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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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The acquisition of Lexcycle by Amazon sure got all the digerati’s creative juices flowing. What is becoming increasingly clear is that general trade publishers have a card to play here that the niche publishers can only join in on: creating a collectively-owned ebook “store” that can provide an economic baseline for the emerging ebook marketplace.

Michael Cairns suggests this possibility in his piece this morning. But his focus is on epub and interoperability standards. Mine is, and I believe the publishers’ will be, on pricing throughout the supply chain.

Through laziness, thoughtlessness, carelessness, or inertia (or whatever combination thereof), the ebook supply chain has adopted discount structures that imitate the physical book supply chain. This is daft. There is no comparison between the retailers’ costs and risks associated with physical books and those associated with ebooks. There is no economic justification to providing the same level of discounts. But that’s where we are. Amazon may be arm-twisting to enforce this discount equivalence, but they didn’t think it up. It’s pretty much universal and it came from the publishers in the first place.

As I suggested in my ebook post from London last week, now is the time to change this, before ebook revenues become too great. The college publishers with CourseSmart have mapped out the way to do something about this legally, but the play is pretty obvious. The publishers need to jointly fund and substantially own a virtual retailer whose mission would be to deliver all conceivable ebook formats (whether epub or not!) The store should be competitive with other offerings as to interoperability, lightness of DRM (I favor social only), and customer service.

Establishing such a business would force publishers to figure out how much discount off retail is required to enable the retailer to be profitable. I suspect that number is about 20% and, at that level, would allow modest discounting (5% or 10%) on some titles to the consumer. To stay on the right side of the law, publishers would sell to the new entity on the same terms they sold to everybody else. But the objective here is to limit the ability of retailers to force higher discounts through boycotting publishers or titles with impunity. That is what his happening now. Sometimes the book you’re looking for now on Kindle isn’t there because the publisher won’t agree to Amazon’s discount schedule. I know specifically of one medium-sized trade house for which that is true and, if there’s one, there are probably more.

If publishers don’t do this, the excessive discounts they offer retailers will turn into high standard discounts for consumers that will create inexorable downward price pressure. Amazon may be subsidizing that $9.99 price point they like, but the publishers are subsidizing it too.

This idea can work because six publishers control the lion’s share of bestsellers, which is a big chunk of ebook sales in the short run. Bestsellers is the one “niche” in which the general trade houses have critical mass.

And if this idea can work, another one waits in the wings.

It has been bemoaned that Google and Amazon are on a path to control both discovery and delivery of books in the future. This isn’t even a particularly competitive situation between the two of them, since Google is much more interested in discovery and Amazon is much more interested in delivery.

Because Google is more interested in discovery, they are also not particularly interested in books. They are about “all the world’s information”, not “all the world’s books.” So as robust as Google Book Search is, the company is not focused on making it a competitive book discovery tool compared to Amazon. They are about incorporating the book information to make a superior information discoverytool.

That leaves another opening for publishers where the Big Six have a strong collective position: the metadataassociated with the biggest books.

What if the Big Six also jointly owned a book discovery site: Allaboutthebookyouwant.com. The play there would definitely not be to act as a retailer, but rather to help consumers find the book and the retailer that is best for them. All retailers that “play” would have their inventory and pricing made transparent on the site which would contain a publisher-assisted best possible aggregate of enriched metadata (excerpts, stories behind the book, video support, etc.) 

This initiative could solve a number of problems for the big publishers. It would create a “Switzerland” for enriched metadata: a place to make it available which would help all the online booksellers. To the extent that it grew in consumer acceptance, it would reduce the danger of being being buried or victimized by bad data on a retailer site (think of the recent brouhaha about the “adult” books on Amazon). It would enable the consumer to shop across many book retailers at the same time. And the referral fees the site could earn would reduce the degree to which it needed to be subsidized as a marketing expense.

The current effort by several general trade publishers to drive traffic to their own house-branded web sites is misguided and doomed. But Amazon (and Shelfari, GoodReads, LibraryThing, and our new entrant, Filedby.com) have demonstrated that sites with information across the trade book spectrum have real consumer appeal. With the support of the big publishers from the earliest possible moment to make the high-profile general trade books visible, at least a large portion of the discovery traffic could be liberated from being captive to Amazon, Google, or anybody else. And the consumer could be assured that the information she is getting on purchasing was being offered in her best interest, not based on what a retailer is trying to push.

Worth noting: the ebook site Smashwords already sells ebooks at 15% margin, returning 85% of the publisher- or author-set retail price to the content owner. Up until now, Smashwords has been about author-generated ebooks; it has not pushed out an offer to publishers. And there are elements of Smashwords’s solution — DRM free, working from PDFs and doc files — that might not be exactly what publishers would want . But they might be the ebook solution, and it might be close to being in place. Smashwords may be the game-changer but the publishers and public haven’t discovered it yet.

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