For a client meeting last week, I was shown a chart that came from Bookstats of channel revenue for publishers. Bookstats is the recent (and now no longer) partnership between the AAP and BISG collecting book publisher shipment information. It has four years of data, which were arrayed in a neat bar chart.
Since the chart showed publisher shipments, it was an imprecise gauge of sales. The third largest channel was “jobbers/wholesalers”, and those books went somewhere else (if they got re-sold and not returned), but we don’t know where. Basically all the other channels got those books eventually.
But it is noteworthy that of the eight channels enumerated (one of which is “other”), only two showed increased sales from 2010 to 2013: online retail and export sales.
Indeed, export sales are one of the real growth opportunities for publishers, and particularly English-language publishers, in the future.
The reasons for this aren’t hard to understand. English is the most important second language in most countries that are not English-speaking. And, obviously, ebooks create no-inventory and little-friction distribution opportunities that make it easy for a publisher in New York or London (or Sydney or Toronto) to deliver to a customer separated by any distance or number of oceans.
In addition, the search engines are global so “discovery” can take place anywhere as well which can increase the demand for printed books as well as digital ones, even though the printed books present a more complex delivery challenge.
The opportunity brings along its challenges. One is that rights conventions need to change. Publishers often have their rights to distribute in some parts of the globe limited by contract. But even when rights aren’t an issue, marketing — including both customizing the metadata and the pricing to a very large number of local territories — can be.
This opportunity has grown rather recently at the same time that many publishers have been preoccupied with overcoming obstacles in their home markets. Both the US and UK markets have been roiled by the relatively sudden emergence of a strong ebook market and the concurrent (and related) weakening of the brick-and-mortar infrastructure for print. Publishers have been scurrying to change many of their practices: licensing differently, learning to do SEO well and employing other digital marketing techniques, shifting their internal structures and workflows, and grappling with the opportunities presented by social media. Many have expended effort on apps and enhanced ebooks which were time and money traps in markets that briefly looked promising but then didn’t pan out.
But in a more settled marketplace, which we have now (perhaps temporarily), the opportunities for growing revenue through export sales is going to get increasing attention from all publishers, who will be happy to know that entrepreneurial companies — some new but some quite established and familiar — have been building out the capabilities to help them.
There are three panels at Digital Book World that will really inform publishers that want to work harder to exploit this opportunity.
The mostly obviously relevant one is called “Global Publishing Tactics: understanding distribution, metadata, pricing, and marketing to maximize sales in different markets”. Two of the panelists are Marcus Woodburn of Ingram and Gareth Cuddy of ePub Direct — we have other conversations pending — and moderated by Len Vlahos, the executive director of Book Industry Study Group. Marcus and Gareth and the panelist(s) who will join them have experience selling around the world on behalf of many publishers. Their insight and advice will be gold for publishers looking to expand their export sales.
We also have a panel discussion “Global Market Spotlights: reports from markets around the world”. The four markets we’ll discuss are Germany, Italy, Brazil, and Russia. The panel will be moderated by Thomas Minkus of Frankfurt Book Fair. Our panelists — all of whom are local players — will talk about the switch to digital reading and online sales in those markets, but will also give specific insight into the market for English-language books.
Another discussion which is a bit more tangential, but will still be informative for publishers trying to grow ebook exports, is one on “How People Read”. What we’re trying to get at here is to use the knowledge that ebook platform providers have about the granular detail of reading consumption: about devices, how far people go in various kinds of books, whether they read more than one book at a time, and how they respond to pricing changes. All of our panelists — Micah Bowers of Bluefire, Michael Tamblyn of Kobo, David Burleigh of Overdrive, and Andrew Weinstein of Scribd — are superintending global platforms. Another aspect of what they’ll reveal is how these consumption patterns vary across markets, including how much English is read in various export markets. Chris Kenneally of Copyright Clearance Center, which also has an increasing international focus, will moderate.
We could well also learn more about global opportunities from the keynote talk we’ll hear from Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins, and Michael Cader and I will certainly be asking Russ Grandinetti of Amazon about how publishers can maximize their export sales through them.
So if export sales is on your current agenda, a visit to DBW on Jan 14-15 also should be. And, in that case, sign up before the end of the day on Monday and save yourself some dough. Early bird pricing ends on Monday night.