Vertical

A dispute broke out on Brantley’s list this morning and I’m in a distinct minority. Maybe a minority of only a bit more than one.

The brouhaha started with observations about ebook pricing, with some very disdainful remarks about Agency pricing in principle and the big publishers’ execution of it in particular. The complaint was “ebook prices are too high” and there was support for Amazon’s protest to the ebook consumers in the UK and even a statement that one should choose what to read based on whether it was priced by Agency rather than wholesale.

Of course, I’m in the camp that believes Agency pricing has, at least (and probably) temporarily, slowed the (still) inexorable downward spiral of ebook prices for branded (big author) books. It has also contributed to breaking Kindle’s hegemony over the ebook market which is not solely a function of deep discounting (it is a great device and a great shopping experience!) As of the last time I checked (two months ago), two Big Six publishers reported to me that the Kindle share for their titles had dropped from the mid-80s to the mid-50s. They no longer dread “the call”, which is the metaphor for the message they feared would come one day from their biggest account saying “I can’t pay $15 for what I sell for $10 anymore; I’m going to give you $5.”

Now, it is possible that the Nook and the iPad would have created a lot of this market erosion under any pricing regimen, but I doubt it. I have heard that Barnes & Noble told publishers last year that Amazon’s ebook pricing was going to kill them and reduce their ability to keep bookstores open if they had to compete with loss leaders in the ebook arena. And Apple still gives a good imitation of an outlet that won’t play except on their Agency terms.

But what really caused the thinkers on the list to take issue was me was my contention that it is logical for the major trade houses to try to keep ebook prices higher in defense of print. From my perspective, the core value proposition of the major houses is “putting books on shelves.” That is the function that requires scale, capital, and a legacy organization with a lot of know-how. If that’s right, the fate of the big publishers is inextricably linked to the fate of brick-and-mortar stores. So of course, they would try to preserve them.

Not all publishers are in the same boat. O’Reilly Media, for example, has told the world that its second largest account is its own aggregated ebook platform, Safari. Print is still important to them, but they’re not nearly as dependent on bookstores as the major trade houses are; they probably sell a higher percentage of even their print online than the big houses do. (They say that Amazon is the one account bigger for them than Safari.) Perhaps it will even be to O’Reilly’s competitive advantage as bookstores diminish, raising the relative value of the customers they can reach directly. O’Reilly is an outstanding example, but not a unique one.

But without bookstore shelves to fill, I fear the major publishers have very little to offer. In their own defense, they tend to fall back on “curation” as their strong suit, but I’m afraid their curation is B2B and the B they curate for is the book trade! They have very little curation “brand” with consumers. I know there are efforts to build marketing capabilities that benefit from scale, but nobody has ever made a convincing case to me that they can do that. Generating robust metadata could benefit from scale if there were real verticality — tagging around the same subject matter again and again — but big trade houses don’t have that.

Another digital head at a big house, responding to my quest for power in scale, pointed out that they’ve been spending scads of money on tax compliance and lawyers. Of course, part of the reason they spend that money is because they have a lot to lose. But it is also true that the tax compliance issues can be offered at scale by third parties. In the US, at least, an outfit called RoyaltyShare is doing just that for publishers trying to live up to the requirements of Agency selling.

We really have at least two trade publishing businesses at the moment, the big houses and everybody else. The big houses pay almost all the substantial advances; they pay the highest royalty rates (which is actually, when you think about it, more than a little bit odd); and they generally get the best terms from their intermediaries. Their executives probably put their pants on one leg at a time (to quote an old baseball line) but, otherwise, they don’t have much in common with everybody else.

When one studies the industry and tries to analyze behavior, it is critical to keep that distinction in mind. It is appropriate that Random House and HarperCollins have a different strategy than O’Reilly or F+W Media for ebook and print pricing and for marketing. They really have different businesses.

All of this recalls the old cliche: where you stand depends on where you sit. If you’re a big publisher, every move you make should consider the fate of brick-and-mortar bookstores and you should be doing everything you can to preserve them for as long as possible. That’s the first element of a survival strategy. The second element could be to try to be “last one standing”. Our client Ingram has demonstrated with two recent deals (with Macmillan and with Springer) how publishers can pull back from their massive bookstore-supporting infrastructures but, even so, a diminution in bookstore shelf space is going to force consolidation. Maybe big houses will merge their back offices (which is, in effect, what Ingram is offering as a third party) but I think it is more likely that we’ll see a lot of mergers in the next ten years.

The most important metric for big publishers to watch over the next few years is “total shelf space available for books in retail stores.” (I’ve even come up with a pretty simple way to track that and suggested it to one of the companies that could provide it.) That’s almost certainly not the most important metric for upstart and vertical publishers.

It is often said that the big mistake railroads made was not realizing they were in the transportation business, or they wouldn’t have let airlines pass them by. I don’t buy that; running a railroad in no way qualifies you to run an airline, let alone to invent one. One listmember in the discussion in which I appeared to convince nobody suggested that the big publishers should focus on how to be more upstart and more vertical. I am afraid that trying to be something that you’ve never been is a very hard path to follow.

All this means that you need to think about which publishers you’re talking to and about when you frame conversations. At Digital Book World, for example, we’ll have a panel on ebook distribution for small and midsized publishers. But we’ll also have some unique research about the ebook royalty deals being made which focuses on agents and big publishers. The experience of smaller publishers, who almost always pay higher royalties, would almost certainly just confuse the issue. Any “industry data” that doesn’t separate the bigs from the smalls has to be parsed very carefully or it could lead to wildly erroneous conclusions.

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At the conclusion of another Frankfurt Book Fair — my thirty-somethingth — here is something I actually knew before but have taken on board in a whole new way: there is an enormous gap between the US and everyplace else in the Western world (at least) in consumer ebook takeup and acceptance.

Here is what I think: it can’t stay that way forever.

Here is what I deduce: the rest of the world is in for what will be, for many, a vertigo-inducing ride while they catch up.

It seems pretty obvious why the US is so far ahead: 300 million people in a single developed economy with a single currency and a single language. Those same factors also largely explain why the US is also so far ahead in Internet print book purchasing. (There is another big cause at play there: the service infrastructure provided by our national wholesalers, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, without which it would have taken a multiple of the initial investment to get Amazon.com off the ground 15 years ago.)

One thing leads to another. Because Amazon had, by the end of 2007 when it introduced the Kindle, built a loyal customer base of tens of millions of book buyers, they had the pillars in place to roll out an ereading device. That really required two things nobody else in any other country has even today: a big enough customer base to reach a critical mass of consumers without any assistance or partnerships and enough leverage with the publishers to get them to put their books into the ecosystem that supported their device.

One thing leads to another. Amazon’s Kindle, with a much larger selection of titles and a smoother path from file server to device than had previously been offered by other ereading platforms (which were, before Kindle, the Sony Reader device for some and reading on PCs or handhelds such as Palm Pilots for others, with me in the handhelds group), gained pretty rapid uptake. That led Barnes & Noble, which also had leverage with the publishers to get titles into their store and access to and brand credibility with millions of book readers, to follow on with their Kindle-like device, the Nook, almost exactly two years after the Kindle. As most of us know, the iPad followed the Nook shortly thereafter, coming onto the US market in April 2010.

All of this has resulted in getting the US to the point as of Frankfurt 2010 where a US publisher launching a book of straight text can expect ebook sales to be a mid-teens percentage of the book’s total sale, with occasional reports that are even more dramatic (such as the anecdote that the first wave of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” was one-third ebooks!)

One thing leads to another. As has been written on this blog many times, all these Internet-based sales put enormous pressure on brick-and-mortar stores. We see shelf space diminishing and there are those among us who believe that over the next ten years it could pretty much disappear.

The Kindle hasn’t had nearly as dramatic an impact abroad as it has in the US for a host of reasons. Amazon doesn’t have the same audience share. They don’t have the same huge number of titles available as they do in the US. And they haven’t had two other big and influential companies (B&N and Apple) pushing the device-reading experience into the public consciousness. It seems Nook and iPad’s arrival have only served as catalysts for Amazon to sell even more Kindles and for the ebook uptake in the whole US market to accelerate further.

So we find ourselves today with this massive gap between the penetration of ebooks in the American market and the penetration in any other country’s market outside of Asia (I didn’t talk to any Asian publishers at the Fair, and I don’t know the situation there.) Certainly (assumption alert: a priori argument not based on any data) this is a situation that cannot last forever. In five or ten or fifteen years the percentage of book sales that are digital and the percentage of print book sales that are transacted online will be pretty much the same in all developed countries.

If that assumption is right, then other countries — starting with the English-speaking ones and then moving on from there — are going to experience the changes we’ve felt in America in a much more compressed period of time.

There are legal and institutional barriers to change which have already been “effective.” The world’s largest natural moat has protected the Australian book market, keeping print book prices high and the retail book trade healthy. It was evident from conversations I had with some Australian booksellers at last May’s BookExpo that they are feeling the winds of change beginning to blow a gale, fanned by the arrival of Kobo ebooks in the market. (Kobo is a sleeper from the US perspective: a small almost-an-afterthought ebook platform in our country but painstakingly building a presence around the globe and some impressive OEM relationships everywhere, including in the US.) Ingram’s POD setup in Australia will surely introduce a lot more titles into the print marketplace. That’s important because POD drives consumers to online purchasing by offering more titles than any bookstore could ever stock.

All of this is frightening to any sentient Australian bookseller.

Retail price maintenance, territorial and language rights restrictions, and variable rules about applying VAT (sales tax to us Americans) to books seriously complicate the development of the ebook marketplaces in Europe.

But the biggest complication of all, in the short run, will be the paucity of titles available in the epub format in languages other than English. Epub enables reflowing of text, which is essential to deliver a reader-friendly ebook experience to a multiplicity of screen sizes. We have hundreds of thousands of titles in epub in English; no other Western language is close. This is a subject that first surfaced for me in Brazil when I was there in August.

One thing leads to another. The epub gap spawns another serious issue for the European book trade as it catches up with the US. Most educated people in most European countries are comfortable reading English. A publisher in tiny Slovenia (formerly part of Yugoslavia) told me that one-sixth of the books sold through the largest chain of bookstores and the largest online bookseller are already in English. Somebody else told me that 25% of the books sold in Denmark are in English. In Holland, I was told, there has been recent legislation requiring “windowing” of English ebooks on titles that have a Dutch edition, holding back the English edition until the Dutch edition has had a minimum time of availability.

The biggest adjustments even for the players in the US book trade are still ahead of them. As far as I can tell, big publishers have not really taken on board that bookstores are pretty much going away in the next ten years and, one thing leading to another, taking the big publishers’ major value proposition with them. There is almost no visible acknowledgment of the shift from IP to eyeballs that I believe is coming. But the change we’ve had and the change we’re facing in the US publishing world is dwarfed by what will be seen and felt by our friends and trading partners in Europe and elsewhere in the next decade.

Some of what this post is about had already been anticipated as we prepared the program for the Digital Book World conference taking place January 25-26. We had already planned a panel on how territorial and language rights trading will be affected as ebook uptake spreads. Now I think I’ve found somebody who can lay out the European landscape as US publishers and agents should be thinking about it. I’m working with her to prepare what I think will be a significant addition to our program covering a topic that is, as it should be, increasingly important to American rightsholders.

Another topic for another day is that the world is getting smaller and publishers in every country will need to understand what’s going on in their foreign markets better. We’ll be delivering just one compressed seminar and a panel or two at Digital Book World because that’s what bandwidth we think conference attendees this January will be comfortable investing in the topic, relative to a lot of other things that need to be discussed. By a year from January, I think understanding how the ebook markets work in countries around the world will be a top-of-mind concern for every publisher and agent in America.

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My professional background —  indeed, most of my life that isn’t family, friends, baseball, and politics — is trade publishing: the publishing that is intended for consumers and which got its name becaiuse it has been transacted primarily through “the trade”: bookstores.

But this past week I spent two full days with the Publisher Advisory Group for my client Copyright Clearance Center where trade is a small part of the total picture. In addition to the program, I had conversations there to prepare for a talk I’ve been asked to give at the IFRRO (International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations) meeting CCC is hosting at the end of October. So, while I always think about trade publishing, this week I’ve been doing it within the context of other publishing — indeed, in the context of the whole world of intellectual property, one that goes well beyond publishing and includes music and art and photography. These are businesses that don’t think about bookstores at all.

There was a point at the CCC meeting (at which people who work at The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Associated Press were among the participants) where it was useful to offer my own articulation of why the problems caused by digital change for newspapers and magazines and record companies were so much more grave than they were for book publishers (so far.) It is simply stated.

For those businesses, the unit of appreciation does not match the unit of sale.

By that I mean that record companies sold us albums when what we wanted were songs. That’s what their economics were built on. The minute we could buy songs, it blew up their business model. Newspapers sell us the weather when what we want are the box scores, or the horoscopes when what we want are the comics. There are many books which will be read cover to cover. Newspapers and magazines are rarely read cover to cover. It was never thought of as wasteful or uneconomic that most people actually consumed a small percentage of every newspaper and magazine they bought. But it gets harder and harder to make that sale in a digital environment.

Of course, we have felt some impact of this effect in the book business. When you get beyond fiction and certain components of non-fiction (memoir, biography, some history and science), the books aren’t read cover to cover either. You usually use (what we now call) chunks of travel books, gardening books, cookbooks, computer books, crafts books. Even in the bookstore environment, sales of these books are suffering because a more granular offering is available online.

Grasping the significance of the “unit of appreciation, unit of sale” paradigm makes me believe that the “album” (do we still call it that?) of music, the newspaper, and the magazine are ultimately doomed as organizing principles. They were built to meet the requirements for content distribution in a world where physical practicalities had to be addressed. The Times couldn’t drop sports and economics on my doorstep and world affairs and theater reviews on yours. And The New Yorker couldn’t deliver Talk of the Town to me and the cartoons to you. The units of appreciation were far too granular to be delivered as units of sale.

It would be a reasonable guess that about half the units that bookstores sell are cover-to-cover reads, where the unit of sale equals the unit of appreciation.

Brainstorming with publishing colleagues about what I need to say at IFRRO gave me a new realization about what’s likely to happen with the half that’s not.

Exploring non-trade publishing — academic, professional, sci-tech, college texts, and schoolbook publishing — makes you realize everybody else is headed in the same direction. They’re anticipating that the “unit of appreciation” for their content will always be defined by the context of either (depending on the customer base) a “learning system” or a “workflow.” The content won’t be the point. Learning something or accomplishing something will be the point and content will be delivered within a framework designed to deliver on the objective.

Pretty much without exception, smart publishers in these non-trade areas see the day coming where controlling the platform is the key and the controller of the platform will be the gatekeeper for, if not the creator of, the content. Since that tracks pretty closely to my notions about “verticals”, it all seems very logical.

But if you think about it a little harder, peel back one more layer of the onion, you realize that much of the rest of our non cover-to-cover publishing — much of what we now call trade — will also be housed within platforms. There will be platforms providing workflow, and content in context, for chefs and knitters and gardeners. They too will be buying “solutions”, not “information”, and the material we now put in the books will be served up, as needed, inside the workflow. It won’t be so much about “units of appreciation” as “units of need” or “units of purpose” for the content because the entire system will be the unit of appreciation and the unit of sale.

That is: the instruction as to how to do a particular knitting stitch will pop up or be linked to the place in the “pattern” (or whatever digital delivery has made the pattern become). The explanation of how to broil or baste something will be linked to the direction to broil or baste something. It won’t be housed in a different physical volume; it won’t even be housed in a different program or file! The beginnings of this are already evident in some apps and enhanced ebooks.

The world in which we will be living this way and routinely getting content this way is not around the corner; it is a few years off. Not twenty, I don’t think; but maybe ten. We’ll be solidly in a cloud world by then with just about all the content we consume — music, movies, TV, and what we get from newspapers, magazines, and books — and all the software we use coming to our devices from remote servers rather than from a hard drive.

In that kind of a world, I think the idea of “owning” content will be nonsensical. Everything will be licensed. “Owning” is really a tangible object-based concept. We discover the reality of that whenever we try to apply the principles of first use — like lending and resale — to the digital things we “sell” today. And, when you think about it, purchasing access to whatever you want or need whenever you want or need it is the perfect matching of the unit of appreciation to the unit of sale.

If you’ll be at Frankfurt next week and you like talking about what I write about, please come by stand 8.0 L916 and if you can catch me when I’m not in a meeting (about half the time), please say hello. I am speaking twice at the Book Fair. On Wednesday, October 6 at 10:30 am, Mark Dressler will interview me about the 2011 Digital Book World Conference program.You’ll find us at the Sparks Stage, 8.0 P923. On Friday, October 8 at 12:30, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on “The Ebook Business – Who’s in Control” which will take place in the “Entente” room in hall 4.C. I understand Victoria Barnsley of HarperCollins UK and Ronald Schild of the German ebook-selling consortium will be my partners for the conversation whose focus will apparently be on the big companies in the ebook space: Amazon, Apple, and Google. Maybe I’ll be a lonely voice saying “don’t forget that B&N and Kobo are very much here — which Google isn’t yet — that Blio and Copia are coming and that the collective power of yet-unaggregated sites and communities, which could be harnessed by yet another player, will be considerable.”

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I’ve been in the book business for a long time, more than 48 years since my first job on the sales floor of Brentano’s bookstore. For over 37 years it has been my fulltime occupation. My father started his career in books just before I was born, so I have been meeting publishing people more or less since I was in the cradle. And it isn’t that big a business. So, over the years, I’ve gotten to know many people in the industry.

But I hadn’t met Markus Dohle, the relatively new CEO of Random House, until we had lunch last month. He proved to be a very sharp, informal, and relaxed companion, very open with his opinions and observations and very straightforward. And since his prior experience was outside trade publishing (the reason I’d never previously met him), he brings a completely fresh personal perspective to the business.

One thing Markus said really struck me because I agree with it so wholeheartedly and because I hadn’t ever heard it said so explicitly by any of his counterparts. “We have to change from being a b2b company to b2c over the coming years,” he said. He expanded on this when I asked him whether I could attribute the quote for this piece. (I don’t want to disappoint my readers, but I make a living as a consultant, not a blogger, and my career would be crippled if I couldn’t have a conversation with an executive without a looming fear that whatever s/he said would end up in print. If some readers wonder why the sources of some comments remain anonymous, that’s your answer.)

Markus replied that he was fine being quoted because he was “convinced that publishers have to become more reader oriented in a marketing and trend finding/setting way rather than in a direct to consumer selling way.” I welcome the clarification and believe it is right in its emphasis on marketing over sales even though I think that sales, inevitably, becomes part of what a publisher has to do too. And direct contact with and tracking of individual consumers both seem absolutely essential.

(The politics of this are worth a digression to spell out. For several more years at least, big trade publishers will continue to depend primarily on a retail network to reach readers. Despite the fact that all the big retailers, in their way, compete with publishers to control content at its source, they are universally resentful if publishers compete with them to serve consumers. On the other hand, it is increasingly apparent that the retail network is reducing its size and scope and, unless publishers develop alternate channels to consumers, they’ll be reduced in size and scope as well.)

Although Markus was the first CEO whom I ever heard say explicitly that the shift to b2c was in any way a priority, there is evidence in other houses that the importance of direct consumer contact is on the radar. A senior digital officer at another large house is directing a wide-scale effort to organize their consumer contact names — which he found, as he would have in every other house — to be scattered, unorganized, and largely unusable. Pulling names together is one of a number of “first steps” the big publishers must take to act on Markus’s insight.

But there are other “first steps” that are just as important as rationalizing the contact database for consumers. Two of them are related. One is being committing to owning specific groups (or, in the current parlance: communities) of interest. This is what I refer to as “verticalization” and I have written and spoken about it exhaustively. But the commitment to verticalization, in order to be captured and turned into real equity going forward, must be expressed in branding.

The names of publishing houses and the imprints they create are their brands today. (Authors are brands for consumer marketing purposes, but publishers don’t own those brands: the authors do.) What publishers own really do work in a b2b context. Bookstore buyers, book review editors, and collection developers at libraries can discern meaning from company names and imprints. They work the way brands are supposed to work: as shortcuts to establish expectations. Brand tells an informed buyer to expect high-quality writing in a Knopf book and high-quality reproductions in an Abrams book. Brands will also signal them, before they see a finished package, whether a book is likely to feel overpriced or underpriced, and whether the publisher’s claims for promotion and media are likely to be fulfilled.

But most of these brands mean nothing to consumers. And mere knowledge of a brand doesn’t necessarily tell you what to expect if you buy it. Nor would knowledge necessarily provide you with a motivation to get “closer” to it.

The one consumer brand in publishing that means the most and provides the most equity to its owner is Harlequin. Consumers recognize it and have understandings about quality and price based on it. But because they also know that the Harlequin name means the “romance” genre, and because many romance readers buy and consume dozens, even hundreds, of titles in the genre every year, they have logical reasons to visit Harlequin’s web site repeatedly and to request and open email reminders of new publications from them.

In fact, Harlequin’s brand is so clear and so powerful that they can get people to subscribe to their books. When you think about alternative revenue sources, that might be the Holy Grail. It will certainly help publishers stay on the right track if they focus on creating brands and clusters of books around them that could conceivably deliver customers for a subscription proposition.

The Penguin brand is perhaps equally well-known, but it isn’t nearly as well defined. Penguin Classics certainly have a collective meaning, but many books are published under the Penguin imprint that aren’t classics. And while it is likely that sometimes the purchasing choice between one edition of Robinson Crusoe or Hamlet and another might be influenced by familiarity with the imprint, it is not clear that the “quality” signal is important there (because, after all, the words were set down long before Penguin or its competitors existed) as it is for a new romance novel. And it certainly would be harder for Penguin to attract regular web traffic with its brand or to make sales through an email list of brand adherents.

A brand that is in between these two is “Dummies.” It definitely creates a meaningful shortcut for a consumer; they recognize it and it tells them “this book explains the basics on the subject in a way that requires you to bring almost no knowledge to it for it to be useful.” But because Dummies covers many subjects under the sun, it would be difficult to make use of it for audience-gathering or direct marketing the way Harlequin is employed.

You wouldn’t “subscribe” to new offerings, sight unseen, from either Penguin or Dummies. That means that, in at least one very important way, those brands aren’t as useful as Harlequin. Why? They’re too broad. General Motors wouldn’t ever have sold nearly as many cars if they called all the cars “GMs” to create a megabrand and had lost the distinction between Chevrolet and Cadillac. Trying to create “one big brand” if it captures unrelated content or unrelated audiences could be “one big mistake.”

My own theory is that publishers have to completely re-think their imprints in light of the need to move from b2b to b2c. Imprints at big houses are almost always silos with no discernible b2c meaning. In fact, the names of smaller houses, because smaller houses tend to focus on subject areas, can more readily have meaning to consumers.

In fact, Random House just faced a branding question of exactly this nature and got it right. They had acquired a smaller, subject-dedicated company, Watson Guptill, a couple of years ago and had some overlap between what WG published and what Random House already did within their Clarkson Potter imprint. RH executives engineered a solution by which they preserved the venerable Watson Guptill name for “hardworking” instructional books on art and photography —  WG’s strongest historical categories — and made made Potter Crafts a subimprint of WG. They invested in building the crafts list to triple the previous output of WG. The two thirds to three quarters of the WG list that is not crafts will still be WG imprint books. By making Potter Crafts, which they owned before, a part of Watson Guptill (joining Amphoto, the well-known photo line, and WG’s other subimprints), they might get the best of all branding worlds.

And it is further worth noting that tripling down on title output to become a serious player in a niche is probably a move very few Big Six companies would be making these days, but it is necessary to think that way if you’re serious about making substantial b2c marketing efforts. Building a subscription business would almost certainly imply a growth in title output in any vertical.

Random House’s clarity on how publishers should structure brands to have content-specific meaning is still unusual. (There are other examples: Hachette’s invention of “Springboard”, a brand to do books for baby boomers, is a nod in the same direction.) Publishing Perspectives, the thoughtful online publication operated by the Frankfurt Book Fair, offered a piece on the subject six months ago that was locked into what is still publishing’s more normal b2b way of thinking. The catalyst for the post you are now reading, actually, was their editor Ed Nowatka’s piece with the provocative headline asking “Does a Publisher’s Brand Equity Translate to the Digital Age?” which (with all due respect, of which I have plenty, to Ed) I thought really didn’t address the question. But at least he asked it. I don’t recall ever reading a single piece on the subject of this one: how do what have always been b2b publishers create b2c brands?

This is a subject that has been on my mind for a long time. I wrote a post 18 months ago about an imprint started at another house that I considered to be, similarly, the product of the same b2b thinking that characterizes the Publishing Perspectives piece. And about a year ago, I stressed the importance for publishers of building b2c brands going forward.

I believe Markus’s insight is the necessary first step that others haven’t yet taken and, whether or not it started with Markus, the awareness of the need for consumer focus certainly helped Random House make sensible decisions to exploit the brand equity in the WG name they had acquired. Once publishers accept that being consumer-focused is essential to their long-term survival, it follows logically (although not automatically or instantaneously) that they need to think about discrete audiences on more than a book-by-book basis; that they need to gather those audiences on web sites and in mailing lists; that they need to publish books that satisfy them repeatedly, not occasionally; and that all these efforts will make more sense if each separate audience has a brand facing them with real meaning. We’re seeing that from the big publishers right now in genres; they are trying to build science fiction and romance communities and branding them. Random House built a vertical in travel earlier in the decade, developing business models out of a critical mass of content that went beyond simply selling books. That, and the efforts at Random and other big houses to build communities around genres, is a start. But a lot more development of this kind is going to be needed to replace the marketing clout being lost as the old channels to consumers wither in the months and years to come.

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What shoved other news aside this morning was the word from Seth Godin that he won’t be publishing books with publishers anymore. This is another early indication that it is going to get harder and harder for trade publishers to sign up books.

It is not the first one. Thriller writer J.A. Konrath discovered the virtues of publishing through Kindle about 16 months ago. With the help of audience-building through his own blog, plus completed manuscripts that the New York publishers didn’t buy, he was pushed into learning how to monetize his own work without a publisher.

Last December, the news was that S&S author Stephen Covey had taken his backlist to ebook publisher Rosetta which had, in turn, made a temporary exclusive deal with Amazon. The motivations, apparently, were a bigger share of the ebook pie and the unique marketing capability Amazon has to really push something direct to appropriate consumers. That deal seemed to be with the original publisher’s explicit consent. (Agent Andrew Wylie recently formed an imprint to do the same thing with a batch of his clients’ backlist apparently without prearranging consent, although no lawsuits have been filed to date.)

At the last BookExpo, one of the leading agents in New York told me he is working hard to learn about self-publishing options because his authors are asking him about it.

Last week, one of the leading publishing consultants to “brands” told me that the 25% standard ebook royalty was pushing her company’s clients to think harder about self-publishing.

And it happens that right now I’m reading a book about my favorite subject (baseball history) called “A Year in Mudville” (about the Mets inaugural season) that was self-published through Smashwords but which, in editorial quality, exceeds many titles I’ve read from established houses. I don’t know whether author David Bagdade didn’t want to bother with the bureaucracy of pitching trade publishers, was rejected by them, or just chose the control and better margins of Smashwords, but Smashwords rather than one of the established players is dividing with the author 70% of the nine bucks I gave iBooks for the purchase

This way lies destruction.

Many years ago, my friend and sometimes colleague Mark Bide and I were talking about threats to the scholarly journal paradigm. For those not familiar with how journals work, it might be an eyebrow-lifter. Universities pay professors’ salaries and encourage them to write peer-reviewed articles. The journals get the articles for free, operate the peer-review and publication process, and then sell the collection of articles back to the university’s library. So the university both pays for the content’s creation and purchases it in its published form. Since the beginning of the web awareness, it has been predicted that disintermediation of journal publishers would occur.

What Mark told me was “watch the level of submissions.” That is, he believes the first sign that journal publishing is in trouble will be if the professors stop sending in their articles. So far, that hasn’t happened (that I’m aware of.)

But it’s going to be happening in trade.

On an email list I read, you can detect the annoyance of publishers who point out that neither Konrath nor Godin would be where they are today if publishers hadn’t invested in them and built their fame. There’s some resentment that neither Konrath nor Godin emphasize this point and, by not doing so, seem to suggest “anybody can do this.” I’m not sure that they’re saying “anybody can”, but it isn’t necessary to push that idea to do real damage to publishers’ futures, because the authors who can do this are among the the ones publishers need the most.

Starting in the 1990s, publishers started to ask “what’s the author’s platform” when they signed up books. In those days, they were asking whether the author had a radio show, a newspaper column, a speaking circuit, or extensive media contacts that could give them a leg up to promote the author’s book. But with the turn of the century and the development of inexpensive websites and blogs, authors were able to build their own platforms. And, lo and behold, they were able to build them faster and better if they had legitimately published books in the marketplace.

Publishers should have remembered the axiom that you should be careful what you wish for. This was, perhaps, the beginning of the unbundling of the publisher’s suite of services to the author. It used to be that the publication of a book was the platform and the publishers’ publicity and marketing efforts worked to capitalize on it. This was all part and parcel of the package: paying an advance; editing and shaping the book; putting it into a distributable (printed and bound) form; getting it known; and, of course, getting it into a store where a customer could buy it.

Publishers still pay advances although they’re doing their best to scale them back. Many don’t provide the same level of editing services that they used to; they often expect more books to be delivered by each of their editors and they also lean to agents they can trust to do a lot of the work of putting a book in shape. Putting it into distributable form isn’t nearly as hard as it used to be and doesn’t require inventory investment if the form is digital. Getting it known is something that Godin very articulately and accurately suggests he can do better himself. He is not alone and authors who can do this are explicitly what publishers are seeking. And getting the content into the customer’s hands is a drastically different proposition in a digital context than it was in the pure print world of 20 years ago, and digital distribution can be done with far less investment and far less organizational muscle.

So there’s less for a publisher to do for an author than there once was. And the publishers sent that signal when they started to focus on the author’s own ability to promote and then, over time, turned that ability into a frequent requirement for publication. If the publisher is going to do less, the author wants to pay less for it. Joe Konrath is very clear about the advantages he sees in getting the lion’s share of the revenue his books generate, rather than a mere author’s royalty.

But, somewhat more ominously, making more money through disintermediation does not appear to be the primary driver for Seth Godin. What Seth seems to be saying is “I want flexibility. I want to use what I write in whatever is the best way to build my overall career, revenues, and audience. I don’t want to be locked into publishers’ schedules and bureaucracy.”

That’s a massive challenge for big trade houses but it will be of increasing importance to big authors, particularly big non-fiction authors. It is much easier for a publisher to provide real value if they’re vertical. On the same mailing list I mentioned above, we got a comment from a biggish independent publisher who claims that the house is finding more and better ways to work with authors and really investing in them. But, we are told, they are all in verticals.

Godin may be a unique case. There are unique aspects to Covey and Konrath too. But it is not comforting for trade publishers to see that authors have alternatives, that as ebook sales rise the viability of the alternatives grows, and that the authors most likely to strike out on their own or look for new partners are those with the strongest existing connections to audiences.

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A year ago — even six months ago — it seemed like Amazon and its Kindle device had an insurmountable advantage in the ebook device and platform competition. Despite our admonition that Amazon’s dominance of ebooks was much more fragile than their dominance in online print bookselling, even we were impressed and sometimes daunted by the enormous percentage of ebook sales that were being made through the Kindle ecosystem.

Then Barnes & Noble introduced the Nook through their 700 stores last December and Apple brought the iPad to market in April. Nearly overnight, it seems, Amazon has gone from the dominant player to the leading player with a share that was often in the 80s for many titles having fallen to the 50s.

Three entirely new ebook platforms are now poised to make their debut. Each of them has an angle, or a USP, that the others don’t and that the vendors, devices, and platforms that preceded them — notably Kindle, iBooks, Kobo, and Sony — don’t. The three new platforms are Google Editions, Blio, and Copia.

Google’s special proposition is ubiquity; Blio’s special proposition is enhanced feature sets; and Copia’s special proposition is building social networking right into the content consumption platform.

The new entrant that is subject to the greatest anticipation, of course, is Google Editions. Whenever they go live (which they say they “hope” will be sometime this summer, which has another 6 weeks or so to run), they are likely to be offering the largest selection of ebooks from any single source. Google has a staggering number — millions — of public domain books but they will also have professional and scientific books not published on most of the prior ebook platforms. Their well-promoted proposition is their cloud model, which will allow their ebooks to be read on any device that can support a browser.

Google is also offering a wholesaling service to enable any bookstore or any web site to sell their ebooks. (What that means, of course, is that their “largest single source” claim could be usurped by their own resellers, who might have added other titles from other places.) Their arrival adds another option for potential ebook sellers who had previously been served by Ingram’s wholesaling operation or their competitor, Content Reserve, which has also reached the book trade through Baker & Taylor.

Google is working the OEM channel as well and not limiting themselves to Android-powered devices in doing so. They’ll have apps available in multiple marketplaces, including Apple. And they are offering to power sales on publishers’ own sites. We’ve seen no announcement of publishers who have accepted this proposition, but it would seem likely that some, particularly smaller ones, will find it attractive.

Baker & Taylor has been developing its own ebook platform, Blio, in concert with futurist Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation of the Blind. We were first shown Blio last December and were really impressed with its crisp presentation of integrated text-and-pictures pages. They showed us a tool kit that made it pretty easy for publishers to enhance their print books for electronic delivery with sound and video, and even to fiddle with the design in the Blio platform. Because of Blio’s roots as a tool to bring reading to the sight-impaired, the ability to adjust font sizes, a capability which all ebooks offer, had to be integrated into their delivery of complex page layouts.

We have been expecting Blio’s debut in the market for some time, and we’ve been expecting to see many highly-illustrated books, like college texts, that have not previously been in the offerings of Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. Highly illustrated books would work fine on the iPad, of course, but they were not a priority for initial inclusion for iBooks (the dedicated Apple ebookstore) and they were not what publishers would put into the eink-reader platforms that didn’t handle that material well.

Blio has announced that it will power the store Toshiba is creating to support its tablet release. Since that is expected in the next month or so, Toshiba’s offering of Blio titles will probably be their debut in the marketplace.

The tool set for Blio was what really captivated us when we saw it last December. When we saw it at the time, Blio was delivering a Blio-ready ebook from the publishers’ print PDF, and then, within Blio, the publisher could enhance the ebook. At the Untethered conference in June, Blio announced a partnership with Quark by which Blio files could be created directly from Quark. Blio says they expect the Quark release to be in beta later this Fall. Blio plans to integrate its tools into other creation software in the months to follow.

Blio introduces another format into the ebook world: rather than epub or PDF, they are using Microsoft’s XPS platform. Right now, Blio itself is handling the conversion of titles from either PDF or epub into XPS, but the Quark arrangement and the others that will take place will allow publishers to deliver XPS-ready files to Blio, cutting past the conversion queue that now exists.

The open questions have been: when will Blio arrive and what will be the retailing environment for it when it arrives? They say they have 200,000 titles committed to their platform. (They can’t just pick up the ebooks of others; they’re not vanilla epub.) The Toshiba store won’t contain them all because titles are coming in faster than the conversion process can ramp up. Blio, like Google and Copia, expects lots of OEM installation. They project that Blio could be on more than 50 million devices by the end of 2011 and that they will be working with “traditional retail partners” in 2011 as well.

Copia made a splash last week when they announced their line of ereaders, including a larger-than-a-phone-screen color model which will be $99 when it comes out in September. Since Copia is a creation of DMC, and DMC is historically a hardware company, using their own hardware to launch the platform makes great sense. But OEM relationships, and an ability to deliver their platform to any device through client apps as well as through web browsers, are part of the strategy too.

The Copia platform’s unique proposition is that they combine social networking right into the platform in which content purchasing and consumption take place. Amazon’s announcement of an integration with Facebook moves them in a similar direction, but Copia would seem to be going much further than Amazon: enabling the sharing of the content consumption experience itself among friends or a personal network. This could be critical for reading groups, areas of common (vertical) interest, or for educational applications. Inside the Copia network, users can readily share their notes and annotations. And to make it easy for people to get started on their platform, Copia enables the import of existing contacts from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Other ebook platforms have demonstrated the power of syncing the reading experience across platforms; you can pick up your book on one device and it will tell you where you left off on the last device. Copia takes that a step further, syncing the social experience, including the sharing of notes and recommendations as well as the reading itself, across all the devices you want: smartphones, tablets, computers, or ereaders. We saw this demonstrated on their forthcoming iPad app.

What also impressed us about the last Copia demo we saw is that they have apparently licked the problem of allowing an epub file using Adobe DRM to move painlessly into their platform, regardless of from what ebook store it was purchased.

In addition to the hardware plans they revealed last week, Copia has also announced that they will be a launch partner for Windows Phone 7, the mobile operating system Microsoft is putting forth to compete with iPhone and Android. [Maybe we know a bit more about Copia than others do because they are our client, but like all the players in this very competitive market, they're not tipping their cards before they play their hand any more than their competitors. Even to us.]

All three of these operating systems come from substantial players. Blio is being delivered by one of the two book wholesalers in America with true national and international reach and relationships with every publisher in the country. Copia is being delivered by a company with long hardware development experience and a long history of partnership with consumer electronics retailers and phone companies. And Google Editions, of course, is coming from a tech company that has had deep involvement with virtually every book publisher in the world as it has developed Google Book Search over the last seven years.

Of all the current players, Sony would seem to be the most challenged. They have the weakest device, the weakest store, and the weakest strategic position with the industry and with the public. All of the rest either have something important and unique for the developing ebook marketplace and, in many cases, they also have an outside proposition that will keep them in the ebook game regardless of how well they do in it. Whether Google’s ebooks sell 10% of their projections or 10 times their projections, they won’t be going away. Same with Apple. Same with Amazon. So I think we can expect a multi-player ebook market, with some incompatible formats and a lot of incompatible DRM for some years to come. And the players currently in the game can expect their sales to go up but their market share to go down when the three new entrants join the fray this fall. That much seems certain, but very little else does.

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The last post I did got more attention than anything on the blog in quite some time, but for somewhat different reasons than I intended. My central point about what increasingly common ebook growth predictions would mean for brick-and-mortar sales (that they’d decline sharply over the next five years) was that it diluted the core value proposition of the major publishers. Most of my comment traffic wanted to talk about the fate of bookstores, not the fate of general trade publishers.

Then yesterday, my friend Michael Cairns had on Persona Non Data a post which really delves into the point I was concerned about: what are the competitive advantages of big publishers? As Cairns points out, it is those things that can scale; the aspects of the operation where size presents a big advantage.

I learned long ago in a talk by industry legend Martin Levin that an acquiring publishing company looks primarily at an acquisition target’s revenue, not its cost structure. The cost structure that counts is the acquirer’s own cost structure; the revenues from the target would be ported over, but the costs would mostly be left behind. True marginal costs, like the cost of picking a title off a warehouse shelf, might remain. But the costs of collecting the order, processing the order, and shipping the box out the door with another book in it (not including actual postage) would not rise at all. Nor would the costs of accounting or negotiating the printing contract or (unless there was a step increment that required a warehouse addition) the cost of storage.

So, as Cairns demonstrates in his piece, most of the scaleable overheads and operational costs publishers have are related to print book operations. It is very difficult to scale the parts of the operation publishers can focus on in a digital delivery world, which would be title acquisition, development, and marketing. Those functions require person-power, and if you want to do more of it you have to hire more people. That’s the definition of something that doesn’t scale. And what doesn’t scale is what doesn’t offer advantage to a large player.

The only way we can think of to apply scale to marketing is to market repeatedly to the same audience. That implies “vertical.” Have you read that anywhere before?

A friend from Amazon was in the office this morning making a different point, which, on reflection, is also about scale. Amazon uses algorithms that have been 15 years in the making to set prices for their books. Publishers under the agency model are setting their own prices but without those years of experience, without algorithms, and without adding expertise — or even personpower — to their staffs. Pricing knowledge is also scalable (what you learn pricing the first ten books makes you more effective on the 11th). If publishers believe in the future of the agency model, perhaps pricing expertise would be a tool they could use to persuade authors to stick with them five years from now if brick-and-mortar sales go the way I fear they will (dragging the publishers’ main value proposition down along with them.) But pricing expertise won’t happen by accident; it will have to be developed rigorously and iteratively over time.

In one more post-script, I dug up an old post from back in the early days of the blog when it had far fewer readers than it does now. It tells the story of Ingram’s creation of the microfiche reader and their subsequent growth, which I called the first big supply chain tech disruption. If you like these posts and never read this one, it may be worth the click.

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One of the recurring characteristics of “change” is that the first iteration of something new looks a lot like what it is replacing. So it has been with ebooks and ebook retailing. The ebooks themselves have, for the most part, been the same as the print books except rendered on a screen instead of on paper. And when we say “the same”, we mean right down to duplicating meaningless blank pages and the legend often found in print books that tells you how many printings the book has had. (This still happens frequently; I’ve just experienced it on The Big Short which I’m now reading in B&N’s reader.)

And ebook retailing has also imitated print book retailing in that the emphasis has been on the assembling the largest possible aggregation of book title choices in one place. This is a paradigm that makes intuitive sense in the physical world; once I’ve driven to my local superstore, I don’t want to find the mysteries are here but the cookbooks are in a store down the block.

It has been a long-established “fact” (although I question if it is still true, as we’ll explain later) that the larger is the selection of books available in a single location, the more powerful is the magnet to attract customers. My father found this out when he was in charge of the Brentano’s chain in the 1960s. Their Short Hills, New Jersey store was the worse-performing store in the chain until they doubled its title selection. And then, like magic, it became the best-performing store in the chain.

Amazon dot com reproved the point when they went into business in the mid-1990s. Although they were not the first online bookstore, they were the first to really attempt to carry everything. In fact, they went beyond carrying everything by providing a database (obtained from Baker & Taylor, in which there is another story) that not only showed just about all the books in print but also books that were no longer in print! Conventional publishing and retailing theory at the time would have said it was a bad move to return suggestions in search results that were books not available for sale. But, of course, it built their competitive advantage. They rapidly became the best place to search because of the completeness of their database and, actually, confirming to a customer that “what you want is a book that was indeed published but is not now readily available” made it easier to sell the customer a substitute. Whereas the the store (online or off) that didn’t have the unavailable book but didn’t also provide that information found it harder to close the alternate sale.

The point about the importance of selection was proven again by Amazon when they launched the Kindle in November, 2007 and lit the fire for what is still a spreading conflagration of ebook reading. Before Kindle, there were perhaps 100,000 ebook titles available as PDFs that could be read on a full-function computer, but not nearly as many in formats that could work on smaller devices (Palm, Mobi, Dotlit). Amazon launched Kindle with about 150,000 titles and used their market power to get big publishers to put more and more of the newest, hottest books into their format closer and closer to publication date.

There were other features of the Kindle (the ability to load books wirelessly and instantly without going through an intermediary device; its easy-to-read e-ink; its built in dictionary; Amazon’s deep relationship with very large numbers of online book buyers; and, of course, eye-catching prices relative to the print edition prices of the hottest new books) that fueled its near instantaneous success, but the robust title selection was a critical element.

So to that point — one could say to this point — the largest possible selection in one place has been as important to the success of an ebook retailer (obviously: online) as it was historically to a print book retailer with a physical store.

Early in the decade, it occurred to me that the magnetic power of the large selection in one physical store had sharply diminished. When Dad doubled the inventory of the Short Hills Brentano’s, he delivered a selection that the consumer couldn’t match for many miles around. When Barnes & Noble and Borders got Wall Street money to replicate the Bookstop model of 100,000+ title superstores in the early 1990s, they were enabling consumers to find conveniently books which had previously been obtainable only with great effort. But the limitless shelf space of online bookselling undercut that advantage and by the early part of this decade, it seemed to me that the consumer was finding the unlimited availability of titles online which could be delivered in a day or two so powerful that the large selection in a store that might be available immediately had really diminished appeal.

But there’s another thread of bookselling history on- and offline that I believe will soon become the dominant paradigm for ebook retailing. And, of course (just so you are reminded what blog you’re reading), it fits into the concept of “verticality”.

Publishers have known for a long time that good deals can be made and large sales can be registered through what we call “specialty retailers”. (The label for these sales in a publishing house, and others such as sales to catalogers or premium sales, is “Special Sales.”) The store that sells the tools and materials to refinish your floors can sell you a book to explain how to do it. The store that sells computers and paper and ink can also effectively sell resume or how-to computer books. The garden supply store can sell books on how to make your roses bloom.

Amazon and other online merchants (and not just of books) have long operated “affiliate” programs by which a web site can earn a commission on sales made at the primary merchant by referring a customer. This generally works by having the affiliate site promote a particular book title; when the site visitor clicks on the link, s/he is delivered to Amazon or BN.com’s page for that title. If the customer buys, the referring site gets a commission. These revenues don’t often amount to big money for the referring sites (although they sometimes do), but it is believed (but as with All Things Amazon, we don’t have the critical data to confirm) that, cumulatively, referrals from perhaps millions of affiliates deliver significant volume and customers to Amazon (and others.)

This is as far as “special sales” have gone in the ebook world. But the guess from here is that this is about to change and that the change we’ll see in the next few years will obliterate the notion that “all subjects in one place” is a significant marketing advantage, online or in a store. Many book sales, and particularly ebook sales, will move to “contextual” resellers. Your accountant’s web site will sell you the book(s) that help you understand a new tax law or how to ready your business for sale. Your favorite sports web site will sell you the new biography of Alex Rodriguez. And your favorite “Literary Review” newsletter and website will take care of your needs to acquire fiction directly and without your having to shop the vaster stacks of an online superstore.

That is: curated ebook offerings (a click away from the ability to buy lots more content beyond the curated selection) will be featured on every web site with any significant traffic. Delivering purchaseable content — books right now, but ulimately magazines, shorter articles, and relevant audio- and video-content as well — will become a standard expectation of any site (or web community) that aspires to a true mutual embrace with its site visitors. “What I’ve read lately and liked, and why” is a legitimate offering to anticipate from every blogger or commentator with a following.

Last week, Barnes & Noble held its regular call to announce financial results and future expectations. In that call, B&N expressed the expectation that the ebook world would ultimately settle down to about five players and that they’d be one of them. With that perspective, they saw for themselves a reasonable proportion — say 20% — of the ebook market.

My first reaction to that was “what are they thinking? There won’t be five online booksellers; there will be five million.” A day or two later I had a conversation with one of my personal tech gurus who saw it the way B&N’s statement suggested they did  (“it will consolidate, just like the music business did…”) He also asked a lot of practical questions. On what devices will these ebooks be read? How will all these individual sites deal with the format issues, the DRM issues, the customer service? In other words, “great vision, Mike, but how can it possibly work?”

I think it will work like affiliate sites worked, but in a more sophisticated way. A strong central operator providing scale facilitates the commercial offering of the niche player. The harbinger of the future is the deal announced last week between F+W Media and Ingram Digital. Ingram is setting up all F+W specialist web sites (and they have them for many different vertical interest groups) with the ability to sell both ebooks and print of all publishers to their site traffic. (Although we have working relationships with both companies, we weren’t involved in that deal and don’t know any of the details.)

I believe that the Ingram-F+W deal is the start of something new and big. Both companies are going to find ways to improve on whatever is the starting point. F+W is going to have to learn how to merchandise what Ingram can give them into a unique shopping and content consumption experience for the consumer. And Ingram is going to have to learn how to deliver what they can offer to F+W in a way that enables F+W  to curate and enhance the selection to deliver something uniquely customized to its own community.

If that view of the future is right, the competition among the players who can provide the ebook selection and transaction services Ingram does — those in the game already like Amazon, B&N, iBooks, and Kobo and those saying they’re about to come in like Google, B&T’s Blio, and Copia — is going to take place in a whole new arena. B&N has announced deals like this, where they “power” somebody else’s bookstore. Kobo hasn’t yet, but I’d expect them to; it just seems to me like an opportunity they’d see. This is a bit odd; it puts “wholesaler” Ingram in competition with retailers to create the next round of niche retailers. Ingram obviously has the built-in capability to offer print and electronic book delivery but, of course, B&N has the internal resources to do that too, and  B&T can do it too. There are anomalies to rationalize about margin, but, in the end, customer acquisition through this strategy will be far cheaper than it is most other ways, even if a fixed margin from the publisher is shared with the niche player.

This business hasn’t really begun to happen yet; we’re just seeing the outlines of it. Initially, the competition appears to be about how each retailer delivers its vast set of content choices to the online consumer in a consolidated way. (And usually it has been the same for Ingram. Most of their business has come from large “sell everything” ebook stores.) But over time it will evolve into a competition for niche resellers. Winning is always about delivering the best consumer experience but the challenge will be to deliver the best consumer experience to somebody else’s consumers. White label is the key to the ebook (and book) retailing future.

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The following post is a collaboration with my friend Joe Esposito, the CEO of GiantChair. The post was Joe’s idea, but I contributed enough to its completion to justify a claim of shared authorship. Joe has kindly agreed to allow this received wisdom to be delivered to the world through The Shatzkin Files.

As thunder roared above the mountaintop, God sat on a throne of light. She stroked her braid and contemplated her new shoes.

“Who goes there?” God shouted.

“It is but a poor publisher,” the tiny figure said.  “I have come for guidance in the treacherous ways of publishing in the digital age.  I have oodles of Googles, but no money in my pocket.  What dost thou command?”

“A poor publisher, eh?” God snorted, shaking the trees around them.  “That’s what the angels call a redundancy.”

“Oh, please, Lord.  Help me navigate the shoals of the noble Barnes and the forest where dwell the Amazons.  Take me beyond my borders to a realm of growth and economic success.  My very soul depends on my making buckets of money.”

God looked at the puny publisher and took pity on him.

“Do as I say,” God thundered, “and you will save your heavenly soul and a place for yourself in the value chain.”  She thus proceeded to lay down these precepts–but as God is timeless, they came in no particular order.

1. Thou shalt regard thy former competitor as thy future collaborator.

2. Thou shalt let no intermediary stop you from knowing your customer, nor stop your customer from knowing you.

3. Thou shalt publish no book intended for an audience outside your spheres of direct influence.

4. Thou shalt read Dr. Faustus in all its editions–Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Google–and know that Mephistopheles always appears first as a helpmate.

5. Thou shalt not forsake thine own brand.

6. Thou shalt create new brands and master the power and importance of brands.

7. Thou shalt respect and value thy communities with the same devotion thou hath always given to copyrights.

8. Thou shalt recognize that metadata is everywhere and associating it meaningfully is thy job.

9. Thou shalt not fail to test a new marketing channel in order to protect an old one.

10. Thou shalt deliver thy content in every imaginable form that thy customers request or might require.

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As readers of this blog know, I’ve been on the “vertical” trail for a long time and I try to stay abreast of book publishers’ efforts to realize the advantages of subject specialization and community building. I wrote a whole post about the Sourcebooks initiative, Poetry Speaks, when it launched last Fall. I have often referred to the vertical efforts of Hay House and Harvard Common Press. And I’m proud to have had a small role in Sterling’s creation of Lark Crafts and their forthcoming Pixiq site for photography.

But of all the efforts I’ve seen so far, the book publisher who seems to have taken the vertical vision we espouse the furthest — one that elevates community-building above content-selling as the first priority — is Cool Springs Press in Nashville, Tennessee. We spent some time earlier this week talking to Roger Waynick, their founder and CEO, to learn more about what they do, looking for lessons that other publishers can apply.

The thing that was most striking about our conversation with Roger was the frequency with which he referred to “our industry”, by which he did not mean the book business! He meant the lawn and garden business, which is the vertical that Cool Springs Press serves. This is a nuanced but massive differentiator. If a company thinks of itself as a “book publisher”, it is already off on the wrong track. If it thinks of itself as a content- and information-provider for an industry or a community, its self-image will lead to it doing the right thing much more often. And the very first right thing a book publisher with community aspirations has to do is to create a site that has very little reference to books, which they have.

Waynick knew nothing at all about publishing when he started Cool Springs Press in 1994. He was looking for a book about gardening and he started from the highly logical presumption that what he needed was local information, since gardening has to match the geography. A visit to a large and well-stocked local bookstore yielded nothing except confirmation that what he wanted didn’t exist.

So he created it and he created a formula. He found a local gardening advisor with a media presence and created a “Tennessee Gardening” book. Waynick had intuitively done the right thing. Finding content knowledge and promotional capability combined meant that he had recruited what the smartest publisher with experience would have called the best possible author. Before long, he was extending his franchise, creating gardening books by state, one after another. (At this point, Cool Springs has state-specific gardening books for 48 states.)

In 2003, large Nashville publisher Thomas Nelson embarked on a strategy to expand out of their religious publishing niche. (They didn’t ask me…) They acquired a few smaller publishers with non-controversial publishing programs and Waynick took the opportunity to sell his business. For the next few years, until Nelson management changed and the strategy changed to re-focus on their core business, he consulted to them and stayed somewhat in touch with the business he’d created.

But when the strategy at Nelson changed, Waynick was ready to buy his company back and turn it into a real content vertical. In 2007, he regained control of Cool Springs Press, set up trade distribution through Ingram Publisher Services, and started to invest seriously in the capabilities he needed to be more than just a book publisher.

Waynick’s key insight was that the lawn and garden customer was looking for solutions. And solutions, to be practical, had to be local. So he constructed a taxonomy around plants (roses, gardenias) and around actions (planting, weeding) to tag the content in his state-specific books. Waynick estimates that, since reacquiring Cool Springs in 2007, he’s spent a dollar on upgrading, tagging, and curating old content for every four dollars he has spent creating new books. And he invested that money upgrading his content repository with faith, but no clear plan about how he’d get it back.

In a formulation that echoes what we’ve heard earlier from Harvard Common Press talking about cookbooks and recipes, Waynick said he needed to see his content as a database of information, not as a collection of books. And just like Harvard Common, he looks at his database for “what’s missing” to direct him about what new content he needs to acquire.

He continued to build on his special retailing network. (Ingram handles Cool Springs’s trade sales, but Waynick maintains the relationships with the lawn and garden trade directly.) He recalls that, when he started, it seemed wildly counterintuitive to a national chain to put a Tennessee book in only the Tennessee stores, and so forth. But his sales were so robust that the skepticism quickly melted away. He built closer relationships with those special retailers by custom publishing: putting together books especially for a particular retailer. His path was smoothed in all these things by his author relationships; many of them were, like his first author, local gardening experts with radio shows popular with the core audience.

This year, for the first time, substantial revenue has flowed to Cool Spring from content licensing. About 10% of Cool Springs’s revenue will come from licensing content to web sites and creating apps for other players in the lawn and garden space. About 25% will come from the book trade, 35% from home center book sales, 15% from individual lawn and garden centers, and the balance from other special outlets like hardware stores.

The way Waynick sees it, the licensing side of the business has just begun to work. Next year will be far larger than this. He expects licensing sales to surpass book sales for his company in 2012.

Cool Springs has an online bookstore at gardenbookstore.net. In his retailing capacity, he sells the books of all his competitors. The day we spoke, Waynick pointed out that only two of the 15 books on his retailing front page were his publications; the rest came from other publishers. Perhaps because he’s a “customer”, he says that more and more of his competitors seems receptive to collaboration, allowing him access to their material for his efforts to provide content to retailers and wholesalers in the lawn and garden industry.

Waynick is not terribly concerned about competitors. Having been the first to act on the insight that gardening is local and that content has to be developed with a highly local point of view, and then having invested to put his content into shape for re-use, he really sees no other player that can deliver the variety of relevant content that he can. And now he’s moving on to a new opportunity that he is uniquely positioned to exploit.

Reflecting the initiative by First Lady Michelle Obama, school gardens are springing up all over the country. Waynick says that over 3000 new ones were created last year. Working with school administrators, Waynick is developing curriculum for the schools from his content. This also puts him in a position to help his retailers and his authors find additional opportunities. And how convenient is it for him that education in this country is organized the same way his book program is: state-by-state!

Waynick also recognizes the value of his author base. He does his best to keep his authors working, and not just on books. They blog for him and create content for his licensing clients as well.

One point that Waynick made in our conversation is an important one for all publishers to take on board: the presentation of content needs to be sensitive to the audience. Too often, he says (and he’s right), publishers end up with catalog copy meant to sell a book to a store buyer being presented on a web site to an end user customer. The copy is wrong for the purpose. He credits his distributor, Ingram, with having a system that helps him deliver the right metadata to the right places.

The future for Cool Springs Press looks very bright. Waynick is already providing content for a number of national retailers, including one of the brand leaders, which is what has jump-started his licensing revenues. These players see good content as a critical competitive requirement. They represent a growth market for web content, apps, and custom books and the growth opportunities they will offer will far exceed the rate of shrinkage in the traditional book market.

What we think will be interesting to watch going forward is how much Cool Springs moves into the business of selling things other than content to the audiences they keep growing and nurturing. They’re certainly positioned to do that.

But the important thing is that they can readily withstand shrinkage in the book trade or even in the printed book business. They’re bound to become an increasingly important marketing mechanism for all their competitors, who will become increasingly dependent on them for exposure to the consumer audience. And they’re in that position because they’re vertical and because they were willing to invest in their long run value to their community.

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