agent takes time. Getting a proposal up to an agent’s professional standards takes time. Publisher consideration and contract negotiating following offers take time. All of this can often take a year or more; it is rare to accomplish it in six months. And then the publisher will need persuasion to deliver it to the market in less than six months. (This is not irrational on the publishers’ part; maximizing sales in print still requires a long runway because the planning in mass merchant outlets requires assigning specific titles to slots many months in advance. That’s a marketplace reality, not an invention of publishers.)

I think self-publishing as a path to publisher discovery may become a new standard and, if it does, the ebook operations being set up by literary agencies may ultimately be viewed in a different light.

My prediction with Locke is that he will end up getting an offer he can’t refuse from a publisher to create a new character. The Donovan Creed series and his westerns will continue to be issued for 99 cents, but something new will be done the conventional way. And, unless my hunch is way wide of the mark, for the next several years the ones done the conventional way will make Locke a lot more money.

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From the beginning of Digital Change Thinking Time, which for me goes back to the mid-1990s, “subscription” has been high on the list of future expectations. That’s natural. The subscription model has emerged as the dominant one for cable TV (although there is still some pay-per-use) and Netflix works that way as well. Lots of people subscribe to satellite radio. Rhapsody is a successful subscription service for music. Pandora for music has a free model and a paid model, as does Spotify.

Subscriptions actually have a history in trade publishing too, where they were called “book clubs”. The print book club model, which also depended heavily on the club’s role in curation (or title selection), was doomed by the arrival of online bookselling. But O’Reilly has demonstrated the common sense (and worked out the mechanics) of a subscription model for ebooks with their wildly successful Safari program for the past several years.

In the past week, Publishing Perspectives offered up a thoughtful piece by Javier Celaya speculating on a free subscription, ad-supported model for ebooks like Spotify is for the music business. PP’s editor, Ed Nawotka extended the speculation to a model of piecework sales: buying a book in chunks or chapters.

Neither of those is what I have in mind. This piece by John Konczal, building on what’s being done in the textbook business, comes closer.

We’ve reached the point where Amazon with their Kindle and B&N with their Nook are perfectly positioned to make a subscription offer. Publishers will have mixed feelings about it and the agents for the top-selling authors have good reasons to be against it, but the proposition seems (to me) to be one that will be compelling to many consumers and will offer tremendous advantages to the retailer that offers it. In fact, I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t happened already.

Here’s how I imagine it working.

The retailer creates a pool of content that will be offered through the subscription service. The proposition to the consumer will be that for a price (let’s say: $50 a month), they can read all they want from the content pool. In turn, the retailer divides 70% of that money (or 75% or 80%) among the publishers in proportion to how many “pages” (a somewhat arbitrary but internally consistent measure) of their material have been read. Of course, all available public domain content will be in the pool.

I am guessing that a very high proportion of the owners of self-published and small press books will find the proposition attractive from the beginning. How the big publishers would react is less certain. My belief is that the smart ones will try it: put in some titles, perhaps from their deep backlist, to get some visibility as to how the program would work.

Meanwhile, the consumers who do this will determine the course of events from there. It seems possible that the impact of this offer will be similar to the impact of the e-ink readers: the heaviest book consumers will see the greatest financial merit in the proposition. And just like customers for Amazon Prime (one annual fee for shipping) and Kindle or Nook owners are highly resistant to buying outside those programs, customers for this subscription service would largely be lost to other book consumption. It will take a more powerful desire to read any one particular book to make it a purchase outside the subscription than it takes to buy it now.

So that, in turn, will drive more books into the program. Authors, and therefore their agents, won’t want to be left out. The early entrants to the program will reap a relative bonanza because they’re on a shelf with less competition which will drive further expansion of the title base.

The tricky part here is setting the right price. As I was thinking about this piece, a reader pointed out a conversation on the Internet about this subject from a different perspective. Here the question was: “what would you pay to read any book anytime you want?” The bidding seemed to begin at about $100 a month. That strikes me as high, particularly since the pool of titles would certainly lack most high-profile books, at least in the beginning.

But a retailer setting the price too low could cost itself a lot of money. Lots of heavy readers spend more than $40 or $50 a month buying books now and, of course, they’d be the first ones to enter such a program (to save money). The benefit for the retailer would be that those customers would be “locked in” to the service, not buying anything elsewhere.

Of course, this idea runs totally afoul of agency pricing. The publishers who are using agency will have the hardest time even experimenting with such a subscription program. On the other hand, if the subscriber base becomes large enough, it will force some reconsideration.

There are all sorts of wrinkles one can imagine beyond this initial idea. There could be a “premium” subscription that had the higher-profile books, creating a more robust revenue pool for them. There could be “vertical” subscriptions for genres or topics. There could be a special discount for subscribers to purchase books not in the pool (except for agency books, of course, whose terms would not allow it.) And a company like Harlequin or a sci-fi imprint of a major house could create their own in-house pool that might attract subscribers. (In fact, the innovative small sci-fi publisher, Baen Books, already has a subscription service!)

But with ebook consumption now climbing rapidly toward half or more of the sales for many titles, it seems inevitable that models that won’t require a transaction for each and every book must emerge. I’d be a bit amazed if conversations about an idea like this, or something like it, aren’t taking place inside the biggest ebook retail shops already.

We created a “thinking about the future” panel for both of our upcoming Publishers Launch shows. They will entertain the subscription question, among other issues, with an eye to the special complexities of international implementation. At our eBooks Go Global show aimed at international visitors and their trading partners at BEA, the panel will feature Tracey Armstrong, the CEO of Copyright Clearance Center; publishers Ricky Cavallero of Mondadori and Cyrus Kharadi of Random House; and agent Simon Lipskar of Writers House. This panel of four incredibly sharp and thoughtful people, moderated by Ed Nawotka, the editor of Publishing Perspectives, represents a real diversity of viewpoints and will explore the practical barriers to this and other innovations across international markets.

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The fact that Publishers Launch Conferences will stage half-a-dozen or more events before our next big multi-day Digital Book World blowout next January doesn’t change the DBW calendar. Now is the time of year when we have to start thinking about what the big issues will be at the turn of the year so we can start planning the program. As we did last year, we’ll be calling a meeting of our Conference Council (the 2012 group is currently in formation) at the end of June to brainstorm the topics and our approach to covering them.

It’s my job to anticipate now where we’ll be in nine months. What aspects of digital change will be most important to us when we convene again at the New York Sheraton and have a couple dozen sessions to explore the issues? This post exposes the current state of my thinking on the subject; I am shamelessly using the opportunity to engage the very smart audience gathered here to help me refine these thoughts and point out what I may have missed. I count 15 discrete subjects here (some of which can certainly be combined) which have made my list so far. (I’ve italicized them so you can count along with me; they don’t all get their own paragraph.)

The biggest subject of all, of course, is “global.” The reality that every publisher anywhere is now able to reach any reader everywhere with no local presence, no inventory barriers, and many of the same intermediaries that deliver content to local customers is an industry-changer that will take a long time to deliver its full effects. Territorial rights allocation is only one of the many long-time conventions of publishing that will be challenged by the reality of global. It looks like the biggest publishers — those with local organizations in many countries — have the biggest challenge to adjust to the new global reality. We see this now as we’re putting together panels for our BEA and London events on the first biggest opportunity of global: the new ease of selling books in any language and of any origin to the biggest ebook market developed so far: ours in the United States.

Perhaps the second biggest subject is one we’ve discussed in this space for a long time: “vertical.” Even the most avowedly “general” of the big “general trade” houses are beginning to recognize the urgency of direct contact with individual customers. Once that becomes an objective, it quickly becomes apparent that audiences cluster around subjects or genres: verticals. We anticipate some dramatic reorganizing of the imprint, publishing, and marketing structures of the major houses as they develop their audience-centricity. There might even be enough development along those lines to warrant conversation about it at DBW 2012.

Two more categories of change will be in the “sales models” and “product models” publishers will employ, neither of which have had anything but the most minor adjustments since the mass-market paperback became a force just after World War II. We’d expect somebody big to try a subscription model, a la O’Reilly’s Safari or what we get with cable TV, for the consumer market sometime soon, maybe before next January. (In fact, a James Patterson Book Club, which is a sort-of new subscription model, was announced just today!) And the new Amazon Singles program for shorter-than-book-length content is accelerating the awareness of publishers and authors that the length requirements for printed books do not extend to digital ones.

All of this will lead inexorably to more “ebook first” imprints, divisions, and initiatives. I’d guess that by January, several (if not all) of the major houses will have “programs” offering content for sale which is too brief to be delivered as a bound book. We first reported on a program of this kind from Harlequin at BISG’s Making Information Pay conference several years ago. It was an outlier then. It’s more of a pioneer now. This week we heard that Hachette has a short fiction program in its Orbit imprint. Last week in London we talked with friends at Pan Macmillan about a short ebook program they created at the end of last year to capitalize on the many Kindles and iPads that were delivered as presents for Christmas. (Of course, we’re putting that on the program for our London conference; the coordination challenges within an established operation to pull off something like this are not trivial.)

Part and parcel of verticality is direct audience contact and retention. When we wrote a couple of posts last summer about direct marketing techniques publishers had to make part of their standard operations, we were a bit early to get the true trade publishers’ attention. By next January, every publisher’s consumer emailing list will be a component of its marketing effort. A part of this work, of course, is effective use of social media, a subject publishers keep learning more about and which we’ll certainly try to cover — in our way, which is looking for scale and replicability — in January.

Metadata is a subject that just doesn’t go away. It is disappointing to hear from industry bodies and retailers that many publishers haven’t gotten the core metadata totally under control yet. We covered the basics at Digital Book World 2011; in 2012 I hope we’ll be talking about things like rationalizing the BIC (British) and BISG (US) subject codes, which have developed separately to address each market’s idiosyncrasies but which need to be harmonized to enable the full potential of globalization.

Over the next two years, I’m expecting the most disruptive change to take place in children’s book publishing and illustrated book publishing. When the catalyst for ereading was the Amazon Kindle, as it was starting in late 2007, straight text worked but not much else did. Now that Barnes & Noble’s Color Nook and the iPad are devices of choice for millions of people, illustrated material and rich color can be delivered as well as text. In the children’s book area, there have been a slew of new entrants, probably led by big publishing veteran Rick Richter’s Ruckus Media. The illustrated book business hasn’t really surfaced in a big way yet, but it almost certainly will by next January’s Digital Book World. I’d expect it to be a major topic of conversation since illustrated books are far more complex to “convert” and present the opportunity to enhance in ways that may soon become requirements.

The recent news from O’Reilly that they are using Ingram’s services to be able to deliver printed books without holding stock signals another new topic that will be of widespread interest: building a virtual inventory infrastructure. This topic also came up in a discussion at London Book Fair with Sara Lloyd and James Long of Pan Macmillan, one company we’ve found that is very consciously preparing for a 50% ebook world. Decentralizing their print production to reduce inventory and manufacture closer to the point of delivery is very much on their radar screen. (In fact, the whole question of how publishers have to adjust their organizations and overheads to cope with a 50% or more digital book marketplace is one we’re featuring at our Publishers Launch show in London.)

As I write this, it has been nearly a month since we’ve had a lot of conversation about authors doing their own publishing, but we got very familiar with the names Amanda Hocking, John Locke, and Barry Eisler in recent weeks because they’re doing just that. That trend can do nothing but accelerate between now and next January.

This is requiring agents to reconsider their own business models. We’re at the dawn of an era where agents will be publishers themselves and business advisors, not wholly dependent for their revenue on their ability to get advances and royalties from publishers. The first Digital Book World conference in 2010 was the first digital publishing conference to feature agents prominently in the conversation and we talked then about how business models might change. This January I expect we’ll be able to stage some conversation about how new models are working out for those who have tried them. (One of the agents we’ve put on the program at DBW is Scott Waxman, and his Diversion division doing ebooks has 20 books in the market and 10 more about to hit.)

And the last two subjects that we almost certainly should be discussing at DBW 2012 are the still-critical but diminishing segments of a publisher’s marketplace for printed books: brick-and-mortar retail locations, particularly bookstores and mass-merchants and the place so many people have discovered and acquired their reading material, the public library.

The decline of bookstores has been duly noted in The Shatzkin Files and, of course, the bankruptcy of Borders has everybody’s attention. Less well-publicized has been the decline of book sales in the mass merchants. (Tactics for arresting that slide will be the topic of a presentation by Tara Catogge of Charles Levy at BISG’s Making Information Pay conference, another one we get our hands dirty on, taking place on May 5.) As the brick channel for printed books continues its inevitable decline into insignificance, the state of play and the tactics to adjust to the loss of sales and, perhaps more important, merchandising exposure, will be a topic we’ll discuss again, as we did with independent bookstores and heads of sales departments last January.

And how to deal with libraries in the ebook world is a question vexing many publishers. Two of the Big Six just don’t sell them ebooks at all; one company has tried a number-of-loans limitation. We are intrigued by a solution pioneered by Bloomsbury in the UK — a “shelf” of books the library licenses a year at a time for online reading only. We aren’t covering it in our London show because we think most of the UK market is familiar with it but we’ll be putting it on the agenda for Digital Book World next January.

Next week I’ll give you a preview of the first two Publishers Launch Conferences programs: for international visitors to BEA and the Americans who work with them (on May 25) and, with the Publishers Association, our program for UK publishers (on June 21.)

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It was just about two years ago that I appeared on a panel at a meeting of agents with, among others, Macmillan CEO John Sargent and Sargent made the point that maintaining ebook pricing and margins was one of the critical challenges facing publishers. Ebook sales were still hovering around one percent of the business. Or maybe two. Nowhere near five. Sargent was prescient.

It was about six months ago that I did a couple of posts on direct marketing techniques. I engaged a publishing friend named Neal Goff, whose background is mostly outside of trade books, to help me with those. I had him walk me through some fundamentals because I didn’t know them and, I feared, neither did the trade houses that were now — because of agency — required to set prices on their own books without the requisite expertise.

It was only last week that Random House announced it was shifting to agency pricing and I said I hoped they would be more ambitious about experimentation with price than their competitors in the arena had been.

All of these thoughts came together for me when I read this post on CNET that has two real wake-up calls in it for the big publishers.

One they are increasingly aware of: very cheap ebooks are selling very well and, with at least two major bestseller lists (The New York Times and USA Today) now counting ebook sales in units for their rankings, there is a real threat that the established business at established price points could be chased from the biggest market-maker there is. (It is important to note that the Times and USA Today methodologies are still a bit opaque and it is not clear how lower-price books are weighted. Some clear successes in the low-price realm haven’t shown up yet.)

The other point is more subtle. Individuals and little publishers are fiddling with price in ways to maximize bestseller positioning and revenues. The rules are complicated. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have programs that reward pricing above $2.99 by paying higher royalties. But it would certainly appear that there are many consumers who are limiting their shopping for ebooks to those that cost 99 cents or below. So some authors have learned that cutting their price increases unit sales to put them on a bestseller list, then raising their price results in more revenue. Apparently one very useful strategy for revenue maximization is to shuttle between prices.

The point that “cutting price boosts sales” isn’t exactly surprising, and it also isn’t exactly news. J.A. Konrath, perhaps the first established author to really start raking in shekels self-publishing through Amazon, has been experimenting with pricing and proving this point for a long time. Konrath’s data was charted for clarity by blogger Dave Slusher a few months ago. Konrath’s work and Slusher’s analysis of it further emphasizes the central point Neal Goff made to us. Experimentation matters. (Neal called it “testing.”)

Another author has demonstrated that cutting price is important, and promoting lower prices is also important.

Although I have heard one major publishing CEO suggest that the house is doing some fiddling with pricing, there was no suggestion there of controlled and monitored experimentation. And I believe it is safe to say, without doing any research, that no major publisher is doing that on a consistent and persistent basis, let alone algorithmically-programmed price management such as the major ebook retailers almost certainly do.

There is another hugely ironic point buried in the CNET story. It is built around the work of an author named Christopher Smith, who has mastered the shuttle-pricing technique. Turns out Smith has a new fan named Stephen King. King, of course, has not only published successfully with major houses for decades, he was one of the first great ebook experimenters around the turn of the century when he tried to do author-direct publishing of ebooks before there was a market. King’s blurb for Smith has been very helpful to the lesser-known, lower-priced author.

Might Smith return the favor for King by teaching him the revenue-maximization techniques he’s developed so King can get back into the self-publishing experimentation game? I think that possibility encapsulates the major publishers’ biggest nightmare. Publishers are going to have a devil of a time defending their 25% royalty rate into the future, which just feels intuitively unfair to authors. They can get away with it for the time being because print sales still matter. But they won’t for long and if publishers don’t use their scale to do a better job managing dynamic pricing to extract the maximum revenue from ebook sales than an author might do on his or her own, the challenge of retaining their top talent will become even more difficult.

There is a reasonable suggestion that publishers should be making in a hurry about bestseller lists in the ebook era. In print, books are separated by format (hardcover, trade paperback, mass-market) by The Times and identified by format by USA Today  so that apples-to-apples comparisons are possible for consumers. It is really a stacked deck to rank on unit sales alone any book at 99 cents and Ken Follett’s bestseller “Fall of Giants”  at $19.99. Format in print creates a reasonable proxy for price. I think price-tiered bestseller lists would be a stretch, but going to the movie studio “box office” concept would not. Publishers, while they still have clout as advertisers in media that promote bestseller lists, should suggest a “units times price” ranking as one that provides a more useful comparison for many consumers.

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Now the Big Six are all selling ebooks on the agency model. Random House has joined their five competitors.

It is almost a year since Apple launched the iPad, opened the iBookstore, and delivered big publishers an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the ebook marketplace, at least for their books and at least for a while. As readers of this blog almost certainly know, five of the top publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) used the opportunity presented by Apple’s arrival on the scene to implement the change to agency for all their customers. Random House, for reasons that made sense to me at the time and almost certainly delivered some competitive advantages to them over the past year, judging by the open annoyance of many of their similar-sized competitors, stayed with the original wholesale model.

The competitive advantaged stemmed from the fact that all the agency publishers “forced” a 30% selling margin in to the ebook retail channel whereas Random House may actually have drawn margin out of the retail channel.

Here’s what I get out of this change.

1. Agency has been successful in cracking Amazon’s hegemony over the ebook market. A year ago, it seemed possible that Amazon could have an enduring 75% or 80% of the ebook market. While they’re still the biggest piece, and almost certainly have more twice as big a chunk as anybody else, agency has enabled real competition to develop from the iBookstore, B&N’s Nook, Kobo, and Google. And the independents served by Google, Ingram, and Overdrive all over the world offer a lot of potential marketing leverage, if they’re not driven out of the game by price competition. Amazon is still the behemoth, but they’re no longer the only game in town. Agency delivered competitive advantage to Random House, but also to Amazon. If they had continued to be 80% of the market, you might not be seeing this switch.

2. Google may not (yet) be selling a lot of ebooks (as in having a big market share), but they are opening the business up to more and more independents. Independents talk to sales reps, and Random House has more sales reps than anybody else. I would imagine the company began to feel some discomfort about the feedback they were getting from the retail network they very much want to keep alive.

3. So far, none of the major publishers has taken the step of aggressively selling ebooks direct to consumers online. But they’re ultimately going to have to. You may recall that Random House’s CEO, Markus Dohle, told me last summer that he realized publishers needed to become B2C. He wasn’t suggesting he’d sell books direct-to-consumers then; in fact he insisted that there were other ways to manifest that vision other than selling direct. But, if it ever enters your mind to sell direct and you think about it for fifteen minutes, you realize that you either have to do it under agency terms or face complicated and very troubling conversations with your retailers.

And here’s what I’m watching for.

So far, as near as I can tell, there has been very little use made by the big publishers of their ability to manage prices in the market. I am not aware of much experimentation. I am not aware of any direct-marketing or dynamic pricing expertise (both of which would be relevant) being brought on board by major houses to help them realize the potential of the opportunities. And I can only think of one senior executive I know who takes much of a personal interest in pricing dynamics.

Maybe Random House will be different. They’ve been the traditional industry leader in operations and analytics. They do vendor-managed inventory for retail accounts; I’m not aware of any other major publisher who does. They’ve done sophisticated supply chain management for years.

Now they’ve had the advantage of seeing what their competitors have done, and not done, over the first year of agency pricing. It will be worth watching to see whether they approach the pricing opportunity more energetically than the other publishers seem to have done so far.

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My generation of publishers is distinguished by a few that really understand the opportunities and value to the enterprise of selling backlist and creating evergreens. Peter Workman is the master of this. Quite aside from the intrinsic quality and appeal of much of what he publishes — which is considerable — he has always pushed books based on their markets and the opportunities, not based on the date they were first issued. Charlie Nurnberg was the same way at Sterling. He has often reminded me that “every book is new to the person who hasn’t heard of it yet.”

Peter and Charlie, and other publishers and sales executives who also stressed the backlist, learned that in the physical world it became a game of managing inertia. The first challenge, with chains or independents, is to get a quantity in the store that will sell. The second challenge is to get it reordered when it sells. That requires fighting inertia because most books don’t get ordered for most stores and most books that are stocked only get an initial order and no re-order.

But after a while, you can get inertia on your side. If the book is seen to have “backlisted” (think Workman’s “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” or a perennial Charlie built called “Gemstones of the World”), it becomes one of the books that is put on auto-pilot with computers, and then it will get re-ordered as long as its performance passes a periodic review which is usually not frequent.

Most publishers “learn” (institutionally) that it isn’t worth promoting backlist. To begin with, most publishers aren’t staffed to do it: the head counts and working processes of publicity and marketing departments are built around the requirements of “launching” books, not “piloting” them. And there’s logic to this. Marketing should always be dedicated to books which are available for purchase. Up until 15 years ago, a book not in stores was not nearly as available as the ones which were. And up until very recently, the non-store sales for most titles was growing to significance, but actually growing pretty slowly.

The fact that the availability differential between new titles and backlist is sharply reduced and shrinking fast is a very significant change. When I came into the business, it was a sign of knowledge and savvy that you didn’t spend money promoting a book that wasn’t in the stores. That meant “don’t promote too soon before publication.”

And it also meant that any promotional opportunity for a backlist book was only seen to have value if you had the lead time to push books out before the promotional event occurred. This fundamental of publishing has been painstakingly explained to authors for years, usually triggered when they call their publisher to tell them they have a major newsbreak occurring the day after tomorrow.

This piece of wisdom becomes less important every day. Soon it will be anachronistic sophistication for those of us who are saddled with it.

Publishers, agents, and authors are all seeing bumps in backlist sales because of newly created ebook availability. It would be my hunch that, sure as there is such a thing as word-of-mouth, the ebook backlist sales will spark a pop in print sales for the very same titles. Alert publishers and the retailers that have stores and also have insight into ebook sales (you know who you are) will probably find ebook sales and online print sales good leading indicators of what should be brought back into stock in the stores as well.

Remember those ebook catalogs I suggested might be a good idea? Why not start by putting one with an entry for every title by an author into every ebook by that author? That’s a pretty obvious opportunity. I’ll make my last publishing prediction of 2010: anybody not doing this by the end of 2011 will be seen as “behind.” (It might be that any agent not already suggesting this, if not insisting on it, is behind now.)

Every ebook sold offers a publisher and an author a significant opportunity for engagement with a real human being who will, almost certainly, buy another ebook in the future. The Peter Workmans and Charlie Nurnbergs of 21st century publishing will build their success on that fact. How well that opportunity is exploited is a future success trait that should hit many consciousnesses soon. (That’s why we tried to stress the importance of direct-response marketing knowledge in two posts some months ago.) As people wake up to these opportunities, how they’re pursued is likely to become the focus of some extensive discussion along the value chain (between publishers and retailers, between publishers and authors, and among publishers).

PS. The first time I met Charlie Nurnberg was in about 1974 at the suggestion of my father. (Len said: he’s a smart guy; you ought to talk to him.) That day Charlie explained to me about granting permissions for excerpts. You do it, he said, and you require a credit line that reads “from Title X by Author Y, published by His Publisher, Address, book price plus $1.25 postage and handling”. That’s how he always did it and money just rolled in. Sometimes the credit line was appearing in Readers Digest with 20 million or more readers. Charlie worked for a small publisher called Frederick Fell at the time.  (They had one huge author, but that’s another story.) With a standard device, he turned regular engagements into revenue streams. There’s a thought worth preserving in that.

I write this in my home aerie, 17 floors above snow-covered 2nd Avenue, within 10 minutes by foot or subway from just about all of American trade publishing. Like everybody else, most of my information exchanges are online, but the intense proximity of literally ALL of consumer publishing’s editorial, marketing, and business decision-making is, at the very least, an extraordinary daily convenience. (Last week Connie Sayre and I saw seven major company CEOs for 30-to-60 minute meetings in between lots of other work. Try that in any other industry and any other town.) It is a frequent source of joy. And it is an indispensable component of whatever knowledge feeds my consulting practice and this blog. One question that it is fair to ask is whether, in a wired world where we SKYPE today and will have conversations tomorrow with a hologram apparently sitting in the next chair, does Manhattan still matter? I believe that it still does and that it still will but I will admit to being as sentimental about the dense and quick-paced Manhattan gestalt as some people are about the smell of the paper and the smell of the glue. (And I’m well aware of how sentimentality can cloud their thinking!)

And on that flight of fancy, I wish everybody a Happy New Year and a healthy and prosperous 2011.

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