Kindle

From the beginning of Digital Change Thinking Time, which for me goes back to the mid-1990s, “subscription” has been high on the list of future expectations. That’s natural. The subscription model has emerged as the dominant one for cable TV (although there is still some pay-per-use) and Netflix works that way as well. Lots of people subscribe to satellite radio. Rhapsody is a successful subscription service for music. Pandora for music has a free model and a paid model, as does Spotify.

Subscriptions actually have a history in trade publishing too, where they were called “book clubs”. The print book club model, which also depended heavily on the club’s role in curation (or title selection), was doomed by the arrival of online bookselling. But O’Reilly has demonstrated the common sense (and worked out the mechanics) of a subscription model for ebooks with their wildly successful Safari program for the past several years.

In the past week, Publishing Perspectives offered up a thoughtful piece by Javier Celaya speculating on a free subscription, ad-supported model for ebooks like Spotify is for the music business. PP’s editor, Ed Nawotka extended the speculation to a model of piecework sales: buying a book in chunks or chapters.

Neither of those is what I have in mind. This piece by John Konczal, building on what’s being done in the textbook business, comes closer.

We’ve reached the point where Amazon with their Kindle and B&N with their Nook are perfectly positioned to make a subscription offer. Publishers will have mixed feelings about it and the agents for the top-selling authors have good reasons to be against it, but the proposition seems (to me) to be one that will be compelling to many consumers and will offer tremendous advantages to the retailer that offers it. In fact, I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t happened already.

Here’s how I imagine it working.

The retailer creates a pool of content that will be offered through the subscription service. The proposition to the consumer will be that for a price (let’s say: $50 a month), they can read all they want from the content pool. In turn, the retailer divides 70% of that money (or 75% or 80%) among the publishers in proportion to how many “pages” (a somewhat arbitrary but internally consistent measure) of their material have been read. Of course, all available public domain content will be in the pool.

I am guessing that a very high proportion of the owners of self-published and small press books will find the proposition attractive from the beginning. How the big publishers would react is less certain. My belief is that the smart ones will try it: put in some titles, perhaps from their deep backlist, to get some visibility as to how the program would work.

Meanwhile, the consumers who do this will determine the course of events from there. It seems possible that the impact of this offer will be similar to the impact of the e-ink readers: the heaviest book consumers will see the greatest financial merit in the proposition. And just like customers for Amazon Prime (one annual fee for shipping) and Kindle or Nook owners are highly resistant to buying outside those programs, customers for this subscription service would largely be lost to other book consumption. It will take a more powerful desire to read any one particular book to make it a purchase outside the subscription than it takes to buy it now.

So that, in turn, will drive more books into the program. Authors, and therefore their agents, won’t want to be left out. The early entrants to the program will reap a relative bonanza because they’re on a shelf with less competition which will drive further expansion of the title base.

The tricky part here is setting the right price. As I was thinking about this piece, a reader pointed out a conversation on the Internet about this subject from a different perspective. Here the question was: “what would you pay to read any book anytime you want?” The bidding seemed to begin at about $100 a month. That strikes me as high, particularly since the pool of titles would certainly lack most high-profile books, at least in the beginning.

But a retailer setting the price too low could cost itself a lot of money. Lots of heavy readers spend more than $40 or $50 a month buying books now and, of course, they’d be the first ones to enter such a program (to save money). The benefit for the retailer would be that those customers would be “locked in” to the service, not buying anything elsewhere.

Of course, this idea runs totally afoul of agency pricing. The publishers who are using agency will have the hardest time even experimenting with such a subscription program. On the other hand, if the subscriber base becomes large enough, it will force some reconsideration.

There are all sorts of wrinkles one can imagine beyond this initial idea. There could be a “premium” subscription that had the higher-profile books, creating a more robust revenue pool for them. There could be “vertical” subscriptions for genres or topics. There could be a special discount for subscribers to purchase books not in the pool (except for agency books, of course, whose terms would not allow it.) And a company like Harlequin or a sci-fi imprint of a major house could create their own in-house pool that might attract subscribers. (In fact, the innovative small sci-fi publisher, Baen Books, already has a subscription service!)

But with ebook consumption now climbing rapidly toward half or more of the sales for many titles, it seems inevitable that models that won’t require a transaction for each and every book must emerge. I’d be a bit amazed if conversations about an idea like this, or something like it, aren’t taking place inside the biggest ebook retail shops already.

We created a “thinking about the future” panel for both of our upcoming Publishers Launch shows. They will entertain the subscription question, among other issues, with an eye to the special complexities of international implementation. At our eBooks Go Global show aimed at international visitors and their trading partners at BEA, the panel will feature Tracey Armstrong, the CEO of Copyright Clearance Center; publishers Ricky Cavallero of Mondadori and Cyrus Kharadi of Random House; and agent Simon Lipskar of Writers House. This panel of four incredibly sharp and thoughtful people, moderated by Ed Nawotka, the editor of Publishing Perspectives, represents a real diversity of viewpoints and will explore the practical barriers to this and other innovations across international markets.

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This is an unusually brief post today, but some worthy observations don’t require long explanations.

I wrote nearly 18 months ago about my concern that publishers’ interest in enhanced ebooks would bring on a repeat of the commercially disastrous CD-Rom era of the mid-1990s. Of course, since the CD-Rom era, a lot has changed.

* The opportunities in linking and multiple media have been explored every conceivable way through the web.

* The number of devices on which people can readily consume enhanced content has exploded.

* A number of tools have been announced that can enable one person working alone, even without much technical expertise, to put an enhanced product together, if they have the digital assets and the rights to use them.

The tools are really in the news lately. Vook, the start-up that has been pioneering video integration into ebooks, has a tool kit being trialed called Mother Vook. Packager Charlie Melcher has a new initiative called Push Pop which promises transmedia authoring tools for Apple’s iOS. And I see on the web a new company called Yapper, for “your app maker”, that looks like Smashwords on steroids.

There are also tool sets operating at a more sophisticated level, but still making development more efficient. Touch Press has just applied its capabilities — which, among other things, enable them to make objects “spin” to be viewed from all sides — to a third iPad app called “Gems and Jewels”. (They had previously done “The Elements” and “The Solar System”.) We’re working with a developer in New York on some sports encyclopedia apps that make use of their proprietary system development to convert large databases to app presentations very efficiently.

A question that will probably rise in importance is whether the system that enables you to make an app for the iOS operating system will also get you to epub or HTML5. That’s one the “do-it-yourself” system developers will also have to answer.

(It might be worth observing parenthetically — which is why I’m doing it that way — that we see Apple developing the huge monopoly position on apps that Amazon has selling independently-published ebooks through the Kindle platform. While it almost always makes sense to distribute content as broadly as you can to amortize the investment in intellectual creativity, Kindle gets you so much of the ebook market and Apple so much of the app market that the effort-reward ratio to doing the rest can only make sense if there’s very little effort required.

(A companion parenthetical observation is that iPad apps with no iPhone-size counterpart are another sign that the creation tools aren’t powerful enough. I know you can’t recreate “The Elements” as it is done for the iPad on an iPhone screen, but you certainly have, within what was done, the makings of a terrific alternative fitted to the form.)

I don’t know how good the enhanced ebook and app creation tools are…yet. (Other people will judge that and tell me.) There have been announcements like what we’re hearing from Vook and Push Pop before that didn’t deliver or haven’t yet, going back to the beginning of ebook time in the early 1990s. There was fairly recent buzz that disappeared about Zinio Fusion. There was a Google App Inventor for Android ballyhooed last year, but that hasn’t been heard from lately. In fact, robust tools were part of the early promise of Blio, which got us very excited 18 months ago, but they have failed to gain traction along with the rest of the Blio platform. The “so easy anybody can do it” promise hasn’t been really fulfilled yet.

But I know the tools will get great eventually. And that might be soon.

When they do it will mean that anybody can make a media- and link-rich ebook; just add intellect.

That’s a trend I’m not sure works in favor of big publishers who are looking for opportunities to apply scale. These tools, if they work, undermine scale by reducing the need for tech wizardry in product creation. Of course, editorial wizardry is still required.

There’s one more trend I expect to see over the next couple of years: a marked increase in the number of ebooks created from what was originally illustrated book content. Some of those books integrated visual images for practical purposes, to illustrate how to tie a tie or cut a piece of wood, or as the images do in the print version of “The Elements”. For some books, “coffee table books”, the illustrations are the featured content.

In either case, the ebooks of 2007-2011 weren’t really suitable for them; in the next couple of years, publishers will be learning how to make appealing digital products with intellectual property like that.

This will be a process of trial, feedback, and improvement on an industry-wide level as we all learn what people actually like, do, and value. But there will be skill development on a highly individualized basis as people develop and express their editorial “touch” for integrating the elements, managing them through Mother Vook, Push Pop, Yapper, Blio, or one of the next dozen competitors that arise.

Will small entrepreneurial publishers develop and relate to these resources best, or big ones? In the next couple of years, I think we’ll find out.

We have one segment of our “eBooks Go Global” show at BEA that will explore the strategy and approach to investing in enhancement, another that looks at what skill sets publishers need to find or get, and yet another featuring publishers managing their digital publishing without much in the way of internal tech resources. And we’ve just added a short demo from Charlie Melcher to show us the tools he’s about to deliver. Here’s the registration link.

On this Thursday, May 5, we’ll be taking part in BISG’s annual Making Information Pay conference. We worked closely with BISG’s Scott Lubeck in putting together this year’s show, which is called “Constructing the 21st Century Publishing Enterprise.” There will be a keynote by Hachette COO Ken Michaels and important presentations on discovery within the context of the semantic web. We’re delivering a presentation jointly with Heather Reid of CCC and David Marlin of Metacomet about what we’ve learned from talking to publishers and service providers about rights databases. Rights databases, like the other topics at MIP and like the topics discussed in the body of this post, will be moving from a peripheral position to center stage in the very near future.

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The Wall Street Journal wrote last week about what we have been concerned about for some time: how hard it will be for publishers to sustain book prices as supply (of books) rises faster than demand because of all the self-publishing being done.

WSJ built their story around John Locke, whose thrillers are 99 cents and who earned well over $100,000 in March selling them on Kindle. Locke himself put the pricing in perspective. If his books are 99 cents and most ebooks from big publishers are $9.99 and up, he doesn’t have to prove he’s as good as they are; they have to prove they’re 10 times better than he is!

I can tell you this. I’ve read one of John Locke’s books. Nobody I can think of is ten times better than he is. By his own criterion, he could readily sell for $2.99 (and be earning a higher percentage royalty) because nobody is three times better than he is, either.

Meanwhile, on a much less signficant level commercially, the ebook of The Shatzkin Files is now out from Kobo for $3.99. How did the price get set? Kobo said, “let’s put it there.” Their first thought was that it should be $4.99 but then they suggested scaling it back because, after all, the entire body of content in the ebook is on this blog, which is available free. (This establishes that anybody who buys the book is paying for the convenience afforded by the container, not for the content itself.)

I don’t know what the dilutive impact on “real” ebook sales is of The Shatzkin Files, but it is, like John Locke’s material, additional competition for books that are issued by legitimate publishing houses. It is more supply competing for the same demand.

Trying to understand the actual impact of price is very difficult. Amazon tells us that books on which they control the prices are seeing share growth over books on which the publishers control the price. That is shorthand for “99 cent and $2.99 books by self-published authors are growing share over $9.99 to $14.99 books published by the big agency publishers.” That would tend (and is certainly meant) to suggest that pricing high (and ignorantly) is hurting the big publishers’ and big authors’ revenues, but we can’t actually draw that conclusion from the data.

Locke makes the point that the $9.99 book needs to be “10 times better” than his to be an equivalent value, but I’d make the point that they need sell only 1/10 as many copies to deliver the same amount of revenue. Penguin is still selling Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants” for $19.99. Would it sell twenty times as many copies if they priced it at 99 cents? And, if it did, would it do so by stealing sales from the hardcover, which, with a list price of $36, is yielding a margin in the ballpark with that nearly-$20 ebook.

I don’t know if $19.99 is the right price for “Fall of Giants”, but I’m pretty sure 99 cents wouldn’t be.

In other words, the big publishers are not crazy to resist following ebook prices to where the new self-publishers would lead them. To be fair, one should not suggest that Amazon would set their prices at that level, even if they had freedom from agency constraints. For one thing, unless pricing schemes changed completely, Amazon would have “bought” an ebook (wholesale) at a price that would limit their willingness to mark it down. They did scare publishers by taking losses on some ebooks, selling for $9.99 what they bought for $12 or $15. But they never sold those books for 99 cents!

In fact, it would appear that Amazon does not have control of Locke’s book pricing, because the Journal article makes it clear that he will stick with 99 cents even if he can make more money at $2.99. (Amazon pays a 35% royalty for books under $2.99 and 70% royalty for books between $2.99 and $9.99, so Locke would get $2.10 a copy at $2.99 and he gets about 35 cents pricing at 99 cents.) Presumably, Amazon would have priced him where he (and they) get the most revenue, not where they get the most unit sales, which we would assume would rise with every drop in price down to free.

But the fact that publishers aren’t necessarily wrong to try to maintain prices at near $10 and up doesn’t obviate two very cogent truths here that it would be a mistake to ignore.

One is that the downward pressure on price is inexorable, because the number of entreprenurial authors like John Locke will grow and they will be discovered and “branded” so that many readers will find them as substitutes for the more expensive big house authors. And because the number of offerings that come like The Shatzkin Files ebook did — from people who weren’t writing for the profit from the content, but who built an audience and had a book issued anyway — will continue to add supply to meet what is relatively static demand.

And the second — made before here and not long ago — is that publishers don’t know nearly as much as they could and should about how price affects unit sales and total revenues.

Sooner or later, a big publisher or two will start seriously experimenting with this. They will gain knowledge that will enable them to tell an author or agent, “we know things about pricing that are worth real revenue to you if you publish with us.” When that happens, it will likely be more significant to an author than an increase in the ebook royalty rate would be. Maybe a publisher can even add enough value with pricing savvy to pay for their cut!

So far, only one author we know of has turned down a significant advance from a major house to self-publish. That’s Barry Eisler, and we wrote about him when he made the decision to give up a half-million bucks to self-publish. We’ve just booked Barry to speak at our first Publishers Launch Conference at BEA on May 25. I’ll be interviewing Barry and focusing on questions of interest to our target audience of international visitors to BEA and their trading partners. We’ll be very interested in how much he anticipates in the way of foreign sales and how he’ll handle translation rights, but we’ll also be looking for Barry’s thoughts about how he’ll set prices for his books when the power is entirely in his hands.

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The fact that Publishers Launch Conferences will stage half-a-dozen or more events before our next big multi-day Digital Book World blowout next January doesn’t change the DBW calendar. Now is the time of year when we have to start thinking about what the big issues will be at the turn of the year so we can start planning the program. As we did last year, we’ll be calling a meeting of our Conference Council (the 2012 group is currently in formation) at the end of June to brainstorm the topics and our approach to covering them.

It’s my job to anticipate now where we’ll be in nine months. What aspects of digital change will be most important to us when we convene again at the New York Sheraton and have a couple dozen sessions to explore the issues? This post exposes the current state of my thinking on the subject; I am shamelessly using the opportunity to engage the very smart audience gathered here to help me refine these thoughts and point out what I may have missed. I count 15 discrete subjects here (some of which can certainly be combined) which have made my list so far. (I’ve italicized them so you can count along with me; they don’t all get their own paragraph.)

The biggest subject of all, of course, is “global.” The reality that every publisher anywhere is now able to reach any reader everywhere with no local presence, no inventory barriers, and many of the same intermediaries that deliver content to local customers is an industry-changer that will take a long time to deliver its full effects. Territorial rights allocation is only one of the many long-time conventions of publishing that will be challenged by the reality of global. It looks like the biggest publishers — those with local organizations in many countries — have the biggest challenge to adjust to the new global reality. We see this now as we’re putting together panels for our BEA and London events on the first biggest opportunity of global: the new ease of selling books in any language and of any origin to the biggest ebook market developed so far: ours in the United States.

Perhaps the second biggest subject is one we’ve discussed in this space for a long time: “vertical.” Even the most avowedly “general” of the big “general trade” houses are beginning to recognize the urgency of direct contact with individual customers. Once that becomes an objective, it quickly becomes apparent that audiences cluster around subjects or genres: verticals. We anticipate some dramatic reorganizing of the imprint, publishing, and marketing structures of the major houses as they develop their audience-centricity. There might even be enough development along those lines to warrant conversation about it at DBW 2012.

Two more categories of change will be in the “sales models” and “product models” publishers will employ, neither of which have had anything but the most minor adjustments since the mass-market paperback became a force just after World War II. We’d expect somebody big to try a subscription model, a la O’Reilly’s Safari or what we get with cable TV, for the consumer market sometime soon, maybe before next January. (In fact, a James Patterson Book Club, which is a sort-of new subscription model, was announced just today!) And the new Amazon Singles program for shorter-than-book-length content is accelerating the awareness of publishers and authors that the length requirements for printed books do not extend to digital ones.

All of this will lead inexorably to more “ebook first” imprints, divisions, and initiatives. I’d guess that by January, several (if not all) of the major houses will have “programs” offering content for sale which is too brief to be delivered as a bound book. We first reported on a program of this kind from Harlequin at BISG’s Making Information Pay conference several years ago. It was an outlier then. It’s more of a pioneer now. This week we heard that Hachette has a short fiction program in its Orbit imprint. Last week in London we talked with friends at Pan Macmillan about a short ebook program they created at the end of last year to capitalize on the many Kindles and iPads that were delivered as presents for Christmas. (Of course, we’re putting that on the program for our London conference; the coordination challenges within an established operation to pull off something like this are not trivial.)

Part and parcel of verticality is direct audience contact and retention. When we wrote a couple of posts last summer about direct marketing techniques publishers had to make part of their standard operations, we were a bit early to get the true trade publishers’ attention. By next January, every publisher’s consumer emailing list will be a component of its marketing effort. A part of this work, of course, is effective use of social media, a subject publishers keep learning more about and which we’ll certainly try to cover — in our way, which is looking for scale and replicability — in January.

Metadata is a subject that just doesn’t go away. It is disappointing to hear from industry bodies and retailers that many publishers haven’t gotten the core metadata totally under control yet. We covered the basics at Digital Book World 2011; in 2012 I hope we’ll be talking about things like rationalizing the BIC (British) and BISG (US) subject codes, which have developed separately to address each market’s idiosyncrasies but which need to be harmonized to enable the full potential of globalization.

Over the next two years, I’m expecting the most disruptive change to take place in children’s book publishing and illustrated book publishing. When the catalyst for ereading was the Amazon Kindle, as it was starting in late 2007, straight text worked but not much else did. Now that Barnes & Noble’s Color Nook and the iPad are devices of choice for millions of people, illustrated material and rich color can be delivered as well as text. In the children’s book area, there have been a slew of new entrants, probably led by big publishing veteran Rick Richter’s Ruckus Media. The illustrated book business hasn’t really surfaced in a big way yet, but it almost certainly will by next January’s Digital Book World. I’d expect it to be a major topic of conversation since illustrated books are far more complex to “convert” and present the opportunity to enhance in ways that may soon become requirements.

The recent news from O’Reilly that they are using Ingram’s services to be able to deliver printed books without holding stock signals another new topic that will be of widespread interest: building a virtual inventory infrastructure. This topic also came up in a discussion at London Book Fair with Sara Lloyd and James Long of Pan Macmillan, one company we’ve found that is very consciously preparing for a 50% ebook world. Decentralizing their print production to reduce inventory and manufacture closer to the point of delivery is very much on their radar screen. (In fact, the whole question of how publishers have to adjust their organizations and overheads to cope with a 50% or more digital book marketplace is one we’re featuring at our Publishers Launch show in London.)

As I write this, it has been nearly a month since we’ve had a lot of conversation about authors doing their own publishing, but we got very familiar with the names Amanda Hocking, John Locke, and Barry Eisler in recent weeks because they’re doing just that. That trend can do nothing but accelerate between now and next January.

This is requiring agents to reconsider their own business models. We’re at the dawn of an era where agents will be publishers themselves and business advisors, not wholly dependent for their revenue on their ability to get advances and royalties from publishers. The first Digital Book World conference in 2010 was the first digital publishing conference to feature agents prominently in the conversation and we talked then about how business models might change. This January I expect we’ll be able to stage some conversation about how new models are working out for those who have tried them. (One of the agents we’ve put on the program at DBW is Scott Waxman, and his Diversion division doing ebooks has 20 books in the market and 10 more about to hit.)

And the last two subjects that we almost certainly should be discussing at DBW 2012 are the still-critical but diminishing segments of a publisher’s marketplace for printed books: brick-and-mortar retail locations, particularly bookstores and mass-merchants and the place so many people have discovered and acquired their reading material, the public library.

The decline of bookstores has been duly noted in The Shatzkin Files and, of course, the bankruptcy of Borders has everybody’s attention. Less well-publicized has been the decline of book sales in the mass merchants. (Tactics for arresting that slide will be the topic of a presentation by Tara Catogge of Charles Levy at BISG’s Making Information Pay conference, another one we get our hands dirty on, taking place on May 5.) As the brick channel for printed books continues its inevitable decline into insignificance, the state of play and the tactics to adjust to the loss of sales and, perhaps more important, merchandising exposure, will be a topic we’ll discuss again, as we did with independent bookstores and heads of sales departments last January.

And how to deal with libraries in the ebook world is a question vexing many publishers. Two of the Big Six just don’t sell them ebooks at all; one company has tried a number-of-loans limitation. We are intrigued by a solution pioneered by Bloomsbury in the UK — a “shelf” of books the library licenses a year at a time for online reading only. We aren’t covering it in our London show because we think most of the UK market is familiar with it but we’ll be putting it on the agenda for Digital Book World next January.

Next week I’ll give you a preview of the first two Publishers Launch Conferences programs: for international visitors to BEA and the Americans who work with them (on May 25) and, with the Publishers Association, our program for UK publishers (on June 21.)

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An ebook of the first two years of The Shatzkin Files is now available and will be linked for the forseeable future from our left nav bar. This post is the introduction to the ebook, which explains how it came about.

My friend, Joe Esposito, first told me about blogs in the early part of the first decade of the 21st century before just about anybody else I knew had heard of them. I am not sure why it took me many years to start one of my own.

I’ve been training for this gig for a lifetime. My Dad insisted that I learn to touch-type when I started fooling around with a typewriter at the age of 8. (As he said, “either we teach him the right way, or he’ll teach himself the wrong way.”) Three months of twice-weekly lessons got me up to 42 words a minute on a manual typewriter, but trained my fingers to do the right thing so that today on a computer I can do about 3 times that speed. By the time I was 11, I was filing copy on a weekly basis on the Little League games for our local newspaper. I got paid too: 15 cents a column inch. The newspaper job actually continued for the next several years as I moved on to covering high school sports.

In my junior year of college, I started writing a weekly column I called The View from Underneath for the UCLA Daily Bruin. I don’t know how good it was or how many people read it, but it got me a certain amount of notoriety. Because of the column, I networked my way into the Bobby Kennedy presidential campaign and, after his death, a slot as an assistant to Pierre Salinger on the 1968 McGovern effort at the National Democratic Convention. (That was the one in Chicago that featured police against protestors in the streets and which villainized Chicago’s first Mayor Richard Daley to that generation of young liberal activist Americans.)

Between the end of The View from Underneath and the commencement of The Shatzkin Files blog, 40 years passed. I did plenty of writing in the meantime: some books (mostly about baseball), a bunch of articles about publishing in trade publications in many countries, and, starting in the mid-1990s, speeches on publishing and digital change delivered at industry forums and then preserved on my website. The posted speeches were a great boon to my professional career, making it possible to build credibility (and “brand”) among people who never attended these live events.

Others I know had blogged daily, or almost daily. Richard Charkin, now Managing Director of Bloomsbury, wrote every day when he was head of Macmillan. My friend Gwyn Headley, Managing Director of the stock agency fotoLibra, told me that when he started blogging, he did so with a list of 365 topics in hand so he’d always have something to choose from on a day he wasn’t feeling creative. Richard gave up his blog when he changed jobs and I don’t think Gwyn kept up the daily habit very long either.

In my case, I blogged six times the first two or three weeks, then five times the next few weeks, and it diminished from there to what is now a one or twice weekly post. It seems like it usually takes me about 1500 words to get in and out, although some posts run a bit longer. I find that I need to review what I’ve written at least three times a few hours apart after I think I’m done to make sure I’m happy with it. Occasionally, a post gets to that point and gets scrapped.

As I think must be normal with these things, the audience for the blog just grew. As of this writing, The Shatzkin Files has about 1700 subscribers who get the blog delivered as an email to their inbox. A number generally ranging from half that to twice that (and occasionally, quite a bit more) reads the posts on the site. The comment strings keep getting longer.

Fortunately, one of my regular readers is Cameron Drew, who, like me, came into the book business through the most honorable possible path: working for his father. I knew David Drew, one of the great book sales reps of my generation, long before I ever met Cameron. Since Cameron has gone to work for Kobo, the global ebook retailer spawned by Canadian retailer Indigo, he and I have seen each other at conferences and trade shows. He told me from the very beginning that he was a loyal Shatzkin Files reader.

Early in 2011, Cameron told me he often found it useful to refer back to previous posts of The Shatzkin Files but that doing so through the website was clunky and difficult. “Your stuff should be collected into an ebook,” he said. “If we did it at Kobo, would you give us a 30-day exclusive?”

I was extremely flattered. “I’ll happily give you 60 days,” I said.

And thus we have this ebook.

If you live in the world of trade book publishing — the publishing that has reached its audience primarily through bookstores for about 100 years — you know we are all in a different world than we were in when I began The Shatzkin Files blog in February, 2009. One of the early posts speculated that it might be  harder for Amazon to hold onto their stranglehold on ebook sales than their hegemony on online print sales. At the time, Kindle was extending its dominance of the ebook marketplace by enabling the Kindle owners to access their ebook content through the iPhone and other devices. And Amazon’s pricing policy of selling below their cost was beginning to scare publishers.

Then, around the first anniversary of the blog, Apple’s iPad and the iBookstore arrived on the scene, offering publishers the opportunity to implement the so-called “agency model,” under which the discounting of ebooks is effectively stopped. I attribute to that tactic, along with the introduction of the iPad, the Nook, Kobo and Google Editions, the stabilization of ebook distribution in a multi-retailer market with evolving global competition. So, two years later, it looks like that early post was right.

We’re going to see a lot more change in trade publishing in the years to come. I expect the next two years to present even greater challenges and more drastic change than the last two years have. Since The Shatzkin Files began, the extremely challenging times we’ve expected for bookstores have become very evident. Over the next two years, the extremely challenging times it has seemed to me must follow for general trade publishers will probably become equally evident.

One thing worth using this introduction to say is that I take no pleasure in the big publishers’ pain. It is a matter of professional pride to me to not allow my preferences to color my predictions. I love bookstores and libraries and consider the top management of the big trade houses to be intelligent, ethical, and creative people. I consider many of them friends. The fact that the transition from reading and distributing print to largely reading on screens and distributing print online makes much of their skill sets and business models obsolete is not their fault. Nor is the fact that preserving their old business, and the cash flow it still yields, sometimes interferes with inventing the new one.

There are serious initiatives in the big houses to acknowledge the importance of verticalization (mostly in genres), to create direct contact with audiences, and to employ scale in search engine optimization and in locating customer clusters online that it is hoped will enable a new version of the horizontal, big book publisher model to leap the chasm of change. At the same time, the big publishers are figuring out how to step back from the enormous overheads associated with doing business the way they have for the past 100 years. How much change is sufficient, and how fast is fast enough, are questions we’ll only know the answers to with the passage of time.

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The headline in a number of places was that Amazon was now aggressively going after exclusives for their Kindle line and actually bid against the publishers for Amanda Hocking’s trade books.

The enabling component, as reported in Publishers Lunch, was that Houghton Harcourt is now Amazon’s trade book distributor. Except please don’t call it that.

Lunch reported that Harcourt had acquired a range of titles from Amazon’s Encore and Crossings imprints, as well as securing a first-look relationship.

From one standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. Amazon can sell the hell out of a book online, and they have long made print available through their CreateSpace program. But they can’t merchandise books in stores. Even paying extremely high print and ebook royalties, as they do, they can’t maximize an author’s revenues if they can’t deliver store sales of print in today’s world.

On the other hand, virtually all of the Big Six CEOs (a club Houghton Harcourt stands just outside of) have said that they wouldn’t acquire print only, a clear signal to authors that their ebook rights were hostages to secure their print sale. After all, they wouldn’t have ever given up book club rights or paperback rights when those were important and didn’t require a scale organization to reach.

Harcourt’s adult trade publisher Bruce Nichols told Lunch that his arrangement did not constitute Houghton Harcourt doing a print-only deal. Quoting from Lunch:

“I’m sure some people will say in principal ‘we never split print and electronic’” rights, but he sees the Amazon deals as “no different than licensing reprint rights,” in which ebook rights are not available. Just as Houghton still intends to compete with Amazon on new projects, Nichols says the house will not bid for print-only rights to new properties. While “there are certainly agents and authors who want to” split rights, he underscores that “we’re refusing” to do so. “This is different; Amazon already owns all rights.”

So, there you have it. Houghtons’ full-fledged print publishing efforts are a subsidiary right.

This simply reflects the most fundamental publishing economics. Somebody can afford to write a check (the initial advance, or what might be called “the enabling transaction”) to buy the opportunity to exploit a copyright because they control the means of reaching the largest single piece of its revenue and the relationships to license others to generate revenue from smaller pieces.

Five years ago, the lion’s share of the revenue from any book-type property would have come from the sales of print in retail stores.

Five years from now, the lion’s share of the revenue from any book-type property will come from the sales of print and ebooks through online channels.

We’re in a period of transition. Houghton’s deal, just like Barry Eisler’s decision two weeks ago to decline a half-million bucks from a house so he could self-publish, are first times for business practices that will soon be normal.

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In theory, the more books are sold online the more sales should move to the long tail. Online bookstores have the advantage of “unlimited shelf space”. Nothing has to be left out of the assortment because of constraints on capital to stock inventory or room to hold it. Furthermore, as Konrath and Eisler pointed out in their extensive discussion of online versus print within the larger conversation about self- or publisher-issued, the differential impact of display when one title has a stack and another has a single spine-out copy is eliminated in the digital world.

But it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. While overall ebook sales in the US are still calculated in the 8-10% range of publishers’ revenues, so we’d reckon perhaps 10-12% of unit sales (ebooks generally, though not always, yield slightly less revenue per copy than print) or maybe even 15% for a publisher still drawing big print sales on books not available as or suitable for ebooks for whatever reason, we’re hearing frequent reports of big books selling 50% or more of their units as ebooks, particularly in the early weeks of their life.

So it would appear that ebook sales are even more concentrated across a smaller title band than print.

Furthermore, the occasional reports of enormous unit sales by the new crop of online author-stars like Amanda Hocking (coming next year to the bookstore that remains open nearest you) and John Locke also tend to support the idea that ebook sales are more concentrated, not less, than print sales. Unlimited shelf space and more uniform “display” don’t seem to be having the expected affect.

I recall a recent stat I believe came from Bowker, which tracks a large panel of book consumers, suggesting that bookstores still account for the largest single share, by far, of “book discovery.” What I recall hearing was that thirty percent of people report having learned about a book they bought from a bookstore display, much more than from any online source.

Of course, that’s certainly not true for Locke and Hocking and the books by Joe Konrath that aren’t in bookstores (although, as Joe points out, he does sell in print through Amazon’s CreateSpace print-on-demand program.) I haven’t seen anybody else talk about this subject, but Konrath also says that he gets a wildly disproportionate share of his overall sales from Kindle, much  more than the 50-60% market share one hears anecdotally attributed to them by publishers. I know from private exchanges that Amazon themselves believe they do a better job than the other ebook formats for the self-published author in proportion to their size. We’d certainly want that confirmed by more authors than just Konrath, but if they’re doing that as a strategy, it’s a good one. A self-publishing author won’t need a lot of persuasion to not bother with other outlets if s/he can get 90% of the expected sale from one (which is what Konrath leads me to believe is the case for him, even though he is widely set up among the other platforms.)

Be that as it may, the fact is that none of the online retailers have figured out how to come close to what a bookstore can do in giving a consumer real choices-per-second. And the principal tool that online booksellers could be using to overcome the disadvantage of 2-dimensional presentation — customized choices for each online customer — is very little in evidence (except as top-of-the-page suggestions) in my personal shopping experience (which extends on a regular basis to Kindle, Nook, and Kobo and on an occasional basis to iBookstore and Google).

The impact of presence and display was understood by all in the bricks world. A book that is in the store in which a customer shops has a nearly infinitely larger chance of being purchased than a book not in the store. Sophisticated merchants like Barnes & Noble know how much sales lift to expect from a front table display. We all expect the book that it is faced-out on a shoulder-level shelf to sell better than the spined book you have to bend down to see.

For years, aggressive sales reps would move their books around. In the years before computerized inventory record keeping, it was incumbent on reps to count the books that were on the shelf to coax out a backlist reorder; that gave them ample opportunity to face books out, move books up, and point it out when a book was displayed in something less than the optimal subject section.

Now the paradigm has changed. The default front table is the choice of titles on the screen that comes up first when a store’s program is opened. That’s almost always that retailer’s bestsellers (and, as far as I can tell, it isn’t customized for me at any of these retailers; you or my wife would see the same default screen that I would.)

Then there are a bunch of pre-packaged choices — think of them as “tables” too — for NY Times bestsellers or (at Nook I noticed) “ebooks under $5″ or under menu-driven choices of subject (they’re like “store sections.”) Of course, the earlier and more often a book is presented to a consumer in their online shopping experience, the more likely it is to sell.

The standard technique is that there are a set and limited number of titles a customer sees “at a click.” If you want to see more, you have to click again and (depending on connection speed) perhaps wait for more titles to load, which will usually be another 10 or 12 or maybe 25. If you shop the same sections repeatedly (and who doesn’t), most of what you see will be titles you’ve seen before and either bought or rejected. If you shop often, trying to find something new can be exhausting and ridiculously time-consuming.

Even the simplest assistance that would help avoid this duplication — such as displaying books in reverse order of publication (most recent first) instead of “by title” or “by author” — is not (or seldom) available.

Online shopping is great if you know exactly what you want (by title or author.) The online book shops can find you the most obscure book much more quickly than the average clerk in a brick store, and certainly faster than you’d find it yourself. Searching by title or author also almost always works extremely well.

But when it gets more complicated than that — perhaps you’re searching for “baseball history” or “Civil War economics” — the combination of inadequate publisher-provided metadata and insufficiently-mediated retailer choices will deliver you a menu of options that contains some titles so off base that a clerk would be fired for suggesting them.

The Lockes and Hockings of the world benefit from the same effect. They’re betsellers and every retailer has a button to deliver those, by genre and sometimes by pricing band. Getting bestseller status is so valuable that self-published authors seem to frequently employ the technique of  lowering their price to 99 cents to get bestseller status and then popping back up to a more profitable price like $2.99 until the effect wears off.

So ebook purchasers make their choices from what is presented to them, which is a limited number of titles. Let’s not ever leap to the conclusion that there is something about ebooks or about ebook consumers that is biased to the most popular. It is merchandising practices which create that result, not consumer taste.

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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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It’s a pre-holiday week and a busy one following a busy one last week. So time for blogging is limited and, besides, all you readers have presents to wrap.

But there is one subject to ruminate on just a little bit that came up repeatedly during last week’s business. Constance Sayre of Market Partners and I are doing a joint exploration of ebook royalty rates for a presentation at the Digital Book World conference in January. We created a survey to allow agents to tell us anonymously what kind of deals they were striking and we got about 130 responses. (Market Partners’ newsletter, Publishing Trends, has a report in their current issue, released today, on what the agents said and the full data will be released for our attendees at Digital Book World on January 26.) We decided to balance our presentation by giving publishers an opportunity to give their side of the story, also anonymously (except, since we interviewed them, we know who they are. The agents, having responded online and in privacy, can’t be tied back to their answers. Connie and I are good at keeping confidences.)

We spoke to seven CEOs last week, a couple of whom were joined by colleagues who actually do the contract negotiating. What they told us about ebook contracts is what we’ll talk about at Digital Book World.

But just about all of them made an ancillary point and that’s our subject today. The point they made is that the main task ahead of them in the next few years is to completely reinvent book marketing. There was clear acknowledgment across the board of something that has concerned us for some time: that inevitably declining retail shelf space means a commensurate decline in critical merchandising capability.

Changes are definitely occurring. The big publishers are undeniably SEO-conscious, investing real effort thinking about what search terms apply to each book they publish. They’re all experimenting with Facebook and Twitter and other social networking sites as well. Various community-building tools, including the very ambitious Copia platform that launched a few weeks ago and the John Ingram-funded start-up Rethink Books and its new Social Book capability, are now being tried out. The established ebook vendors, notably Kobo and Kindle (on my radar screen; I’m sure Nook and Google too), are building social capabilities into their platforms. And the established book discussion networks like Goodreads and LibraryThing are continuing to add participants, books, metadata, and conversation that constitute raw material for marketing the next book from any publisher.

There are two questions big publishers need to be asking about all of this. One is “does it scale?” The other is “does it adequately replace the stack on the front table of a highly-trafficked bookstore as a way to generate attention for a new publication?”

If marketing efforts don’t scale, then a newcomer or a smaller press isn’t handicapped competing against a major. And if the new techniques don’t compensate for the lost front table spaces, then publishers are going to need something more. And effort that doesn’t scale takes time, which costs money. Publishing margins have never been robust enough to allow publishers to increase the percentage of revenue allocated to marketing and remain profitable.

Of course, book retailers share in the difficulty. As much as publishers have depended on retailers to sort the books out into sections and featured areas and to bring the customers into contact with them, the retailers have depended on the publishers to make the public aware that a book exists.

This is a big problem with many aspects to it and this is supposed to be a relatively short pre-holiday post, so I want to drop just two conceptual thoughts on it: one a principle and one a suggestion.

The principle is that “investment marketing” must replace “expensed marketing”. “Expensed marketing” is what publishers have always done: promotion for a single title that has no lasting payoff or value. That’s an ad in the paper or online, a press release that gets picked up and run immediately and has no value next week, or a free copy of the book that might result in a review of that book or, most of the time, result in nothing at all. (Thank goodness that, at least, those review copies can be far less costly to distribute in digital form and for that it is worth mentioning another relatively new service called NetGalley that facilitates distribution of electronic copies for promotional purposes.)

What I’d call “investment marketing” is an effort that yields a result of ongoing value: a batch of email addresses that can be pinged at no cost to promote a future book or a relationship with a web site or a blogger that adds to the promotional arsenal available in the future. This concept is particulary important on the social marketing side, which is labor-intensive.

I was glad to have the concept validated in a conversation with a leading digital marketer that we recruited as a speaker for Digital Book World. She agreed that in order for digital campaigns to make sense, they should be on behalf of a block of books — by an author or on a subject — rather than pushing one title.

This is a sea change for publishers who have always marketed one title at a time. It is particularly important to implement as the distinction between backlist and frontlist for promotion — which was always partly rooted in the reality that backlist might not be available at retail months or years after its initial publication — makes less and less sense.

The suggestion is to attack the search and discovery problem, the browsing problem, the serendipity problem, the substitute for the stack of books problem. Or, maybe we’re better off envisioning this as the “replacing the marketing clout of the book clubs” problem.

Introducing a simple concept: the book shopping or book marketing app.

I would happily pay a subscription fee to somebody who would put into app or ebook form a periodically curated catalog of recently published books on baseball history. I want to see the title, author, precis, table of contents, sample material, publisher selling copy of all kinds, and reviews. I don’t care if the purchase is “in app” or if I can click my way to the landing page for the book at my favorite ebook retailer (and I’m easy: I have four of them!)

I am sure regular fans of romance, sci-fi, historical fiction, business books, popular science, and many other subjects share the same frustrations I do with shopping for ebooks now. Any search you do returns more dirt than diamonds, more chaff than wheat, more noise than signal and, for the subjects nearest and dearest to me, far more books I have either already read or already rejected than that are new and of interest. It would be ever so much easier to have all this information presented in an app or an ebook that I could peruse at my leisure, online or off, and which would have proper navigation rather than a constant struggle with pointless links and back buttons.

I think we’ll see publishers and retailers delivering this, or something like it, before the end of 2011.

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