With the exception of a handful of companies worldwide that chase big books with big advances, most of the money publishers spend is spent on printing. Even though many publishers write off overenthusiastic author advances, most of the money publishers lose is lost printing books that were never needed. And another chunk of it is lost financing inventory that is printed well before its necessary time. With the pressure on publishers to be more efficient growing daily, getting the printing decisions right — or at least getting them better — should be a priority for every publisher
The Future of Distribution
The future of distribution” is simply too big a subject to be covered in an hour, even by a fast-talking New Yorker like me. So we’re going to focus our attention on “distribution” as defined by the companies that call themselves “distributors” and by publishers who offer “distribution services” to other publishers. That is, we’re going to talk about how it works when a publisher hands off important distribution functions to another entity
Sensible Metrics
It is a virtual certainty that every major trade publisher could increase their profits if the people setting the price and print order had no idea how much the house paid for the book or what the total sunk costs are. Of course, it is valid to know things about market expectations today: how big a market, how much promotion are we doing, and what are the sales of recent comparable books? All of those things tell us important things to consider for the pricing and printing
Keynote Address – “The New Face of Publishing” Conference
One of the first times I talked to a book publishing audience trying to visualize the future that digital change would bring was about ten years ago at Book Expo America. It was already apparent at that time that the music business might have a major problem and there seemed to be ways that publishing might follow
Under the Radar: There’s more to supply chain management than influencing reprint decisions and allocating existing inventory
…making the best use of the available data requires going beyond the objective of right-sizing reprintings and allocating scarce stock. It can also be used to identify under-distributed books that are “flying under the radar”. Teasing out that information has been a new challenge for publishers large and small. Publishers’ customers are almost universally able to provide regular data feeds and are, with few exceptions, willing to do it. And publishers are increasingly finding that proper management of the data they are receiving can surface opportunities to increase sales of books that were languishing because they weren’t available in quantities sufficient to meet discernible demand
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