Publishing History

Sometimes expressing your opinion can have unintended consequences.

In a post last week, I observed that the explosive growth of ebooks made it likely, in my opinion (shared by others, some of whom are in high places), that as many as half the book purchases could be online purchases by the end of 2012. I see many consequences of that change, but one of them is likely to be a complete reconsideration of the long-standing industry policy of accepting returns from retailers and wholesalers of unsold inventory.

My reasoning was that once returns only help you reach half the potential market, viable publishing becomes possible without them. And with perhaps more than half of the brick-and-mortar outlets (by that time) for most books (excluding bestsellers, which are sold in mass merchants) being accessed through a single retailer (Barnes & Noble) that has its own distribution centers and a managed supply chain, returns would start to fade away. (With their robust supply chain capabilities, B&N will be able to work the new marketplace, which will undoubtedly feature a higher discount no-returns option, to their competitive advantage.)

I didn’t deal with my feelings about that (mixed) or the impact on sales I would expect (damaging), but I’m moved to do so today because my prediction has led to a celebration in anticipation of that turn of events, a 2-part series (Part 1 is here and Part 2 is there) called “Publishing 3.0: A World Without Inventory” by agent, ebook publisher, and digital thinker Richard Curtis. He casts preprinted inventory distributed with returns as “the speculative model” and a no-returns marketplace supplied largely with books printed on demand as “the prepaid model.”

Richard characterizes returns as “a bargain with the devil” and “an addiction”. He cites return rates in the neighborhood of 50% (which they are — and even higher — on some books but which they are not for any publisher across their list) as the killer of publishing profits. But I think Richard leaves two very important realities out of his analysis:

1. Inventory creates sales that would not take place without the inventory placement.

2. Publishers (and Richard’s clients: authors) have a great deal to gain from the publisher’s practice of selling returnable.

In fact, this piece effectively argues that a responsible agent will prefer a publisher that allows returns to one that does not for their client, if the royalty rates are the same (and often if they are not.)

Before making the two arguments promised above, let me deal with three realities that are often elided when returns are discussed.

First of all, book publishing is not the only business with returns, despite frequent claims by returns skeptics that it is. Newspapers and magazines have returns, of course. But, apparently, so does technology hardware! I learned this hearing our client Copia present itself and its parent company, DMC, to publishers. DMC is very deep-pocketed. They make the point that putting out six ereader devices (which they are doing) requires the financing to put tens of millions of dollars of inventory onto retail shelves, and taking them back, eating the cost of producing them if they don’t sell. That’s one reason why there are few upstart manufacturers of consumer electronics. Even if you could get in the door at Walmart and get an order for your gadget, the financing required to fill the order would be beyond anything but a large and well-established company. So the principle that the manufacturer insures the retailer who stocks speculative inventory is not applied to books alone.

Second: publishers are customarily asking retailers to put books on their shelves before there has been any public exposure to the title. It hasn’t been reviewed (except possibly by the diminishing industry sources for pre-publication reviews); it hasn’t been sampled by the public; it hasn’t been read by the sales rep pushing it or by the buyer deciding about investing in it. The promotion plans are promises that are sometimes not kept. It is a competitive requirement to offer returns in that situation if the publisher wants the books in place at retail on publication date. I have never heard a clear narrative about the introduction and spread of returns in publishing. Curtis’s account, which confirms my understanding, is that the practice began in the 1930s. This was before my Dad’s time in the business; he thought it was Viking Press that began the practice. But the practice apparently spread so quickly that nobody got clear credit for starting it. And we all got a lesson about the competitive requirement when Harcourt Brace Jovanovich tried to eliminate returns (in favor of much higher discounts) in 1981 and rescinded the policy in about 90 days because the trade just wouldn’t stock their books.

And third, publishers’ practices affect returns. Most returns from major retailers to publishers are on big books for which the publisher wants to force out a quantity that creates a noticeable presence in the stores. There are occasions when the over-ordering is due to retailers being zealous or concerned that they’ll have trouble getting replenishment inventory. But, more often, they are due to publishers pushing out bigger quantities because they know that bigger stacks in the store make the book move faster. Or because the rep wants credit for a bigger sale. Or because the publisher’s discount schedule rewards a larger buy with a better price.

(It is commonly suggested by no-returns advocates that publishers at least eliminate returns on backlist. It would be a dumb publisher that did that. The way you entice the trade to buy without returns is by increasing the discount, shifting margin from the publisher to the retailer. But backlist returns are already low for most publishers. So following this suggestion would lead to a publisher giving away margin to reduce returns on the segment of the list on which there aren’t many returns. It is worth noting that no publisher that I know of has taken the bait to eliminate returns on backlist.)

And all that leads to me making the first point: that inventory creates sales that wouldn’t otherwise occur. The point is made over and over again, most recently by Bowker PubTrack data (click that link and take a look; it’s quite startling) that what happens in the store — how books are displayed and what clerks say (which is also affected by how books are displayed) — influences a lot of purchases. If we don’t have retail locations with books merchandised to entice people to buy, I believe overall book sales will go down. And as long as we do have stores (which we will for quite some time, even after the end of 2012), then the books well displayed in them will have a competitive advantage over the books that are not.

And the first point leads to the second point. The author, in effect, “hires” the publisher to maximize the sales of the author’s book. Pushing out inventory and taking the returns that enable pushing out inventory are part of what a publisher does for an author that the author can’t do for herself. While I believe that publishers will move to no-returns and no-inventory models for many books, and that will enable the publication of  books that would have been too risky the conventional way, the sales expectations for these books will definitely be lower than for those published with inventory and risk. And let’s remember that the cost of each book produced is substantially higher printing one at a time compared to a press run. Press runs are distinctly more profitable if returns aren’t astronomical and very few books are published with the expectation of astronomical returns.

So the days of returns may be numbered, just as the days of brick-and-mortar bookstores likely are numbered, but that’s not a good thing for overall book sales or even for the profits of publishers. For the books with highly-targetable audiences the effects will be less damaging but for the books that sell the most — the kind that agents represent to publishers — it will mean a great reduction in the chances that the book will take off and reach big numbers. And for the publishers that step down from returns by managing them before they eliminate them, there will be a real competitive advantage.

I didn’t make it to London. I’m in good company. My friends who are in London are wondering exactly how and when they’ll get home. Of course, there are far worse places to be stuck.

I see in today’s Shelf Awareness that The Bookseller in the UK has been sold by its corporate owner to an entrepreneur (its publisher, Nigel Roby) just a week after Publishers Weekly in the US was sold by its corporate owner to an entrepreneur (its long-ago former publisher, George Slowik.) There are powerful structural and institutional forces that have weakened the inherent position of a trade magazine for trade publishing in both markets and making a success of them will be a real challenge. We wish the bold new owners luck with their ventures.

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I was interviewed a couple of weeks ago by a journalist who was working on a story about publishers and digital change. He was building something around my “Stay Ahead of the Shift” speech from last year’s Book Expo.

“I was impressed by that speech,” he said. “You were very prescriptive about what publishers should do. So my first question for you is whether anything has changed since that speech?”

“No,” I said.

“Well then, would you say that trade publishers are doing any of the things you suggested? Have they taken your suggestions on board?”

“No,” I said.

“What would they say, then, about the assessment you offered? If I put you and a major trade player on a stage together to discuss the content of that speech, where would they say you went wrong?”

“They wouldn’t,” I said. “They’d probably say I was right and that they’re doing what I suggested. But they’re not.”

We moved along and talked about how the world is indeed, as I said, moving to vertical. We talked about publishers like Hay House and F+W and others that have extensive email lists of book purchasers that they can target directly, and inexpensively, every time they publish a new book. These are advantages and marketing capabilities that the big general publishers don’t have.

After we’d been talking for a while, the journalist had a last question. “Can you suggest any top executives you think I should talk to for this story?”

I suggested one that I thought was interested in pushing out the company point of view. Didn’t work. “I’ve been trying to get to that person for a week and my calls aren’t being returned,” said the journalist.

Then I mentioned another. “Oh, yes,” I was told. “I talk to that person very regularly.”

“A very smart person,” I said. The journalist agreed.

“So take this on board,” I said. “We’re talking about somebody who is a friend of mine. We’re talking about somebody who understands everything I say very well, but who isn’t implementing it. What does that tell you?”

It tells me that big companies are in the business of acquiring rights, creating products called books, and selling them. They have numbers to meet every quarter. They can’t start switching over their businesses from a model based on selling products to a model based on owning communities just because Mike Shatzkin says that’s the future.

I thought back to two pieces of advice I dispensed over a decade ago. In about 1999, executives at Book-of-the-Month Club paid me a modest sum for a quick-and-dirty strategic assessment. My advice anticipated my later thinking, even before I had learned to articulate the concept of “vertical.” What I told them is “book clubs don’t map into the 21st century. Communities of interest do. So you have to take your hunting and fishing book club and turn it into a hunting and fishing community.”

“How would we monetize that?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll have to figure that out.”

So they said “thank you very much” and moved on. They apparently made the (perfectly rational) decision to keep extracting cash from the book clubs until they couldn’t anymore and then sell them, if they could. If you owned a blacksmith shop in 1910, you might not want to invest in developing an auto mechanic’s capabilities just because you could see it coming. You might want to just pull out your blacksmith profits and go into another line of work. Or put the money in a bank.

At about the same time, the owners of the Atlantic Monthly magazine asked me for thoughts about a web strategy. “What are you most known for?” I asked.

“Publishing great writing,” they said.

“And who are your top competitors?” I asked.

“The New Yorker and Harper’s,” they replied.

“Then my advice would be to partner with the two of them and create a web community dedicated to great writing.” That advice also went no further.

Looking back on both of those recommendations, I recognize how hard it would have been to follow them. But imagine there were a Hunting and Fishing community that had been built on the backs of the hundreds of thousands of names BOMC had a decade ago. Think you could sell some red checkered jackets and fishing tackle through it now?

And in this age of diminishing reviewers and proliferating content requiring evaluation for consumers of quality literature, do you think my Atlantic-New Yorker-Harper combo community would have some real power today that could be turned into money? I do.

I see the big publishers developing vertical presences in the few areas where they have enough of a content flow to attempt it: books for kids and teens and the genres, particularly romance and science fiction. And they’re leaving just about all the others to upstarts who are slowly and methodically building their presences in cooking (book publisher Harvard Common Press and web sites like Cookstr and Serious Eats), mind body spirit (Hay House), sustainable living (Chelsea Green), crafts (F+W and C & T, among others) and the list will just continue to get longer.

General trade publishers will soon find themselves handicapped trying to sell anything except the most challenging books: the sure-to-be-big ones that cost a fortune to sign and the fiction, memoirs, hot current topics, and other writing that is the most expensive to promote book by book. And they’re remaining dependent on a very fragile chain of intermediaries.

Just as BOMC pursued a strategy that eschewed converting book clubs to communities in favor of squeezing every penny out of the old model, it is also rational for today’s big publishers to pursue a “last man standing” strategy. It will be a very long time before major authors don’t sell lots of print books and they’re going to need a strong organization to print those books and put them on the shelves that are out there. They need a strong organization. But do they need six?

Aside from “last standing”, the other alternative to my “multi-niche development” suggestion is to convert from a rights-acquiring publisher to a service organization. HarperCollins seems to be at least exploring the development of that alternative.

We have had remarkable stability among big publishers since Bertelsmann acquired Random House in 1999. There are reasons for the owners of every one of today’s players to sustain their present operations for the greater good of the larger organization. But would a 10% reduction in the number of bookstores in the US change their mind? How about a 25% reduction? How many years do you think it will be before we find out?

I’d say no more than five, and it could be two.

I am addressing UK publishers at the Annual General Meeting of the Publishers Association at the end of April. I’m taking another look at the Shift speech to try to re-cast the advice for trade publishers to make it more “followable.” One thing for them is to start thinking about the day when they can sell ebooks globally and, in effect, get distribution in the US market without going through a US publisher. On the one hand, why should they care, since they’re all global companies anyway? On the other hand, we know they do care because the UK publishers have been on a pretty successful crusade to convert Europe from an open market where US and UK editions compete to one that is closed to US entries. I suspect that as ebooks grow to and past a quarter of sales over the next few years, UK publishers will be able to see the virtue in a less rigid territorial regime.

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Only a short post on a rainy Sunday, a little folksier than usual. But I did think of something sort-of analytical at the end.

But when I write about my Dad, nice things happen. Last week I got this link sent to me by a friend in London, reminding me of the disclaimer in In Cold Type. Dad was actually pretty proud of it. I also got a call from a retired CEO who encountered him early in his career and was permanently influenced. And next week I’m having coffee with a literary agent  who started her career working with a dose of his mentoring at Doubleday in the 1950s.

Dad’s book is a tour de force. Nobody ever thought more analytically about every single process in trade publishing or brought such a comfort level with technology to their thinking.  He should have gotten more attention for correctly predicting the inevitable decline of mass market publishing at a moment when few saw it: very shortly after what remains the biggest paperback deal in history. (That was Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz, from Crown to Bantam Books, for $3.1 million, in 1979.)

It was a real struggle for Dad to get the book published. Although, as Dad pitched it, this was a book for everybody in book publishing and anybody interested in book publishing, that could only be true in the Cliff’s Notes version. Indeed, this is a book only for people with a deep interest in publishing. But time has proven that, for those, it is compelling.

David Replogle was the head of Houghton Mifflin’s trade department in the early 1980s and he had worked for Dad at Doubleday in the 1950s. All of the big houses had turned the book down. Was it because it wouldn’t sell well enough? Maybe. Was it because they didn’t want their authors and agents and shareholders asking them whether they did things the Len Shatzkin way, which they usually didn’t…? (What were those? Standardized trim sizes and text designs, much larger sales forces, statistically-driven print and pricing decisions, publishing companies encouraging retailers to allow them to manage  inventory at the point of sale…) I believe the nuisance factor crossed more than a few minds. Anyhow, Replogle, in a decision that was X parts business and Y parts sentimental favor, signed the book.

It sold well enough in hardcover to warrant a trade paperback edition. And when it reverted, Dad was one of the first to sign up for Lightning Print, almost two decades after he wrote In Cold Type. New technology always did appeal to him.

Clicking on a few links that I hadn’t for a while for this post made me realize something new about The Long Tail. While Dad’s book is in Lightning, there’s hardly any reason for somebody to buy the POD version anymore. The combination of the ones we’ve sold over the past 10 or 12 years and the relentlessly-increasing efficiency of the online used book supply system means there are probably enough copies in circulation to require bulk demand — for, say, 25 or more copies — for it make sense to do anything but shop the net for used. This is happening book by book. It would mean that the valuable shelf life of many scans for POD purposes might be considerably shorter than forever and that some books probably sell their very last newly-printed copy every day. That’s a new thought to me.

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This blog and my speeches contain frequent references to what we see as the big shifts the book publishing industry, and some publishers more than others, are feeling. The horizontal and format-specific product-centric media of the 20th century are inexorably yielding to the vertical and format-agnostic community-centric delivery environment for content that will soon predominate.

In that context, we’ve observed that the most general publishers are the most challenged. The distinction between publisher and retailer is blurring; in a decade or two it will be a distinction without much difference. What has always been the source of competitive advantage to trade publishers is leverage; they could reach thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of customers for their wares through retail channels that aggregated audiences for content creators and curated content for consumers.

The non-trade components of the book business: publishers of textbooks, professional information, databases, and academic content already tended to specialize by subject so the challenge of being audience-specific, a prerequesite to creating community, had already been met. Non-trade publishers had never depended much on horizontal intermediaries. Even in college textbook publishing, which depended (and still largely does) on the college bookstore to actually deliver the product and collect the consumer’s money, the marketing component of the bookstore’s contribution was and is minimal. The publisher works vertically through a network of professors to drive adoptions, and adoptions are what drive the sales.

Trade publishers, which are called trade publishers because they reach consumers through “the trade” network of bookstores, libraries, and the wholesalers that serve them, have been generally alert since the 1970s to the importance of what are generically called “special sales”. Those are sales that come from outside the book trade, often from retailers in other channels. Special sales experts learned pretty quickly that you did better when you had a selection of books for an audience. If you had one book of Jewish interest, you couldn’t do much with it. If you had a dozen, it could make sense to buy a mailing lists of rabbis. If you had one home repair book, you couldn’t afford the cost of setting up relationships with retailers of hardware or construction materials (particularly thinking back to days before those outlets had consolidated into giant retailers like Home Depot and Loew’s.) But if you had a list, then the mutual interest in a relationship was obvious to both sides.

Some publishers specialized. When I was consulting with Wiley in the 1980s as they were developing their fledgling trade program, they brought their philosophy of really covering the needs of a vertical market from sci-tech to trade. They didn’t want just one resume book for job-hunters: they wanted one at every sensible price point and different ones for different kinds of jobs. One day a sales rep called in from the road to suggest that they deliver a book on the cover letters that should go out with resumes. They already knew they had a market through specialized customers of all kinds and through their direct mail efforts. The lists that worked for resume books would also work for cover letter books.

The most “general” of the general trade publishers tended not to develop the same depth of specialized lists. When Wiley considered that cover letter book, they knew they’d be able to sell it very efficiently and they knew it would enhance their relationship with individuals and channel partners through and to which they were already selling a lot of books. Would the cover letter book be big? Possibly not, but it didn’t have to be to make it clearly worth doing.

But the big trade houses were not built that way. And the biggest books, the sexiest books, the most exciting books, don’t tend to be in niches. In fact, niche identification can dampen sales in a general trade market. The CEO of a major house told me a couple of years ago that he didn’t want to label a book that could become a betseller a “mystery” title. Mystery was a “category” (read: “niche”) and, while those books tended to meet theshhold expectations more readily, he perceived them as harder to break out to the sales levels they could achieve if they were perceived as unique.

We are now seeing the early signs of what will soon be a tendency, then a trend, and then a stark reality: you just can’t sell as many copies of most books if you don’t have a proprietary position with a vertical audience. The early signs are evident through companies like O’Reilly Media (computer programming and technology), Hay House (mind body spirit), Chelsea Green (sustainable living), Harvard Common Press (cookbooks and pregnancy-childbirth), and F+W Media (several niches, including writers and crafts), which have special retail channels and huge email lists of individual customers that the big houses simply don’t. Niche by niche, the big houses will find it impractical to publish in areas that were once productive for them. Their need for each book to be “big” individually — for the single title to provide its own critical mass — works against what you must do to be “big” in a niche. To do that requires a more across-the-list kind of thinking that is counterintuitive to a company that makes the lion’s share of its sales through trade channels.

So for just about all the books that aren’t novels, memoirs, celebrity-driven, or epic works of popular history or politics, trade publishers are increasingly handicapped. Unfortunately for them, things are going to get worse.

The obvious problem is that the capacity of the general trade market to merchandise and move product is diminishing. I hate to invoke the old wisdom that many things happen “gradually, then suddenly”, but it is often true and we have been gradually losing bookstores for the past decade. What happens to the economics of the big publishers if we lose a big chunk of superstores pretty suddenly?

I recall a dinner conversation with the Chairman  of a large diversified multi-niche publisher two years ago. Even back then, we were speculating about the possible sudden demise of Borders. (Hey! It hasn’t happened; maybe we were wrong!) My dinner companion said, “you know, Mike, we’re as diversified as a publisher can be, but if Borders went out, we’d definitely feel it. It would really hurt us.”

“Temporarily,” I said. He needed me to explain.

“Sure, you’ll suffer a bad debt if they go out. That hurts right now. But over the next couple of years, you’ll get a lot of cheap and useful assets from competitors of yours that couldn’t withstand the blow. By a couple of years from now, you’ll be ahead.”

“You may be right,” he said.

So even with the obvious problem, a multi-niche publisher has a big advantage over a general publisher, just as it does over smaller niche players. But the ground for the general publishers is about to shift in ways that will be even more challenging.

Because “book publishing” in an increasingly vertical world is less and less about content sales in the unit of “books” (although that will be the lion’s share of revenue for a long time) and more and more about sales bigger than the book (databases that stretch across many books and other things too) or smaller than the book (chapters or fragments that naturally stand alone or which address a particular content need.) The iPhone app as a unit of delivery is accelerating the latter trend. The value of a database across titles has long been demonstrated by O’Reilly’s “Safari” offering, which generates more revenue for them than all but one trade account.

As the percentage of a publisher’s revenue that is generated by fragments and aggregations rises, so does the value of being vertical and, especially, so does the value of a direct relationship with the end users. The fragments piece is especially important, especially challenging, and requires new ways of thinking (and perhaps new contracts.) For example, Dominique Raccah, the visionary leader of Sourcebooks, whose Poetry Speaks is building a model for vertical community building, has found that many publishers of poetry aren’t sure they have the rights to license her vertical to sell individual poems! Does that mean she has to go directly to the poets for those rights? And how long will it be before it is more important to a poet to have their individual poems available for sale on Poetry Speaks than to have them available in a publisher’s collection bound as a book?

Bruce Shaw, the longtime empresario of Harvard Common Press, is demonstrating another aspect of this thinking that we’ve expected for a long time but hadn’t seen in practice before. He told us about a macaroni and cheese cookbook his house was considering for publication. Normally, Bruce reports, that’s a subject they’d skip because it just isn’t distinctive enough to make the ambitous sales targets he normally sets for print publications. But, in this case, he’s doing the book because his overall recipe database (all the thousands of recipes HCP has published in over 30 years in business) is light on mac and cheese recipes. So he’s willing to publish the book, knowing he’s going to make less profit than he normally requires, because it is a subsidized way to improve the value of his overall database of recipes.

The question of selling fragments opens up a host of other challenges: figuring out what is a saleable fragment, tagging it with an identifier and metadata, managing transaction costs for a much higher volume or low-value transactions, and retro-fitting accounting systems to process author royalties that will require increasingly complex analysis of smaller amounts of money.

In fact, there is opportunity on what might be viewed as a micro- or nano-level of transaction, too small for even a niche publisher to manage the customer relationship and the transaction. That is going to present new opportunities for our client, Copyright Clearance Center, which we’ll elaborate on in future posts.

There’s a great deal of new opportunity out there but a lot of it is in pennies, not hundred dollar bills.

Let’s hear it for Wifi in the air! This is the first post for The Shatzkin Files filed from an airplane. Boy, did I have fun at Spring Training!

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I was extremely fortunate in my “choice” of parents. I had both admiration and affection for them, and I always had a great time just shooting the bull with my dad, Leonard Shatzkin. He was a real visionary about the publishing business and was also very witty and cogent. A great deal of what passes for my insight is really just a recycling of his.

He died in May of 2002. Until the last six months or so of his life when the heart failure that killed him so weakened him that he couldn’t really think anymore, he was still working hard on what he always considered to be the most important commercial challenge for book publishers: how to manage the inventory in retail locations. In fact, he was developing a system he hoped to commercialize as a solution for independent stores. I didn’t want to say “what independent stores?” to him back then, even though it was already obvious to me that their existence was seriously threatened. Dad had shaped his view of publishing during the 1950s, when the industry was near the front end of what was nearly half-a-century of unfettered growth.

That period of growth was over by 2000, and those of us who were trying to measure the trajectory of digital change in the early 2000s couldn’t avoid seeing it. Dad might have seen it 10 or 20 years earlier, but he was intellectually and emotionally incapable of accepting it in the last few years of his life. In fact, while taking control of the inventory in independent bookstores had been the key to the growth Dad fostered at Doubleday in the 1950s and in building the Collier Books imprint, which he created, for what we now call Macmillan I in the 1960s, it didn’t present the same level of opportunity in the 2000s. He had been right for many years about this, but he wasn’t anymore.

Another immutable truth in my father’s picture of book publishing which also turned out not to be permanent was his belief that book publishers should just keep expanding their lists, pretty much without limits. When Dad launched Collier Books by doing 600 titles a year in 1962, the entire industry only produced about 10,000 titles. In Dad’s time, it was probably true that most books big houses did contributed to profits, so the more titles you did, the more profits you made. Tom McCormack, who was a protege of Dad’s in the late 1950s and then went on to a long and successful career as CEO of St. Martin’s Press (now part of Macmillan II), attributed much of his success and St. Martin’s to Tom’s own recycling of Dad’s insight.

There is this beast in publishing known as the “title P&L.” The “title P&L” proceeds from the mistaken premise that titles, standing alone, deliver profits or make losses. In fact, that’s not true, because a substantial chunk of a publishing house’s costs are not title-specific; some costs are not really attributable in any sensible way.

The way “title P&L”s normally work is that “overhead” — rent, salaries, etc. — is figured as a percentage of sales (which, if you look back to last year, is, indeed, a calculable number across any company.) By “distributing” the unattributable costs that way, the logic says, you make sure that each book covers its “share” of the costs of keeping the doors open. But, as McCormack pointed out many times over his career, the rent didn’t go up because he signed a new title and it was nonsensical to charge each title, let alone each sale, for the rent.

Dad had a very succinct and persuasive way to explain the folly of the “title P&L” logic. What he suggested is that every house do a recalculation of their overall P&L at the end of each year. To do it, they should take out every title that failed to earn back the overhead charge (usually somewhere between 35% and 45%) because those had, by the internal logic, “lost money.” Surely, if you take out all the titles that lost money, you would see your overall calculation of profits rise. Right?

But it never does, it always falls. Why is that? Because most of the titles deemed to have lost money by “title P&L” logic actually made a contribution to overhead. That is, the direct revenues attributable to that title were greater than the direct expenses charged to it; they just weren’t sufficient to be scored as profitable when the overhead tax was deducted. But if you subtract all the books that earned 6% or 10% or 19% or 34% margin on sales, you subtract actual dollar contributions to overhead and profit.

Important point: overhead and profit are both produced by gross margin on sales. When enough margin has been generated to cover all the overheads, the margin becomes profit. So titles don’t earn profits or losses, they contribute more money or less to overhead and, in some cases, actually don’t recover their direct costs. The titles that don’t recover their costs clearly have lost money; all other titles contribute to overhead and, if it is covered, to profits, but they aren’t, strictly speaking, profitable in and of themselves.

All that was true in Dad’s day and is still true today. What has changed (I think; I haven’t actually done the analysis with a real house’s numbers) is that the percentage of titles that don’t even recover their direct costs is rising. It is actually getting harder and harder to publish new titles successfully, even if the standard of success is lowered to “recovered all costs” from “delivered its pro rata contribution to overhead.”

That’s because each title published today is facing a much more challenging commercial environment than each title published two, three, four, or five decades ago. Each title competes with more titles in the marketplace and more new titles coming into the marketplace: print-on-demand and online used books have snared a great deal of market share that used to be available only to new titles and backlist kept alive in print-run quantities by publishers. And, for the past 10 years, each new title is coming into a marketplace that has less shelf space available for books overall than it had for the last title.

So the “keep publishing more and more” paradigm that Dad believed in and that McCormack credited with St. Martin’s growth may not actually work anymore. In fact, any sentient publisher today would have to look at their output regularly to recalibrate what new title publishing is actually profitable. I expect that analysts in every major house are slicing and dicing their lists, trying to figure out whether they can discern — by level of advance or subject matter or by imprint or editor or agent — which bets will return the cash invested and bring profit to the house.

We can assume those analyses are being done, but can we assume they’re being done right? Without any inside view of the details (and I don’t have one), we’ll assume (hope) that the crude application of a single overhead percentage to each title is not the standard for analysis. If it is, the house doing that will almost certainly be led to erroneous conclusions, just as Dad and Tom pointed out they were if they saw a book that contributed 30% margin as “unprofitable” and would think they’d be better off not publishing it.

The big publisher of 2010 has another problem besides the reality that new titles are harder and harder to launch to any standard of acceptable return. They also have to feed a machine built to handle a certain volume of printed books when the decline of print book sales is being accelerated by the shift to digital. The additional margins in digital (which are being produced as long as prices can be maintained) are not very helpful if they need to be diverted to pay for warehouse space, field sales forces, and higher unit printing costs because there is less print “throughput” to support them.

Big publishing management is aware of this challenge; it is part of what drives up the value (and prices) of big brand franchise authors. The big authors are still the fastest way to guarantee the volume of print output and sales necessary to fill those volume-guarantee contracts with the printers, absorb the warehouse space, and cover the cost of calling on accounts that sell print only. And look at the irony. With less volume, unit costs per book go up, which reduces total gross margin. And if warehouse and sales organization costs are fixed (they aren’t but it is hard to adjust them quickly, the way you can cut a press run or a marketing spend), then the percentage of sales they will consume will go up. So much for calculations of overhead as a percentage!

The big variable publishers have to deal with today is marketing cost. The most common rationale for list-cutting is that it will allow a greater amount of marketing attention to the books that are published. But that articulation actually begs the question, because marketing resources are variable. If you add more, you increase the overhead nut you have to cover before you get to profits. And if you reduce those resources, then you’ll be chasing your tail trying to put more marketing effort behind each title.

The analysis of how to cut has to be done; it is pure insanity for publishers to keep cranking out new titles if they are losing on many of them. Some of the ones they lose on have the potential to be big but just don’t make it; some aren’t even seen to have that potential. But the ultimate answer is not in how or how much a publisher can reduce title output, but in how they focus it. That’s the secret to reducing marketing costs and it is something we will certainly explore in another post someday.

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This post contains a reference to our next conference effort: this year’s Making Information Pay for the Book Industry Study Group. There is a survey associated with this conference about how processes and job descriptions are changing that we really hope everybody employed in a publishing house — particularly those people involved in editorial, production, marketing, and sales — will take. If you’re employed by a publisher, please respond to the survey!

Even though I personally have concerns about the precious money that could be wasted on “enhanced ebooks”, I know that we’re going to see an explosion of interest in them and a huge escalation of investment in them in the next couple of years. That’s why I’m working on a new project called Enhanced Ebook University (EEBU) about which there will be much more to say in the next few weeks.

The idea behind EEBU is, to twist a quote from Mark Twain, “everybody’s talking about enhanced ebooks but nobody is quite sure what they are.” The first task of EEBU will be to survey the possibilities of what can be done and how it can be done. The process of building the outline for the White Paper that will be part of this project has uncovered a lot of great ideas that give me some renewed hope that enhanced ebooks can be more useful, and more supportive of the immersive reading experience, than were the CD-Roms we created 15 years ago.

One thing we’re hearing often enough now so that it is becoming a new cliche is that making enhanced ebooks is “like producing a movie.” The point is that there are many creative efforts that need to be integrated. This all makes me nervous for publishers. This is not their skill set. This is CD-Rom land. This is an invitation to spend enormous sums of money creating products that will never earn back their costs.

Now what I’m wondering is whether the enhanced ebook could lead to the resurgence of a diminishing breed: the (enhanced e)book packager. It may be already happening.

Starting in the 1960s and famously led by Paul Hamlyn, who consecutively created and then sold packagers Hamlyn and then Octopus, the UK-based packagers of heavily-illustrated books intended to be delivered in multiple languages became a critical component of commercial book production worldwide. The “packaged” book had a number of requirements that challenged publishers. They were illustration- and design-intensive; they required large amounts of subject and photo research that then needed to be rendered in a consistent and (for each title) formulaic way; and they required an understanding of design and language requirements so that they could be printed for different language markets with just a black plate change. (Some languages consistently take more characters to express the same thought than others and knowledge of those details was a component of the packagers’ expertise.)

Packaging evolved over the years. Some packagers, like Dorling Kindersley and Octopus, went for the greater margins of being publishers. With the greater margins, of course, also came greater risk as they invested in books, rather than being hired hands creating them on the back of a publisher’s firm order for copies. (One major packager — Quarto — evolved into a bifurcated company that is half-packager and half-publisher.) As the bookstore chains and other large customers like the mass merchants grew, they sometimes went directly to the packagers at Frankfurt, rather than waiting for a publisher to buy the book and offer it to them. That disintermediation reduced cover prices for the packaged books in those outlets which put further pressure on any attempts by publishers to sell the books in the remaining parts of the market.

Packagers existed for a reason: they added value. They organized themselves differently from publishers, focusing on complex project management challenges that publishers didn’t want. They set up important relationships, with Asian printers and with photo stock houses, and developed skill sets, for templated design and efficient assembly of books from multiple component parts, that publishers didn’t have.

So today we have ScrollMotion (which acts, in many ways, like a publisher), Brad Inman’s Vook in the United States and Peter Collingridge’s Enhanced Editions in the UK and, according to Peter Meyers — a veritable font of knowledge on this subject that I just tapped for EEBU — literally hundreds of others that now call themselves “app developers” offering up the equivalent of book packaging services for enhanced ebooks. These entities probably have a bright immediate future; they can do things that publishers will find themselves highly challenged to do for themselves.

In these still early days of developing the EEBU idea, it had already occurred to me that agents were going to be playing in this sandbox. When I first looked at Blio, it seemed immediately to me that authors had a key role to play and Blio’s very intuitive toolkit made it possible for them to do that. I included an agent in my initial round of readers for the EEBU White Paper outline because I believe that  before very long big agents will be hiring staff to help their authors execute enhanced ebooks. Meyers, who seems seems to have done more thinking about this subject than anybody else I’ve met (I’m meeting Collingridge next week at Tools of Change), also posited that agents could become the new packagers in the emerging enhanced ebook landscape.

One other point has arisen repeatedly in our early research for EEBU and also touches on another upcoming project of ours: the next BISG Making Information Pay conference that we’re organizing which, this year, is on “Points of No Return.” (That’s the one I want publishing company employees to take the survey on.) PONR is trying to assess how much the workflows and jobs will change in editorial, production, marketing, and sales as the digital revolution takes hold. That project intersects this discussion: when we make ebooks first or enhanced ebooks often, will the required skill sets change so much for editorial and production people that the current incumbents will be unqualified?

At least one expert I’ve talked to thinks they will be. A friend who has worked in trade publishing but who is now oveseeing vast programs that create college textbooks says that the editorial skill sets that work for print alone don’t seem to port to multi-media. I have heard this before. When we were doing research for the BISG conference in 2008, a digital operator at Wiley made a very similar observation.

The use of outside packagers for ebooks might not work as well as it did for illustrated books twenty and thirty years ago. Packaged books, generally, did not have single authors or, if they did, the author was secondary to the idea and to the package. In fact, the author was usually hired by the packager that had the idea rather than the author developing and pitching the idea, which is how the agented-author book usually works with publishers. That argues for the agent-as-packager model.

Or it argues that some kinds of enhanced ebooks — the movie-like ones — won’t be the purview of publishers at all. I saw somebody suggesting an enhanced ebook of Avatar. Good idea. I had the same idea. But the way I’ve been thinking about it is that it will come from the film producer. It would be a lot easier for somebody working for James Cameron to pull five minutes of movie clips and 100 stills and hire somebody to turn the script into a ten thousand word narrative than it would be for somebody working for a book publisher to do this. Why would anybody think a book publisher would be needed for a tie-in of this kind in an app and enhanced ebook world? The publisher was needed for thebook tie-in because the publisher put the product on store shelves. Publishers have no advantage over movie studios for access to the App or Kindle stores.

On the other hand, there are a lot of enhancements to ebooks that aren’t so movie-like and which would be more like what an author or publisher could provide expertise to do better: character description capsules; background material about a person, place or thing; back story narratives that would interrupt the flow for most people; links to sources or further information. It could be that the Baker & Taylor Blio tool, and other things like it that are coming along, will enable an author and editor to accomplish a lot of that. They can even mix in the video. But it wouldn’t make them qualified to shoot it or even curate it, let alone negotiate for any rights.

That’s the kind of thing we’ll be exploring in the EEBU project.

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One thing that makes trade publishing companies a bit confusing to outsiders is that they’re all organized a little differently. I remember years ago when the great editor, the late Alan Williams, was running a small general trade house near the end of his career. At one point, Alan’s sales and marketing director came to him and said, “I’d like to have publicity, which now reports in to ‘publishing’, report to me.” And Alan said, “fine.”

Then a few months later, the sales and marketing director said, “I’d like to have subsidiary rights, which now reports in to ‘publishing’, report to me.” And Alan said “no.” Alan’s logic was: “I need the capabilities of subsidiary rights reporting to me to make acquisition and product development decisions.” (Those were clearly different times, when book club and paperback sales potential could affect an acquisition decision, which they almost certainly wouldn’t today.) But, even then, Alan recognized that a different editor-publisher doing different books might look at it precisely the other way around.

In an ideal publishing world, the vision of a book and its market promulgated by an author and “gotten” by an acquiring editor, will guide all the work done by (in large houses) legions of people to develop the book’s editorial quality and presentation in any form, its “messaging” for marketing, its pricing, and its ultimate merchandising and delivery to the public.

I have observed for years that “each book published presents the opportunity to make an unlimited number of decisions, which must be resisted”. In big houses, those decisions are often made by committee. It creates a lot of meetings; more meetings than anybody can stand. That’s why good publishing management is constantly trying to delineate the lines of authority for decision-making because just about everything can become the subject of a cross-functional committee, if you let it.

Which raises the question of how you do introduce cross-functional ideas to a publishing house at anything other than the CEO or COO level, a strategy which has its own limitations. On Friday, we had a company in our office seeking our advice about how to advance their proposition. They were a large Indian printer with strong capabilities bolted at both ends: prepress services that included XML workflows and content conversion and complete warehousing fulfillment services, down to the single copy level. They could see all sorts of problems they could solve for publishers that would reduce costs and grow sales, particularly with supply to Africa, which is a problematic but growing market.

They had already engaged one of the most senior and knowledgeable consultants in the industry to help them. He just couldn’t find the “right” person to talk to in each house. Efficiencies that result from more sensible linking of prepress to printing, or printing to warehousing and fulfillment, will fall in multiple bailiwicks in any publisher of consequence. He called us; we called in two other senior consultants who might be able to help. It was a sales development meeting for all of us (that’s consultant-speak for “an uncompensated opportunity to help somebody in the hope that work might result from it”.) But none of us felt the integrated services and cost savings would be easy to sell because of the structural impediments. The best advice that came out of that meeting (and it wasn’t from me) was “sell them that you can grow revenue in Africa; revenue enhancements are easier to sell than savings.”

We’ve been helping a client called SBS Worldwide tackle a similar problem. The label most publishers would put on them is “freight forwarder”, but because they are entreprenurial, aggressive, and creative out-of-the-box thinkers, they’ve built capabilities that make them much more than that. By forming a partnership with a big company in China, they have put freight-forwarding capabilities (which, standing alone, consist merely of commissioning the transport companies to move goods — usually by land, then by sea, and then by land — and keeping track of where the goods are throughout their journey) into the same service offering as warehousing, pick and pack, splitting and combining shipments, and handwork like stickering or prepack assembly. And they deliver these services at Asia prices, not Western prices. SBS wrapped it all up with a great web-based reporting system that “sees” the goods from end to end any way you want to, tied a ribbon around it, and called it eDC for “electronic Distribution Center.”

The capabilities this offers a publisher — with no capital investment — doing a lot of printing in China for the American or European markets are enormous. They can consolidate shipments from four printers, split off 700 separate packages for the Barnes & Noble stores, the shipments to the top five distribution center customers, and 200 review copies (with a press release folded in), and send each its most efficient way directly from Asia.

And they can hold books in Asia if they aren’t needed right away and the publisher’s warehouse is full or would like them “metered” in. I am aware of two major houses who have expressed warehouse space pain within the past year. I don’t imagine asking for cash for more warehouse space would be well received in the current business environment.

And eDC can customize looks at those shipments so that each stakeholder inside or outside the publisher can see their own view: their distribution center, their customers’ distribution centers, their sales people, and their editors. This can take an enormous communications burden off their organization.

The challenge SBS faces is that the freight forwarder is viewed as the most commoditized and least important component of the supply chain (they don’t absorb much of the budget compared to the other costs of delivering the inventory). Many publishers just let the printer “deliver” to their warehouse (so the printer may be choosing the freight forwarder). In that case, the production director is “buying” what SBS is selling, and it isn’t crazy that production’s first instinct is to let the printer handle it. (After all, they’re trying to choose the lowest “landed price” for the book, aren’t they?)

Some larger houses have a “supply chain management” function, which takes a broader view. But, even there, vested interests come into play. Does the house need to continue showing “throughput” to justify distribution center fixed costs? Does the supply chain department or production department even want to develop a routine involvement with marketing functions like review copies and sales interactions like delivery to Barnes & Noble stores?

Print book publishing is shrinking because of the alternatives being offered by technology. Sometimes technology can turn that shrinking into an advantage by collapsing functions, or reconfiguring the relationship between departments. But publishers are structurally resistant to entertaining propositions that could do just that. There’s no widely applicable solution to this problem except to have an energetic COO that looks for solutions with a broader organizational perspectives that her functional heads might resist.

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Is this where I came in?

In the early 1990s, the computer manufacturers and Microsoft were doing everything they could to persuade businesses and consumers that they really, really, really needed CD-Rom drives. That Microsoft would benefit from them was very clear; the software they were selling was taking more and more diskettes to deliver in those pre-broadband, pre-Web days when all software was “shrinkwrapped.” If computer owners could take their new software on CD-Roms, the cost of delivering the product would drop dramatically.

Only a year or two before, Bob Stein had developed what we can now identify as the first “enhanced ebooks”. His company, Voyager, introduced the “Expanded Book”. These were the first efforts to use the book as the foundation to do something much more ambitious: linking in pictures and sound and video and databased information. No web links yet, because there was no web yet, but the Voyager Expanded Books really foresaw the possibilities.

Microsoft encouraged publishers to build on the Voyager Expanded Books example with CD-Roms, and, indeed, the Voyager product itself moved quickly from a diskette-based product to a CD-Rom, which gave it a multiple of the digital space to add content.

Publishers at that time had recent experience with new product forms. In the early 1980s, a few had experimented with software publishing, but that was quickly seen not to work and the publishers who tried it, like Wiley, pretty quickly got out. In the mid-1980s, audiobooks first came on the scene, however, and their acceptance, fueled by the ubiquity of tape players in cars and the relatively new Sony Walkman family of portable cassette players, was very rapid. With the encouragement of Microsoft and the hardware makers promising that all computers would soon have CD-Rom drives, many publishers jumped into what we can look back and see was an enhanced ebook business with both feet.

It turns out they jumped into an empty swimming pool. Many legs were broken.

The whole idea that people who wanted a cookbook needed video in the middle of the recipe or that people would “read” a book on a desktop computer because of sound effects in a CD-Rom version always seemed like a stretch to me. Sometime in the middle of the CD-Rom craze, I learned that McGraw-Hill had a big animal encylopedia on which something like 60% of the cost went into the sound. This was for a high-priced professional product. This made no intuitive sense. It wasn’t placing the investment where I thought anybody would find the value.

What seemed more likely to work to me at that time was to just put the book on a diskette (they were still much more common then than CD-Rom drives) to allow one to just read it on their laptop. The writer and enrepreneur Po Bronson might not remember this, but he and I discussed that idea at great length at the time. Meanwhile, I predicted in 1995 and 1996 that CD-Roms were going nowhere, that the “action” for book publishers would be online, and that the first important thing that would happen online would be increased sales of plain old printed books, all of which turned out to be utterly correct.

Now, as Yogi Berra allegedly once said, we have deja vu all over again.

In the later 1990s, the simple ebook delivery I imagined happened through online distribution, not diskettes. The devices of choice were plain old PCs (mostly reading PDFs) and handheld PDAs, reading the Palm Digital format, Microsoft’s new “dot lit” format (remember how revolutionary that was supposed to be when it first came out!), and then Mobipocket which, until Amazon bought them and largely buried them, was going to be the cross-platform standard.

Now that I had what I wanted, I was a happy guy. I started reading ebooks predominantly and I went out on the prediction limb again. I figured that PDA-reading would become widespread, and quickly.

Talk about jumping into an empty pool!

In fact, underscoring my misunderstanding, I wrote in about 2004 or 2005 that PDAs were the key to ebooks. If you carry a PDA, was my thinking, then you shouldn’t need anybody to explain the advantage of ebooks to you. It was transparent; you always had your book with you. And, conversely, I figured that if you did not have a PDA, there was no great advantage to ebooks. What I saw as the big advantage was not having to carry the book as an “extra.”

Still, ebooks just didn’t happen. I couldn’t understand it. A lot of people told me the problem was that ebooks didn’t really do anything that couldn’t be done with plain old print books. They didn’t take advantage of the opportunities afforded by digital books. No video. No audio. No web links. That didn’t seem like the answer to me. I remembered the CD-Rom fiasco.

Then Kindle came along. On the one hand, it proved me wrong because here was a device that had to be carried around (like a book) and didn’t do anything for you except let you read a book. On the other hand, Kindles sold well (particularly considering Amazon was the only place to get one) and, more important, Kindles sparked an explosion of interest in and uptake of ebooks. And that, I thought, proved that “just the book” was enough for many people to have a satisfying ebook experience.

But now it looks like market forces are going to tempt publishers to invest in enhanced ebooks all over again. We are awash in news of new ebook readers — meaning both software that can play on PCs, netbooks, iPhones, or various more dedicated devices and a slew of those more dedicated devices to choose from. So people are going to be reading books on devices that can do a lot more than a Kindle or Sony Reader can do.

Two other things happening at the same time also push for more complex ebooks. One is that the tool sets to deliver them — and even to allow any author working with a bright young person alongside of them to deliver them — are getting more ubiquitous. And the other is that publishers think they see a connection between more complex ebooks and higher-priced ebooks, and that makes them very interested in exploring the subject.

A lot has changed in the past 15 years since the CD-Rom era. I am not in any way suggesting that the CD-Rom disaster of the mid-1990s will be repeated in the enhanced ebook era we are heading to now. But nobody figured out what compelling consumer product could be made from a book with lots of digital space to play with then and we’d be kidding ourselves to think anybody’s figured it out now either. There will be a lot of trial and error work done by the industry in the next couple of years trying to find the book-into-something-better formula that works artistically, functionally, and commercially. The answers are by no means self-evident.

One cautionary tale from the CD-Rom era. One of the first big successes on CD-Rom was issued by Simon & Schuster and based on StarTrek. In retrospect, we can see that StarTrek was the “perfect subject”: the one thing that would work with early-adapting techie geeks even if nothing else would. Unfortunately, S&S read the StarTrek success as an endorsement of the CD-Rom product idea and rapidly expanded their new media division to do more titles. Nothing else came close to matching StarTrek’s success.

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Although the decline of newspaper book review sections is just a sub-set of the larger sadness of the overall demise of newspapers, I was struck by the recent report of the mighty Los Angeles Times Book Review being stripped down to practically nothing.

I haven’t read it for years, but this news made me think about a time when book reviews in that paper were important to me.

Something over 40 years ago (wow!), I was an undergraduate at UCLA fortunate enough to take a bunch of courses from Robert Kirsch, who was then both the Book Review Editor of the LA Times and the daily book critic. Kirsch wrote six daily book reviews a week and edited the Sunday section. He also taught a course or two each quarter at UCLA, assigned more writing than any professor I ever had, and put more editing and commentary marks on the stuff we turned in than any other professor did too. He also clearly had plenty of time to have fun.

Obviously, there had to be a trick to it.

Kirsch explained to one of our classes that he had invented a speed-reading technique for himself in the early 1950s before he had ever encountered Evelyn Wood. The key, Bob said, was that you had to stop “silently reading aloud”, effectively articulating each word to yourself (as we all did, he said) as you processed it. He said if you put your hands to your throat you could feel yourself doing it. Avoiding that, he claimed, allowed you to pull in whole sentences and paragraphs at a time.

I just didn’t get it. It didn’t make any sense to me. I always read “word by word” and still do. But Kirsch read at a speed that I would call “scanning” (his eyes moved over the page) and he turned pages like a person who was looking for something that would stand out. (Let’s say you were looking for a series of capitalized words on a written page: “United States of America” or “American Civil Liberties Union” and think about how fast you could scan text and be sure you weren’t missing that.) But he remembered everything he’d read.

(Years after I left school, I met my wife who reads in these chunks the way Kirsch did. I always finished every reading test I ever took before time was up; Martha reads narative books about 2 or 3 times as fast as I do. She’s not as fast as Kirsch and she didn’t consciously “teach herself” the way he did, but she also does what I just can’t get: she reads in chunks, rather than word-by-word.)

Kirsch loved writing those daily book reviews and teaching the classes, but he hated the admin involved in being the book editor. So around the time I graduated from college, he took his best student from UCLA, Digby Diehl, and made him the Book Review Editor. (I am deliberately not checking this story with Digby — with whom I have a friendship that goes back to those days — prior to posting but I’m going to tell Digby about the post and invite to “revise and extend” my remarks as he sees fit as a comment.) Kirsch once, in a weak moment, said I was the best (or maybe he said “one of the best”; I didn’t have hearing aids yet back then but needed them) student he’d had, but I wasn’t old enough to be considered for the job. I wouldn’t have been as good at it as Digby was anyway.

The first course I took from Kirsch was on “Criticism” and the first assignment he gave us was to write “Your Critical Credo.” What are your rules for yourself when you write criticism of literature or movies or art? What are your standards? This was typical of Kirsch, assigning you something that forced you to think about how you think.

Another assignment that stands out in my memory was a movie review we did for his class. Bob arranged for us to see a movie screening of a Campus Christian Crusade film called “Up with People”. We saw the film in an evening screening and had to turn it our reviews at class the next day, just like real film critics!

A number of us stayed in touch with Bob Kirsch after our college years. I remember an assignment he had in London in the early 1970s and recall his pretty and youthful and blonde wife wearing a leather skirt she had bought on Carnaby Street in London (according to Bob.) We lost him far too young; he succumbed to pancreatic cancer in the late 1970s. Even the nature of his death, as it was told to me, bore his special stamp. When he got the diagnosis, he and his wife moved to a beach cottage in Santa Barbara where he lived out his few remaining weeks without treatment or any fanfare. He accepted reality. I think that was a hallmark of his intellect.

Of course, the realities of Kirsch’s time didn’t include disappearing newspapers and disappearing book review sections covering a disappearing trade book business. But I can only begin to imagine what he would have done with digital reading. Plenty, I’ll bet.

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I lost a very dear friend who was a unique figure in the publishing world two months ago when Caroline Latham died in Novato, California. I am pretty sure she was 68 or 69; her close friend Joan was sure she was 70. Even Caroline didn’t know for sure.

I met Caroline in 1978 when my family’s Two Continents Publishing Group, a distributor along the lines of PGW or NBN, and her Latham Publishing Company, a packager of college textbooks, were in their last days. Two Continents was desperately looking for more books to distribute; Caroline was desperately looking for additional ways to monetize content assets she held. We couldn’t solve each other’s problems then, but we became friends and I got to know one of the most extraordinary people on the planet.

Caroline had been raised in an oil-industry family; her father was an engineer. She had grown up in various places in the US and in Iran, and went to Oberlin College very young. She graduated from Oberlin at the age of 16 or so (later events established that she didn’t really know) and, as she put it to me, married the richest young man in town who had a job as a college traveler for Macmillan, putting Caroline in touch with the college textbook business. For several years, Caroline lived a relaxed life, bearing a son and daughter and indulging her lifelong passion for the written word. She read extraordinarily fast and could literally devour several full-length books a day. By the time she was in her early 20s, she had read more books than most well-read people consume in a lifetime.

Then, after they had moved to New York so he could move from sales to being an editor, her husband suddenly disappeared from her life. As I recalled the story, he was discovered a few years later, having had a total emotional breakdown, in Detroit. Caroline abandoned his family’s fortune to him for a variety of reasons — one being that she knew he would need it to live out his life — and immediately shifted to writing textbooks to earn a living in New York for herself and her children, Scott and Sarah Bridge. Her kids were just about grown and out of the house when I met her and she began to work in trade publishing.

The first project we worked on together was for a Warsaw Ghetto survivor named Jack Eisner, who had made a fortune in the US after World War II and then, in the late 1970s, was underwriting the telling of his story through all available means. Caroline ghost-wrote his book, “The Survivor”, and Abby Mann was hired to write the play of the same name (which closed very quickly despite Jack’s efforts to build a success on Broadway.) Caroline and I together made a deal for the book with William Morrow; then she supervised a team following scripts I wrote to augment the house’s sales efforts with calls to bookstores all over the country, an effort that seems rather quaint today but actually produced measurable results back then.

Caroline was really good at the ghost-writing thing. She could “become” any person and produce an appropriate style or voice. She never violated the trust by telling me his name, but I know that she ghost-wrote many of the books and articles signed by the head of the business school of one of the country’s better-known universities. She also ghost-wrote a sociology 101 textbook that became a standard in the field.

From ghost-writing and a brief unsuccessful stint as a literary agent, Caroline moved on to authoring. She wrote celebrity bios of movie and pop stars (many of them penned in a few short weeks): her bio of Michael Jackson hit the bestseller list. She co-authored “Life with Rose Kennedy”with Kennedy secretary Barbara Gibson, another book that hit the lists. She did a bio of David Letterman 20 years ago. Our Filedby web site has pulled together the biggest list available of her credits, but I’m quite sure it isn’t complete.

Of course, the Eisner book doesn’t show up on Filedby under Caroline’s name; it was ghost-written. Another project we worked on together that was ultimately published was a book to reveal the duplicity of Nixon and Kissinger in the Vietnam War by a Denver lawyer and peace activist name Joe Amter. There were others…

By 1990, Caroline’s kids had moved to the West Coast: Scott was pursuing a career in Seattle as an agent for exotic travel and Sarah was in the real estate business in San Francisco. Caroline moved to the Bay Area and, with Sarah, started a new business called RealFacts. RealFacts is a database surveying rents and occupancy in multi-family housing, a business Caroline grew and ran — sometimes with Sarah’s help and sometimes without — until her death.

But none of this — not raising two kids without a husband; not writing dozens of books; not even picking up, moving on, and starting a completely new business at about age 50 — describes what made Caroline so extraordinary. You see, she couldn’t. That is: she couldn’t see.

From the time I met her, I was aware that she had trouble with her vision. She wouldn’t know me if I passed her on the street (we lived not far apart in New York, so that happened.) She had to hold written material very close to her face or look at it through very thick glasses. She drove a car, but admitted to me that she probably shouldn’t (she drove slowly and, as with everything she did, with a huge application of intelligence.) Apparently she had an accident earlier in life that rendered one eye absolutely useless; the stark worsening of diabetes in her 50s, concurrent with the ailment that compromised her heart, robbed her of much of the rest of her vision and for the last years of her life she was legally blind.

But, somehow, she read; she wrote; she built and ran a business.

It was in the late 1990s that Caroline suffered an infection which lodged in her heart and induced congestive heart failure. The Mayo Clinic branch in Phoenix told her in 1998 that she had three months to live. She then took over the custodianship of her own health care, pretty much telling the doctors what to do from that time on. A few years later her kidneys also started to fail, which is when I learned (from her) that just about everything that helps the kidneys hurts the heart, and vice-versa. She was managing a very sensitive balance, which she did — for years.

Her health issues became further compounded with a digestive malfunction that, as far as I know, was never successfully diagnosed. But it meant she was deprived of one of her great pleasures — eating. What used to be a source of great joy and amusement became a chore and a challenge. But she persevered and, although she went from being a rather large and round lady to a lean and frail one, she cheerfully lived with the condition for the last several years of her life.

Caroline was a totally unique mixture of a brilliant intellectual with eclectic tastes that ran from very middle-American to quite sophisticated, the former being perhaps a product of her family’s tight connection to a little town called California, Missouri (she called it “CalMo”) right in the center of the state. She could parse professional material in business, science, medicine, statistics, and real estate. But she loved gossip about movie stars and celebrities, spending time at the beach (when I met her her “ambition” was to own and run a small hotel on a Caribbean island), sports, and pop culture. (A CD of her favorite music that she gave out at her 65th birthday party was testimony to that: it starts and ends with Ray Charles and in between you find artists as diverse as Frank Zappa, Leonard Bernstein, and the Beatles, and June Carter Cash!) She was not a beautiful woman, but she usually had an affectionate and caring boyfriend, often a Caribbean man with a limited education. She related to everybody.

And she cared about everybody. She not only wrote more books than any two people I ever knew, she also lent a personal helping hand to more people than anybody I ever met. Over the years, RealFacts had employees who were down on their luck or otherwise found themselves in dire need. Whether through fault of their own or not, Caroline was always there to help them. Sometimes they let her down and she had to let them go, but if they got on new meds or turned a corner some other way, she’d take them back.

I found out that Caroline didn’t now how old she was when she had her 65th birthday party in Novato in 2005. She celebrated the party because she found out that Social Security thought she was 65, even though she thought she was 64! I remember getting that party invitation in about January and her birthday was in June. We wondered whether she’d make it; she was already frail, it was years past the 6-month death sentence from the Mayo Clinic, and she was on the heart-and-kidney teeter-totter that was the story of the last decade of her life.

But she did make it; she made it to that party and for several years beyond, including a wonderful 1-week trip back to Manhattan, along on which she brought an entourage and took an apartment on West 55th Street. She continued to consume books (by audio now, with the help of a friend named Don Christensen in New York who remotely picked out the books to be delivered to her for her from the local Marin County Library System.) She put a program on her computer that blew type up to a huge multiple of its normal size — so big that you had to move the type across the screen with the mouse to read more than a word or two at at time, and she continued to read and write. (I know because she answered my emails!)

Being Caroline’s friend for the past several years has meant knowing a phone call delivering news you don’t want could come at any time. I got the call last May from Caroline’s friend Joan Winer Brown, who told me Caroline was about to die. She had been taken to the hospital with blocked intestines, unable to take in any more food. Doctors were telling her there was no point to surgery; Joan felt they were about to stop heroic efforts.

But a month later the news had changed. Caroline had, from the depths of her illness, mustered the strength to tell the doctors and her caregivers, “yes you will operate. Do whatever you can that might save my life.” And they did. Caroline moved to a rehab facility by the end of June.

I last spoke to her on the phone when she was in that rehab facility and about to go home. Talking on the phone was something Caroline always loved to do. Her voice was weak, but her mind was clear. She knew the odds against her were long, but she was determined to manage things toward a solution as long as one was possible. She was happy to be going home.

I’m glad she got that last couple of months in her own house and the feeling, to the end, that she was in some ways at least the master of her own fate. She leaves a daughter and granddaughter and son and brother and countless friends who will never forget her and her kindnesses, and will certainly never meet another like her.

I am indebted to Caroline’s close friend Joan Winer Brown for some key information that is in this post.

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