Bookmasters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Getting ready for our eBooks for Everyone Else conferences, I discovered an author named Bob Mayer who impressed me with his self-publishing zeal and apparent success. Bob has written lots of military fiction, science fiction, even a romance novel, and some non-fiction: dozens of books over the years for major publishers. Most of it was mass-market, most of it reverted relatively easily and Bob systematically secured those rights reversions for years.

He caught my attention with the bare bones of his story. He started putting his work up as ebooks in January, when he sold a few hundred books. By July he had more than 40 titles available and was selling a total of over 100,000 units a month. I had long wanted to put an author before my conference audiences who had achieved self-publishing success to talk about how s/he’d done it.

Joe Konrath and, more recently, John Locke had politely turned me down. I booked a 1-on-1 conversation with Barry Eisler at our Publishers Launch Conference at BEA right after he announced his decision to turn down a 6-figure advance to self-publish. Alas (for this objective of mine), the morning of the event Barry signed a contract with Amazon to do his next book with them. Although he has self-published some short fiction. Eisler’s story became that he is an Amazon-published author, not a self-published author. That’s a good story and we had a good session on-stage that the conference audience benefited from, but it was not a a self-publishing report from an author who truly did it on his or her own.

(Eisler’s wife, the literary agent Laura Rennert, reported at eBEE in San Francisco that Amazon is succeeding very well with Eisler’s current book, The Detachment — which I read and enjoyed – and that his substantial advance has already been earned out.)

So I was pleased to learn with a phone call that, not only was Mayer an enagaging talker, but that he was willing to make the journey from his home in Seattle to San Francisco to discuss his success with a conference audience.

But what became clear when I had a further conversation with Mayer the day before our conference, buttressed by what was said by many other participants at the event, is that the Hocking-Konrath-Locke story — an author managing all the pieces of their publishing program and and achieving a totally private success — is a Dodo bird. Unless we consolidate down to an only-Amazon ebook world, which, despite Amazon’s best efforts, doesn’t seem likely anytime soon but would undoubtedly create a whole new rule book if it ever arrived, the work and expertise required for successful publishing will lead inexorably to one of two results.

Either an author will get help to publish their own material — a distributor like Constellation or Ingram or a publisher — or they’ll find what they built to serve themselves would be better and less-expensively maintained with the work of additional authors to go along with their own. There’s enough work and expertise involved in what had first seemed to many such a simple process that it requires building a bit of a machine to do it. And once a machine is built, it is just wasteful to leave it idling between the works generated by any one writer.

This point was made by Mayer when he told me that he is now recruiting other authors to publish. He started out by finding a partner to handle the technology component and mechanics of his efforts. In his already-substantial experience in less than a year, he has learned that proper editing is essential, as are eye-catching covers, as is the right metadata. He told me and our audience that a single complaint from a reader to Amazon about a typo in one’s book can result in the ebook being taken down for a required correction. He has learned, as others have, that maximizing revenue requires changing and re-changing your prices, which is more work.

Bob says he has even fixed plot errors that were pointed out by Kindle readers.

(Another view of this aggressiveness to satisfy customers was offered to me by a Big Six executive a few months ago when he related the story of a book published by his house that had been taken down. There the “culprit” was vernacular language that was interpreted by a reader as poorly copy-edited grammar. There was nothing wrong with the ebook, but one reader thinking there was resulted in a takedown that cost everybody sales for several days until the ebook could be put back up!)

Bob says books can disappear from major retail sites for no apparent reason as well. He says that anybody who believes that ebook publishing is like “sending the book to a printer, after which you can forget about working on it” is mistaken.

And he believes that any author whose work is good and wants to take a self-publishing route would be wise to cede a percentage of sales to him, or somebody else, who has learned what he has and equipped themselves to prepare books properly for sale and manage them after they’re launched.

This is establishing ever so much more clearly that publishers are right when they say there’s a role for them in an ebook world. Amazon itself makes that clear by the difference in the deals it offers self-published authors and authors it signs for its imprints. Although authors will continue to self-publish, the debate that matters in the future is what the basket of services will be that authors require and what will be the right price for them. The lines are drawn for that discussion and the opinions are really all over the lot.

There are ebook publishers — the granddaddies eReads and Rosetta, Scott Waxman’s Diversion Books, and the giant in the space: Open Road — who are saying the “right” ebook division between author and publisher is 50-50. (We should make clear that this is the division of the revenue obtained from the retailer or “sales agent”, which would normally be 65-70% of the selling price or 50% of a publishers suggested list which could be discounted, depending on what kind of sales arrangement is in place.) Smashwords, an entirely automated service, and BookMasters, a service provider, provide distribution for 15% of the take. Two agents speaking on our panel in San Francisco, Deidre Knight and Laura Rennert, are capping their agency’s take at 15% of the revenue as well, as they walk the ethical line that is perceived by some to require that they make no more money self-publishing an author than they would selling the rights to a publisher.

Then there are many other service offerings with prices that fall in between 15% and 50%.

Amazon’s rules offer some insight on this. If you work with them through their KDP service, you get 70% (if you set your price within their accepted bands). But, as Mayer and others at our conference made clear, through KDP you can’t even purchase any special merchandising or promotion. But if you are published by Amazon’s imprints, the take is cut in half and the author gets 35% of retail, but you get lots of promotion by positioning. (Deals are private, and the details of Eisler’s deal have not been revealed, but the presumption would be that he earned out his rumored six-figure advance from Amazon at the 35% rate.) Thirty-five percent matches what a 50-50 publisher could deliver if they had an agency-like deal with the retailer.

Amazon agreements also come with the requirement that you participate in their other programs, including library lending in cooperation with OverDrive and, presumably, the new subscription program they have just announed. (It appears they chose not to include all KDP titles in the subscription program; there are only 5,000 titles announced for that initiative and since we know that Smashwords has nearly 100,000 titles, it is likely that KDP has more than that. On the other hand, late reporting by Publishers Lunch on Thursday spells out that Amazon will simply “buy” copies of any non-agency titles it wants to lend. That means they make one purchase for each loan, so it is expensive for them, but it demonstrates again that only publishers with agency arrangements have control of their distribution and how their books might be used to strengthen any one distributor’s ecosystem.)

The comparisons get complicated, but, if a conventional publisher is providing the full range of services that our speakers said is needed to maximize sales: good covers, changing covers, dynamic pricing, constantly improved metadata, monitoring to catch glitch take-downs, as well as developmental editing, line-editing, copy-editing, and proofreading, the author wouldn’t be doing badly at all to get 35% of the consumer’s dollar for an ebook. Throw in real print book distribution and sales and the royalties and marketing from that, plus a publisher’s core marketing effort (being part of a “legitimate” list gets attention from reviewers, bloggers, library collection development, and other places that matter), and, perhaps, some dedicated marketing as well, and it can be a relatively profitable exercise for an author to be with a publisher for even less than that.

When agency publishers pay 25% royalties, they are giving the author 17.5% of the paying customer’s dollar. Everybody will draw their own lines, deal by deal, but that doesn’t strike me as totally crazy as long as print sales remain more than half the total and the publisher is paying an advance that carries with it some risk that the actual royalty paid will be higher than what the contract stipulates.

That’s a moving target, of course, I personally don’t expect print sales to remain at half the total very much longer. But if major publishers were paying 50% royalty on a 70% agency sale, they’d be matching the 35% Amazon pays the authors it publishes. Amazon can do much more to promote on Amazon (which panelists at eBEE said is what really moves the needle); but publishers make noise in a lot of other places Amazon (yet) doesn’t. Presumably Open Road and Diversion and eReads and other 50-50 ebook publishers can’t match the agency terms with Amazon (they can get 70% through KDP, but that comes with pricing restraints and required agreement to those other deals we discussed earlier), so only the Big Six, who can apply agency across all accounts, can offer a comparable deal with a manageable percentage payout.

Amazon is demonstrating what they see as the value of securing the loyalty of digital book consumers for its ecosystem by their willingness to pay full wholesale price for an ebook that will then get lent once, as well as their penchant for pricing for sale well below their cost. The evidence that agency pricing is the only wall between a multi-channel ebook business and a single-retailer monopoly continues to grow. But as long as print in stores matters, and it will for a while longer, the Big Six have a legitimate commercial argument to defend ebook royalties between 25 and 50 percent. After that, everybody except Amazon will be hoping that that the Nook, Kobo, Google, and Sony market share is enough to keep it essential to an author to cover them all. And that means of discovery and merchandising will emerge that are a meaningful alternative to what is provided by the world’s biggest virtual retailer.

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I wasn’t planning to write a post this past weekend for Monday morning publication. But then Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler contacted me on Saturday to tell me what Barry is up to. I’ve read their lengthy conversation about Barry’s decision to turn down a $500,000 contract (apparently for two books) and join Joe (and many others, but none who have turned down half-a-million bucks) as a self-published author.

To use a metaphor that connects with the current news: this is a very major earthquake. This one won’t cause a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown, but you better believe it will lead everybody living near a reactor — everybody working in a major publishing house — to do a whole new round of risk-assessment. Because, in its way, this is more threatening than the earthquake that just hit Japan. This self-publishing author will much more assuredly and directly spawn followers.

As news of Eisler’s decision spreads, phones will be ringing in literary agencies all over town with authors asking agents, “shouldn’t I be doing this?”

I submit a bit of perspective from another part of publishing: scholarly journals. A few years ago I asked my very smart friend Mark Bide, who knows that part of publishing much better than I do, how I’d know if the business model for journals — by which they publish work the university paid the professor’s salary to write and then sell the published version back to the university’s library — was threatened. Mark told me to watch their submissions. As long as the scholar-authors felt the need to be published in journals, the journal business model would continue to function.

I am not alone in having long known that self-publishing would ultimately present big authors with the opportunity to disintermediate their publishers, but I wouldn’t have thought when I asked that question that the sci-tech journal would hold its ground longer. Now I wouldn’t be so sure.

The decision for Eisler, at its core, was pretty simple. On the basis of what he’s learned from his friend Joe Konrath, who seems to be banking in the mid-six-figures self-publishing annually after a career as a non-bestselling author for established publishers, and what Eisler learned himself by self-publishing a short story, he figures he can earn more, much more, in the long run by publishing himself. This is not about ego or vanity; it is not about hating the publishing establishment. It is a coldly calculated decision (by an author who should make those well; he started out in life as a covert CIA operative) that says, in effect,  ”it would not be smart to take half-a-million bucks considering what I’d have to give away to get it.”

In the conversation between them which they just published, Konrath and Eisler touch upon many aspects of the publisher-author interaction and the author’s self interest. The conversation is smart, sophisticated, and mostly entertaining (although it is definitely too long; should they have hired an editor?) It is a conversation that everybody in the industry thinking about its future will likely read more than once (particularly the highlights, which are sure to be extracted by many people from the entire text.) Contained within it are certainly a number of points made to which there are valid rejoinders that could be offered. And certainly some will point out that Eisler’s BookScan figures suggest a decline in commercial appeal. But, in the overall scheme of things, the contentious portions are minor and the fact that his sales through publishers have been declining would mitigate the expectations for him somewhat and make any success he achieves on his own even more noteworthy.

The overall thrust is that an author has just made an entirely rational decision to turn down half-a-million bucks of big publisher money to self-publish. And what is said in their dialogue, but perhaps not emphatically enough, is that the direction of change makes this decision likely to make more sense to more authors each successive week than it did the week before.

What we do here at The Shatzkin Files is try to provide insight about the implications of news events rather than be the best reporter of them. If the implications of self-publishing to the business models of established publishers interests you (and what are you doing here if it doesn’t?), then you need to read the entire exchange they’ve published and the reporting others will do of it. I will limit this post (longer than mine usually are as it is) to a few points which for the most part are intended to extend their discussion, rather than contend with or correct it.

1. They didn’t do the math on what the loss of print sales and print merchandising might mean in dollars and cents and how to address it.

One of the themes that I’ve been working on for some conferences I’m planning (more on that upcoming later this week) is how the arguments about rights, royalties, and publisher leverage change as the balance between digital and print sales continues to shift. What this conversation can make you forget is that far more than half of most books’ sales, perhaps more than 70% for the majority of titles, are still print copies selling because they’re on-hand in a physical retail location. And that’s in the US. The number is higher in the UK and is almost certainly more than 90% in most other places in the world. So even if the math Konrath and Eisler put forth showing that the author share of ebook sales can increase by three or four times through self-publishing; even if we ignore (as they did) the fact that the higher percentage will be on a lower retail price (they trumpet the lower retail price they can charge as a key motivation for the shift); and even if we forget about the costs in time and actual expense involved in self-publishing, the author who follows this formula has to take into account the loss of presence and revenue from the retail channel.

But, having said that, the shift to digital seems to be increasing in speed worldwide. The percentage of print sales will keep declining. Eisler would have been signing a contract for a book that would come out a year from now and digital will be more important then, perhaps twice as important then, as it is now. And, as he points out in the conversation, the book a publisher would put out a year from now will have been selling and delivering revenue for a year before the publisher would have had something in the marketplace. To paraphrase the great author and publisher, Mark Twain, “the self-publisher will be halfway round the world before the legacy publisher can get his boots on.”

And that leads me to…

2. I’d be amazed if Barnes & Noble doesn’t detect an opportunity here to do a completely different kind of deal. What if B&N went to Eisler and said, “we’d like to buy print rights to sell your books just to our own customer base”? I can’t see why he wouldn’t just say “yes.”

What I’m envisioning here is something like a book club deal. B&N pays an advance and licenses the right to print its own copies for display and sale through its own stores and dot com. This could work many ways, but one might be for them to pay a royalty based on the actual selling price for every copy shifted. That would allow them to manage their downside risk on the printing because they could cut the price when sales slow down.

That might lead (or even trail) a wholesaler like Ingram or Baker & Taylor or Charles Levy to make a similar offer to print copies for sale through other retail outlets. The big publishers have taken a firm position (which, in my opinion, they’ll be figuring out how to walk back in a year or two) against buying print rights only, but one has to figure that a smaller publisher or a trade book distributor, looking at lots of underutilized capacity to handle print in the coming months, might see commercial merit in handling the print side of a major ebook bestseller.

Konrath does tout his sales through Amazon’s CreateSpace, which enables his books to be available in print for their online customer base. But he doesn’t talk about B&N’s PubIt program or setting up his title at Lightning Source, which would make it available as print online more broadly. None of these solutions put speculative inventory in stores, though, and that’s necessary to get the full marketing and sales impact for any book today (and probably for a few more years to come.)

3. Because Konrath has proved to be such a multi-talented combo do-it-yourselfer and finder-of-resources, the conversation doesn’t touch on the range of service providers that can help the potential self-publishing author for fees or for a much smaller percentage than a publisher would take. There’s mention of Smashwords, which is one, and of CreateSpace. But the self-publishing giant Author Solutions and lulu.com aren’t mentioned. Neither is BookMasters, a company we’ve worked with in Ashland, Ohio, which offers a range of self-publishing services, including access to all the editing requirements discussed by Konrath and Eisler along with some human-intermediary handholding that many authors will need. Perseus is building a similar set of services, extending its Constellation service, which began as the means to enable their roster of print distribution clients break into digital publishing. And Ingram has a suite of capabilities that could be extended, if they chose to make the investment, to be an author-service platform. The Scott Waxman Literary Agency is the first to have created a digital publishing arm that, with tweaking, could provide an author with the help they’d need. They won’t be the last.

The single greatest shortcoming of the Konrath-Eisler conversation, to me, was its Amazon-centricity, although there is one place in the conversation that begins to acknowledge that Barnes & Noble’s Nook sales are becoming significant. (Some publishers have told me that Kindle has declined from a share well north of 80% to one in the mid 50s while Nook is now accounting for 25% of their ebook sales in the US.) They don’t mention Kobo, which might have as much as a 7% share now. Sony is still a player. Apple’s iBookstore really shouldn’t be ignored. And Google ebooks is the lifeline for independent bookstores to sell ebooks. No author who wants to stay sweet with independents can afford to ignore putting their books into Google. In fact, Random House executives told us that the growing use of Google by indies was a factor in their decision to level the pricing playing field by moving to agency pricing last month.

And as the build-out of pathways for English-language books abroad continues, these non-Amazon, non-B&N players become even more important.

When Konrath started doing his self-publishing two or three years ago, working exclusively through Amazon made complete sense on an effort-to-reward basis. It is becoming increasingly important to cover more points of distribution, even digitally.

But that doesn’t change the calculation that much for Eisler’s decision. There are already helpers in the marketplace to extend beyond Amazon and there will, undoubtedly, be more. The conversation imagines this kind of service provision. And (if they’re competent) the ones now in the marketplace will be falling over themselves to introduce Eisler to what they can do for him.

4. OK, here’s what these guys really got wrong. They made a mistake about baseball. Their post is full of line drives off the wall, but their interpretation of baseball history is flawed.

I refer to Konrath’s observation about the Negro Leagues in baseball, suggesting that the reason the majors brought in black players was that Negro League baseball had become superior to Major League baseball. Actually, that wasn’t true at all. Although some integrated barnstorming over the years did result in black teams beating white ones from time to time, it was seldom suggested — and certainly no major league owners or fans thought — that the overall level of play was higher in the Negro Leagues. It wasn’t.

Beating a competitor that had somehow demonstrated its superiority was never the motivation for the major league teams to integrate. It was all about them competing with each other and not ignoring talent. The real history might contain a useful lesson for the legacy players in publishing today.

What drove Branch Rickey to sign Jackie Robinson was pure competitive zeal. He wanted to win. He wanted good ballplayers to help him win. If he was missing some good ballplayers by ignoring blacks, he’d stop ignoring blacks.

When he did that, other teams followed. And, in pretty short order, the Negro Leagues were destroyed because the best ballplayers they had were playing in the Major Leagues.

A similar effect has weakened, if not quite destroyed, Christian publishing in the US. A quarter century ago, Christian publishing and bookselling existed in a parallel universe to secular trade: different publishers, different stores, different commission rep groups. Just different. Then superstore expansion and some major Christian bestsellers led to the major chains starting to carry the best titles from the Christian publishers. That weakened the Christian booksellers, who were the ones that carried the wider range of titles from the Christian publishers which, in turn, weakened them.

Of course, Eisler hasn’t succeeded yet. He has a book to put out this Father’s Day that he turned down $250,000 to have come out next Father’s Day. If the over-under is whether he’ll have earned his $250,000 by then, which way would you bet? It would strike me as extremely ambitious, but if he can sell at $4.95, not entirely inconceivable. And, of course, you could set the bar at which you’d call it “success” a lot lower than that.

If the legacy publishing establishment can develop tools to deliver marketing at scale, adjust its contracts to pay higher digital royalties, and, perhaps, offer a “fee for service” model alongside its “advance against royalty” model, it might, like Major League Baseball did, weaken the infrastructure that is developing that will increasingly tempt authors (and readers) to abandon it. But it also could be that I was right four years ago when I said that the general trade publishing house was a dinosaur in the emerging world of 21st century publishing. Wasn’t it a natural disaster that was the catalyst for killing the original dinosaurs as well?

Konrath made the point that self-publishing just gives him more time to write. He and Eisler both expressed frustration about living with the long schedules and companion limitations of traditional publishing practices. From their perspective, it is wasteful to not start monetizing IP quickly after it is finished in the digital age and it is unnecessarily constraining sales and income to publish only one book a year, or even one per publishing season.

I’ve tried to recruit Joe to speak at conferences, with a total lack of success, because he thinks the best marketing he can do is just to keep writing. New stories help him market himself more than public appearances do. Since he also enjoys writing more than speaking and would rather be home than on the road, it’s a pretty tough sell to ask him to lose a day of editorial output to have a conversation with a bunch of strangers.

The portion of their conversation about staying focused on generating editorial output was one of the most persuasive elements of it. A publisher would help itself a lot if it focused on that question too and thought of a writer’s time as a valuable resource that should be devoted, as much as possible, to doing what that writer can do that nobody else can. And that’s “write.”

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My last post tried to lay out a comparison of royalties paid by big publishers to agented authors on ebooks against what they pay on print books. What it showed is that the authors suffer a bit on ebook sales that substitute for hardcover print sales, but that they do pretty well selling an ebook instead of a paperback. And the numbers also showed that a publisher selling ebooks under a wholesale arrangement pays the author a higher royalty than an agency publisher when the print is in its hardcover life, but that the agency publisher is actually paying more royalties if the printed edition is a mass-market paperback.

But this comparison has its limits. It helps an author or agent compare their economic prospects with an agency publisher as opposed to a wholesale one. But it doesn’t help an author understand the next comparison she’ll want to make, between doing her book with a publisher and doing it herself without a publisher at all

Fortunately for authors and agents, the benchmark for self-publishing revenue is clearly established by the ebook platform Smashwords, which I first wrote about at the end of a post 16 months ago. There are certainly alternatives to Smashwords: web-based solutions like Scribd, full-service offerings like our clients at Bookmasters, and things in between like Author Solutions. But Smashwords is the most automated, least expensive, and, at this point, most heavily used self-publishing solution for ebooks.

Smashwords pays authors 85% of the sales price for ebooks sold on its own site, and about 85% of the receipts for sales made through iBooks (Apple), Sony, B&N, Kobo, and the Diesel eBook Store. In other words, an author would get more than three times the “old” standard 25% ebook royalty offered by the big publishers and double the “new” possible 40% royalty implied as the new ceiling by the Random-Wylie agreement announced last week.

It is worth noting that Mark Coker of Smashwords says that all their deals will be agency going forward because control of the retail price is very important to their authors and publishers. The net to the author or publisher through their existing deals is 42.5% for sales made through Sony or B&N, 46.75% for sales made through Kobo, and 60% on their agency deals with Apple and the Diesel eBook Store.

And although Smashwords does not (yet) have an agreement to distribute through Kindle (though they’re working on it), the authors and publishers that use Smashwords would be free to make a separate deal with Kindle, giving them a possible 70% of their retail price if they can keep the potential discounters in line (that would be B&N, Kobo, and Sony.)

One thing very much in Smashwords’ favor is that the barriers to use them are very low. All you need is a doc file and a bright person to pay attention to quality control as you work through your conversion. They make metadata management simple.

What might give big authors pause about using Smashwords is that they distribute DRM-free (although the retailers listed above will be adding their own unless the publisher tells them not to) and that they depend on trust. Each retailer selling Smashwords titles has the content file and the metadata file in their possession and the sales reporting cannot effectively be audited.

But whether or not Smashwords is everybody’s solution, they certainly are establishing that pure automated ebook conversion and distribution services are worth 15% of what is collected from the consumer or from the intermediary selling to the consumer.

Smashwords is already pretty big and growing fast. They have 18,000 titles on offer from 8,000 different authors and publishers at the moment and Coker says they’ve added 2,500 titles in the past 30 days!

And I can personally attest to the fact that Smashwords has some books people will want. I found a title on iBooks called “A Year in Mudville” about the Mets first season — baseball history being a subject I know well and read broadly — which is terrific. It is well-researched, well-written, and well-edited. I found some presentation glitches (type fonts changing for no apparent reason) and pointed them out to Coker. He showed them to the author who then corrected the file. (The glitches didn’t interfere with reading the book at all.) And that book was priced at $8.99 on iBooks, which means the author was getting $5.40 from the sale! Look at that against the chart in my prior post! On a $9 list-price ebook, the author would be getting $1.125 from a wholesale publisher and $1.575 from an agency publisher at 25% royalty; $1.80 and $2.52 at 40%. (And, assuming they did an Amazon deal separately and could meet the restrictions required for the 70% royalty, that author would be getting $6.30 for each sale on Kindle!)

At per-unit revenues from ebook sales anywhere from 2.5-to-6 times what they could get from a publisher, and ebook sales rising inexorably as a percentage of total sales, authors and their agents are ultimately going to be doing their math against this option for each new book they have to offer. Some may be doing it already.

There are a few things publishers can tell authors to try to keep them from jumping.

1. “Don’t forget: we give you an advance!” That is the first, and for many authors the most powerful, argument. Agents like advances too, so they’re likely to be sympathetic to the publishers’ point here. But, of course, with that advance comes the publisher’s claim to more than half of what would otherwise be the author’s ebook profits.

2. “Don’t forget: print books are still 90% of your market!” This is really the reason established authors will be reluctant to jump to Smashwords. And as long as print is 90%, or even 80% (and it is falling to that level on many immersive reading books now), getting a multiple on the ebook sales still leaves a shortfall of revenue to the author unless they figure out how to also have the book available in print. The big publishers won’t be doing print-only deals for quite a while, but smaller publishers will certainly be available to work with brand-name authors on that basis. And when the print share falls to 50% of the total sales, which many of us believe it will over the next few years, this argument won’t be effective anymore. (There are many ways for the author to self-publish print too, but only the print-on-demand solutions don’t require big investment or risk, and you aren’t going to get what a publisher would deliver with POD alone.)

3. “You’ll have to do your own publicity and marketing.” This is true, but it is also true that publishers have wanted authors to do a lot of their own publicity and marketing already. From here, it would seem that the author’s marketing efforts will be critical either way. If the author is already big and branded (likely due at least in part to the prior efforts of a publisher, but that’s not necessarily relevant here), it’s less of a barrier than if they’re not. It might be no barrier at all. This is an uncomfortable point for publishers because the authors who need the least help are the ones they want to publish the most.

4. “If we publish you, you’re legitimatized.” I think this point carries almost no weight with any author who has had a bestseller already or has already had more than a couple of books published by established houses. I think it will carry less and less weight with everybody else. I just found my first great book by an unknown author on Smashwords. Sooner or later, you will too.

5. “We’ve built email lists and other direct contact with the consumers you want to sell to, plus we have relationships with the book retailers to get you more attractive placement and promotion through them than you can get without us.” Now, that would be attractive. Can any big publisher justify that claim?

6. “We will pay you 70% of receipts on ebooks to keep you in our stable. It isn’t the 85% you get from Smashwords, but with our advance, our print book sales, and taking all the admin and management off your hands, it’s a better deal for you.” That will probably work, but no publisher wants to let it get to that point.

Publishers better work on number five.

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I spent a chunk of yesterday working on this post while, with one eye, I was watching the news about the volcanic eruption in Iceland that shut UK air traffic. As I post this on Friday morning with a flight scheduled to leave tomorrow night near midnight, I’d guess the chances of actually getting there might be as low as 50-50. In fact, the post has already been edited because two people from one client I was going to work with there — Copyright Clearance Center — already had to cancel because of the air travel disruption. I hope the post will be of interest no matter how this turns out.

It’s been a running joke between me and my oldest friends (none of whom are in the book business or digital space or anywhere near it, having chosen careers long ago as teachers, lawyers, engineers, TV directors, and other “normal” comprehensible things) that all of them wonder “what the hell does Mike do?”

It has occurred to me that readers of The Shatzkin Files might wonder very much the same thing. So while I’m thinking through my planning for what promises to be a very busy time next week at the London Book Fair, it seemed to me that writing about it would both help me think and spell out a bit about how a book business consultant adds some value and earns a living. And hey, maybe we’ll promote some clients and some of these activities of mine at the same time!

My principal mission next week is to talk to UK publishers, mostly to the digital strategists but also to some senior management, about the following initiatives:

1. I am just starting to organize the program for the second annual Digital Book World conference, which will take place in New York in January, 2011. I’ll be doing a post here sometime after London to enlist the help of all my readers in brainstorming and planning this, but what I’m going to do next week is tell publishers what I have in mind and get feedback and suggestions. It is an article of faith among the US publishing community that we’re “way ahead of them” and, indeed, I am not aware of conferences dedicated to publishers in the UK that are comparable to Digital Book World, O’Reilly’s Tools of Change, or the Book Business Conference and Expo. (There is London Online, but that is not a conference focused on book publishing.) Since it would seem that the world of digital would bring publishers of different nationalities closer together, not further apart, I’ll be looking for possible speakers as well as ideas, and probing whether it makes sense for our partners at F+W to really market our conference in the UK to look for paid attendees as well.

2. We’re also on the verge of formally announcing a new program in partnership with F+W Media: E2BU, Enhanced Ebook University. The White Paper, being written by Pete Meyers, is expected to go out for “peer review” next week. Kirk Biglione of Oxford Media Works, our CTO, has been leading our effort to craft a multi-track webinar program that will also be part of the initial E2BU offering. Since this effort is all virtual, we’ll definitely want to market it in the UK. I’m expecting UK participants in our webinar sessions (as “faculty”) and we’re recruiting peer reviewers from the UK for the White Paper as well.

3. As readers of this blog know, we’ve been working with Copia, a new ebook platform with social networking integrated in (and six ebook reader hardware offerings as well). Copia offers some unique marketing opportunities to publishers that are simply not a part of any competitive platform. So we’ll be using the London Book Fair to meet with the digital heads of UK houses to jump-start the awareness of this new platform and sales channel among non-US publishers. The response to the Copia presentation among publishers and agents in New York has been unanimously enthusiastic. Meanwhile, from the Copia side, we’ve been seeing that we need to engage with publishers well beyond their ebook departments; really taking advantage of Copia will require the involvement and creativity of editors and marketers. I’m looking forward to seeing how the UK publishers react to the opportunity.

4. London Book Fair ends this coming Wednesday, April 21. Exactly one week later, I’ll be addressing the AGM of the PA (which everybody in the UK knows is the “annual general meeting of the Publishers Association.”) My remarks are already thoroughly planned, of course. I’ll be talking about where the world of content and publishing will be in 20 years, predicting a world where owning IP won’t be of nearly as much commercial value as owning eyeballs. And I’ll be talking about a couple of publishers who are already getting ahead of that change. Then I’ll discuss where the US book marketplace is going in the next three years, which I think has very significant implications for UK publishers thinking about territoriality and global markets. But I’ll be using the book fair to get somewhat more acquainted with how UK publishers see their market today, hoping to find additional bits of relevant information to sprinkle into the talk.

The London Book Fair is not just about meeting publishers and publishing operatives from “across the pond” or around the world. Sometimes it is presenting an opportunity for us to work in person with US clients who are not based in New York, or to introduce clients to US publishers who are not based in New York, as with these:

5. I have also written on the blog about our “freight forwarder” client, SBS Worldwide and their eDC supply chain solution. Steve Walker, the Chairman of SBS, is speaking at the BIC (that’s Britain’s Book Industry Communication, their rough equivalent to our BISG) Supply Chain Meeting, an annual London Book Fair event. So, of course I’ll go see that. In addition, we’re using the London Book Fair to introduce Steve and eDC to a couple of US publishers from outside NYC.

6. In the same vein, we’ll use London Book Fair to meet with our clients at Bookmasters. They have a very broad suite of author- and publisher-support services, which have grown organically from their roots as a short-run printer. The range of their services really extends across the entire publishing value chain: literally from getting the book written (if necessary), getting it set up for printing or digital distribution with an XML workflow, content conversion, printing (POD, short run digital, or offset), and all sales and distribution services up to and including a toll-free number to take orders. And, unlike others that approach that range of services, they’re a willing on-ramp to publishing for individual authors and tiny publishers. Bookmasters is based in Ashland, OH and they’ve just created a new position called Business Development Manager for Integrated Solutions and put a new executive named Bob Kasher in place who is making their very complex set of solutions accessible to potential customers. LBF gives us a chance to meet and refine the way the propositions are being presented in light of real customer reactions and responses.

Oh, that’s not all, of course. I’ve been invited to speak in Ljubljana at a digital publishing event next year and the person who invited me will be available for a chat in London. I’m having dinner with the head of one of the big DADs (digital asset distributors) that I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to know personally. I’m seeing a Boston-based publisher with which I’ve had some conversations about digital change to see if there’s a potential engagement. I’m meeting with an Irish publisher to be interviewed for a thesis he’s writing. And I’m seeing lots of old friends before my wife comes in and we head off with two of those old friends (and their dog) to spend a weekend seeing Scotland from our base at The Pineapple in Dunmore.

I certainly won’t be bored at the London Book Fair and now you know why new posts from me might be sparse until I get back to the States on April 29.

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The monthly release of ebook sales figures by the IDPF provides a regular reminder about how fast this market is growing and it always provokes me to project the curve into the future and think about the implications. It was an IDPF data release that triggered the thought that we needed a “Tipping Points” panel at Digital Book World last January which turned out to be one of the highest-rated presentations by the attendees of the conference. And it was another release of that data that made me say on this blog on March 22 that I thought ebook sales would reach 20-25 percent of the sales for new works of narrative writing by the time of Obama’s reelection in November 2012.

Then last week, The Economist had a story quoting Carolyn Reidy, the CEO of Simon & Schuster, forecasting S&S ebook sales in that range in “3 to 5 years.” This is the first time that I’m aware of that a Big Six CEO has been willing to put their name on a forecast that is just about as aggressive as my own. Another conversation with the head of another one of the Big Six companies captured a forecast that is in the same ballpark.

So I think it is worth a few moments to contemplate what it means if this forecast is accurate, or even close to accurate.

If by the end of 2012, 25% of sales for a new book are digital, then about half of new book sales will be made through online purchases if we count the print book sales made through online retailers (mostly Amazon.)

Online print sales can be served through inventory generated on demand. So, if these estimates are right, we are less than three years away from a publisher (or author) being able to reach half the market for a book without inventory risk!

Having half the market reachable without print-run risk or inventory storage; having half the customers connecting with their reading through online paths that make them at least theoretically identifiable; and having a quarter of those customers reading through a medium that enables interactivity will make all the changes we’ve seen so far in trade publishing appear trivial. And if the very perspicacious Carolyn Reidy, her unnamed counterpart, and I are right, that disruption is going to take place before many books now under contract reach their publication date.

The immediately disruptive effects of this, for which every major publisher should be preparing right now, include:

1. Publishers are going to really have to rethink the development process for their ebooks. Right now, publishers put their creative energy into optimizing print books; ebooks are an afterthought.  The most forward-thinking houses are going to XML workflows which will reduce the costs of conversion to ebook formats. But are any of them fundamentally rethinking how the editor and author shape the project to optimize the ebook experience? That working relationship is going to have to undergo fundamental change.

2. It will be eminently sensible to launch books with a no-inventory strategy and move to press runs with returns allowable when reviews or sales have proven that it makes sense. Of course, publishers will be happy to sell anytime on a no-returns basis and for some books launched “digital first” there could be enough no-returns demand to generate a printing, but the idea of printing and distributing speculatively will make less and less sense as the potential market to be reached by that tactic diminishes as a share of the whole. By the way, this reality would give B&N, the only retailer with its own DC resupply infrastructure, an additional competitive advantage.

3. A non-US publisher will be able to reach half the US market without needing an operation of any kind in the States. This is a sea-change that could even encourage our UK counterparts to reconsider their staunch defense of territorial rights. We already know that the greatest part of marketing value beyond the display and positioning in a bookstore is generated online. That means it can be done from anywhere without a local nexus. By the end of 2012, we’re saying half of all the sales potential can also be reached with the product without a local nexus: no requirement of local inventory or any shipping or revenue collection facility beyond your digital distribution and print-on-demand partner.

4. Because books or ebooks will be purchased by half of their customers electronically, the potential exists to know exactly who those are and to establish interaction with them. Obviously, the intermediaries have both selfish and customer-oriented reasons not to share data, but for ebooks, at least, publishers will find hooks to get readers to check in with the publisher and establish contact. (Of course, they will also be selling more and more units direct to consumers, without any intermediary at all.) This opportunity presents a new battleground for competitive advantage that publishers will have to pursue both for marketing and for author relations.

5. Publishers will have to start devoting the bandwidth and resources to direct sales that they devote to intermediary sales today. The notional 50-50 split of sales between terrestrial and online means that half the sales are actually direct sales. Publishers will increasingly find ways to influence those sales decisions, but the companies that devote management attention and resources to the challenge will find those ways faster, to their competitive advantage.

6. There’s an inevitable concurrent downward spiral of brick-and-mortar retail inherent in this forecast that sales are moving online. The nearly-limitless online selection has been an increasingly powerful magnet since the day Amazon opened and in the new paradigm there will be a growing body of talked-about content not visible on store shelves. It is beyond the scope of today’s speculation to consider what this means for the strategy and survival of bookstores and wholesalers and for publishers’ expectations for them, but it’s not likely to be pretty.

7. Self-publishing strategies for entities that can do the marketing become much more compelling. It is no secret that an author can make more money on each copy sold managing her own publication through Lulu or Author Solutions or Bookmasters. If half the market is directly available without regard to the effectiveness of a field sales force then we can be sure, at the very least, new title acquisition will be more challenging for established publishers. The big players will still be the only big bankrolls in town, but that’s a two-edged sword that can lead to overspending and losses as well as to securing desirable projects.

8. If the infrastructure for direct sales management at most publishers will be woefully lacking, the infrastructure for print warehousing and delivering print orders at most houses is likely to be heavily underutilized. That should lead to a reduction in the charges for distribution services, adding pressure to a business that will already suffer from the growing viability of no-inventory publishing. And publishers with volume-related pricing contracts with their printers will find they don’t need as much capacity as they contracted for a year or two before.

For the past three years, Ted Hill and I have conceived and organized the program for the Book Industry Study Group’s Making Information Pay conference, coming up on May 6. Our theme this year — Points of No Return — addresses precisely this issue from the perspective of how functions will be organized, what the changing skill sets will be, and how secure people doing jobs today can feel about having a job they can do tomorrow. If you found that this post gave you something to think about, you’ll find MIP a morning very well spent.

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One of the most significant pieces of news to come out of Tools of Change is that O’Reilly is going into the distribution business for ebooks. This is indeed, a “tool” of change. It is also a harbinger of times to come that threaten a lot of big companies: major publishers; the big distributors like Perseus, NBN, and IPG; the digital asset distributors including Ingram, LibreDigital, North Point codeMantra, and the fledgling operation at Bookmasters; as well as the digital wholesaling operations at Ingram, Content Reserve, and Baker & Taylor.

The O’Reilly offer is to do whatever conversion is necessary to deliver files to a wide range of ebook channels for free and then to make the ebooks available through that retailing network for a charge of 25% of the dollars received. One prospective client told me that O’Reilly is willing to do a one-year contract.

This both an object lesson and a serious shot across the bow of the legacy giants of the print book business.

We’ve made the point here before that big publishers have a competitive advantage built on print-world capabilities, among them being the ability to get fast printings and reprints; the ability to quickly move books in and out of a distribution center; the ability to ship books according to the receiving requirements of many intermediaries, large and small; and a strong sales network with accounts, mostly brick-and-mortar, that sell printed books. All of these things require pretty massive scale. You couldn’t consider doing them well yourself for a $1 million (in sales) company or a $10 million company and it would be challenging to be competitive doing them with a $50 million company.

The scale required to do effective print book distribution affects both the supply and the demand in the distribution business. It means there are a lot of companies too small to do it well for themselves (creating lots of demand) and very few companies with the scale to do it well (creating a limited supply of providers.) Even so, as the need for scale along with declining overall sales have driven the big publishers deeper and deeper into the distribution business (pushing up the supply of distributors), prices for distribution have fallen steadily for at least the past decade.

Of course, anything that requires expertise benefits from some scale to develop it. And that’s what O’Reilly has in digital distribution. Partly because of the nature of the company’s audience, but largely because they have been aggressive and innovative about exploring every conceivable avenue for ebook distribution and developing a tool set that makes it possible for them to try new channels and opportunities quickly, O’Reilly has more scale, and therefore more expertise, than anybody else in consumer ebook distribution (except, arguably, some publishers in the romance space.) It is quite believeable that they can put ebooks into more channels with more efficiency than anybody else. And that’s an expertise that is largely (but not completely) topic-agnostic.

So we have a real Man Bites Dog story here. In the print world, O’Reilly is distributed by Ingram, which has invested heavily in ebook distribution. But not only does Ingram not get to be the distributor of their client’s ebooks, O’Reilly is issuing what amounts to an open invitation for all other publishers, including their fellow distributees at Ingram, to use them for ebook distribution.

(In his wrap-up talk at Tools of Change, Tim O’Reilly referenced a remark John Ingram had made to him at dinner the night before. On reflection, one wonders how the part of the the dinner conversation about ebook distribution went.)

This new challenge is playing itself out all across the distribution landscape. In the past week I have had two conversations with smaller publishers who have distributors on the print side. One is repped by one of the big independent distributors and the other by one of the Big Six. Both are planning their ebook distribution strategies, and neither of them intends to use their print distributor to help in any way.

The one distributed by an indie distributor is seriously tempted by the O’Reilly offer. This well-established company is quite comfortable taking responsibility for its own sales if they don’t need scale to handle it, so they have already pulled Amazon out of their print distribution deal. They planned to do digital on their own. They’ve had a digital workflow for a while, so their current books are in XML documents that make ebook conversion pretty straightforward. (If the offer of totally free content conversion is correct, then O’Reilly may have developed some tools helping them automate the way to from PDF or epub to XML. And they solve the problem of getting from XML to anything else that comes along for all their books.) But this publisher still have an extensive backlist that needs conversion to XML. This company sees a 1-year contract with O’Reilly as a possible way to get the conversion done and to get a line on a large number of points of ebook merchandising that they might otherwise not have known. In any case, the big print book distributor — with all its sunk costs and infrastructure and years of performance and relationship — isn’t even getting consideration.

The other company, distributed by a Big Six publisher, has also decided that digital distribution through its print distributor is a non-starter. They have been looking at the many Digital Asset Distributors to handle their conversion and distribution and have been close to settling on one. This company also has a legacy conversion challenge. Might they now want to put the deal they’re close to on hold and explore O’Reilly?

I would if I were in their shoes.

Cader wrote Wednesday (behind his pay wall) about the smaller trade publishers who have been slow to enter the ebook marketplace. He springboards from the results of a survey Perseus did of its clients and which formed the basis of a presentation they did at Tools of Change. Cader observes that 2/3 of Perseus’s 300 clients don’t use their Constellation service, their digital publishing assistance program (book distributor as DAD), at all. And, of those that do, he says:

Making ebooks available at all though looks to remain the biggest challenge for the survey group. The largest segment, 33 percent, said that fewer than 10 percent of their titles would be available as ebooks in 2010. Another 26 percent said half or fewer would be available, with just 30 percent expecting to have 75 percent to 100 percent of their titles available.

As ebook sales climb to very desireable levels, publishers of all sizes will pursue the revenue opportunities they represent. Trade book distributors have always lived on the reality that they provide the necessary scale to enable publishers to do what they do well that needs no scale: pick, develop, and deliver books people want. What requires a bit more scale but less to the publisher that specializes, and most small publishers do, is marketing. Distributors have never been much help there, frankly.

This perspective of the distributor was made very clear by the best-delivered presentation at Tools of Change, the one from Skip Prichard, the CEO of the Ingram Content Group. Skip was basically saying to the publishers: you do the content, we’ll do the rest. I know that Ingram’s perspective on a problem I’ve written about before — that publishers will have increasing trouble supporting the big infrastructures they have built for print — is that the publishers’ challenge creates opportunity for them.

And on the print side — the diminishing side — that is definitely true. What is not nearly as clear is whether on the ebook side — the growing side — they will face new, smaller competitors who have built a strongly competitive infrastructure without needing to be nearly as big. If that’s also true, then, one suspects, O’Reilly is not the only relative upstart that will be taking real business away from established players in the very near future.

There is actually a nice extension to this post that ties in nicely with my prior one on title P&Ls and the Motoko Rich piece in the Times about ebook pricing, but I’m going to leave that as a teaser for another one I may write someday because I’ve gone on long enough for now.

While I’m in Florida watching baseball games, as I am now and will be for the next few days, take a few minutes to respond the BISG survey supporting the “Points of No Return” Making Information Pay conference we’re organizing for May 6.

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I had a lunch conversation this week with three successful literary agents, who will remain anonymous for this post. They wanted to talk about the panel we’re having at Digital Book World called “The Changing Author-Agent Relationship: How Will It Affect the Business Model?”

That panel was born when I engaged an agent last summer with my observations about digital change and tried to recruit her to join a panel discussion about it. “Suppose you work with an author to develop her manuscript so your creative input becomes part of the work. Then you can’t sell it, or you get only a token offer for it, and the author wants to self-publish. Shouldn’t you, or any agent in that spot, be entitled to something in that case?”

The agent, sensing quickly that I was going to a model of “author pays agent for consulting help” said, “I can’t participate in a conversation like that. We have a canon of ethics in the AAR, and that might well run afoul of it.”

As it turns out, the canon of ethics of the AAR only explicitly prohibits agents from charging “reading fees” to prospective clients. Other charges are explictly permitted, such as for xeroxing and messengers. And others, such as consulting on self-publishing options, aren’t mentioned.

But, still, the question of whether the business model needs to change remains. The kind of book advances that agents have made a living on for years are diminishing in number. And now that self-publishing is legitimately part of the commercial continuum, authors have a right to expect that their career business manager, which an agent is, will employ it, or suggest that they do, when it makes sense. And agents will have a right to expect to be paid for that.

Of course, that’s not what these three successful working agents do. Their business assets are their personal knowledge of and relationships with acquiring editors; their ability to shape a writer’s concept and proposal into a commercial book; their knowledge of the ins and outs of book contracts and publishers’ accounting procedures. Exploring and keeping up with the various print and electronic self-publishing options: starting with Author Solutions and Smashwords, but including many others including our client Bookmasters, lulu.com, and many others, is a fulltime job in itself. (There’s a string started on Brantley’s list today by Joe Esposito who noticed announcements for four new self-publishing startups in his email in the past few days.) And searching out the authors with the money to self-publish, let alone to pay for advice on how to do it effectively, is also not what the successful agent in the current marketplace does.

I had spoken at a Writer’s Digest conference two months ago and told aspiring writers “get an agent” but also, “make sure the agent knows about the self-publishing options.” These very professional and desirable agents did not. But they agreed that when ten or thirty or fifty times a year a project they’d developed goes off for self-publishing, they’ll want to have a way to monetize that. We agreed that the likely solution will be an alliance with somebody who perhaps positioned themselves more as a “consultant” to aspiring authors. There is no shortage of such people.

The conversation turned to contract terms, particularly regarding ebooks. The agents asked me: “don’t the big trade publishers see that the strategy of paying authors half or less of what many ebook publishers will pay on digital book royalties isn’t sustainable? that we’ll end up splitting those deals?” I told them that I had raised this point with Big Six CEOs and they all said, “we won’t buy print-only; never happen.” The big publishers are counting on the authors’ (and agents’) desire for the advance to keep them locked into the current model. (Richard Curtis made this same point in a recent eReads post.) It is clear that the idea of splitting off ebooks from print contracts is one that these agents have been thinking about for a while. The relative attraction of the advance goes down as the level of ebook sales on which you’re taking half or less of what you could get goes up.

We also spent a little time discussing “verticals” and my theory that power is moving from “control of IP to control of eyeballs.” In the past week, I’ve had two conversations with Hay House executives (they’re on the Digital Book World program too) about their business. To somebody with a trade orientation, it’s pretty phenomenal. They run between 30 and 100 live events a year for their community. They have over 1 million email addresses that drive the sales of all their books. One of the agents said he had an author for whom he sold a book to one of the Big Six houses and they sold twelve thousand copies. He sold the next title to Hay House and they sold two hundred thousand. How long will the Big Six houses be able to compete for big-potential books in Hay House’s sweet spot (mind-body-spirit), advances or no advances?

One of the agents at lunch does a lot with juveniles. “Do I have to worry about this ebook thing much?” that agent asked. Soon you will, I said. After lunch I was working with my frequent collaborator Ted Hill on a proposal we’re making for another conference on digital tipping points. One we were talking about is “when does the publishing house have editors shift their focus from developing a print book with an author, with the ebook as afterthought, to developing the best possible digital product, with the print book coming out of it?” That gave me an answer for that agent: you better have somebody on your team now who can see the digital book possibilities in every idea before you peddle it. Now that you’ve made me think about it, I realize that if you’re not fully exploring the creative possibilities for digital products for every kids book you develop, you’re already missing the boat.

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The New York Times had a story on Tuesday morning about an advantage the Ford Motor Company had over its competitors at GM and Chrysler: it is still family-owned. As the Times explained, the family ownership was able to take a longer view than their competitors. In fact, we still don’t know whether the re-tooling the family has ordered up will work in the long run. But we do know that they have had a steadier and more far-sighted management because the family cared about the long-term health of the business, not just the next quarter’s profits.

This recalled to me a conversation that I had with Peter Wiley, currently the Chair of the Board of John Wiley & Sons, over dinner 15 or more years ago. Peter said then that he believed Wall Street undervalued family ownership. As Peter put it, “just about all our competitors are focused on quarter-to-quarter results. Mike, my family has owned this company since 1807. I am not thinking quarter-to-quarter.” Wiley’s financial results (even though they have suffered in this recession along with everybody else) over time have certainly vindicated Peter’s opinion.

Family-controlled businesses have been  been ubiquitous in publishing through my whole career. When I was young, there were Scribners at Scribners, Doubledays at Doubleday, sometimes two Roger Strauses at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. When family-controlled but publicly-traded Barnes & Noble acquired Sterling in 2002, they acquired it from the founding families: the Hobsons and the Boehms.

I have consulted with several family-owned or -controlled businesses. Wiley, Barnes & Noble, and Ingram are distinguished by how well managed and basically competent they are as organizations. They really do the “blocking and tackling” well. A big part of the competitive edge of all three companies is in the quality of their operations.

They make the investments, particularly in infrastructure, that are critical to the business. I once asked Peter Wiley why it was that his company’s travel web sites were so much more commercially successful than those of other publishers with equivalently-strong travel brands. “Constant, controlled experimentation,” he said. “What worked for us was on the third try. We didn’t get it right the first two times.” Family ownership — with belief — can make those kinds of investments and stay with them. And it can support a second and third attempt to make a good strategy that is tricky to execute succeed.

John Ingram, the member of the owning Ingram family who runs the book industry-related businesses, got a clear vision of the potential in print-on-demand a little over a decade ago. Very few other owners, and almost certainly no publicly-traded owner, would have made a bet of the scale, in relation to the size of the company, that he did with Lightning Print. But John could see that POD would become extremely important and that Ingram, because of its position in the supply chain, was in a great position to apply the technology. And although it took a few years for him to be proven right, the family had the commitment to see it through and, as a result, Lightning occupies an increasingly central place in the US supply chain and is the linchpin of Ingram’s plans for future growth as the traditional book wholesaling business contracts.

What most distinguishes the successful and still-profitable Barnes & Noble from its once equal and now reeling competitor, Borders, is the quality of B&N’s supply chain. That required investments in warehouses and systems that Borders, long ago sold by its founding family, didn’t have the long-view management to make.

Now I’m working with another family business called BookMasters, in Ashland, Ohio. BookMasters started out as a printer in the 1960s. Their operations have grown in both directions along the value chain from printing. They have a business, BookMasters Digital, that provides an XML workflow from concept to the press. And they have another division, BookMasters Distribution, that takes the output from the presses and provides warehousing, sales, fulfillment, and collection. The Wurster family that owns BookMasters has many business characteristics in common with the Wileys, Riggios, and Ingrams. They have a high degree of loyalty with many long-standing employees. They have a persistent commitment to operational excellence. And they have a high degree of strategic consistency: they are willing to build things over a long period of time.

John Ingram saw over a decade ago that the book wholesaling business Ingram was in was living on borrowed time. He saw Lightning as a bridge to the future. Dave Wurster knows that printing is not a growth industry and he’s building his bridge to sustainability with service offerings that expand his importance to his customer base. Over time, both of these family owners can see the possibility of a totally transformed businesses. Their focus primarily is on how to make sure their business survives a long time, not on immediate profit. In a time of great change, I believe it’s a competitive edge.

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Dinner Saturday night. 12 of us. Three spouses who had no particular interest in the BEA. Eight of us with one interest or another in the book business, but no possibility of personally being an exhibitor. And one publishing company CEO with a stand.

Of course, I got my money’s worth. I got in free as a speaker and live in Manhattan. I had several meetings with publishers and distributors on stands they were paying for that could result in assignments. I had other meetings with a bookstore chain and some technologists that came because of the publishers too that also could result in work.

An ROI of pretty much infinity. We all felt that way. Except for the exhibitor.

“No way it is worth it,” he reported. He even had to plan on having four people at the show on Sunday, just to cover the booth when he knew in advance there’d be hardly any productive business conversation. (BEA is fixing this next year by shifting to a mid-week schedule.)

I am always skeptical of any individual’s ability to characterize a show like this based on their own experience. After all, there were considerably more than 20,000 people there. There were dozens of panels going on that had great impact that I didn’t even know were happening, because I was engaged doing something on the floor. But, speaking for me, it was a great show. Lots of fun and lots of business.

Martin Levin, whose first ABA was in 1950 and who commented on my previous BEA post, argued with me about my prediction that BEA would soon come to an end. I had to remind him not to confuse what I say I think will happen from what I would hope would happen. It is work to keep those things separate.

Martin said, “being fat is no reason to commit suicide. This show is fat. It needs to go on a diet!” Another trade show veteran from one of the supporting technology companies said very much the same thing.

But wait, there’s another point of view. Make it bigger! Richard Nash and Michael Cairns (two smart guys I agree with a lot, but not this time) both suggest “open the show up to the public.” Frankfurt does! Book festivals in Los Angeles and Miami attract huge crowds! 

Sorry, public participation is not the “solution” for this show. What ails this industry is horizontality! What ails this industry is dedication to the book as a form! Publishers need to understand niches better; they don’t need to try to replicate the horizontal world that is disappearing in newspapers and bookstores through trade shows!

What made BEA such a fabulous experience for those of us for whom it was that was the aggregating of all of the industry players from around the world. And not just publishers! What do Bowker, Bookmasters, and Klopotek (just to name three exhibitors who were important to me at this past weekend’s show) have to gain by having the public come in? The smartest publishers who are beginning to understand verticality — like Wiley or F+W or  Taunton — need to meet the public in verticals. They don’t need to spend a beautiful Sunday fending off people looking for a free novel or a free children’s book. (And, of course, the German model isn’t “free books for the public”. Exhibitors sell the books to the public off the stands! I wonder what the sales tax authorities in New York would say to that…)

I’d love it if Reed would keep BEA going for years and years, particularly when they bring the mountain to me on my very own home island. But I’m still having trouble seeing why publishers will keep paying and, if they don’t, no more show. I’m afraid that what will work for publishers is smaller and more focused, not larger and more horizontal. That may very well not work for Reed. I expect very shortly it won’t work for Reed. I think the rights-trading piece can be revived in a much cheaper form. The retailer-facing piece — horizontally — is a dinosaur. And all the PR opportunities occur because of the size and glitz. Like most horizontal PR opportunities for books, that won’t get replaced either.

My message of verticality is clearly not getting through! The Washington Post was kind enough to feature me on the front page of today’s Style section with a lengthy and, as far as it went, accurate summary of my Shift speech from last Thursday. But, you know what? Not one mention of the central theme: verticality!

These are twilight times for the good old days.

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