Carolyn Pittis

I showed up Tuesday morning at the gorgeous Cipriani restaurant and ballroom on 42nd Street for The Future of Publishing Summit, not knowing what to expect. I had been invited to attend this in an email last month which promised an interesting program (lots of big tech companies plus a book publishing “track” led by the always-interesting Carolyn Pittis of HarperCollins) at an all-day conference. I was invited because of my status as a “thought leader”; an all-day event like this with no fee is not unheard of, but it also isn’t common. I accepted.

Then when I heard from my friend Evan Schnittman of OUP over the weekend that he’d be going, I decided I should look at “what is this” more carefully. So I went to the web site for it and I found it almost impossible to figure out who was staging this thing and what they hoped to get out of it. My prior experience with free events — many I helped organize that were run by VISTA Computer Services (now renamed Publishing Technology) in the 1990s and several since hosted by MarkLogic — tended to have the organizer highly branded and visible. This one was opaque. “About us” on the “The Future of Publishing” web site described the conference, the agenda, and the goal of “setting the agenda for publishing’s new business model amid digital disruption”, and it led to a link listing the sponsoring companies. But nowhere did it say, “I’m the organizer of this event and this is why I want you there.”

When I got to Cipriani in the morning, I started to see some people I knew: Evan, David Young and Maja Thomas from Hachette, Peter Balis from Wiley, Dominique Raccah from Sourcebooks. “What is this about?”, I asked them. “Who is behind this?” Nobody really seemed to know.

As the day developed, it seemed that the two parties in charge were Tim Bajarin, President of Creative Strategies and Colin Crawford, former EVP Digital at IDG Communications, Inc. Bajarin kicked off the session recalling a critical meeting at UCLA in 1990 that really charted the course for CD-Rom development.

Uh oh, I thought. I wonder if these guys know what “CD-Rom” calls up in the mind of anybody in the room who was in trade publishing the 1990s.

What I had walked into took me back to the early 1990s when I went to a conference sponsored very openly sponsored by Microsoft for book publishers. The message then was, “here are the amazing things we are going to be able to do with CD-Roms in the very near future. To realize the true value of this technology, we need content. We’re not sure exactly how you make money from the content, but, hey, guys, get creative.” And, in fact, that was the message that the five key sponsors of this Summit — Sony, Adobe, Marvell, Qualcomm, and HP — had for their publishing audience.

This was the takeaway. Consumers are going to be navigating their content on faster, smarter, lighter, and cheaper devices that will open up more flexible and robust content delivery and consumption models. Publishers should take advantage of this! But “taking advantage” in this case often meant “more sound, more pictures, more video”. And that recalls the veritable disaster of CD-Rom development for book publishers: largely uncontrolled spending in development of new kinds of products, ostensibly but loosely rooted in books, that had no established market and never found one. The iPad had already unleashed several sparks of enthusiasm for enhanced ebooks; this conference wanted to pour fuel on those sparks and start a real fire burning.

The format of the day was that each of the primary sponsors got a half-hour to present their technology, following 30 minutes from Tom Turvey of Google on the forthcoming Google Editions. (Turvey joked about the fact that he had given the presentation to just about everybody in the room before in their office or his.) I’d say that most of the 30 minute presentations packed at least 5 minutes of useful information into them. There were definitely people buzzing about the fact that Adobe has a workaround to enable Flash-like content on the iPhone, which doesn’t support Flash. We all got the message that connectivity will be more robust and more routine; that both LCD color and e-ink (and before long, color e-ink) will be available in a staggering number of devices (or “form factors.”)

With all that capability in your hand, you can pull up just about any content you want. “Why would you read a plain old book” was certainly part of the message.

Then after a really terrific lunch, about half to two-thirds of the audience (I’d reckon; couldn’t really see because we were broken into three groups in different rooms for books, magazines, and newspapers and no more than a fourth of the audience was there for the final part of the program after the breakouts) remained to hear the content-based presentations. The intention here was “the tech guys will explain what’s coming in the morning; the publishing guys will explain where they are in the early afternoon; and then our experts will ‘pull it all together’ at the end of the day, allowing us to leave with a new plan for publishing.” The “experts”were additional sponsors, of course, and creators of tools or platforms for products or presentation: Zinio, Notion Ink, ScrollMotion, Vook, and Skiff. These are all very worthy companies with substantial propositions that have made real inroads working with established media.

But are they qualified to chart a commercial course forward for complex publishing enterprises? Frankly, I don’t think so.

Cader said privately on Monday that he had joined Conferences Anonymous. He wasn’t going. Admittedly, these guys had a rough row to hoe trying to tell people something new following on the heels of Digital Book World in January, Tools of Change in February, Pub Business Conference and Expo earlier in March, and an ABA meeting on digital change in between. People who are really junkies for this stuff were out at SXSW, which apparently also didn’t seem as revelatory to some savvy book practioners as it did last year (or so said my buddy from the Microsoft conference two decades ago, Lorraine Shanley.)

My sense of this one was “nice try”, but it didn’t work. The superficial logic of putting the tech and publishing people together, laying out the picture from each side and then coming up with “answers” within a single stimulating day is appealing, but it is ultimately impractical. Book publishers (and, I suspect, other publishers as well) aren’t going to do much today based on what they see tech might deliver two or four years from now. And book publishing isn’t one business anyhow. As Turvey of Google, who understands the publishing business better than any other tech company representative I know and, frankly, better than most publishers, spelled out in the beginning: “book publishing is about five different businesses that don’t have much to do with each other.” We in publishing know that very well. Tech companies that want to get our attention need to make clear that they know that too.

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Because of a couple of panels I spoke on last spring and because of the development of FiledBy, I have had more and more conversations lately with agents. They are part of the General Trade Publishing ecosystem. So their lives are getting more difficult and more complicated, like everybody else’s in Book Valley.

The agents’ concern is frequently expressed as “what do I tell my authors?”  Publishers are increasingly insistent that a prospective author have an internet platform to build on before they sign a book. Editors always wanted credentials to back up a writer’s authority on any subject; now they’d like to see that the writer has a following on that subject as well.

But agents are also concerned about themselves. The two most innovative imprint initiatives in recent memory — Bob Miller’s HarperStudio inside HarperCollins and Roger Cooper’s Vanguard inside Perseus — are built on the idea of reducing risk, paying the author a lower advance. Yes, they also promise a higher reward (higher royalty), but experienced agents know most books don’t earn anything beyond the advance.

Miller and Cooper are smart guys and it could well be that their imprints will have a higher percentage of earnouts than most. But, as smart guys, they wouldn’t be willing to pay more on the high side if they didn’t believe they were saving at least that much on the risk side.

The advance pool is probably shrinking. John Sargent, Macmillan’s CEO, said as much at a gathering of agents a couple of months ago when he explained that the de-leveraging that is taking place throughout the economy is also taking place in publishing. Big houses just won’t have the cash available to them that they used to, and that means less money for advances, less money for printing, and less money for promoting.

But in addition to shrinking, publishing advances are taking on much more of a power law configuration, with concentration at the top and a long tail of books getting less and less (and extended by mushrooming self-publishing where the “advance” is actually negative; it’s a cost!)

This is already having an effect. I have heard from people who know that larger agencies are now shopping among the smaller ones to buy them out. It takes more agents working to pay the same rent than it used to. And the smaller agents are finding it harder and harder to make a living so they’re ready to sell out a bit of their upside to get some stability. The small number of agents that have clients at the power end of a power law distribution are doing great; those who have traditionally made a living on making lots of second level deals are really suffering.

Compounding the problem for agents is the changing nature of publishing opportunity. While the sales and royalty potential of the book through the publisher is declining, other opportunities are opening up. There is a multiplicity of ebook channels that in the aggregate do not replace the revenue that print used to provide and doesn’t anymore. Chunks of books and material too short to be published as a book can be sold through them. Agents have for years been trying to split off audio rights to sell to Audible or Brilliance or Tantor Media. The opportunity to sell content to web sites seems to be emerging. But all of these deals require conceiving, pitching, closing, negotiating, and contract reviewing. For fifteen percent of what?

And further comlicating things is the ubiquitous self-publishing option. As self-publishing becomes part of the strategic approach to getting a “real” publisher (and it is), it adds a further complication to the business relationship between agent and writer. Is it fair for an agent to work with a writer on developing a proposal or a manuscript and then, when it fails to sell to a publisher, see that writer self-publish what amounts to a collaborative effort without owing anything to the agent? I think most agents would say, “NO!”

An agent for a book writer carries the same title as the agent for an actor or the agent for a performing musician but that’s a bit misleading. A book writer’s agent is really a business partner, more like the managerof an actor or musician. I see the writer and agent as two halves of a business: the writer creates the product and the agent handles the B2B relationships necessary to turn it into money.

When the book agent’s job, most of the time, was to find the biggest possible up-front payment for an author’s work, a straight commission deal made complete sense. With writer-pays options becoming not only more common and accessible, but more sensible as a commercial choice and, indeed, becoming part of the step-ladder to commercial success, it increasingly will not.

At a conference on “Giving It Away” in Toronto at which I spoke two weeks ago, Carolyn Pittis of HarperCollins was explicit that the publisher buying content and making money by selling it was “one model”, and she pointed out that there is a “fee for services” model as well. The inference I drew was “that’s not what we’re doing today, but every option is on the table for tomorrow.” Why not? Don’t we have to believe that one of the exit strategies for the investors in Author Solutions, the biggest rollup of self-publishing service companies, might be to sell to one of the Big Six who, despairing of the future of their publishing model, tries to buy their way into a new one?

I am old enough to remember that agent’s fees, now standard at 15% of revenue, once were 10% (like the agents in other businesses I referred to at the top.) When that change happened — was Scott Meredith the first? — many of the 10 percenters sneered at the change as exploitation. But eventually they all went that way. About 10 years ago, agent Richard Curtis started EReads, an ebook publishing company which gave his authors, and others, another choice besides throwing the ebook rights in for print publishers who, at that time, seldom exploited them. Curtis was also excoriated in some circles for generating a conflict of interest, which, indeed, it would have been if he steered his authors away from better ebook options with their publishers. (He doesn’t do that.) It would be like a doctor owning a medical testing business, for crying out loud! (And they do do that…)

A friend of mine in the financial business wrote a book 20 years ago and wanted to get an agent to sell it. He knew the advance would be low, but he also knew the book would add credibility to his business. He wanted it sold. An agent told him that the agency only handled books on which they thought the advance would be $25,000 or more, yielding a commission of $3,750 at the normal 15%. This friend told the agent, take the first $3,750. The agent took the book, sold it for $6,000, and everybody was happy. This kind of arrangement, as well as others where the agent actually charges a fee for helping an author manage self-publishing options, are going to have to become more common in the future. Let’s not be too judgmental about the pioneering agents who change the paradigm.

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I had the good fortune to spend a couple of days last week in Toronto to speak at a conference on “Giving it Away”, how the culture of “free” is affecting the book business. My workshop sessions were called “Giving It Away with a Purpose”, by which I meant using content as “bait” to build community.

Since this was a workshop, most of the 90 minutes in each session was spent hearing from my audience about their publishing and marketing challenges and trying to help them see how the concepts of vertical and community applied to their particular examples. One of the many pieces of wisdom I’ve picked up from Mark Bide over the years is that we often “learn what we think by saying it”; questions from the audience force me to articulate things that might have been lurking in the back of my mind but had been left unsaid, even internally.

And what I learned that I already knew from these exchanges has to do with “critical mass” and its role in the shift from horizontal to vertical.

I read a piece about a month ago (who knows where, but I think I was originally steered to it by the ReadWriteWeb daily email) about the “X of Y found this review helpful” found on Amazon. What the article explained is why you don’t, and won’t see this employed effectively on any other bookseller’s site. Of all the people who buy books on Amazon, only a small percentage of them write reviews. (Many books don’t have reviews on Amazon; you are often invited to be the “first” to review a book.) Then of all the people who read the reviews, only a small percentage of those will comment as to whether the review was helpful. And a small percentage of a small percentage is an tiny, tiny percentage.

So only when you start out with the number of book customers Amazon has, which is a multiple of BN.com’s customer base (which is, presumably, in second place), can you get enough reviews and enough ratings of the value of the reviews to get a meaningful “Y” for “X of Y found this useful.”

And that was not what we talked about in Toronto.

In the course of my presentation, I talked about FiledBy.com, the new venture offering authors free web sites of which I am a co-founder. Carolyn Pittis of HarperCollins, a very acute thinker about digital strategy, pointed out from the audience that FiledBy is totally horizontal: it’s about book authors of all kinds. She wondered if my own new venture might contradict my own theory about verticals.

Temporarily, it might, although the initial “vertical” of FiledBy is book creators (there are sites there not just for authors, but also for illustrators, editors, and others who are credited with creative contributions to books that have ISBNs.) But the creators of FiledBy are very aware that as the number of authors registered with us grows, we will be able to put authors together by interest, creating sub-communities of mystery authors or history authors or knitting authors. And we intend to do that.

Earlier in the presentation, I had expressed the thought that Facebook and Twitter are like AOL for Internet 2.0. AOL (and Compuserve and Prodigy) made the online world, and then the internet, easy for everybody to use. As the internet itself got easier to use, the on-ramp wasn’t necessary anymore and, in fact, the parts of AOL that are healthy today are the verticals they created in the early part of the 21st century when they (belatedly) saw this coming. Soon we will see social networking and short messaging tools everywhere and we will be more likely to employ them in verticals, among people of similar interests, than in the world at large, which is what the horizontal communities are.

Communities require critical mass. It’s great be able throw out a question for the community to answer, but if nobody’s there, it is ineffective. If only 20 editors and 10 agents were on PublishersMarketplace, the deal database wouldn’t be worth much.  By the same token, growth in a community enables niching to get more and more narrow and deep.

Soon, publishers are going to see that they that they require critical mass by vertical in order to do cost-effective marketing. That is going to lead to a reshuffling of publishing portfolios, which will be the topic of a subsequent post.

Another big piece of ebook news landed this morning. ScrollMotion has announced that one million titles are on their way to them from LibreDigital! One always presumes that publishers want every title they have on every possible platform so that similar announcements will come from other ebook players soon, but this is another huge stride forward for the ebook business. And for ScrollMotion.

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