Publishing History

As a result of spending my college days at UCLA, I had a handful of contacts in the Hollywood community when I came back East to live in 1969. When I started becoming familiar with New York publishing in the 1970s, I found myself, on occasion, shopping movie or TV tie-in projects. Armed with a script and a release plan, one could make the rounds of editors at the mass-market houses that had been assigned specific responsibility for this kind of acquisition.

At the time I was doing this kind of thing 30 or 35 years ago and more, the book business was growing wary of tie-ins to TV movies. They didn’t have the same promotional life as theatrical releases, even in those days when about one-third of the country was watching any network broadcast. Films that ran in movie theaters were definitely preferred as desirable book properties.

In the decades since then, the link between Hollywood and New York publishing has not exactly been severed, but it certainly hasn’t strengthened. One agent I spoke to told me that interest from Hollywood can definitely help raise the profile of a book project being peddled in New York, but the same agent agreed that the tie-in sale, where a script is novelized to just take advantage of the exposure the title and story will get through the movie, is all but dead.

Another agent, one with strong Hollywood connections through his office, had a slightly different point of view. He says it is still “humbling” to see how much being tied to a movie or TV show (“or even radio”) can “move the needle” on a book sale.

To the extent that the agent who believes in the power of Hollywood exposure to move books is right, the relative reduction in interest by New York publishers only increases the opportunity for Hollywood entities who exploit publishing through ebooks (and judicious and selective use of print) on their own.

(I recall two specific deals from my past relevant to this post. In around 1977 or 1978 I sold the book tie-in rights to a TV movie called “Cotton Candy”, which was produced by Ron Howard. In 1985, I sold the rights to two books to tie into the third “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie: one was a novelization of the first three films and the other a heavily-illustrated “making of…” book. I’d say the “Cotton Candy” deal today couldn’t possibly happen and “Nightmare”, which went to a major publisher, would be a real long shot.)

New York’s interest in Hollywood-originated content was, of course, centered on big properties. Hollywood’s enthusiasm about getting a book deal was often not very great. It didn’t add a ton of revenue (big publishing money for a big movie was small money to the movie producer) and the “promotion” done by publishers was trivial compared to what the movie studios did for the film.

In fact, there were often rights issues that got in the way. Even if the screenwriter had conceded the tie-in rights to sell the script, the studio might still be required to get clearances on the novelization, which would be a nuisance for a book project that often had annoyingly tight deadlines and not much benefit. If the screenwriter had held the tie-in rights and was the one selling to the publisher, it could become a bureaucratic nightmare to get art and logos from the film, which would be controlled by the studio, to promote the book.

New York’s incentives were often too limited to interest Hollywood. Hollywood’s unpredictability on things as basic as release dates, as well as the diminishing likelihood over time that any particular movie property would enjoy enough theatrical success to give real legs to the tie-in book, made systematic efforts unproductive for publishers. There haven’t been dedicated tie-in editors for decades.

But digital publishing changes many things. The relationship between Hollywood and the book business, because of the changes brought on by ebooks, will almost certainly be one of them.

In the digital age, what it takes to succeed as a publisher are access to commercial properties to publish and an ability to let an audience know an ebook of interest to them is available. Those are the core requirements. Everything else can be put together from services, and they can be put together one project at a time (although most people in Hollywood aren’t really aware of that yet.)

A Big Six CEO told me last week that the two core skills and competencies that publishers require are “editorial”, picking the books and developing them, and “marketing”, letting the interested public know the book is there. This CEO would be happy to outsource just about everything else. Starting where this executive wants to end up — with commercial properties in hand and an ability to tell an audience about them but with no overhead or organization to support — is essentially where Hollywood entities get the chance to begin.

Things have changed in Hollywood too. Digital tools make it cheaper and easier to make a movie, just like it is now cheaper and easier to make a book. But, just like book publishers, producers of Hollywood content find the growth in competition mushrooming. The corrolary to the fact that making movies can be cheaper is that promoting them is that much harder and, much more than decades ago, every revenue stream counts, even pretty small ones.

The change in both industries means that Hollywood has enormous opportunities through the digital publishing world, as soon as they figure it out (which we plan to help them do).

There are some early signs that this is beginning to happen.

The most ambitious project we’ve become aware of so far comes from Warner Brothers Digital Distribution. They’ve announced their Inside the Script series that will issue 300 classic scripts (think “Casablanca”) as ebooks, starting with a release of four titles. Doing an entire program enables them to take a templated approach to creating the ebooks, which will cut their costs of making really good products. Whether classic scripts will sell robustly is an open question, of course. But the cost of the experiment is low in a Hollywood context, and they gain the additional benefit that their classic films get a shot of recognition and reader-adrenalin which can only increase Netflix views and DVD sales.

NBC has established NBC Publishing to begin to exploit this opportunity. Michael Fabiano, the NBC VP who is the General Manager of this operation, says that “In general, text will come from titles already published, direct relationships with authors and, in some cases, from the staff of NBC News. We will also utilize a network of professionals as needed.” They make it clear that NBC will continue to work with established publishers. (Left unsaid, but I’d assume: they’ll work with established publishers for projects that have a big print component or where they can get substantial advances.)

ABC has a venture called ABC Video Books. This is being done in conjunction with the publisher they own, Hyperion. They position the initiative as “a new storytelling experience, enhanced with ABC video.”

Thinking about this has led me to believe that every network, every studio, every producer, every agent, and every screenwriter in Hollywood needs to have a digital publishing strategy. If fledgling novelists with no Hollywood presence can blog and tweet their way to commercial success, and some do, certainly a Hollywood-developed story would have an even better chance. Novelizing a screenplay (which is just one of a number of ways to do a Hollywood tie-in as an ebook) isn’t a trivial job, but it isn’t a massive one either. And publication as an ebook can be done for less than the cost of a few lunches. Even cheap lunches.

Broadly speaking, there are two categories of opportunity here. One is for legacy brands: all the stories (like “Casablanca”) that have been made famous over a century of film-making. Publishing scripts or novelizations are the simplest things that can be done. Why not publish all the Seinfeld or All in the Family scripts as ebooks? How would they sell? We don’t know, but the cost to find out is low and the availability of the book constitutes additional promotion, even of a long-established film or TV show.

The other category of opportunity is to build interest in a developing property. This will work better for projects that are about something substantial: a historical event or person or an issue (divorce, alcoholism, etc.) that people would search under looking for reading matter. If you’ve written a screenplay about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and you’re trying to develop interest, you could do worse than publish the script or a novelization as an ebook. People searching their favorite ebook retailer for Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig will find it (and this happens every day) and some will buy it. You can develop fans and a following. You can get revenue.

Of course, you can also get more creative. Characters can “write books” (an approach that has already been tried.)  And successfully.

Discussing these ideas with players in Hollywood today, I have learned that there is a growing awareness of the ease of ebook publication with another motivation as the catalyst. It is apparently easier for the owner of a screenplay to keep ebook rights out of their movie deal if they’ve already published the ebook. There would seem to be very little risk in that strategy. As we’ve seen, movie studios don’t much care about book tie-ins so they’re not likely to walk away from a deal because these rights have already been exploited. And book publishers are increasingly aware of self-published ebooks as a farm system. No book publisher would decline to buy rights to a book becoming a movie because an ebook had already been issued. (The owner would almost certainly have to pull the self-published ebook off sale, but that would be painless if a publishing deal made it worth it. That precise strategy has been executed by indie publishing star Amanda Hocking and her new full-service publisher, St. Martin’s.)

The first step for networks and channels and producers in Hollywood is to learn how to utilize their new revenue and marketing tool: ebooks. We’re going to jumpstart that effort with a Publishers Launch Conference at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel on Monday, October 22 called “FILM/TV-TO-BOOK: How Digital Publishing Creates New Revenue and Marketing Opportunities for Hollywood”. We’ll be co-located withF+W Media’s Story World Conference. We think this could be the start of a long-running conversation.

Publishers Launch Hollywood will emphasize what the Tinseltown players can do on their own, which is the big opportunity presented by digital change. But we’ll also present players from the publishing world: both new entrants from the “ebook first” world and established players. None of them want to do every pr0ject Hollywood should do, but when they want to be involved, they’re still almost always the best path to the biggest market.

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This post contains a batch of observations from this year’s London Book Fair. Some of it recalled an experience from about 20 years ago. We’ll begin there.

In the early 1990s, Microsoft was on a mission to get computer hardware manufacturers to install CD-Rom drives in new machines. Microsoft had a very simple motivation. Software then was sold as hard goods. One CD-Rom could hold the data that required many, many diskettes. So if the storage and transfer medium were changed, the cost of goods for Microsoft would drop sharply. Since the value customers were buying was the code, not the package, Microsoft figured (correctly) that they’d be able to keep the price of software the same and simply make more profit if their customers could handle the CD-Roms. (Please note this logic applies very nicely to any discussion of what ebooks should cost in relation to print.)

But, of course, most people don’t load that much software, so the CD-Rom argument would be strengthened if content were also available on them. That inspired Microsoft to stage a half-day conference to “educate” the trade publishing community about the “opportunity.” (Of course, areas of technical and professional publishing, which had opportunities in delivering very large amounts of data, had already started to move in that direction; the value of CD-Roms was real and obvious to them. They also had vertical audiences of professionals that were perfectly able to hook up a CD-Rom drive to their existing machines, and did.)

At the conference, Microsoft basically showed all the “cool” things the computer could do: delivering sound and images (not video so much in those days) and hyperlinks. They basically said, “we don’t know how you’re going to make money on this; you’re the content experts. But we’re giving you this great new canvas to create on. Create!!!”

The excitement Microsoft and others were able to generate led to a burst of activity by publishers to create CD-Roms. Very few people found this new packaging of content particularly appealing at any price, and they actually were listed at very high prices. In other words, the techies had no clue about the content business and their advice to it was self-serving.
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Last Monday in London, Susan Danziger of Publishing Point hosted The Great Debate. The proposition being debated was that the new tech companies would ultimately deliver a “knockout blow” to the conventional publishing establishment. Michael Healy of Copyright Clearance Center moderated.

Speaking for the new tech companies were two stunningly successful new technology entrepreneurs: Bob Young of Lulu and Allen Lau of Wattpad, both of which take anybody’s content and put it into circulation. Lulu’s core mission is seamlessly turning content into printed books and Wattpad’s is about organizing it for crowd-sourced consumption and discussion.

Opposing them were two publishing veterans (and, I’m happy to reveal, good friends): Evan Schnittman and Fionnuala Duggan. Schnittman is about to move from a global sales and marketing position at Bloomsbury to become Hachette Book Group USA’s head of sales, marketing, and digital. Duggan came from the music business, spent several years heading up digital at Random House UK, and is now Managing Director for International Course Smart, the digital platform created by a consortium of college textbook companies.

There is no ambiguity about what happened in this “debate”. The format required each of the approximately 250 attendees to register their opinions as to which side they favored on the way in and then again after the speakers had presented. The “establishment” side — the Schittman and Duggan side — picked up about 100 votes with their arguments from where the audience was when it came in. The incoming audience favored the proposition that the knockout blow was coming by a wide margin. After the debate, the margin was as wide in the opposite direction. (Some were undecided; so don’t drive yourself nuts trying to work out the math.) It is hard to imagine a more decisive outcome.

Of course, Duggan and Schnittman know quite a bit about technology. But neither Young nor Lau seemed to know anything about the content business. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Both of them have gotten rich in businesses that are ostensibly content businesses, but they aren’t. Their financial success is not dependent on the quality of content, the skill in developing or marketing it, or its inherent appeal. In fact, Lau kept touting the volume of what he hosted and claiming that technology would handle the curation perfectly adequately in the future. This was “proof by assertion.” It was the ultimate declaration of faith. The audience didn’t buy it.
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On the day before, Schnittman had hosted the Digital Minds conference. One of the keynote speakers was an old friend of his, Andrew Steele, who is the creative director of the very successful web site, Funny or Die. Steele told us the story of that business, which is instructive.

The original concept of Funny or Die was to crowd-source user-generated content, like YouTube. They’d build up traffic and monetize it. But there was a problem. Most of the amateur stuff they got just wasn’t funny. As Steele points out, we go to YouTube when somebody sends us a link for something good. We don’t go to YouTube and browse all the amateur content. There’s a reason for that. Most of it is crap. And most of what Funny or Die was getting from the crowd was crap. They weren’t getting page views. They weren’t going to succeed.

So they tried something new. (That’s called pivoting, for those of you who don’t spend enough time talking to the tech-and-finance community.) They got professionals to create content. Things changed quickly. By allowing their professionally-produced content to go off the site while it maintained the “Funny or Die” branding, they soon built a large audience. It now keeps growing and growing. Success is assured. But the lesson Steele emphasized was that professionally-created and -curated content succeeds where amateurs fail. He sees no reason why it should be any different in our world.
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I got a chance to visit with Charlie Redmayne of Pottermore. He was a bit bleary-eyed at the Digital Minds event on Sunday because the site had opened to the public that weekend. When I saw him on the show floor during the week he had just benefited from a full seven hours of zzzs, and he was enjoying his status as a game-changer.

The key to Charlie’s disruption was his willingness to substitute watermarking for DRM. He said it definitely made him nervous to do it, but he couldn’t see any other way to achieve what he wanted for Pottermore. He had to be able to sell to any device; he wanted to be able to allow any purchaser complete interoperability. There was no way to do that and maintain DRM.

His technical infrastructure is awesome. It stood up even though the average length of engagement by each user was three or four times what they had projected and the traffic exceeded expectations as well. But the most startling early news was what he reported about piracy.

Apparently, Potter ebook files started showing up on file-sharing sites pretty much right away after they opened. But before they could serve any takedown notices, Charlie says the community of sharers reacted. They said “C’mon now. Here we have a publisher doing what we’ve been asking for: delivering content DRM-free, across devices, at a reasonable price. And, by the way, don’t you know your file up there on the sharing site is watermarked? They know who you are!” And then the pirated content started being taken down by the community, before Pottermore could react. And very quickly, there were fewer pirated copies out there than before.
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I heard a rumor from a very reliable source that two of the Big Six are considering going to DRM-free very soon. The rumor is from the UK side, but it is hard to see a global company doing this in a market silo. Another industry listener I know was hearing similar rumors from different sources.

Could we see another crack in this wall sometime soon, maybe this year?

This is one lecture the techies have been delivering to the content folks that might have been on the money. I’ve always been skeptical that DRM prevents piracy, but I’ll admit that I was more concerned in the past than I am now that it would cost sales.
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At the Digital Minds conference, there was a panel on children’s content publishing. Sara Lloyd, head of digital for Pan Macmillan, moderated a group that included Belinda Rasmussen from her own company, Eric Huang from Penguin, Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner Entertainment, and Kate Wilson of Nosy Crow, which is a new children’s “book publisher” that seems much more focused on apps.

I have trouble seeing a future for book publishers in the kids’ content world. Everybody seemed to agree about what the apps of the future required (interactivity, game elements, animation) and that the parents of five years from now will be much more likely to hand their kids in the back seat an iPad than a book. So I asked them, as books diminish, what will publishers have to offer here? Wouldn’t this business belong to people who know gaming and animation, not books?

Kate seized the question from the stage and answered in a way that seemed to confirm my conjecture. “We don’t hire people with book experience,” she said. When I checked in with her later, she agreed that books were a revenue-generating convenience to get her company started. She sees the day when they won’t be part of her business anymore. What excited her (and well it should) was that they’d just made their fifth app and had created all the software tools they needed to build it while making the first four. The cost of creating their apps is plummeting because they’ve built the toolkit.

———————-

The news about the DoJ’s charges against five publishers and Apple and their settlement with three publishers broke just before LBF. It was a topic of much discussion, of course. Most people in the industry are horrified by the lawsuit and the settlement and there is really widespread fear about the consequences of ending the agency model. (The settlement doesn’t do that, but having three big publishers pushed to allow discounting for the next two years at least certainly cripples it.)

On Publishers Lunch, Michael Cader rounded up an impressive set of links to media around the country who are just as horrified as publishers, retailers, and agents at LBF were. Here are the stories from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal (behind a pay wall, unfortunately), Slate, and the Los Angeles Times.

We understand that an amendment to the Tunney Act obliges the DoJ to take note and report to the court any opinions expressed in writing by the citizenry about a settlement that takes place in a case still being litigated. Cader notes that the law has usually been used to expand a judge’s ability to exercise oversight when the court believes DoJ hasn’t been tough enough. In this case, we’ll be asking them to pare back a settlement, which is apparently a less common use of the law. But the law allows us 60 days from the settlement to get those letters in and it is what we in the community can do to help fight this battle.

As I wrote in my summary of the impact of this settlement, it is one where Amazon and the cost-conscious ebook consumer win, but everybody else (and that means authors, publishers, retailers, and the public that wants good books, as I explained on NPR) lose. The low-price side of this is easy to understand. The publishing business side isn’t. (If this were a GOP DoJ, I’ll admit that I would have inserted a snide remark here about what this shows about their IQ.)

One point to note here, which didn’t occur to me at first, is that the three settling publishers are about to game the two fighting publishers (and, perhaps, Random House) the same way Random House gamed them when they stayed out of agency at first. Whether or not they stick with agency, they are now enabling discounting, so they might get the same benefit of the retailer discounting their goods while they retain their revenue that Random House got for the first year of agency.

In other words, more weight on the shoulders of the two companies, Macmillan and Penguin, who are carrying the fight for the whole industry. And that means more reason for the rest of us to try to help.

I am working on my letter to DoJ now, and I’ll publish it in a future post. I hope all my readers who understand what’s at stake here will also write to Justice. Address your letters to

John Read
Chief Litigation III Section
Antitrust Division
U.S. Department of Justice
450 5th Street, NW, Suite 4000
Washington, DC 20530

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I was brought up to believe in the virtues of a large field sales force. One of Dad’s early successes in his career as Director of Research at Doubleday was when he analyzed sales rep effectiveness to advise the company about the optimum number of reps to keep when they combined sales forces that had 10 and 14 members, respectively. The company expected him to come up with a number between 10 and 14, or, perhaps, between 14 and 24. His careful analysis of the impact of reps calling on stores led him to recommend that the new sales force consist of 35!

This decision was contrary to the contemporary practice and reasoning of all other publishers.

And very quickly thereafter, Doubleday concluded that taking orders was not the most important function for the rep. Influencing display, store merchandising, and sales clerk awareness of Doubleday titles were where they came to believe the big wins were.

A lot has changed since then, of course, including the ubiquity of computerized inventory management tools, very fast service nationwide from well-stocked wholesalers, and the growth, and then decline, of bookstore chains. But, most of all, we have gone from a country where the number of bookstores was organically increasing to one where it is, clearly, organically diminishing.

Is a large field sales force still a good idea? Dad died 10 years ago, but I am pretty sure he would think it was. He’d be very pleased to see what Random House is doing. They are maintaining a force of well over 100 reps in the field (among several different sales organizations with defined product or account specialties) while everybody else is cutting, usually from a much smaller base. They are, as he did, operating contrary to the contemporary practice and reasoning of all other publishers.

We’ve tried to get at the question of sales force deployment before but I had clearly not focused sufficiently on Random House. We had a session at Digital Book World in 2011 about it and Jaci Updike of Random House (who, as you will see, was a key actor in all this) was on the panel. But the Random House initiative we’ll be talking about below was only in development then. The story that was told at that session, and in industry news reports from time to time, was that the combination of field realities (fewer stores) and new capabilities (like electronic catalogs created by some houses and the industry electronic catalog Edelweiss) made it possible to cover the retailers with fewer reps. Not only that, sales conferences — a very expensive exercise that requires enormous travel expense to bring reps together — were sometimes being replaced by videos of editors pitching their books. The videos, unlike the reps, travel for free.

What made me want to learn more about what was going on at Random House was a conversation I had two weeks ago with another Big Six executive who wondered what they were doing. That person was aware of cuts at their own company and at others, but not at Random House. It seemed impossible that the biggest publisher in town could be cutting sales force and nobody else knew about it; those dismissed reps would be out looking for jobs and knocking on all the competitors’ doors. What was going on there?

I got the chance to ask the question of a friend on Random House’s corporate strat team a few days later. I was told that, indeed, Random House senior executive Madeline McIntosh and the adult sales director who had been on the DBW panel, Jaci Updike, had been redefining the role of the sales rep, broadening the responsibilities so that they remained productive and could be retained in large numbers even with fewer stores. Not only that, but they were proud of what they were doing and were happy to talk about it.

So last Friday I sat down with Updike for an hour and learned about the project that Random House calls “Rep 3.0″.

Whenever you learn about a company innovating, a recurring theme is “it requires support from the top” and that is true here. Jaci’s first reference, when asked “where does this come from?” was to the support the sales reorganization has gotten from CEO Markus Dohle. In his most recent end of year note, he specifically cited the work that Random House’s field reps do. (Updike also pointed out that she’s not the only sales executive leading this. She made it clear that Joan Demayo, leading the children’s sales organization, is doing the same thing.)

There is a belief in Random House, not necessarily documented and perhaps impossible to document, that half of sales come from word of mouth. They are also convinced that their field force is a primary tool to generate the dialogues that sell books. With Updike heading adult sales, they had a leader who had started out as a sales rep at Random House 22 years ago — after working in a bookstore before that — and who was their first Director of Independent Bookselling.

Jaci lived through many shrinkings of the Random House sales force in the 1990s and earlier in this century. But starting about three years ago, they started to disassociate the sales rep’s work from billings and look hard at what reps do “in the community”. Reps already did staff presentations in stores and connected to local media and to libraries. This was behavior that grew organically, but Jaci believes that Random House was unusual in that they encouraged it. If you’re stretched thin trying to cover all the accounts, it is harder to be supportive of what appear to be extra-curricular activities.

But three years ago, with Madeline McIntosh, Jaci’s predecessor in her current job, now running sales and all related operations, they embarked on their Rep 3.0 program. A core element of this was to reorganize the workflow of the rep’s job, using such tools as iPads and electronic catalogs, to make order-generation take less time and free up time for other activities. And those new activities, presenting to libraries and corporations as well as to bookstore staffs, became part of what the company expected their reps to do.

Implementing this strategy required that they make some changes in philosophy and approach that would seem counterintuitive to most sales executives.

They no longer compensate reps based on the sales they generate. Reps are compensated, as are many at Random House, on the overall company performance.

They encourage blogging and speaking engagements without corporate control of the messaging. In fact, they’re quite comfortable if the books their reps talk about aren’t all Random House books. This comes from their conviction that their community-building exercises won’t be taken seriously if they’re seen as shilling for their own stuff. On the other hand, they’re sure their own stuff benefits the most.

And they’ve invested in supply chain in general, seeing the connection between improving the tech in the reps’ hands, the speed of shipment from the warehouse, and the development of such capabilities as vendor-managed inventory, as worth the effort even in an era when the number of bookstores is getting smaller.

The community-building, non-bookstore efforts by the reps get very ambitious. There are Random House reps organizing “retreats” with authors where readers pay to join the group. These bring in attendeees from far afield, including from other countries who want to participate in the discussion about books. The attendees are not book sellers, primarily, although a bookseller is always involved. They are book readers, book lovers. But Random House doesn’t see this as a brand-building exercise. Updike believes that a part of what makes this all work is that the reps are “credible”; they’re not just pushing Random House books.

“We don’t touch what they do with their blogs,” Updike says. “We don’t influence. We don’t suggest.” It is the independent view the reps offer that “makes efforts like this work”, in her opinion.

With these new marketing practices largely arising from reps’ creativity and initiative and then being spread as “best practices” throughout the sales force, the company-wide sales meetings remain very important and Random House continues to run them twice a year.

So Random House sustains an investment in covering field accounts that none of their competitors appear to believe is sustainable, and they do it employing very unconventional techniques that are hard to measure. Is it working? Do they believe it is working?

Updike was convincing on this subject, even while she rejected as somewhat inflated a colleague’s report that independent store sales were measured as “up 40%” in February. (Like her reps increasing their credibility by not limiting their discussions to Random House books, Jaci’s willingness to discount what she thinks is an inflated measurement of their success reinforced her credbility with me!)

She figures some of that 40% increase was simply a shift of sales from wholesalers to direct because Random House had a few-month program of 2-day-shipment that ran through February. But she also knows that “POS was up” and she believes “our in-stock position was better than other publishers. We were in stock on a lot of hot titles when others were not; that was part of it.” And even with Borders closing, which we all know put wind in the backs of many independents, the 15% increase in indie store sales she thinks is the accurate number, is a very impressive feat in these times.

Random House figures that its “army of marketers”, which is how Updike now sees her sales organization, is helping them sell more books, build more titles from obscurity to success, and is thus giving them an edge winning over agents as well. This is a strategy not likely to be duplicated by any of their competitors. It will be interesting to see how clear a competitive advantage it can deliver them, and for how long.

Here’s another family anecdote that brings all this home. In 1975 I was working for my father, running sales at Two Continents. He had met a young sales director at Frederick Fell named Charlie Nurnberg. “Go meet him, Mike,” my father said. “You’ll learn things.”

I did, and I did, starting with the very first conversation we had when Charlie explained to me that if the permission line when somebody excerpted your book included a price and an address, you’d get orders.

In any era before the current one, the executive who got me started on this investigation by wondering aloud what was going on at Random House would have just picked up the phone and taken somebody there out to lunch to find out. “What are you guys doing about sales force deployment?” would not, in and of itself, have been seen as a “price-fixing” or “combination in restraint of trade” question.

But the reason why they don’t act that way today became very publicly evident yesterday, with the announcement of the DOJ suit against Apple and five publishers and the settlement agreed to by three of them. Publishers can’t talk to each other about the industry anymore. Aside from many other things, this means publishing just isn’t as much fun as it used to be anymore. (Even as I write this, I can hear the ridicule that statement will inspire in some quarters.)

I want to let the dust settle for a couple of days while people smarter about this than I am make clear what the legal papers actually say and what the timetables are for changes to become effective before I try to spell out some things it might mean.

This will certainly make for a lot of interesting conversation starting this weekend at the London Book Fair.

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I’ll admit that I would have thought a few years ago that by the time we got to the point when more than a third of unit sales for major houses had gone digital — and perhaps more than half for fiction — that the future shape of the book business would be discernible. But, at least according to what I learned from one Big Six house last week, we have reached that level of ebook uptake and despite that, the business still looks very much as it has. It seems impossible to me that it will stay that way.

Here are a few bits of information that came onto my radar last week.

One Big Six executive told me that ebook sales in their shop had reached the mid-30s as a percentage of units sold. That broke down to about 50% of fiction units and 25% of non-fiction.

Nonetheless, that same executive noted a real slowdown in the rate of ebook growth. This is to be expected as the base of sales grows, of course, but it slowed down faster than this house expected. They had seen a 120% increase in ebook units in 2010 and figured they’d see an 80% growth in 2011; it came in at 60%. In short, the rate of increase was cut in half.

These numbers gave this particular executive reason to believe that print demand was begining to stabilize and that it was reasonable to assume that 50% print units might persist into the future, with commensurate new stability for brick-and-mortar stores. I have since been told that a leading executive at another of the Big Six houses shares the same expectation, or hope. Perhaps they all do.

On the other hand…

Another publisher, substantial but not Big Six, has seen much more explosive growth continuing in ebooks and, for that publisher, unit sales for fiction have already gone to well beyond 50% digital.

A paper by the accountants-consultants at Deloitte in the UK, reported in the Guardian, predicts a decline of 40% in all brick-and-mortar stores over the next five years. That’s because books are not the only item for which sales are migrating from brick stores to online. We’ve already learned that books are among the items most susceptible to online purchasing for a myriad of obvious and well-established reasons. We also know that buying public in the US is at least as receptive to online purchasing as the British.

I’ve written time after time after time about the diminishing retail network for books and its potential impact. I have always seen this as existential for big trade houses, whose distinguishing value proposition for authors remains their ability to put books on retail shelves. (There are other things that matter, but I’d argue that all of them put together don’t equal that.) Publishing printed books is a complex endeavor best done by a large organization that can perform its various functions — warehousing, shipping, billing, commissioning the manufacturing, sales representation, and contact with marketing megaphones — at scale.

A proliferation of online marketing channels with real influence could once again challenge the under-resourced (authors working alone or smaller publishers) or otherwise-preoccupied (Amazon) who are trying to substitute for what the big publishers do. So far, the platforms that matter (to the extent they do…more on that below) have been limited in number, Facebook being the most prominent one. (One sales executive said to me yesterday, “Facebook isn’t a platform. It’s a requirement.”) If Tumblr becomes really important and Pinterest really were the next Facebook and, over time,  online influencers become as dispersed as our 20th century media world was, it opens up opportunity for big organizations to add value that smaller ones can’t.

So even if the Big Six optimists are wrong that their business proposition will be preserved by a slowing switch from print to digital (and, with no more knowledge than they have, my intuition against their intuition, I wouldn’t bet a dime that they’re right), perhaps we’re heading for a world where any author in her right mind would want a publisher to cover all the digital marketing bases, with the help of technology and dedicated staff, rather than trying to do it herself.

Nobody’s predicted that yet that I’m aware of, but let me be the first on the block to acknowledge the possibility.

The future of bookstores and the future of publishers if the bookstores diminish much futher in importance should be one of the most important topics on the minds of all stakeholders in the book business. We’re going to try two different ways to explore it at our next Publishers Launch Conference, taking place at BookExpo on June 4. Both of them involve one of the distinguishing features of our events: delivering insightful data about our industry that is not delivered by other industry conferences.

All of the current industry data reporting, including the recent effort called BookStats put together by the AAP, BISG, and Bowker, are unable to isolate sales and inventory in stores by type of book. To plan future publishing programs (and to sign up books this month and next), publishers need to understand with some level of granularity whether it is true that stores are shifting their buying (and selling) from immersive reading to illustrated books and, if so, which illustrated books. Among the reasons that the industry stats fail to capture this properly is that they don’t look beyond the sales publishers make to wholesalers to find out what happened with the books the wholesalers bought.

But the wholesalers know whether the book they just sold went to a brick store, a library, an online store, or an individual. We’ve been fortunate to get Phil Ollila of the Ingram Content Group to examine his company’s records to give us a more detailed and granular understanding of what is really happening in the retail marketplace. Are bookstores really stocking fewer novels and more illustrated books? Is the proportion of sales made online versus in stores changing at different speeds for straight immersive books and illustrated books? Ingram is mining its data to come up with answers to those questions. Ollila will report some findings at our conference.

We will also have a data-rich and sobering presentation from Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group. Hildick-Smith and his team have been surveying book consumers on a quarterly basis for nearly a decade. Their work is high-level and expensive and is normally only available to the big companies that can afford to subscribe. But Hildick-Smith sees a crisis ahead for the industry in his data, and he cares enough about our collective future to want to sound an alarm. He’ll be doing that our June 4 event.

And what he sees and documents is the critical role bookstores play in consumer discovery of new books and authors. He demonstrates with data and logic that SEO and social media are totally inadequate substitutes. Hildick-Smith thinks a future without bookstores will be very different than the present. He makes the case that author brands established in the bookstore era will be largely unchallenged when the bookstore ladder gets pulled up and future authors can’t climb it. And he believes that publishers don’t appreciate that all measures, even desperate measures, are called for to preserve the brick store base as long as possible.

When you start trying to figure out how publishers could do that, you appreciate very quickly that you’re tackling a very challenging problem.

Six decades ago, long before there was any bookstore crisis, my father, Leonard Shatzkin, then at Doubleday, recognized that bookstores were the publishers’ lifeblood. He didn’t see the logic in giving bigger discounts to wholesalers than to retailers. After all, wholesalers primarily put their books in warehouses waiting for orders that publishers’ marketing efforts and a book’s inherent appeal create while retailers put them on shelves in front of customers, stimulating demand. His solution, implemented ever-so-briefly, was to eliminate the wholesalers’ discount differential and offer them the same terms as retailers.

Unfortunately, this is a story about which I didn’t capture all the details while Dad was around to give them to me. I know that the wholesalers went ballistic and demanded meetings with Doubleday management (presumably including Dad, who implemented policies like this from the relative safety of the “Research Department”, not from the front lines of the Sales Department.) The policy was reversed and the wholesale discount was restored.

But I can personally attest to the enduring bad feelings this initiative engendered. In 1974, around two decades after the failed experiment, I was working for Dad selling books for Two Continents. As the top sales guy, it was my role to introduce the company to Bookazine, a wholesaler that then occupied a warehouse on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. Bill Epstein was the owner of Bookazine and, when he met me, all of the anger from that Doubleday discount change came to the surface, as if he’d been waiting 20 years to complain about it again.

The day has perhaps come again when publishers will want to consider offering the highest discount incentive for placing a book on a retail store shelf. (The idea exists in the world of commerce: it is called a “retail display allowance”, although the concept would need to be extended to favor all retail display, not just favored positioning.) This would be a devilishly difficult policy to design and implement to avoid alienating the wholesalers the way my Dad did. (There is no way a policy like this would be well-received by Amazon.) But after publishers hear Peter Hildick-Smith at Pub Launch BEA, it is bound to strike some, at least, as an idea well worth considering.

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This post is the second that is contemplating two big questions facing the publishing industry:

When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop?

Who will be left standing when it does?

Amazon applies pressure and generates angst among publishers from two directions. As they grow to be 30% or more of many publishers’ business, they are in a position to push to improve their margins at publishers’ expense. And they do, indeed, push.

At the same time, they are both offering authors attractive opportunities to self-publish and wielding a checkbook to build their own publishing program. Both threaten to constrict publishers’ access to the ultimate source of all their revenue, the output of authors looking for a path to readers. And even when Amazon doesn’t sign a book they go after, they could well be pushing up the price a publisher has to pay to get it.

This pincer maneuver is really unprecedented in its power, even though elements of it have existed before.

Joint ownership of publishing and book retailing is definitely not new; it has been a part of the industry for my entire 50 years in it. My first book publishing job was on the sales floor of Brentano’s Bookstore on 5th Avenue in 1962. My dad was a publisher. He was a vice-president of a company then called Crowell-Collier, which bought the first Macmillan in the early 1960s, eventually changed the corporate name to Macmillan, and was then purchased by Simon & Schuster in 1994. None of these entities have anything to do with the company now called Macmillan, which took its name from the British company the owning Holtzbrinck family had also acquired.

Anyhow, when Crowell-Collier bought Brentano’s, Leonard Shatzkin became the responsible corporate executive. He had gone to Crowell-Collier from Doubleday, which also owned bookstores. Across the street from Brentano’s was the Scribner Bookstore, owned by Charles Scribner’s Sons. They were the publishers of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, among others. (Scribners exists today as an imprint of Simon & Schuster.)

And, of course, it has only been about 10 years since book retailing giant Barnes & Noble expanded its proprietary publishing program by purchasing independent niche publisher Sterling. That doesn’t appear to have worked out particularly well for them; they are apparently having trouble selling Sterling today, even at a fraction of the price they paid for it.

And, in fact, Amazon’s publishing efforts haven’t been particularly disruptive to publishers so far. Their big “gets” to date are Tim Ferriss and Deepak Chopra, two big authors who are unusual because their pattern has been to write for different publishers rather than having a lengthy run at one particular house. The very biggest names, which would be fiction authors, have not yet been enticed to make the jump, although Jackie Collins created a stir last week with some self-publishing plans that don’t have entirely to do with Amazon. It has been nearly a year since Amazon signed former Time Warner Books head Larry Kirshbaum to lead their attempt to woo big trade authors. That was very concerning to the big houses but, so far, the sky has definitely not fallen.

Whether we will really see profound changes that justify the questions that head this series of pieces or whether this turns out to be a totally baseless bout of nervousness by the established players depends on what happens in the overall marketplace in the next few years.

The percentage of a publisher’s business that Amazon represents is largely channel-dependent. If ebook sales go up overall, then Amazon’s share will probably go up. If purchasing shifts from brick stores to online, then Amazon’s share will certainly go up. If print sales in brick stores hold their ground, then Amazon’s sales won’t rise.

I think you’d have to look hard to find a credible voice making the case that print sales in stores will hold their ground. To the extent there is a debate, it revolves around how fast those sales will decline.

AAP says we’ve seen double-digit declines of print sales in 2011 over what they were in 2010. They say print revenue was down 17.5% in adult hardcover and 15.6% in adult paperback.

Forrester’s survey of publishing executives finds few expecting such a big decline in the coming year, but then, few expected such a steep decline last year. Forrester’s own prediction is for sudden drops. I would agree that sales will tend to decline in “step-increments”, as players exit the game. Borders may be responsible for a lot of the loss we saw in 2011. There wouldn’t seem to be any shelf space loss that great on the immediate horizon, but we do see B&N reducing both the number of stores and the percentage of shelf space within them devoted to books and there are many predicting that books might lose their appeal to the mass merchants as well. They are fully capable of substituting other merchandise for books and making that switch very quickly whenever they decide it should happen.

My own expectation is that over the next five years we’ll see the share of sales that are ebooks more than double. (This should be seen as a startlingly conservative prediction, since that number has doubled annually for the past five years!) That would put ebook unit sales at about 65% for commercial immersive reading. (I’m grossing up the 20% of revenue number the big houses are reporting because ebooks produce less revenue than print hardcovers and because many titles in the print revenue base aren’t in the ebook revenue base.)

Of the remaining 35% allocated to print, I’d expect half of the sales, at least, to be online. If those numbers are right, then 17.5% of immersive book sales would be in brick stores.

If Amazon remains about 60% of ebook sales and 90% of print books sold online, that would put their share of immersive reading sales at about 50%. And were a book available in Kindle that people knew about and wanted to read and not available in other formats, Amazon could pick up a lot of the ebook sales they would otherwise miss. (Remember, anybody using a Nook or Kobo app as opposed to a Nook or Kobo device could just switch to the Kindle app to read that particular book.) All that is really hard for them to capture is the 17.5% allocated here for print sold in stores. And even the loss of that share wouldn’t be total, since, for any really big book, in-store buyers would buy online if they had to. So they’d be in a position to reach well more than 70%, perhaps even more than 80%, of the market for all books that are principally text. (And those are the books that lead the industry.)

Imagine what that will do for Kirshbaum’s ability to go get big authors. Today an author considering an Amazon publishing deal must figure that half or more of the market is unreachable through that arrangement. No matter how much money Amazon is willing to pay, no matter how much they increase the ebook royalty over the publishers’ offers (which they have ample margin to do), it is a pretty tough sell to get an author to write off more than half the marketplace, particularly the half most visible to the public.

In other words, overall trends are moving things increasingly in Amazon’s direction. Even if nothing changes in the deals offered or resources available to the competitors for author attention in the next five years, Amazon’s position will have grown considerably more powerful. And, in fact, Amazon’s share of publisher sales just about assures that any changes in deals and resources in the meantime will favor Amazon as well.

Of course, there is more to successful publishing than just signing up a book and managing an online audience. Editing and presentation count. A marketing plan that goes beyond just reaching online bookstore customers counts. Rights sales count. And pricing to maximize a particular title’s revenue, not a bookseller’s overall share and customer loyalty, also counts. None of these are things that Amazon’s experience naturally leads them to do. All of them require investment and development of infrastructure and team skills. Will Amazon invest in and perform these functions?

And the more books a publisher does, the more challenging it becomes to manage all these things. Title growth might also challenge Amazon’s marketing resources, such as they are. There are only so many slots on the home page for a category of books to use to feature your own titles. (And there’s a risk of alienating your customers if they think your featuring and recommendations are just shilling for your own books.) There are only so many emails you can send pushing your own books before you lose people’s attention (and perhaps their permission). The special sales and vertical marketing functions that will be increasingly important for publishers are not natural fits at Amazon. Will they do these things?

Of course, we need to remember that while Amazon signs up titles directly, they pressure competitive retailers as well as publishers. There are two approaches Amazon can take in that circumstance and one can imagine them choosing which approach to apply by title.

Either they are a supplier of titles to the rest of the trade, which gives them a different kind of power. Or they withhold what they’ve got from the rest of the trade, which means the Amazon title selection is advantaged over the competition.

You have to excuse publishers if it makes them nervous to think about living in a world where the company through which they get 50% of their sales is also competing with them to sign up titles directly. This is a situation where it is accurate to say that any other player in the ecosystem who is not at least mildly panicked probably doesn’t fully understand what’s going on.

The challenges faced by Amazon as they try to grow as a publisher are not trivial, but neither is the strength they bring to address them. The world five years from now where Amazon is stronger because they can reach 80% of the market rather than somewhat less than 50% is also one where the big players with whom they’re competing for authors are also weaker. In fact, if the number following “Big” isn’t smaller than “6″ by then, I’ll be one very surprised prognosticator.

It’s taken me two posts (here’s the first one) to lay out what I see as the dynamic forces tilting the trade book business toward Amazon. I have at least three more components of this story to consider: how these changes look from each spot in the value chain (author, agent, large and small publisher, retailer, reader); a discussion of the “cultural gap”, which can be traced as much to different objectives as to the lack of shared history, between Amazon and the legacy book business; and a discussion of the Amazon antidotes: what other players in the industry can do, within the constraints of the law and practicality, to slow down or reverse the Amazon share growth before it changes the nature of the industry, and its cast of characters, beyond recognition.

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A lot of people in publishing would pay a lot of money to get a reliable answer to these two questions:

When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop?

Who will be left standing when it does?

I won’t attempt to answer those two questions in this post. In fact, the purpose here is to begin to generate agreement that those are, indeed, the way the industry’s existential strategic questions should be framed going forward. In my consulting work, it is often my role to provide “synthesis and articulation.” This post will begin to document the synthesis that led to articulating the questions, which are actually implicit statements, above. The catalyst for these ruminations was the news last week about Amazon’s dust-up with Independent Publishers Group (IPG), a demonstration of its power and willingness to exercise it that recalls an incident almost exactly two years ago when they were unsuccessful at bullying Macmillan (or the other big publishers) into giving up their notion of implementing agency pricing.

Amazon was not the first online bookseller. But they appear to have had several distinctions from all others from the beginning. One is that they always saw bookselling as a springboard to a much larger business. That meant that bookselling was, perhaps primarily, a customer acquisition tool, not an end in itself. A second is that they saw, long before it was accepted general wisdom, that perfecting the “customer experience” online was the core requirement for success. And the combination of those two things, in concert with the ubiquitious availability of capital for promising Internet propositions that characterized the late 1990s, fueled growth powered by aggressive pricing that has had their trading partners and competitors agape for nearly two decades.

Any discussion of Amazon’s success must acknowledge that the other key component, aside from the strategic components of long-term vision, smart use of capitalization, and customer-centricity, has been the quality of their execution. This has been true from the beginning and it is still true today. Some of this is subjective, but it still looks to me like they offer a better print searching-and-buying experience than BN.com and a better overall ebook ecosystem than Nook or Kobo. I read on an iPhone and use all the ebook purchasing systems from time to time, but I use Kindle the most because it is the best. I am close to somebody who prefers to buy from BN.com because (she says; I don’t do this research…) they give money to Democrats and Amazon gives money to Republicans, but she still does her searching at Amazon because it works better before she hops over to BN.com to make her purchase.

[An update on that last point since the original posting of this piece. I was challenged on the "Amazon is red" statement by a couple of people whose opinions I trust, so I asked my favorite Democrat for citations and I got two. You'll see (if you care and if you look) that both of the analyses that delivered this characterization are squarely within the Bush presidency, so they could constitute a company hedging bets rather than expressing political conviction. On the other hand, B&N was blue throughout the Bush Administration. And the point about the search engines, which was the one germane to this piece, remains true.]

Some of these advantages have become structural; having more customers means more having more customer reviews, more consumer knowledge, more product to sell, and, of course, higher rankings for many searches. There isn’t much their competitors can do about that. But they also keep innovating, most recently announcing an X-Ray feature for Kindle books that does outlining and annotating that could add value for readers of immersive fiction and non-fiction that it will take a while for other ebooks to match.

That’s the good news: good for consumers and good for producers of books that want consumers to buy and appreciate them.

This post is not all about good news.

Amazon’s relentless customer focus doesn’t prevent them from keeping a close eye on threats to their business, whether they come from obvious competitors or whether they are more tacit challenges that spring from trading partners.

This goes back to 1997. Ingram, well aware that Amazon had started its business by simply using Ingram to supply most of the books its customers wanted (Bezos put his business in Seattle because Ingram’s Roseburg, OR warehouse was within a day’s trucking distance), decided they could put many retailers in business the same way. So they announced the formation of I2S2: Ingram Internet Support Services. I2S2 would provide the tools to allow any bookstore to start selling online. Prominent industry thinkers saw I2S2 as the way all booksellers could start to reap the opportunities of the Internet as a sales channel.

Had Amazon not quickly reacted to this threat, they could have gone away so fast that we’d have trouble remembering their name now. But they did. They promptly cut their sale prices so deeply on most of what they sold that the other retailers, focused as they were on their stores, saw no point to expanding into unprofitable web business. Almost as quickly as I2S2 was announced, it was dead.

I2S2 was the first instance of Amazon successfully using price as a weapon but it has been an important part of their arsenal ever since. It has been a powerful one. It works for them commercially because they aren’t just a bookseller; they use book pricing to acquire customers and nurture their loyalty. They lock in that loyalty with their Prime program, by which the customer pays a fixed price annually for benefits that include expedited shipping, thereby making an investment which pays off in direct proportion to how much they buy from Amazon. The more they buy from Amazon, the better deal Prime is for them.

But using price as a weapon has another benefit; it puts the customer on your side. Even when Amazon’s lower prices are subsidized by their being excused from sales tax responsibilities that fund state and local governments and disadvantage local retailers who could be their friends and neighbors, consumers want it and defend it.

Amazon opened its virtual doors in 1995. Soon after they fended off the I2S2 challenge, they discouraged their first really well-financed competitor. They competed with BN.com (in which Bertelsmann, owner of Random House, bought a half-interest in 1998 to become partners with B&N) by extending their anti-I2S2 strategy and discounting so deeply that the online book channel hardly made any margin for the retailer. From Amazon’s perspective, acquiring customers for a long haul that was going to include selling many other things besides books, this made sense. From Bertelsmann’s, a company that made money selling content, owned book clubs that made money, and with no interest in being a multi-product online retailer, it made none. They sold back their half to Barnes & Noble in 2003.

And B&N faced the complications of not wanting to cannibalize their own store business with cheaper prices online. They also didn’t want to invest in the site and the search engine for it the way Amazon did. By the middle of the last decade, it was pretty clear that Amazon would be the dominant online bookseller for the foreseeable future and that those sales efforts would be subsidized by margins earned on other products.

Until the Kindle debuted in November 2007, however, publishers didn’t need to see Amazon as anything but their principal online channel and, for trade publishers, that was still ancillary to their principal channels to the consumer. Barnes & Noble was still growing its store presence. Borders was not doing as well (and still recovering from the mistake of handing Amazon its online business earlier in the decade), but was still a robust brick-and-mortar bookseller. The online share of total sales was rising, but even the bookstore component of sales was still a growing business. And expectations that ebooks would change any of that were limited to True Believers (like me) who had been predicting a change from paper- to screen-reading that had not yet gained any traction.

I recall in the late 1990s the suggestion was made by some pundits (but definitely not this one) that publishers should combine to compete with Amazon. If they had, they almost certainly would have failed as ignominiously as I2S2 and the Bertelsmann-B&N combination did. Publishers wouldn’t have gone into online bookselling to lose money and it would have taken vision and guts to use books the way Bezos did, as a springboard to create a global online Walmart. The point I want to emphasize is that it was not a failure on the publishers’ part to have “allowed” Amazon to grow their online hegemony. It was not in their power to have changed it. And, in the meantime, Amazon was making all their books available and selling much more than they would have if they had been trying to produce more margin on book sales. (Of course, store sales would have atrophied more slowly if the publishers had managed to keep online prices higher, but it wasn’t the publishers’ or booksellers’ choice to make even if they had full cognizance of what was to come.)

Of course, since 2007, ebook sales have doubled or more every year, print sales are declining, print sales in stores are declining even more rapidly, Borders has gone away and closed hundreds of stores, independents and small chains keep disappearing, and even B&N is drastically reducing the shelf space it devotes to books. eBooks have enabled commercially viable self-publishing in ways never before anticipated, giving authors leverage in their negotiations with publishers they never had before. And agents now have to share the concern of the publishers and retailers that Amazon could disintermediate them as well by providing their publishing and distribution services to authors directly.

Aside from the pricing pressure and the arm-twisting of Macmillan and now IPG, Amazon has shown in other situations that they will use power when they have it. A few years ago, they tried to pressure publishers who wanted to sell print-on-demand titles to do that printing for Amazon with CreateSpace, not with Lightning. Recently they have instituted charging publishers for posting supporting material for books online that a few years ago they would have begged them to make available at all. There are now reports that they are pressuring for more margin and more coop (Amazon has apparently recently “invented” ebook coop).

This kind of pressure is not surprising. Retailers who account for a large percentage of a manufacturer’s business apply it routinely. What is new and unprecedented is that Amazon sales now constitute 30% or more of many large publishers’ business, between print and digital, and that number is rising.

This would all be difficult enough if there weren’t a huge cultural gap between Amazon and the rest of the publishing industry. But there is. More and more, people who have been in publishing for years see Amazon as “in” the book business, but not “of” the book business. That attitude is exacerbated because the answer to the second question above (“who is left standing?”) for many is “perhaps not me.”

In fact, what we know is that Amazon’s share of the trade book business has done nothing but grow since the company began in 1995. And however direct or indirect the connection, we’ve lost a lot of players in the business since then, and we continue to.

(Of course, if Amazon had failed in 1997 and I2S2 had succeeded, we would have had a different online and digital history, but there still would have been a digital change and brick-and-mortar would still have declined over time.)

The cultural gap will be covered in an upcoming post that analyzes the impact of Amazon’s growth in each segment of the publishing value chain. Then we’ll start trying to tackle the questions at the top. I expect to get a lot of help with that from the comment strings of this post and the next one on the big questions. From what I can tell, every player thinking about their own future in a world where Amazon just gets more and more important is looking for some help answering those questions as well.

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Back when my father, Leonard Shatzkin, was active with significant publishers — the quarter century following World War II — he observed that very few books actually took in less cash than they required. That is not to say that publishers saw most books as “profitable”. Indeed, they didn’t. They placed an overhead charge of 25% or 30% or more on each book so most looked unprofitable. But that didn’t change the fact that the cash expended to publish just about every book was less than the cash it brought back in.

The exceptions were usually attributable to a large commercial error, most commonly paying too much of an advance to the author or printing far more copies than were needed. But, absent that kind of mistake, just about every book brought back somewhat more revenue than it required to publish it.

This led Len to the conclusion that the best strategy for a publisher was to issue as many titles as the organizational structure would allow. That was a lesson he passed along to the next generation of publishing leadership that came under his influence. And the leading proponent of that business philosophy was Tom McCormack, who worked for Len at Doubleday in the late 1950s, then went on to Harper & Row before he ascended to the presidency of then-tiny St. Martin’s Press in 1969. Tom often credited the insight that publishing more books was the path to commercial success as a key component of the enormous growth he piloted at St. Martin’s over three decades.

(I checked in with Tom, who is long-retired as a publishing executive but a very active playwright, about how many books didn’t claw back the cash expended. He told me that his “non-confirmable recollection” is that the percentage that did at least get their money back ranged from 85% to 92%. He recalls “incredulity” from his counterparts in other houses, whom he believes simply couldn’t “wrap their minds around the meaning of the statistic: revenues minus disbursements.” He went on to tell me that this number “seemed effectively irrelevant to them. They had an overriding and deeply flawed notion of something they called title-profitability. They thought they were analyzing the profitability of a title with their ‘p&l’.”)

Despite the apparent immutability of the fact at the time that most titles brought in incremental margin, many publishers who were losing money would come to the opposite conclusion. They would decide they should cut their lists, pay more attention to the titles they published, and create more profits that way. I remember discussing the futility of that approach in the 1980s with my friend and client, Dick McCullough, who was at that time the head of sales at Wiley. When I observed that the publishing graveyard was littered with the bones of publishers who pursued cutting their lists as the path to profits, Dick said of their efforts to cut “yes, and very successfully too”.

I got another lesson about this reality in the late 1980s when a company I consulted to (Proteus Books) sued its distributor (Cherry Lane Music) for a failure of “due skill and competence” in the sales efforts for Proteus Books. One of Proteus’s expert witnesses was Arthur Stiles, who had been Sales Director at several companies, including Doubleday, Lippincott, and Harper & Row. Stiles confirmed that big and competent publishers routinely put out thousands of copies of titles in advance of publication, with extremely few failures in terms of getting the initial placements. He was testifying in a time that was still like what my father experienced: the industry’s title counts were growing, but so were the the number of bookstores in which they could be placed.

Those days are over. And, coupled with the ebook revolution, the implications of that are profound.

A few things happened to change the environment so that it became no longer true that even big publishers could get all the distribution they needed on every title to assure a positive return of cash.

1. The title output of the industry has grown enormously. In the 1960s, the total output of the industry was in the neighborhood of 10,000 titles a year. Now it is something more than 30 times that number published traditionally, with a multiple of that number being self-published. Each new book is competing against more new titles every two weeks than a book fifty years ago would have competed against in a year!

2. Nothing published ever dies. Fifty years ago, stores were smaller and, while there’s no easy way for me to measure this, I’d guess that the active backlist across publishers was probably no more than 25,000 titles. Superstore growth in the 1980s, the efficiency of Ingram as a national wholesaler, and computer systems that helped stores track their inventory and sales fueled backlist expansion. Even in the early 1990s, the total of truly competitive titles was probably in the low six figures. But then came Amazon’s unlimited shelf space and Ingram’s Lightning Print to deliver one copy at a time, and, even before ebooks, the competitive set of available titles had probably jumped to seven figures.

3. Bookstore shelf space is declining. Nobody who has been reading this blog needs much elaboration on that point.

What that means is that a list-cutting therapy that McCullough and I saw in the 1980s as suicidal and which McCormack explained repeatedly was folly is no longer crazy. (Oh, how I wish my dear departed Dad was around to discuss this with!) And the new conjecture in this blogpost is that the day might come when a publisher with an extensive backlist might decide that the most profitable path would be to hardly publish any new titles at all!

The portfolio of any longstanding publisher today contains a lot of backlist which is pure profitable gold in the ebook era. Contracts often give publishers the rights to a book for the life of copyright if they continue to sell it. (I’ll confess here that there is a caveat to this point coming up in an italicized postscript below.) So a major publisher doing $600 million and up (of which there are six), almost certainly has triple-digit millions of sales in its backlist, which is increasingly shifting to digital. Even the most sober industry observers are seeing revenues exceeding 50% from ebooks in the next two or three years, which would mean that substantially more than half the units of these books are selling electronically.

So, let’s say you’ve got a company doing a billion dollars in annual revenue and barely eeking out a profit or perhaps even losing money. With a strategy of continuing to publish what you own as ebooks, you can see digital backlist revenue of $150 million, decaying by 10% a year, with gross margins giving you $100 million or more in cash flow. Offloading all the print operations for which you own rights to a distributor or competitor will provide incremental revenue as well. (You only need help for the offline print sales. Getting the online sales requires no operational capability.) You’d then need a minimal organization to do some marketing (not a lot), sign up and put out some additional titles that would be chosen for being risk-free (not a lot), and to handle the administration and royalty processing for your thousands of contracts. Five or ten million ought to cover those costs very handily.

Of course, the other thing you could do is sell your rights to that backlist. But I think it would require somebody to overpay in relation to your net discounted cash flow to make that attractive because the costs of keeping it all for yourself would be so minimal.

One hopes that today’s publishers are looking at the simple statistic Len and Tom authored: revenues minus disbursements by title. No doubt today’s biggest publishers are looking carefully at the performance of their copyrights in a way that sorts the new titles from the backlist. But doing so is only useful if they’re apportioning their costs properly across the title base. If they are, what is described in this post will be evident if and when it is true. In the meantime, careful focus on new title acquisitions and accepting that the healthiest way to manage for the future might be to reduce the commitment to new title development will have to replace the clear truths that guided smart publishing strategy for previous generations.

The history and analysis are all valid, but there is one big monkey wrench in this scenario I’ve sketched. There is a provision in the 1978 copyright law that allows authors to reclaim rights to their books after 35 years. Titles published in 1978 become eligible for reversion, called “recapture” apparently, starting in 2013. (With logic that is ironically typical of what Congress does when it touches copyright law, older titles are on a slower track for liberation.) Agents are planning for this; publishers will have to deal with it. I am given to understand that publishers can only retain these books for life of copyright by, in effect, reacquiring them. (Should be lots of fun!)

So, in fact, the backlist attrition might be faster than 10% (but it might not, because ebooks may create more readers for backlist than we had before as well.)

It is also true that many publishers have already been moving in the direction I suggest: pruning their new title counts and being particularly cautious with midlist. Of course, there was a conviction by many that list-pruning was a good strategy even before it actually was a good strategy, but the execution of it has been much more rigorous over the past decade.

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If you imagine the publisher’s business as one that divides most of the consumer’s dollar between two core stakeholders in the supply chain — the retailer and the author — you’d have a pretty accurate picture. The publishers, at least theoretically, decide what the retailer’s “working margin” will be with their discounts and agency agreements. And they decide what the author’s share of the proceeds will be by the advances and royalty rates they offer and agree on through their contracts.

These are the essential, and basically non-substitutable, trading partners for a publisher. They can choose a different printer or publicity firm without changing the character of their business or their economics. But the author relationships are existential and defining and the intermediaries who reach the public and enable the consumer transaction are indispensible.

Plenty has been written, by me and others, about the challenges trade publishers face due to the decline of shelf space for books. But, in some ways, it looks at the moment like those (also including me) who have said that publishers are in big trouble as bookstores decline are mistaken. Sales in stores are declining and sales of print books are declining but total sales, including ebooks, are holding pretty firm and the big publishers are reporting pretty healthy results. So if declining bookstore shelf space, which we have clearly seen over the past few years, doesn’t weaken trade publishers’ commercial performance, what will?

I have written before about asking my friend and sometimes-collaborator Mark Bide a similar question about another segment of publishing. As a John Wiley stockholder, I was worrying 15 years ago about their reliance on journals for their revenues and profits. We thought way back then that journals were likely candidates for disintermediation. After all, the university pays the professor’s salary to write the journal article that the publisher gets for free and then monetizes by charging the same university’s library for a subscription to the journal. Even in the early days of the web, we could see the potential for professors to post their own articles and for peer review to be crowd-sourced, delivering the IP to the academic community faster and saving universities a boatload of dough.

At the time Mark said the thing to watch was whether the publishers stopped getting the submissions. If the professors didn’t need the journals, they’d stop getting the raw material that feeds the whole engine.

So far, it hasn’t happened (and I still own the stock). Despite lots of open source academic publishing, the journals remain important brands in their fields and the professors want the journal publication as a credential. (In books we know that lots of people read the book and have no idea who the publisher was. In journals it is the opposite: more people will know the professor published in the journal than will read the article.) The business has changed and library budgets grow considerably more challenged, but most of the journals, including Wiley’s, remain highly profitable and highly desirable to the authors.

In fact, Mark identifed the point of vulnerability for trade publishers. If the stores and other intermediaries they rely on go away, they have to find other ways to sell their books. That’s a challenge, no doubt.

But if the authors don’t play along, they have nothing to sell. Making deals with authors is the publishers’ price of admission to the game.

As the central player whose contracts and sales terms manage the distribution of revenues throughout the supply chain, how publishers view the commerce of our business is central to how it operates. This has, historically, been challenging. The activity of publishing is complicated and its economics are complicated.

A couple of months ago, Michael Cader pointed out to me that the big publishers were making a serious tactical error in the way they were accounting for sales under the agency arrangement. (Quick reminder: under agency, the publisher is considered the “seller”, not the retailer. The publisher sets the price which the retailer can’t change and pays the retailer, or sales “agent”, a fixed 30% of the set price paid by the consumer.) Publishers simply imitated their convention from the wholesale terms transactions they’d always done before. They book as revenue the 70% they keep of the sale, not the full price the consumer pays (and which, if they did, would make the 30% paid to the retailer a “cost of sale” like printing or shipping is in the physical world or like DRM costs might be in the digital world).

Cader spelled out two important benefits that would flow to publishers if they made a different choice of how to account these sales. (He says, and I trust him, that GAAP rules don’t require them to employ the methodology they do.)

One is that that their “top line”, their “total revenue” line, would be higher. That’s critical to foster a helpful perception in the investment community, which worries when they see declining revenues. And if publishers insist on sticking to booking only the 70% they get on the ebook sales as the total revenue, they’re locked into declining revenue for years to come as competition drives down ebook prices (probably) and as ebook sales continue to replace hardcover print sales (for sure).

The other perception publishers are manipulating against their interests is within their negotiating community. Both agents (on behalf of authors) and the big accounts publishers sell through look at the publishers’ margins as a percentage of sales to decide if there’s more there for them to get. Reporting ebook sales as they do, publishers are achieving about 75% margin on ebook sales (because they give 25% of the take to the author.) If they took the full price as the revenue, they’d be achieving 52.5% margin on those sales (although, of course, nothing really changes.)

There are fewer knock-on problems for the publishers when the big accounts move to convert this (apparently excess) margin into changed business terms than if they allow agents to change the author deal. Changes forced by Amazon or Barnes & Noble could conceivably affect only them, depending on how the change in terms were framed.  But were an agent to succeed in pushing up the contractual ebook royalty, that change could affect a whole host of other contracts because of most favored nation clauses. That could mean royalties are suddenly due on contracts that under the previously-negotiated royalties hadn’t earned out their advances.

So we acknowledge that the price of raising contractual ebook royalties could be high. But it still might be worth it. As we will see later, more margin given to accounts achieves no incremental gain for the publishers; more margin to authors does.

There’s one more very big reason for publishers to change their accounting in the way Cader’s insight suggests. Right now, every big publisher’s life is being disrupted by state, federal, and international investigations into the legality of agency selling, which is characterized by some as “price fixing”. The defense is that the publisher, not the retailer, is the seller and it isn’t illogical for somebody selling something to charge the same price to every customer no matter how they reach them.

If “I’m really the seller” is the defense, it would be much more persuasive if the accounting supported that paradigm. As it stands, the accounting contradicts it.

The total situation not only argues for publishers to change their accounting, it also argues for them to give a bigger percentage to authors and to do it now! Doing so would deliver them two important benefits. It would reduce the apparently excess margin that their retail trading partners are noticing and coveting. But — of much greater importance —  it would also reduce the differential between what Amazon (and who knows, perhaps B&N in the future) offers an author and what the publisher offers, making it more difficult for Amazon to lure their authors away with higher royalty terms.

In fact, they might even get some sympathy from Barnes & Noble about having less excess margin to trade if they can make it clear that giving more to authors is keeping them out of Amazon’s clutches, which B&N and all other retailers absolutely need them to do.

Part of what prevents publishers from seeing merit in paying more to authors is their high cognizance of another accounting element they track: unearned advances. Unfortunately, either publishers aren’t looking at that category of expense in the right way or they’re eliding important distinctions when they discuss those unearned advances with agents.

Because all unearned advances are clearly not created equal. All of the biggest authors pile up unearned advances because they are intended to be unearned. When the agent for a megaselling writer sits down with a publisher to negotiate the advance, they are often negotiating around dividing up what they both see (perhaps without explicitly saying so) as the total revenue pie likely from the book. That leads to agreement on the advance against royalties, which divides the revenues at what is effectively much higher per-copy royalties than standard contracts call for.

But then, for reasons of “not establishing precedent” and, perhaps, not kicking in “most favored nation” clauses that could exist in other contracts (all in the publishers’ interest), the actual contract has conventional royalty splits. The book would have to sell a big increment over expectations to “earn out” on conventional royalties. That’s very unlikely because these are deals done with highly established authors where the track record is a good predictor of future performance.

So some of these “unearned” advances were never intended to be earned; they simply measure how much of a premium the publisher was willing to pay to get certain revenues into the fold.

In other words, publishers aren’t trying to manage all unearned advances down, just some of them. And if they don’t make that distinction (and some further nuance to their measurement) when they analyze this, they’re doing themselves a disservice in a number of ways. Right now, one of those ways is that it is persuading them not to pay higher royalties when doing so could well be in their interest, both because it will keep the author away from Amazon and because it leaves less margin on the table for their trading partners to pursue.

Declared royalty rates that are closer to what Amazon can offer are critical for publishers to turn around a PR war for new authors that they have been losing. The focus of a great deal of the author community buzz is around the ebook royalty differential. Disadvantages of self-publishing — the biggest three being the actual financial cost of necessary editing and core marketing (like a cover); the difference in risk between taking those costs versus taking a revenue guarantee in the form of an advance; and the additional marketing and sales a publisher generates (right now largely through the merchandising and additional revenue from print) — are too easy to ignore or elide. The royalty comparison is straightforward and apparently persuasive when it is as stark as it is now.

A 50% ebook royalty from an agency publisher on revenue after agency commissions would match the 35% royalty that Amazon pays when they pay advances and publish. But publishers don’t actually have to reach that number to be offering  a better deal because they offer sales through other channels Amazon currently either doesn’t reach or actually prohibits employing when they pay an advance to publish. It’s just a tough argument to make when they offer half that number.

One more reflection on unearned advances to bend your mind in the other direction, and then we’ll stop. When the publisher sells a copy of a book that has an unearned advance, the cash flow for this month on the book is better, because no payment to the author is triggered. If publishers paid authors higher royalties on ebook sales, they’d have fewer dollars in unearned advances (because books would earn out faster) very quickly. Of course, that’s not “good” for them because it means they have to pay new royalties on those books as they sell. This is just to say reiterate what I said above: publishing economics are complicated. Anytime you hear them oversimplified, like by somebody lumping together all “unearned advances” into a number or a percentage and wielding it like evidence or analysis, have your grains of salt handy.

I make no secret that my view of the world is publisher-centric. I was brought up that way and I’ve spent 50 years learning about the book business with that point of view. And I also make no secret of my high regard for the current leadership of the biggest publishing houses. With all due respect to the executives of my father’s generation and since, the current crop of leaders is the smartest and most thoughtful and innovative group I’ve ever seen in those slots. But (unless I’m missing something, which is, of course, always a possibility…) they all appear to be making the same mistake at the moment. I would sum up the observations from this post with three suggestions for today’s biggest publishers:

1. Change the way you account for ebook sales in the way Michael Cader suggests: call the consumer payment the top line revenue and the payment to the retailer a cost of sale.

2. Recognize that no excess margin will go unpunished. The forces of big author agents and powerful retail channels will assure that. You know there’s a minimum margin you need to survive; in fact there will also be a maximum margin you’ll have any prayer of holding onto.

3. Pay authors more so you can pay retailers less. There will be a direct connection between the two.

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The division of the consumer’s dollar across the publishing value chain has a history of change. When I came into the business 50 years ago, discounts from publishers to retailers often topped out at 44% and even wholesalers seldom got more than 48% off the retail price on hardcover books. Today discounts into the mid-50s for big retailers and for wholesalers are common.

The top royalty for authors was, as it is now, 15% of the retail price, but there were fewer exceptions allowing the royalty to be cut, contractually or in practice. Today “high discount” clauses, calling for a royalty of something less that 15% of retail (and sometimes a lot less than 15% of retail) will often apply to more than half of the sales the publisher makes. (It is also true that in those days the agent’s standard cut was 10%. The 50% increase they’ve achieved to 15% is the single biggest change in share in the past 50 years.)

Lower royalties subsidize higher discounts and higher discounts have subsidized price cuts to the consumer. Discounting off the publishers’ suggested price by the retailer was rare until the Crown Books chain, which had a meteoric tenure as a major retailer from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s, made it a core component of their offering. The Barnes & Noble and Borders chains, which rose to prominence during the Crown decade, used the tactic, although less aggressively than Crown.

All of these numbers: the discount determining what the retailer will pay; the royalty calculated either as a percentage of the stated retail price (usually printed on the book) or of the net paid by the retailer on a high-discount sale; and the ultimate consumer price (whether what the publisher printed or lower if the retailer wants it lower) are based on the price the publisher sets and prints on the book in the first place. The informal internal formulas for setting the price have changed over the years too and, although it is a bit hard to really compare, it would appear that the markup over manufacturing cost has also risen steadily over the past 50 years.

So we had reached a point, somewhat before we had the Internet and Amazon.com, where, on big books at least, the publisher would charge a price higher than they expected the consumer to be charged, give the retailer a discount larger than many retailers would keep as margin, and state a percentage as the per-copy royalty in the main body of the contract that didn’t apply to most of the sales. One could say there was a “virtual” world in trade book publishing’s value chain before the term was applied to our new digital reality.

The core underlying point here — obvious but often ignored — is that the division of revenue across the value chain is never fixed. That’s important to remember as we consider how the ebook chain is shaping up. One hears authors and publishers arguing about what is the “fair” division of the ebook consumer’s dollar (as if “fair” had anything to do with it, which it doesn’t) and we have a very unsettled picture of what the retailer’s share of that dollar will be (even though Apple is doing its best to be definitive about it.)

Right now for ebooks we have two “standards” for the publisher-retailer division of revenue. For agency publishers across all retailers and for all publishers selling to (or perhaps we should, with respect for the agency logic, say “through”) Apple, the retailer share is 30% of the purchasing customer’s payment for the ebook, or the publisher’s “digital retail price”. For non-agency publishers selling to everybody else but Apple, the normal offer is 50% off the publishers “suggested retail price”. The DRP is set within boundaries basically set by Apple, primarily based on the price marked on the print version of the book. The SRP is the publisher’s own creation and has been at or close to the lowest-priced print version. The non-agency publishers who sell to Apple are obliged to have both: their DRP is the price Apple will charge (until and unless they’re undercut) and the SRP is the price that forms the basis of discounts to wholesale customers. I haven’t studied this but I think most publishers set SRPs higher than the break-even point because they want wholesale customers to go agency and would trade less revenue to achieve that, as they did when they switched over in the first place. (The publishers could set the SRP at a point where 50% of it equals 70% of the DRP, so their take is the same either way.) Theoretically, the publisher can count on the wholesale-purchasing retailer to discount the book to match the DRP, reducing their own margin and being competitive with the DRP in the consumer’s eyes.

This pricing strategy depends on the retailer discounting from the SRP to keep the pricing of the ebook from looking ridiculous. Not discounting is a way for the retailer to push the publisher to lower the SRP, which could start a cascade of price-cutting. That discounting has usually started with Amazon; others then follow suit. There are anecdotal claims that Amazon is starting to foil this strategy by letting publishers who set high prices live with the prices they set more often than they once did, but nobody but Amazon knows that for sure.

During the period when Random House stayed out of agency pricing, one thing they said was they thought the 30% agency standard was high and they didn’t want to memorialize a retailer cut that rich. Either other considerations prevailed or Random came to the conclusion that they couldn’t singlehandedly change that standard cut.

But if we maintain a competitive landscape of retailers, there is a way it could come down. What if one retailer (B&N? Kobo? Google?) were to offer publishers a deal where a discounted version of an ebook were offered through them on a temporary exclusive — say, the first 60 days the ebook was out — during which they would help subsidize the discount by taking a smaller percentage themselves during the promotion. Would publishers find it tempting to accept such an arrangement to poke a hole in the 30% standard? I think they might. (They would certanly enjoy the conversation with a competing retailer inquiring about how that happened, in which the publisher could offer a “matching” deal for some other equally appealing book and leave that retailer to think about whether to hold the line on the 30%.)

Another value chain segment the industry is still trying to value and price is the percentage a distributor can charge in the digital world. There’s wide variation here already, as there is in the print world, where the same bundle of services (sales, warehousing, shipping and returns processing, collecting receivables) can cost anywhere from around 20% to around 33% (fully loaded.) In ebook distribution, we see BookBaby willing to set up for a fixed fee (with no percentage deducted), BookMasters and Smashwords and some agent services like Knight charging about 15% of the revenue, and then offers from various publishers, distributors, and literary agents that go as high as 30% of the revenue.

Usually those offers are framed as “we pay 70% of revenue” which, I think, some hope will be confused with the 70% the agency retailer pays of the consumer dollar. Of course, if they are paying 70% of the revenue on a wholesale account buying at 50% off and the account doesn’t discount to the consumer, the distributor is actually paying 35% of the consumer dollar to its client.

The challenge for distributors is to offer services which don’t commoditize. Many authors already manage their own digital publishing affairs and sneer at the idea that a distributor or publisher has anything to offer that is worth even a token payment, let alone a substantial share. Over time, one can imagine information dashboards, metadata enhancement, dynamic pricing, and marketing assistance capabilities that will give ample justification for a distributor’s presence in the value chain for many authors and small publishers. It would be premature to predict how much value can be added and how much margin it could command. Most of these roads aren’t paved yet. What the distributors are offering at the moment is their ability to navigate unpaved roads and constant marketplace change which, despite the skeptics, is service many of us can see the need for.

What gets perhaps the most attention in the industry’s conversation about dividing the digital swag, but which is dependent on the upstream divisions of revenue, is the author’s royalty from the publisher. The majors have held the line for a year or two at 25% royalty, which means 25% of the 70% they get from the retailer, or 17.5% of the consumer’s dollar. That’s a quarter of what the author can get from Amazon or Kobo, and just a bit more than a quarter of what they can get from Barnes & Noble. Aside from publishers’ significant efforts to build marketing capabilities that will grow sales and their ability to charge a retail price often four times higher than an author would on his/her own, the publishers are offering guaranteed payments (advances against royalties) and a print revenue stream to sugar-coat the 25% digital royalty. Still, as the percentage of books sold digitally rises, it is likely to pull up the percentage of the sale authors will get along with it.

Everything happens faster with digital than it did with physical. And so it will be with changes in the revenue distribution along the value chain. My hunch (all hunch, no data) is that in the long run (5 or 10 years?) retailers will find it hard to keep 30% of the consumer’s dollar, publishers will find it nearly impossible to keep 75% of what the retailers pay, and that any author who wants to compete seriously will have a cost structure that will often make a royalty rate taking even as much as half of it away worth considering. Right now putting an ebook into Amazon and having them sell it on autopilot can get a lot more of the total market than will be the case over time as a more fully articulated and global ebook infrastructure builds out.

If I’m right, retailers should want longer contracts than publishers in their agreements; publishers should want longer contracts than authors, or at least longer terms for the stipulated ebook payout percentages; every author or publisher wants as short a contract as they can get with their distributor; and every author giving an ebook exclusive to a retail channel for longer than an introductory period should think twice about what that might cost in years to come.

Michael Cader did an absolutely fabulous reporting job on the distribution alternatives available today for our eBooks for Everyone Else conference in San Francisco. We’re doing an eBEE track at Digital Book World in January, and Michael’s doing a reprise of that presentation, with time for q&a, at a breakout session there. The distribution piece is by far the most complex of the three moving parts (the retail function and the royalty rate being much more straightforward components that don’t vary much in their definition) and a lot of DBW attendees will benefit from Michael’s reporting.

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The end of Borders took place within a larger context.

I was in Italy for the IfBookThen conference last February when Borders’ impending bankruptcy was a rising expectation. Somebody in the audience asked me if I attributed Borders’ difficulties to ebooks. I said:

“When the flu hits town, the old and sick die first.”

Ebooks present an enormous challenge to brick-and-mortar stores. And the growth of ebooks over the past three years or so has been nothing short of astonishing, even to somebody like me who expected a more gradual rise to have started much sooner. (The IDPF chart which shows the growth in the market, sharing data actually collected by the AAP, has apparently not been updated for the past two quarters, but this gives you the idea.)

But the disruption to brick stores started before ebook sales were even visible with a microscope, more than a decade sooner, when bookstore customers started migrating to online buying. Ebooks just accelerated what had been a trend of traffic and sales erosion that had existed for quite some time.

Ed Nawotka of Publishing Perspectives has a nice account of some serious errors Borders made around the turn of the century. Replacing a book-experienced management with merchants from outside the book trade was the gateway mistake. Eliminating the local marketing function was one that probably came from it: the local differentiation and customization required for a successful bookstore is much greater than what is needed for pets or groceries and successive managements from outside the book trade wouldn’t have known or understood that.

Turning over ecommerce to Amazon showed a shocking lack of digital vision. It is often forgotten that Barnes & Noble once made half the same mistake: they originally owned their BN.com ecommerce capability jointly with Bertelsmann until they bought their partner out. And Barnes & Noble had obvious challenges reconciling their online business with their overall business until they brought in new management that clearly saw the online business as the future. That wasn’t until much later in the century’s first decade. The problem both chains probably saw is that the skill sets required to run a successful brick store chain didn’t apply to creating a digital business so they were nervous about investing too heavily in it. When the time came that it was obvious that they had to do so, Borders was too weak to recover and Barnes & Noble, despite a web operation that had serious flaws, at least had a platform and customer base to build on.

And they had strong cash flow from a healthy, well-managed in-store print book business.

The category management idea Borders tried to implement and which Nawotka documents was a fiasco in every way: poorly conceived, poorly executed, and an idea that, if it could work for the book business at all, would have to be selectively applied, not forced on every section of the store.

The reduced selection concept that was underlying category management suggests that perhaps Borders had an early and accurate read on the fact that the Internet had diminished the power of selection in a brick store as a magnet for customers. It is true, and it was true then, that the power of aggregation had shifted from offline to online. It is just impossible for any physical location to deliver the choice that an online bookstore can. Most people now know that if you want to choose from the widest possible selection of just about anything the the last thing to do is go to a store. And that’s particularly true of books, which you don’t have to smell or taste or try on for size.

In my opinion, the defect in Borders that led to their ultimate demise was “none of the above.” It was their supply chain, which for well over a decade has been an inefficient mess.

The irony is that when Borders started, inventory management was their signature strength. The Borders brothers developed a tracking-and-purchasing system which was state of the art at the time (the 1980s) and turned it into an expansion opportunity. It all worked so well that they were able to sell the chain to K-Mart, which already owned the mall store chain, Waldenbooks, in 1992. That was probably the beginning of their downfall.

Borders and Barnes & Noble were on parallel paths building out superstore chains, featuring bookstores that pulled over 100,000 titles together under one roof. Until Amazon arrived in 1995 and started gaining traction, this was a nearly-irresistible proposition to the heaviest book consumers. Both chains, fueled by Wall Street investment, grew their number of large stores quickly. The stores were free-standing destinations, not in large shopping malls.

But this is where the chains diverged. Barnes & Noble made a substantial investment in a supply chain infrastructure. They built what was effectively an internal wholesaling operation, putting backup supplies of the books their stores carried within one day’s delivery of most of their chain and within two day’s delivery of just about all of it. They built systems to set stocking levels and maintain them. My first client work at B&N was in the late 1990s when they were crawling with logistics experts to make inventory management rules and policies, but they were also smart enough to want some book inventory expertise from outside their company (not that they didn’t have plenty of it on their own payroll) to help with the planning as well.

Meanwhile, Borders was working on gimmicks like category management and their supply chain became increasingly bureaucratic and convoluted. They pushed books through a warehouse, but only to put stickers on them. This compounded the irony. In the 1970s, the B. Dalton chain that B&N owned had virtually invented computer-assisted inventory management based on stickers they put on the books carrying an SKU number. Walden, in the days before they were owned jointly with Borders, had leap-frogged Dalton in that regard by scanning the ISBN instead of needing a sticker. Now, 15 or 20 years later, B&N regained that same advantage over Borders. Borders suffered the delay and the cost of stickering new books as they came in and B&N didn’t have to.

But, much worse, Borders backlist ordering was haphazard (almost totally human-controlled, whereas B&N’s was largely automated) and infrequent. B&N literally ordered from many publishers every day; Borders was ordering from major publishers as infrequently as every six weeks.

When you order infrequently, you face two choices. You can be overstocked on many things or out of stock of many things. There is no other alternative.

The complications to inventory management posed by the granularity and diversity of book selection utterly defeated the non-book veterans that serially ran, or mis-ran, the company. The lack of a digital strategy compounded the problem, but the supply chain lunacy was the problem. The cost of inventory is the greatest variable expense of running a bookstore. If you don’t get value for your inventory dollars, your leases and your staff couldn’t save you, even if they were good.

What this means for publishers’ sales is a bit difficult to predict and will even be harder to discern. Sales this year have been skewed by the Borders inventory dump. Publishers’ editions elsewhere and the stores their books are in have been competing with liquidation sales. This depressing effect on other retailers’ business and, as a result, their willingness and ability to order from the publishers, will be coming to an end.

Publishers Lunch got together with Bowker a couple of months ago to ask questions of Borders customers to try to discern where the business would go. They have hard data to the extent that it is possible to develop it, having asked people how their purchases would be affected and where they would buy when their Borders was gone. Only 8% said they’d buy fewer books, although nearly 20% said they’d use the library more.

My own totally hunchy math, checked out in a rigorous conversation at dinner with a good friend who is a publisher, is that Borders constituted about 10% of a publisher’s business until very recently. My guess is that half that business goes to Barnes & Noble, most of the rest is split between online purchasing and independents (with online getting more, much of it in ebooks), and maybe 1% or so, or 10% of the old Borders business, will be “lost.”

Of course, the movement of sales from print in brick-and-mortar to print and ebook online will continue, so how much lift from this will actually be felt by chains, independents, and mass merchants is still up for grabs.

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