Mark Bide

If you imagine the publisher’s business as one that divides most of the consumer’s dollar between two core stakeholders in the supply chain — the retailer and the author — you’d have a pretty accurate picture. The publishers, at least theoretically, decide what the retailer’s “working margin” will be with their discounts and agency agreements. And they decide what the author’s share of the proceeds will be by the advances and royalty rates they offer and agree on through their contracts.

These are the essential, and basically non-substitutable, trading partners for a publisher. They can choose a different printer or publicity firm without changing the character of their business or their economics. But the author relationships are existential and defining and the intermediaries who reach the public and enable the consumer transaction are indispensible.

Plenty has been written, by me and others, about the challenges trade publishers face due to the decline of shelf space for books. But, in some ways, it looks at the moment like those (also including me) who have said that publishers are in big trouble as bookstores decline are mistaken. Sales in stores are declining and sales of print books are declining but total sales, including ebooks, are holding pretty firm and the big publishers are reporting pretty healthy results. So if declining bookstore shelf space, which we have clearly seen over the past few years, doesn’t weaken trade publishers’ commercial performance, what will?

I have written before about asking my friend and sometimes-collaborator Mark Bide a similar question about another segment of publishing. As a John Wiley stockholder, I was worrying 15 years ago about their reliance on journals for their revenues and profits. We thought way back then that journals were likely candidates for disintermediation. After all, the university pays the professor’s salary to write the journal article that the publisher gets for free and then monetizes by charging the same university’s library for a subscription to the journal. Even in the early days of the web, we could see the potential for professors to post their own articles and for peer review to be crowd-sourced, delivering the IP to the academic community faster and saving universities a boatload of dough.

At the time Mark said the thing to watch was whether the publishers stopped getting the submissions. If the professors didn’t need the journals, they’d stop getting the raw material that feeds the whole engine.

So far, it hasn’t happened (and I still own the stock). Despite lots of open source academic publishing, the journals remain important brands in their fields and the professors want the journal publication as a credential. (In books we know that lots of people read the book and have no idea who the publisher was. In journals it is the opposite: more people will know the professor published in the journal than will read the article.) The business has changed and library budgets grow considerably more challenged, but most of the journals, including Wiley’s, remain highly profitable and highly desirable to the authors.

In fact, Mark identifed the point of vulnerability for trade publishers. If the stores and other intermediaries they rely on go away, they have to find other ways to sell their books. That’s a challenge, no doubt.

But if the authors don’t play along, they have nothing to sell. Making deals with authors is the publishers’ price of admission to the game.

As the central player whose contracts and sales terms manage the distribution of revenues throughout the supply chain, how publishers view the commerce of our business is central to how it operates. This has, historically, been challenging. The activity of publishing is complicated and its economics are complicated.

A couple of months ago, Michael Cader pointed out to me that the big publishers were making a serious tactical error in the way they were accounting for sales under the agency arrangement. (Quick reminder: under agency, the publisher is considered the “seller”, not the retailer. The publisher sets the price which the retailer can’t change and pays the retailer, or sales “agent”, a fixed 30% of the set price paid by the consumer.) Publishers simply imitated their convention from the wholesale terms transactions they’d always done before. They book as revenue the 70% they keep of the sale, not the full price the consumer pays (and which, if they did, would make the 30% paid to the retailer a “cost of sale” like printing or shipping is in the physical world or like DRM costs might be in the digital world).

Cader spelled out two important benefits that would flow to publishers if they made a different choice of how to account these sales. (He says, and I trust him, that GAAP rules don’t require them to employ the methodology they do.)

One is that that their “top line”, their “total revenue” line, would be higher. That’s critical to foster a helpful perception in the investment community, which worries when they see declining revenues. And if publishers insist on sticking to booking only the 70% they get on the ebook sales as the total revenue, they’re locked into declining revenue for years to come as competition drives down ebook prices (probably) and as ebook sales continue to replace hardcover print sales (for sure).

The other perception publishers are manipulating against their interests is within their negotiating community. Both agents (on behalf of authors) and the big accounts publishers sell through look at the publishers’ margins as a percentage of sales to decide if there’s more there for them to get. Reporting ebook sales as they do, publishers are achieving about 75% margin on ebook sales (because they give 25% of the take to the author.) If they took the full price as the revenue, they’d be achieving 52.5% margin on those sales (although, of course, nothing really changes.)

There are fewer knock-on problems for the publishers when the big accounts move to convert this (apparently excess) margin into changed business terms than if they allow agents to change the author deal. Changes forced by Amazon or Barnes & Noble could conceivably affect only them, depending on how the change in terms were framed.  But were an agent to succeed in pushing up the contractual ebook royalty, that change could affect a whole host of other contracts because of most favored nation clauses. That could mean royalties are suddenly due on contracts that under the previously-negotiated royalties hadn’t earned out their advances.

So we acknowledge that the price of raising contractual ebook royalties could be high. But it still might be worth it. As we will see later, more margin given to accounts achieves no incremental gain for the publishers; more margin to authors does.

There’s one more very big reason for publishers to change their accounting in the way Cader’s insight suggests. Right now, every big publisher’s life is being disrupted by state, federal, and international investigations into the legality of agency selling, which is characterized by some as “price fixing”. The defense is that the publisher, not the retailer, is the seller and it isn’t illogical for somebody selling something to charge the same price to every customer no matter how they reach them.

If “I’m really the seller” is the defense, it would be much more persuasive if the accounting supported that paradigm. As it stands, the accounting contradicts it.

The total situation not only argues for publishers to change their accounting, it also argues for them to give a bigger percentage to authors and to do it now! Doing so would deliver them two important benefits. It would reduce the apparently excess margin that their retail trading partners are noticing and coveting. But — of much greater importance —  it would also reduce the differential between what Amazon (and who knows, perhaps B&N in the future) offers an author and what the publisher offers, making it more difficult for Amazon to lure their authors away with higher royalty terms.

In fact, they might even get some sympathy from Barnes & Noble about having less excess margin to trade if they can make it clear that giving more to authors is keeping them out of Amazon’s clutches, which B&N and all other retailers absolutely need them to do.

Part of what prevents publishers from seeing merit in paying more to authors is their high cognizance of another accounting element they track: unearned advances. Unfortunately, either publishers aren’t looking at that category of expense in the right way or they’re eliding important distinctions when they discuss those unearned advances with agents.

Because all unearned advances are clearly not created equal. All of the biggest authors pile up unearned advances because they are intended to be unearned. When the agent for a megaselling writer sits down with a publisher to negotiate the advance, they are often negotiating around dividing up what they both see (perhaps without explicitly saying so) as the total revenue pie likely from the book. That leads to agreement on the advance against royalties, which divides the revenues at what is effectively much higher per-copy royalties than standard contracts call for.

But then, for reasons of “not establishing precedent” and, perhaps, not kicking in “most favored nation” clauses that could exist in other contracts (all in the publishers’ interest), the actual contract has conventional royalty splits. The book would have to sell a big increment over expectations to “earn out” on conventional royalties. That’s very unlikely because these are deals done with highly established authors where the track record is a good predictor of future performance.

So some of these “unearned” advances were never intended to be earned; they simply measure how much of a premium the publisher was willing to pay to get certain revenues into the fold.

In other words, publishers aren’t trying to manage all unearned advances down, just some of them. And if they don’t make that distinction (and some further nuance to their measurement) when they analyze this, they’re doing themselves a disservice in a number of ways. Right now, one of those ways is that it is persuading them not to pay higher royalties when doing so could well be in their interest, both because it will keep the author away from Amazon and because it leaves less margin on the table for their trading partners to pursue.

Declared royalty rates that are closer to what Amazon can offer are critical for publishers to turn around a PR war for new authors that they have been losing. The focus of a great deal of the author community buzz is around the ebook royalty differential. Disadvantages of self-publishing — the biggest three being the actual financial cost of necessary editing and core marketing (like a cover); the difference in risk between taking those costs versus taking a revenue guarantee in the form of an advance; and the additional marketing and sales a publisher generates (right now largely through the merchandising and additional revenue from print) — are too easy to ignore or elide. The royalty comparison is straightforward and apparently persuasive when it is as stark as it is now.

A 50% ebook royalty from an agency publisher on revenue after agency commissions would match the 35% royalty that Amazon pays when they pay advances and publish. But publishers don’t actually have to reach that number to be offering  a better deal because they offer sales through other channels Amazon currently either doesn’t reach or actually prohibits employing when they pay an advance to publish. It’s just a tough argument to make when they offer half that number.

One more reflection on unearned advances to bend your mind in the other direction, and then we’ll stop. When the publisher sells a copy of a book that has an unearned advance, the cash flow for this month on the book is better, because no payment to the author is triggered. If publishers paid authors higher royalties on ebook sales, they’d have fewer dollars in unearned advances (because books would earn out faster) very quickly. Of course, that’s not “good” for them because it means they have to pay new royalties on those books as they sell. This is just to say reiterate what I said above: publishing economics are complicated. Anytime you hear them oversimplified, like by somebody lumping together all “unearned advances” into a number or a percentage and wielding it like evidence or analysis, have your grains of salt handy.

I make no secret that my view of the world is publisher-centric. I was brought up that way and I’ve spent 50 years learning about the book business with that point of view. And I also make no secret of my high regard for the current leadership of the biggest publishing houses. With all due respect to the executives of my father’s generation and since, the current crop of leaders is the smartest and most thoughtful and innovative group I’ve ever seen in those slots. But (unless I’m missing something, which is, of course, always a possibility…) they all appear to be making the same mistake at the moment. I would sum up the observations from this post with three suggestions for today’s biggest publishers:

1. Change the way you account for ebook sales in the way Michael Cader suggests: call the consumer payment the top line revenue and the payment to the retailer a cost of sale.

2. Recognize that no excess margin will go unpunished. The forces of big author agents and powerful retail channels will assure that. You know there’s a minimum margin you need to survive; in fact there will also be a maximum margin you’ll have any prayer of holding onto.

3. Pay authors more so you can pay retailers less. There will be a direct connection between the two.

Share this post

There are lessons that can be taught or learned in one segment of publishing that can then apply to another. Well over a decade ago, Mark Bide and I were discussing the business model for journals. The way it works is that the university pays the professors a salary and rewards them with promotions and tenure for writing publishable material for the journals. Then the journal publisher pays nothing for the article (although they spend lots of money managing peer review and doing other things associated with editing, curating, and delivering the content.) Then the university pays for the IP all over again by buying (now licensing) the journal.

From our earliest understanding of the Internet and its potential for disintermediation, this seemed like a very vulnerable model. “How will we know when there’s a problem developing with the model?” I asked Mark. “When the publishers are having trouble getting submissions,” he said. “The problem will become obvious on the supply side before it becomes obvious on the demand side.

One of the challenges for a retail player trying to be a publisher is the difficulty of getting other retailers to play along. Even the most dominant US retailers, Amazon in the online world and Barnes & Noble in brick stores, don’t have a total monopoly on the customer base. People buy books online through outlets other than Amazon and people buy books in stores that aren’t owned by Barnes & Noble. And, of course, either of the two delivers grossly incomplete access to the total customer base without the other.

Barnes & Noble has been acquiring content directly for a long time. They’re very aware of the dichotomy between having a monopoly on content for your stores’ benefit versus making it more broadly available in the content’s best interests. Almost from the minute B&N acquired Sterling, Borders stopped stocking Sterling books (a problem that matters much less today than it did a few years ago.) And Sterling had a real sales force, retailer-friendly sales policies, and all of the systems necessary to support moving their books through intermediaries. Amazon does not.

Amazon took the first steps to fill that gap by making a deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt a few months ago, giving HMH a right of first refusal (apparently) to purchase paperback rights (excluding Amazon, we’d assume) to the books Amazon was publishing through their proprietary imprints. I have no inside information, but I would assume that one of the things Larry Kirshbaum will figure out early in his new role there will be how to get real print book distribution for the books he will be acquiring.

Amazon’s strategy appears to be that they’ll use their checkbook, the offer of 70% ebook royalties from the most powerful ebook platform, and their close connection to the online consumer, to get the books they want on the terms they want. And what they seem to want most for the books they pay for is “Kindle exclusive”: the ability to build up an inventory of titles available through Kindle but not through Nook, iBookstore, Google, or Kobo, let alone the stores here and abroad served by Ingram and OverDrive.

Barnes & Noble is familiar with that idea. They wouldn’t let other stores sell their Sparknotes study guide line. They never made it generally available through Sterling’s organization because they perceived value in having it be uniquely available through their stores and online channels.

But they didn’t avoid that dichotomy. The value they perceived is to the retailing entity, not to the content holder. Since their retail business was something like 50 times bigger than Sterling, it might not have been seen as a terribly difficult decision even though the content holder is always better off if the book is sold in as many places, online or offline, as possible.

Last week, PW did a story introducing Amazon’s “summer list”: ostensibly the books being published by them in the next few weeks. Obviously, these books were signed up before Kirshbaum’s arrival.

I’m not a bookseller. I have no expertise to apply to look at a list of books and decide what should be in any particular bookstore. But nothing on this list looked like a “must have” for an independent bookseller. To make sure, I reached out to a smart one I know and asked her to look at the PW list. “Would you stock these books?” was my question.

Her answer was interesting. “I don’t know about any of these,” she said. “For the most part, I learn about books by sales reps visiting our store and telling us about them. Nobody has ever told us about these.”

I had my staff do a little bit of searching. We couldn’t find a consolidated list of Amazon’s summer offerings online. What we found was the press release announcing 32 titles that PW referred to, but that release only listed 19 of the 32. We couldn’t find anything on any of these books at the Houghton Harcourt web site. We were able to find 14 more titles by looking under the various Amazon imprints (including Seth Godin’s Domino partnership with them) for a total of 33 coming or having been released from last March through November. Is this the “summer list”? Maybe, with global warming…

We found nothing about any of the titles on the Houghton site. Oddly enough, they did publish a prior title by one of the Amazon authors, Max Allen Collins, but they haven’t listed the current one, a collection of short stories.

(Here’s an ironic thought. You think Amazon will place an ad in the PW Announcement Issue to get this all straight?)

So, as far as we can tell, the Amazon summer list contains very few books that the old publishing guard, publishers or booksellers, will suffer much for having missed.

Except, of course, that maybe Amazon can create demand among the millions of online customers they have for books and ebooks. If they do, and the word of mouth grows to a point that independent booksellers find they must stock these books, Amazon will really have created a new publishing paradigm. That certainly seems to be what Godin is counting on.

Nobody — or at least very few — outside Amazon knows what new capabilities will be put in place to support the publishing programs Kirshbaum will build. Barry Eisler indicated at our Publishers Launch BEA conference that he had received a six figure advance for the book he just signed directly with Amazon to publish. He seemed to expect, or at least had hopes for, a robust bricks-and-print strategy along with his high ebook royalty. But he’ll have the same problem with Barnes & Noble and independents that Sterling had with Borders: it will take the perception of a very high level of demand to compel them to stock a book from a company they think is taking the bread right off their table.

A related development is that Arthur Klebanoff, one of the original ebook publishers founded on the idea that the big publisher standard of 25% ebook royalties creates opportunity for entrepreneurs, told the British AAA (the agents) this past week that he’d be delighted to publish their backlists and pay a 50% royalty. To agents who are already planning to do this themselves (and quite a discussion has broken out in the UK about whether that is a legitimate thing for agents to do; the AAA has decided it is) Klebanoff points out that things can go wrong with ebook publication (it might not sell, for one thing) and agents would be wise not to jeopardize their relationship with an author client when there are alternative ways to get a high royalty.

Klebanoff seems here to be jumping squarely into competition with Jane Friedman’s Open Road, which has been signing up content with very much the same pitch. (Open Road also has other attributes to tout, primarily some very talented digital marketers and a focus on developing tools and techniques to do that work effectively.)

Meanwhile, other agents are setting up their own digital publishing capabilities and service offerings continue to mushroom. Agents tell me — two were in the office this week talking about this — that their authors are frequently asking about self-publishing.

Does the insight Bide offered to me late in the last century about scholarly journals end up applying to trade publishers? Will the most obvious sign of a challenged model become the resistance of authors to their blandishments and their advances? There seem to be a lot of entities betting on the idea that it will.

It is worth noting here that there’s one dog that hasn’t barked. Richard Curtis was the first ebook publishing agent. He set up his E-Reads business over a decade ago. He also pays 50% royalties. Richard did not create E-Reads to compete with publishers on royalties but because when he did publishers just wouldn’t do the ebooks. He has built his enterprise since that time to nearly a $1 million annual business (meaning that he’s delivering half-a-million a year to authors for properties that, at least until very recently and perhaps still, would never have been put into ebooks by a publisher.) But his name is noticeably absent from the chorus using higher ebook royalties as a public prod to bedevil publishers.

Share this post

The first Publishers Launch Conferences show outside the United States, “A Global Perspective on Digital Change”, will be at the Congress Centre in central London on June 21, with the Publishers Association serving as our partners in putting on the event. We also owe special thanks to the PA’s group of Digital Directors, who were extremely generous with their time and insight. If you can be in London that day, you couldn’t find a better way to spend it than with us.

We’re still putting the finishing touches on what will be a one-day conference packed with illuminating conversation, but we can tell you quite a bit about it already. We aim to deliver strategic, practical, and focused discussion of near-term issues and opportunities. This won’t be a showcase for cool products or a venue to debate what the future might look like some day. We’re examining essential issues — ebook “export” opportunities; what happens to territorial rights; hiring and retraining to meet today’s challenges; revamping publishing systems for a dual print and digital paradigm; getting “found” on digital shelves — that publishing professionals should focus on now to thrive in the days to come.

The UK market is in between the US and the rest of the world in its migration from print to digital reading. Kindle and iPad sales really took off last Christmas and, while ebook penetration may be a fourth or less of what it is in the US, it has grown enough to be disruptive and to generate a consensus acceptance that very substantial change in the industry is inevitable.

On the one hand, my PLC partner Michael Cader and I have followed the developments in the US very closely so we have some firsthand experience with some aspects of what the UK trade is going through. On the other hand, we know history won’t repeat itself precisely. There are important differences in the markets and there is a substantial group of companies with experience and capabilities developed in the North American market that can hit the ground running in Britain or anywhere else in the world. That alone will make everybody else’s experience different than what happened in the US.

In order to be sure we were talking with the UK industry, not at it, we took some preparatory steps. In February, we put a large number of ideas for panels and topics up on Survey Monkey and invited 70 players in the UK book trade to express their opinions on them. In five days, 40 of the people responded.

Then we followed up by spending three days in London meeting with about 50 people to discuss our ideas and theirs. Our partners at the PA provided invaluable assistance, hosting our conversations and inviting us to join a regular meeting of the Digital Directors to get the insights of the most knowledgable people in the UK market. Those conversations were crucial in helping us focus properly on topics and in locating some key sources of insight. Frankly, despite our long experience working with the British publishing community (I have visited London on business three or four times a year for 35 years), putting this conference together would have been impossible without the help we got.

But because of that help, I think we’ll be presenting the UK publishing community with a lot of very useful discussion that hasn’t taken place at the many prior gatherings that have discussed book publishers and digital change.

One topic that we identified very early is the opportunity we see for publishers in Britain and Ireland to sell into the US market now without payng for a distributor infrastructure or taking an inventory risk. When we started to explore this topic, we learned that, of course, people are definitely starting to plan for it. Some are starting to exploit it. This was something we thought should be happening below the radar, and it is.

This is a peculiar opportunity, because it might be more important for independent UK publishers large and small than it is for the biggest global players. We’re still filling out the panel for this one, but we have Helen Kogan of Kogan Page, an independent whose company was already working in the US market (and therefore has some helpful experience to pass along) but who is seeing the expanded opportunity presented by digital, and Jean Harrington of Maverick House Publishers in Dublin. Jean is also President of Publishing Ireland and we invited her to join this particular conversation for a reason. The Irish diaspora in the US has a particularly strong identity with the old country and we expect books of Irish history and Irish fiction will find a substantial additional market through ebook sales in America.

We’re working on adding another British publisher and an agent to that dialogue.

Another topic arose out of a conversation that longtime UK consultant Mark Bide and I had while we were at Tools of Change in New York in February. How long will it be, I wondered, before half of UK sales are digital? Mark said he wasn’t sure about the timing, but he was sure that the publishers’ systems, overhead allocations, staffing, and infrastructure would require a lot of adjustment to be ready for that day. That’s a good conference topic, we thought.

Then, in our conversations at the PA 10 weeks ago, Anthony Forbes Watson, the MD of Pan Macmillan, told us he had charged his team with thinking through the question exactly as we had defined it. Anthony wants to know “what does 50% ebooks look like? What do we have to do to be ready for it?” The next day we talked to James Long of Pan Mac who told us that, yes, he was actually the person in the company with the primary responsibility for thinking this question through.

We decided the best frame for this conversation was “thinking about the future.” James, as he will tell us on June 21, is largely focused on what Pan Mac needs to do in systems development and integration, workflow changes, and skills development to be ready for a 50% digital world.

But there are two other aspects of preparing for the future we felt could be illuminated by other panelists we recruited.

Perseus, a US company whose Constellation division that provides digital services to smaller publishers is a global sponsor of Publishers Launch Conferences, is one of several companies in the world (Ingram in the US is another; so might Random House be in the US and the UK) that are investing in warehouses and print book distribution capabilities at precisely the time many publishers are disinvesting in them, precisely because they know that most publishers will have to disinvest in them. They’re trying to be there for publishers who want to dispose of fixed cost overheads for the shrinking print book market. We put Rick Joyce of Perseus into this conversation to cover the sensitive topic of consolidation on the physical side (a subject that Dominic Myers, the MD of Waterstone’s, famously put on the UK publishing community’s agenda a couple of months ago.)

Copyright Clearance Center, the US RRO which is also a global sponsor of Publishers Launch Conferences, has steadily called our attention to another industry-wide challenge: the need to manage rights more effectively and on a more granular level to take advantage of emerging opportunities to license chunks and fragments for apps, ebooks, and web sites. We thought that the voice for this topic in London should be local, and we were pleased that Sara Faulder, head of the Publishers Licensing Society, agreed to join this conversation.

Mark Bide has agreed to moderate this group in what I think will be a dialogue about publishers and the digital future unlike any the audience will have heard before. (Except, that is, if they are at our Publishers Launch BEA show on May 25, where we’ll have a different version of this conversation, one more focused on export and rights sales than infrastructure, but also covering the change we’ll see to selling more and more fragments.)

We’re not above stealing our own ideas and giving them a local spin. One panel that was extraordinarily successful at Digital Book World last January was one we describe in shorthand as “new skill sets”. It’s about capabilities publishers need to get that they don’t have and it is about process and workflow changes and the use of cross-functional teams as well as hiring in or training people with new skills. Charlie Redmayne of HarperCollins did that panel for us in New York in January and is reprising it at our BEA show. In London, he’ll be joined by Juan Lopez-Valcarel of Pearson and Jacks Thomas, the CEO of Midas Public Relations, on a panel moderated by Jo Howard of Mosaic Search & Selection Ltd. One of the key elements in the New York discussion of this, which we expect will arise again in London, is “when is it best to hire in the skills and when is it better to retrain the people I already have?” This is a subject every publisher needs to be thinking about that isn’t discussed in public very often.

We’ll have three of the top digital leaders of UK houses — George Walkley of Hachette, David Roth-ey of HarperCollins, and Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan — joining Michael and me for a dialogue about the big companies who have cut their teeth on the US market and are now taking their capabilities worldwide, starting in the UK. We’ll be talking about Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Ingram, and Overdrive (the six clearly-declared and clearly-capable global ebook players) as well as Sony, aspirants like Copia and Blio, and US titan Barnes & Noble (which has shown no clear signs of global interest yet.) It looks to us like there is only one UK player with a global perspective, still-tiny cell phone provider Mobcast, but we’ll be learning from our panelists whether there are others we should be considering. And our audience will learn more about the North American companies which are bound to be a big part of the local market’s ebook life in the years to come.

We’ve reached a time when “metadata” is an important subject to discuss, no matter how dry or back room it has seemed. We were fortunate to get Graham Bell of EDItEUR to moderate a dialogue about this for us. He’s recruited Jon Windus of Nielsen and Karina Luke of Penguin to discuss it with him. We’re now looking for a retailer to join them. The condition of metadata in the marketplace is not good enough in enough places yet. This is costing publishers sales. This panel will explain why that is and what every publisher should do to make sure this isn’t a huge hole in the side of their boat as online sales, print and digital, grow and the impact of metadata grows right along with them.

We are also going to have a discussion of the future of territorial rights. Richard Charkin of Bloomsbury, a well-known skeptic about them, and David Miller, an agent with Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd., have agreed to participate. We’re looking for a full-throated defender of the current territorial regime to join them in what will be more of a conversation than a debate. We wonder whether territorial rights make as much sense in a 50% ebook world as they do in the 5% ebook world we might now be in. The agent’s voice in this conversation might be the most important one because, after all, they decide whether the deals are acceptable or not.

One thing that the territorial rights dialogue will certainly entertain is what we should expect to see in terms of author initiatives. That topic is bound to come up in two other discussions as well. There’s one we’re now calling “experiments, best practices, and out of the box thinking” which is really about innovation. But we are going to focus on innovation in business models and practices and innovation in marketing, not on product innovation. We are still working on putting this group together, but we were very impressed with our preliminary conversations with two of the panelists.

Marc Gascoigne is at Angry Robot, a sci-fi imprint started by HarperCollins and then bought by Osprey. Angry Robot’s better mousetrap is its community focus; Gascoigne will make the case that doing that right (which many publishers say they want to do) requires that everybody, and that means every editor and everybody else, communicate directly with the audience. It is hard to see putting that across in many established trade houses.

Richard Mollet of the PA will moderate the conversation with the innovators.

Also on that panel will be Peter Cox, an agent with Redhammer. Cox is changing his own business model (providing more in the way of services to his authors, but charging them more for it and looking to represent fewer authors, not more) but he’s effectively changing the author-publisher relationship as well by making the author an active marketer and community gatherer. He’ll have examples and he’ll have ideas that will challenge the thinking of many publishers and agents in the audience.

The last panel of our day is intended as a Grand Finale. Michael Cader and I will sit with Stephen Page of Faber, Rebecca Smart of Osprey, John Makinson of Penguin, and agent Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown. We’ll get their take on the speed of the ebook takeup and its consequences.

How will British publishers cope in a market that may soon have no full-line bookstore chain? How will the industry cope with the rise of self-publishing? Is there any real danger of a consolidated English-language world in which London becomes subsidiary to New York? Or, in some companies, might it be vice-versa? Will both agents and publishers be changing the core business models which have prevailed for the past century over the next few years?

What excites me about the last panel — aside from the sheer smarts and savvy of the people we got to join us — is the diversity of their perspectives. The publishers run companies of different sizes and with very different approaches to building their publishing lists. The agent joining us has gained a reputation as one of the most digitally savvy players in the UK market. Michael and I thrive on spirited conversations with very smart people; we think we’re going to finish the day very stimulated and with big smiles on our faces.

And we think our audience will too.

Of course, before we get to London, we’ll be running our “eBooks Go Global” show aimed at international visitors and their trading partners at BEA. At that show, we’re particularly excited about two panels we won’t be doing in London. One is with a few booksellers already working with the new Google Ebooks capability reporting on how it is functioning for them. The other takes a slightly different approach to the “selling in the US” opportunity. Patricia Arancibia of Barnes & Noble, which has aggregated about ten times as many ebooks in Spanish as most people in Spanish markets will tell you exists, will open a lot of foreign publishers’ eyes to the possibilities that exist for them in the US market. We’ll also have a chat with Barry Eisler, the author who turned down half-a-million bucks to self-publish. And that’s not all. Tickets still available… And tickets still available for London as well.

Share this post

I had already been in the “publishing futurist” game for a few years when my frequent project partner Mark Bide and I put together a day-long conference in March 2000 at the London Book Fair called “Publishing 2010.” (As I look at what I wrote for that conference, I can see some things I got right, some I got wrong, and some look like good predictions for the next few years, but haven’t happened yet.)

Although it was an “innovation” when I included agents in the digital change conversation at Digital Book World in January 2010, Mark and I actually did it for the first time at that conference 11 years ago. One of the agents we recruited for this conference was Michael Carlisle. Just a week before the conference, and the day before I was leaving for the UK, Carlisle called me with bad news. One of his literary clients was the driver of Lady Diana Spencer’s car in the crash that killed her in August of 1997. The driver’s book was coming out, Carlisle represented it. The promotional book tour needed to take place during the week of London Book Fair and Carlisle just had to cancel his trip across the pond.

“But,” he said, “I can give you a replacement. I know you don’t know him, but his name is Michael Cader and I can assure you he’ll do a great job as my substitute.” With no time to find somebody else, or even to vet this fellow Cader, I just said thank you and good luck with the book tour.

The conference was a success. We made a little money, had a very provocative day of conversation, and a few people even told me it was the best such conference they’d ever attended. Cader was, for my money, one of the stars of the show. I hadn’t ever heard anybody say so many things about digital change in publishing that I agreed with but hadn’t really thought of before. It was easy to agree that we should stay in touch.

A month or two later, Michael sent me a prototype for an idea he had and was about to start: a newsletter called Publishers Lunch. It was a great concept: links to stories about publishing from all over the internet with a graf or two of summary, explanation, and comment. I was bound to think this was a great idea because I’d had a similar thought about six or seven years earlier, just before the Web changed all of our lives. I had suggested to my friend (and one of my very favorite people to work with) Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners that the publishing world needed a service. Since a story about publishing could appear in any one of several newspapers or magazines on a New York newsstand on any day, we should hire a kid to read the papers at 3 am and send out a FAX at 6 in the morning telling people what stories they shouldn’t miss!

We didn’t do it. Cader’s version, with the advancements of technology, was an infinitely better iteration of the idea. As it turned out, his ongoing commentary also added more value than we could possibly have added (unless, of course, we had his help, but we didn’t know him then!)

In the decade-plus since that London Book Fair and the start of Lunch, Cader and I have had the opportunity to work together from time to time on conferences and industry events. We’ve shared stages. At the last BEA in Washington a few years ago, I interviewed Michael in a 1-on-1 session. And we have endlessly discussed our views about publishing and digital change.

We are both, in different ways, already making our living delivering “industry education.” For public consumption, Michael delivers each day’s facts with a few words of wise context; my less-frequent Shatzkin Files posts select a context or a paradigm to explain with, usually, some supporting facts. The consulting assignments of my company often involve teaching a tech company about the publishing business or helping an industry service get a better handle on what their client base needs or can accept. We’ve talked about ways to formalize a partnership over the years. Before it disappeared, we talked with the Stanford Publishing Course about delivering a new digital curriculum. We’ve fiddled with live event ideas.

When David Nussbaum, the Chairman of F+W Media, came to me two years ago with his concept for a new conference called Digital Book World and asked me to organize the program, I suggested strongly to him that he figure out how to engage Cader as his marketing arm. David agreed, and for the past two years, Michael and I have happily collaborated on programming and promoting a 2-day event which, in two short years, has grown to the same size as the 5-year old, very successful, and very worthy Tools of Change.

Today, Michael and I have announced a formal partnership called Publishers Launch Conferences to deliver live events — globally and throughout the year — on publishing and digital change. It is an anchor of this business that we will continue to do the 2-day Digital Book World event in January 2012 and for years thereafter. We call Digital Book World a “State of Play” event, covering the landscape of digital change.

DBW is aimed primarily at US trade publishers and the extent of the show — 2 days and 4 parallel programming tracks for half of the time — allows us to cover more than two dozen distinct topics with panels and presentations. Publishers Launch Conferences will, in its first year (ending next January with DBW 3), deliver about seven shorter (1 day or 1/2 day) and more focused events in New York, London, Frankfurt, and San Francisco. Our first day-long conference will be at (and in conjunction with) BookExpo America in May, aimed at international visitors and the Americans who are doing business with them. Our event in London on June 21, being presented in partnership with the UK’s Publishers Association, will address digital change from a UK perspective.

It has already been an education for us to think things through from the point of view of the different audiences we’re delivering for. Our plans for our London show were greatly informed (and modified) by meetings we had three weeks ago (thanks to our partners at the PA) with about 20 different players in UK publishing to discuss what needed to be addressed, how, and by whom.

Some of the Publishers Launch Conferences events will be topic-targeted. We’re planning two niche shows in the Fall: one on juvenile publishing (which both Michael and I see as the segment of the book business facing the most potential intrustion from outside players because of digital change) and one we’re calling internally “ebooks for the rest of us”. That one will focus on the mechanics of ebook publishing — from content conversion to the ultimate sale — for the smaller publishers, agents, and authors who don’t have the IT and marketing resources of the big publishers. A number of small publishers and entreprenurial authors have achieved notable success in the ebook world already. We’ll focus on what it takes to do that so that more small players can follow in their footsteps.

We decided on doing a few things differently than most other conferences. We won’t have a zillion sponsors; we’re limiting sponsor participation in the interests of our audience and in the interests of the sponsors themselves. Our first two Global Sponsors, Copyright Clearance Center and Perseus’s Constellation service, have embraced our unconventional practices. There will be no sponsor pitches from the stage during our programs. There will be no email spam sent to attendees by sponsors after the programs. Even our printed program will be designed to be helpful and worth keeping and we’ll do our best to have it contain the information that our audiences need to take home, reducing their need to take notes during the show. As readers of this blog know, organizing conferences engages me in conversations that often turn into posts.

Part of my value — and Michael Cader’s — comes from talking to people who are smart and well-informed about the topics that all of us in publishing must inevitably wrestle with if we want to stay in publishing during this time of constant and roiling change. Planning these events and recruiting speakers for them as a continuous and year-round process will be a new ongoing feature of my life, and therefore of these posts as well. I hope we’ll see you at some of the shows but, whether you’re there or not, they should result in you should be reading a more informed blogger when you come to The Shatzkin Files.

Share this post

One of the key building blocks of my career was the six years I spent working on a program called “Publishing in the 21st Century” with Mark Bide and a team at Vista Computer Services (now Publishing Technologies) led by then-Chairman Denis Bennett, John Wicker (now at Tata Consulting Services), and Martyn Daniels (now at Value-Chain International). Every year we picked a digital change theme: organizational structure, content to context, etc., and did some research around it. Then we’d present our findings in a White Paper and conferences.

I think it was Martyn who observed that our exercise was like “looking into the same house through different windows.” That is, the subject was really always the same — digital change in publishing — but taking a different slant on it each time would deliver different observations and insights.

And so it continues. The subject of digital change in publishing continues to prove an endlessly fascinating one for observation, analysis, and speculation. And each time you think about it from a different point of view, you learn something new seeing what you have seen before.

This entire experience was critical to my own intellectual development for two reasons: it gave me subsidized (paid-for) time explicitly devoted to thinking about the future and it gave me a lot of smart people, inside Vista and among publishers and other stakeholders whom we interviewed in our research, to discuss with and learn from.

The topic of digital change outside the English-speaking world was placed on my radar in 2008 when I was invited to speak in Copenhagen to Danish booksellers and publishers. It was already the case that a large percentage of the books sold in Denmark were in English. (I have recently heard it said anecdotally that sales of English-language books in Denmark have climbed to 25% of the total!) I observed at the time that digital disruption, which would make books more ubiquitously available outside their home territories, would result in increased intrusion by books in English. It seemed to me, at first, that booksellers would be better able to adapt to this change than publishers because booksellers are not nearly as tethered to their language as publishers are.

I got another chance to focus on how things look outside the US and the English-speaking world when I spoke at the Sao Paolo Book Fair last August. What slapped me in the face there (a sort of “d’uh, I shoulda known that” moment) was the paucity of titles available in epub format in Portuguese. That meant that Portuguese-language ebooks were PDFs, which are not reflowable and very clumsy to read on a device. What is obvious immediately is that holds back the ebook market in Brazil. What is obvious on second thought is that those Brazilians who want to read on devices and who can read in English will find much more of what they want to read in our language than in their own.

Now, with the US having reached a point that ebook sales are substantial, providing meaningful revenue, threatening mortal damage to the print book distribution infrastructure, and upsetting the publishing value chain we’ve known for a century, more or less, the rest of the world knows it is going to follow suit. The UK, frankly as much because they operate in English as for any other reason, is beginning to catch up noticeably. The rest of the world isn’t so noticeably yet, but we all expect they will begin to very soon. And that means disruptive change is coming to the book businesses of the world and they’re looking to the US experience to understand the nature of that change and what to do to prepare for it.

It is clear already that 2011 is going to be a year for me to be discussing the US experience and trying to discern its global implications with publishers and booksellers and agents all over the world. Some of the plans in that regard aren’t quite ready to be announced (although they will be very shortly) but the first such opportunity will be at the IfBookThen conference in Milan where I’ll be speaking on February 3.

I got an insight (another “d’uh” moment) talking to a French sales executive about the local French ebook market a couple of months ago. He said he’d be urging French ebook retailers to make sure to carry titles in English. Why? Because Amazon, Apple, and Google (and he didn’t mention Kobo, but he could have) would all be serving titles in all languages to French consumers. If the local retailers don’t compete that way, they’ll quickly be bypassed by consumers.

So the reality that everybody in the world has to deal with is that English-language title availability in epub dwarfs that of all other languages and that we’re also exporting a developed infrastructure that can make those titles available everywhere and very quickly.

All of these players (and Kobo, Canada-based with a worldwide base of investors) are sourcing titles in all languages, have multi-device platforms, and are each developing a separate and siloed content-focused app market. Standing on the sidelines (internationally; they’re a US-only play at the moment) with many of the same capabilities is Barnes & Noble, who could decide at any moment to be a global player and would have a big infrastructure and title base from which to do it. Copia, which has been our client, Baker & Taylor’s Blio, and Sony also have many of the necessary components in place.

And all of them have designs on getting some content exclusively if they can.

What I’ll tell the conference-goers at IfBookThen in Milan is what the local booksellers and publishers should be thinking about as digital change in their neck of the woods accelerates.

The local retailers must, as the French sales executive said, endeavor to carry titles in all languages, particularly English. (There are tools from the US infrastructure available to enable that too, particularly from our clients at Ingram and our longtime friends at Overdrive.) They have to deliver multi-device functionality: an easy ability to shop and consume ebook product on all of the most popular devices. They have to keep up with features like lending and notes and internal dictionaries. They have to deliver impeccable customer service. And for those retailers that have brick-and-mortar stores, they should learn the lesson from Barnes & Noble’s delivery of Nook that retail locations are very effective places to introduce readers to ereading devices.

Retailers based locally have some other advantages to employ against the global players. They can provide local propositions for content and marketing of use to libraries and institutions. They can be better partners for local authors and local brands. They can maximize their knowledge of local content silos, such as IP that is developed by governments and local corporations and not-for-profits. And, presuming they are more successful than the global players at harvesting content in their local language, they can garner important revenue by selling to their own-language customers globally.

The challenges and opportunites are somewhat different for publishers. I am looking forward to discussing those, as well as going into more detail about the American experience and what lessons can be drawn from it, when I get to Milan in ten days.

In the meantime, next Tuesday and Wednesday we’ll be looking at this from the other end of the telescope at Digital Book World. We’ll have a conversation with a European member of the IDPF board, Cristina Mussinelli, about the emerging market for English-language ebooks in Europe. We’ll have a session moderated by agent Cullen Stanley with an American, a French, and a British publisher talking about how rights carve-ups might be changing going forward. We’ll have presentations from both Amazon and Google. And, perhaps most important of all, we’ll have separate sessions on core and enhanced metadata moderated by Scott Lubeck of BISG, along with a conversation between Lubeck and consultant Michael Cairns about ebook identifiers. Metadata that is accurate and robust is the key foundation for publishers with digital ambitions anywhere in the world.

All publishers are global now. All book retailers are global now. The publishers and retailers who embrace that reality soonest will have the best chance to be around the longest.

Share this post

I had a chance this week to chat with a very smart person who works for a company that does a lot of business with book publishers. Some things articulated themselves in that conversation — one of my favorite collaborators, Mark Bide, has often observed that we “learn a lot by talking” — that seemed worth repeating for public consumption (while preserving the anonymity of my fellow conversationalist.)

What we talked about is the current situation with ebook distribution: agency model, wholesale model, and what is being called the “hybrid” model, but which I would simply call “a mess that won’t be sustained.” (It should be noted that this a pre-Google Editions conversation and analysis; when GE comes it will be disruptive and change many things, but, not knowing if it is coming next week, next month, or next year, this analysis is about where things stand now.)

Our conversation articulated five things worth repeating:

1. The “hybrid” model for ebook distribution, by which some publishers are selling to Apple on agency terms and Amazon on wholesale, is risky and likely won’t last.

2. Amazon is pursuing enlightened self-interest by forcing some publishers to the hybrid model.

3. The iBookstore could be in real trouble, and is going to find it difficult to build a title base that gives it a sustainable retail position.

4. Big publishers are forced into being disingenuous about their strategy, or what should be their strategy: keeping print sales through brick-and-mortar as robust as possible for as long as possible.

5. Amazon is also forced into being disingenuous about its strategy, or what should be its strategy: getting as many readers as they can hooked on the Kindle device because, as things stand, the only easy way to put a book on a Kindle is by buying it from Amazon.

The hybrid model

When Apple opened the iBookstore, they “insisted” on the agency model, in which publishers set the retail price across all accounts and pay a fixed percentage (reported to be 30%) from the “agent” whose web site brokered the sale. This differed from the wholesale model, in which the publisher “sells” the book to the web retailer who then re-sells it at whatever price it likes to the consumer.

Because Amazon has deep pockets and had the first successful ebook reader on the market, they were comfortable deep-discounting major bestsellers below their cost to build market share. (One should note that Amazon always claimed that they made up that margin on other books and always ran their Kindle file sales at a profit. What they told me once, not under NDA, was that 4% of the titles were deep-discounted below cost and they accounted for 25% of the sales. This data was from before iBooks and agency reduced the number of deep-discounted titles.)

When five of the Big Six publishers presented Amazon with their decision to switch to agency, Amazon agreed to the switch (after initially balking, famously pulling Macmillan’s buy buttons very temporarily), but only for the Agency Five. All other publishers had to remain on wholesale terms, allowing them to continue discounting.

A few publishers have responded by trying to execute on both models. This requires some pretty fancy gyrations, because the price the publisher establishes for an agency book (which is what the public will be required to pay) is considerably less — half or less than half — of the price a publisher establishes to base their discount if they’re selling wholesale. So a $30 print book might become a $30 retail price ebook for wholesale, with the store paying $15 and perhaps charging $9.99. That same book would have a $12.99 or $14.99 retail price in agency, with the publisher getting 70% of that (or about $9.09 or $10.49.) But that’s not what makes the model unsustainable.

The agency deal with Apple reportedly (I have never seen a contract) allows Apple to meet any price somebody else charges on the web. So if Amazon really does sell the book above for $9.99, and Apple matched it, they’d only owe the publisher $6.99! How long do you think Amazon would sit still for paying more than twice as much as a competitor matching their price? How long would you sit still for that?

I checked with one hybrid model publisher who had not faced this problem yet in any unmanageable way. Apple does let them know about books on which price adjustments are required, but so far the number of them has been very small and there have been no major bestsellers that would be very disruptive. But that publisher, and any other trying to execute on both models, must feel very vulnerable and, in a way, dread the runaway bestseller that could start a spiral of price-cutting.

Amazon’s self-interest

Amazon’s objective here is to discourage publishers from putting their books into the Apple store. In this, they appear to be having success. The iBooks store has become the mall store of ebook retailing: they have most of the bestsellers (not all, because they don’t have Random House) and not much else. Meanwhile, Amazon and Barnes & Noble (and Kobo, despite some bad press about their dealings with small publishers) are building larger and larger title selections. With price parity at the very least and a much larger title selection, and the fact that anybody who might use iBooks (an iPad or iPhone book reader) can just as easily buy their ebooks from any of the three other big resellers, Amazon’s tough stance is making many smaller or medium-sized publishers question whether they need to be in the Apple store.

What happens to iBooks?

It is hard for me to see much future for iBooks unless they soften their stance about buying only on agency or, even less likely, unless Amazon softens its stance about taking books from publishers smaller than the Agency Five only on wholesale terms. The gap between what they have to sell and what the other major retailers have will continue to grow. All three of the others (and Copia, for that matter, when they go live) can be read on many devices. Purchases from iBooks can only be read on an iPad or iPhone. Over time, the only reason I can think of for somebody to buy at iBooks would be to get the two-page spread reader capability on their iPad. If there is any other proposition that would attract a purchaser, I don’t know what it is.

Furthermore, Apple has not devoted nearly the resources that its competitors have to publisher contact to get more books. They have fewer people and less interaction with publishers. It’s as if they don’t really care if iBooks lives or dies. And maybe they don’t, since anybody who has one of their devices can read books to their heart’s content from Amazon, B&N, or Kobo on their Apple hardware.

What publishers can’t, or won’t, say

I have written and said many times, going back to 2007 and before, that big general trade publishers depend on a bookstore network for their survival. Their core proposition is “we put books on shelves”; that’s what requires the scale and expertise that they have and that nobody else can compete against. When retail shelf space goes away, there’s little a big publisher can do that can’t be duplicated by anybody with the cash to put together an ad hoc team of freelancers and graft them to some service providers.

But as the response to my “why are you for killing bookstores” post some months ago made clear, “defending the old model” is a very unpopular position that mainly just opens up an advocate to ridicule. No big publisher will say that it is their strategy to restrain ebook uptake to save print at brick-and-mortar, but they’d be pretty dumb not to be thinking it.

What Amazon can’t, or won’t, say

But if Amazon likes to ridicule publishers for price-setting without expertise (which they’re doing in an attempt to keep ebook prices up and restrain the movement from print to digital), they also don’t talk about their core strategy: converting as many readers as possible to the Kindle device. While you can buy from anybody if you read on an iPad, as a practical matter you can only buy from Amazon if you read on a Kindle. Every Kindle convert is a lost customer to every other retailer and etailer.

So while publishers say anything but “we need to slow down the switch to digital” when they talk about “maintaining the perception of value” or “the costs we incur for ebooks” as justification for their agency and pricing policies, Amazon is similarly disingenuous when they talk about pricing their Kindle editions. “Offering great value to the consumers” and “pricing according to scientific algorithms” are much more palatable explanations than “we’re trying to own as much of the market going forward as we can”.

I have a friend in one of the big houses who just analyzes the business and thinks about strategy all day long, one of the few jobs in a publishing house that I could possibly even do! He’s very smart. He tells me that he’s not persuaded that pricing ebooks higher deters people from switching over from print. I can believe that he sees that in the data, but I can’t believe that is true regardless of the price differential. Keeping ebook prices up is also about preserving revenue as the market shifts to digital, but from here the hunch is that it is also, perhaps only in a very small way, keeping some people with print longer than they would if the price attraction to switching were stronger.

Share this post

What shoved other news aside this morning was the word from Seth Godin that he won’t be publishing books with publishers anymore. This is another early indication that it is going to get harder and harder for trade publishers to sign up books.

It is not the first one. Thriller writer J.A. Konrath discovered the virtues of publishing through Kindle about 16 months ago. With the help of audience-building through his own blog, plus completed manuscripts that the New York publishers didn’t buy, he was pushed into learning how to monetize his own work without a publisher.

Last December, the news was that S&S author Stephen Covey had taken his backlist to ebook publisher Rosetta which had, in turn, made a temporary exclusive deal with Amazon. The motivations, apparently, were a bigger share of the ebook pie and the unique marketing capability Amazon has to really push something direct to appropriate consumers. That deal seemed to be with the original publisher’s explicit consent. (Agent Andrew Wylie recently formed an imprint to do the same thing with a batch of his clients’ backlist apparently without prearranging consent, although no lawsuits have been filed to date.)

At the last BookExpo, one of the leading agents in New York told me he is working hard to learn about self-publishing options because his authors are asking him about it.

Last week, one of the leading publishing consultants to “brands” told me that the 25% standard ebook royalty was pushing her company’s clients to think harder about self-publishing.

And it happens that right now I’m reading a book about my favorite subject (baseball history) called “A Year in Mudville” (about the Mets inaugural season) that was self-published through Smashwords but which, in editorial quality, exceeds many titles I’ve read from established houses. I don’t know whether author David Bagdade didn’t want to bother with the bureaucracy of pitching trade publishers, was rejected by them, or just chose the control and better margins of Smashwords, but Smashwords rather than one of the established players is dividing with the author 70% of the nine bucks I gave iBooks for the purchase

This way lies destruction.

Many years ago, my friend and sometimes colleague Mark Bide and I were talking about threats to the scholarly journal paradigm. For those not familiar with how journals work, it might be an eyebrow-lifter. Universities pay professors’ salaries and encourage them to write peer-reviewed articles. The journals get the articles for free, operate the peer-review and publication process, and then sell the collection of articles back to the university’s library. So the university both pays for the content’s creation and purchases it in its published form. Since the beginning of the web awareness, it has been predicted that disintermediation of journal publishers would occur.

What Mark told me was “watch the level of submissions.” That is, he believes the first sign that journal publishing is in trouble will be if the professors stop sending in their articles. So far, that hasn’t happened (that I’m aware of.)

But it’s going to be happening in trade.

On an email list I read, you can detect the annoyance of publishers who point out that neither Konrath nor Godin would be where they are today if publishers hadn’t invested in them and built their fame. There’s some resentment that neither Konrath nor Godin emphasize this point and, by not doing so, seem to suggest “anybody can do this.” I’m not sure that they’re saying “anybody can”, but it isn’t necessary to push that idea to do real damage to publishers’ futures, because the authors who can do this are among the the ones publishers need the most.

Starting in the 1990s, publishers started to ask “what’s the author’s platform” when they signed up books. In those days, they were asking whether the author had a radio show, a newspaper column, a speaking circuit, or extensive media contacts that could give them a leg up to promote the author’s book. But with the turn of the century and the development of inexpensive websites and blogs, authors were able to build their own platforms. And, lo and behold, they were able to build them faster and better if they had legitimately published books in the marketplace.

Publishers should have remembered the axiom that you should be careful what you wish for. This was, perhaps, the beginning of the unbundling of the publisher’s suite of services to the author. It used to be that the publication of a book was the platform and the publishers’ publicity and marketing efforts worked to capitalize on it. This was all part and parcel of the package: paying an advance; editing and shaping the book; putting it into a distributable (printed and bound) form; getting it known; and, of course, getting it into a store where a customer could buy it.

Publishers still pay advances although they’re doing their best to scale them back. Many don’t provide the same level of editing services that they used to; they often expect more books to be delivered by each of their editors and they also lean to agents they can trust to do a lot of the work of putting a book in shape. Putting it into distributable form isn’t nearly as hard as it used to be and doesn’t require inventory investment if the form is digital. Getting it known is something that Godin very articulately and accurately suggests he can do better himself. He is not alone and authors who can do this are explicitly what publishers are seeking. And getting the content into the customer’s hands is a drastically different proposition in a digital context than it was in the pure print world of 20 years ago, and digital distribution can be done with far less investment and far less organizational muscle.

So there’s less for a publisher to do for an author than there once was. And the publishers sent that signal when they started to focus on the author’s own ability to promote and then, over time, turned that ability into a frequent requirement for publication. If the publisher is going to do less, the author wants to pay less for it. Joe Konrath is very clear about the advantages he sees in getting the lion’s share of the revenue his books generate, rather than a mere author’s royalty.

But, somewhat more ominously, making more money through disintermediation does not appear to be the primary driver for Seth Godin. What Seth seems to be saying is “I want flexibility. I want to use what I write in whatever is the best way to build my overall career, revenues, and audience. I don’t want to be locked into publishers’ schedules and bureaucracy.”

That’s a massive challenge for big trade houses but it will be of increasing importance to big authors, particularly big non-fiction authors. It is much easier for a publisher to provide real value if they’re vertical. On the same mailing list I mentioned above, we got a comment from a biggish independent publisher who claims that the house is finding more and better ways to work with authors and really investing in them. But, we are told, they are all in verticals.

Godin may be a unique case. There are unique aspects to Covey and Konrath too. But it is not comforting for trade publishers to see that authors have alternatives, that as ebook sales rise the viability of the alternatives grows, and that the authors most likely to strike out on their own or look for new partners are those with the strongest existing connections to audiences.

Share this post

The publishing industry faces some mammoth challenges that it will be very hard for any one publisher, even the biggest, to address.

Costs have to be cut dramatically over the next few years. New technology is going to enable upstarts to compete in the marketplace with far less overhead and infrastructure than legacy publishers have built. The legacy cost structure will be competitively unsustainable and, at the same time, investments are needed to create whole new infrastructures for marketing and new processes for product creation. What the products themselves will turn out to be is something that will only become clear through experimentation, trial-and-error, and an iterative exchange between publishers and their markets.

There are some challenges that are simply awesome. The big publishers are sitting on rights they can’t exploit because they don’t know what they own. The typical “rights database” in a major house is an ocean of filing cabinets containing hard copy contracts that could be 20, 40, or 80 years old and still in effect. The biggest emerging market might be the use of publishers’ material on web sites that do, indeed, need to “buy licenses” to use the material, but the granularity of potentially millions of very low-value transactions would defeat any attempt in the current environment to make this business profitable.

In fact, transaction costs are going to be one of the closely-watched metrics distinguishing publishers in the 21st century from publishers in the 20th. Everybody is going to have to be paying attention to cutting them to enable those low-value transactions to be profitable.

We’re going to need concerted and focused efforts to enable today’s publishing companies, particularly in trade but really in all areas except a few professional niches that have already made the transition, to do what’s necessary to reconfigure and rebuild for new paradigms that are still being invented.

All of this leads me to introduce an organization I hadn’t heard of a month ago which could well be the White Knight riding to the rescue of publishing. I don’t know them well — I’m still in the process of getting introduced — but a publishing systems veteran who has been my client twice before has just taken an important position with them. We’ll be working with them to hone their approach to the publishing community, which I’m sure will have a profound impact over the next few years.

The company is the Tata Group, and more specifically, the unit within it called Tata Consulting Services, or TCS. The executive is John Wicker, with whom I worked in the 1990s when he was at Vista Computer Services (now Publishing Technology) and more recently when he was at Klopotek. (We did the Digital Asset Distribution project together three years ago.) Tata is extraordinary.

The company was founded in 1868 and today the Tata Group comprises 96 different companies with over $70 billion in annual revenues (not far off the annual revenues of the entire book publishing industry, worldwide.) The consulting group is about 10% of the company, with annual revenues of about $7 billion, growing at about 20% a year. TCS has 160,000 associates worldwide, with more than 14,000 in the United States. All of them, of course, have a technology background. Hundreds have experience with publishing and thousands have experience with other media.

Wicker’s new job is to head up the Publishing Segment for TCS’s Global Consulting Practice (GCP), but he is building on a substantial existing base. There’s a major media company of great importance to the publishing community that has been having TCS handle its back office functions for years. Another major publisher was halfway through an Oracle system implementation that was over budget and behind its schedule working with a big brand consulting firm. TCS took over the project and delivered the implementation within the original timetable and budget.

And a substantial portion of the apps on sale for the iPad were developed by TCS. They have dealt with publishing’s legacy challenges and they’ve got experience at the things publishers are just learning that are critical to our future.

In the 1990s, Wicker helped us pioneer a new fusion between envisioning publishing’s future and educating the industry by organizing Vista’s “Publishing in the 21st Century” program, which I co-chaired with Mark Bide of Rightscom in the UK. The White Papers and conferences we did then were really groundbreaking. We can read what we said was publishing’s future more than a decade ago with pride. (Most of the speeches on this web site that are from before the year 2001 were delivered at Vista conferences.) We tapped the thinking of a lot of smart people to develop our understanding of the challenges publishing faced and to feed our imaginations about where things were going.

But the degree to which we could address the challenges directly was limited. Vista was the biggest provider of ERP (that’s “enterprise resource planning”) systems to publishers, but they were a tiny company, far less than half a percent of the size of TCS. What we learned influenced Vista’s systems development but we really couldn’t help much with a lot of the challenges we saw.

We didn’t have the resources to boil the ocean. TCS does. TCS can’t stop change (nor would they want to try) but they really have the capabilities to help publishers do what’s necessary to adapt to it. From the perspective of guys like Wicker and me, who for years have been contemplating issues so large they were more frustrating than enlightening to consider, being able to help steer such a massive rescue flotilla into publishing waters looks like the opportunity of a lifetime.

Share this post

In the Internet world, brands will be more important than they’ve ever been before.

Why?

Because as the number of choices available to anybody seeking anything proliferate, brand is the shortcut that allows choices to be made quickly and reliably. And the Internet does nothing better than presenting us with more choices for any quest than anybody can possibly consider carefully.

In the next 20 years or so, the brands that will dominate for a very long time will be created.

Why?

Because the organization and delivery of stuff — including information — is being realigned into verticals; that is: subjects. The requirements of physical delivery required aggregation across interests that the Internet does not. So enduring horizontal brands of content like newspapers or book publishers but also outside content, among retailers, for example, that thrived across interest groups will find themselves challenged by new brands that are narrower and deeper. Being narrower and deeper permits a much more involved engagement with the audience. It strengthens the brand.

That’s how entities like Politico and Fivethirtyeight.com for political news suddenly challenged The New York Times and the Washington Post. That’s how Ravelry and Etsy arose out of nothing to become brands with real power in the crafts space, or how The Food Network or Epicurious became dominant in the web conversation about food.

The owners of the brands that matter will control access to the audiences that matter in the future. Content creators’ fates will be in the brands’ hands.

Publishers can compete in this environment, but only if they recognize the realities and try!

I am not an expert on brands (and I don’t even play one on TV.) But I have been paying attention this concept for about 15 years, since Mark Bide introduced me to it during our work together on the Publishing in the 21st Century program in the 1990s. There are a few simple truths that I believe are clear to anybody who spends any real time thinking about this.

1. For a brand to succeed, its message (often called its “promise” among the Brandanista) must be crystal clear and unconfused. You wouldn’t put the same brand name on toothpaste and tomato sauce. And if Ravelry wants to expand into gardening, they almost certainly should invent another brand.

2. Publishers particularly need to distinguish between B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) brands. So a company’s name might be an acceptable B2B brand, communicating things about commerciality, quality, and its marketing effort to bookstore buyers, librarians, and reviewers who will be interested in its offerings across subject matters. But consumers require brands that are consistent as to subject matter, or as to the problems the content offerings solve (which is what makes “Dummies” work.)

3. Healthy brands reduce marketing costs. If you want to sell a romance book, you have to find the audience. In Harlequin’s case, the audience finds them! Yes, Harlequin is one of the exceptions to the rule that a publisher’s name is not a B2C brand. Why? Because they have a consistent product offering. If they decided to expand into mysteries or thrillers, they’d need another brand. Even within romances, Harlequin has sub-brands to give their readers shortcuts to the particular lengths and types of books they want to buy.

4. Precisely the same product with precisely the same marketing expenditure will sell better under some brands than it will under others, which is a corrolary to point 3 above.

5. We all well know that not all brand promises are about content. “Community” (interaction among the interested) and “service” (solving problems or providing help, which is what the content in Dummies books do) are important components of brand as well. My paradigm is to use content as bait to attract eyeballs, but then to use community and service to strengthen the hold of the brand on its adherents.

The overall vision presented in the Shift speech is that vertical communities are forming and that the stakes being planted in the virtual ground are analogous to the land claims made by settlers when Oklahoma was opened up. Each of those claims will ultimately be branded and many of those brands will endure for a very long time. Will important gardening brands be owned by publishers or seed and fertilizer companies? Will important cooking brands be owned by publishers or a food manufacturer or a restaurant chain? Will important travel brands be owned by publishers or a hotel or an airline? It depends on who delivers the combination of content, community, and service that pulls together the interested and then leverages that interest into an enduring brand.

Publishers have great tools to compete but they can only succeed if they know what the game is. Establishing enduring brands is the great opportunity of our time and book publishers are very well-positioned to win. If they play. Understanding content and how to deliver it to markets is a great start, but that’s all it is.

Share this post

In the 1990s, Mark Bide and I used to chair a program for VISTA Computer Services called “Publishing in the 21st Century.” We’d do a “white paper” every year and run conferences twice a year each in New York and London. The subject was digital change in publishing and the purpose was, simply, to think it through.

The conferences developed a pattern. Mark would open the show with a summary of our research. He’d be followed by a couple of outside speakers and then I’d wrap up with what we took to calling a “walk on water” speech. I got a lot of practice doing big vision stuff.

Part of the pattern was that Mark would start each conference by reiterating that book publishing is not one business, but many. The procedures and business metrics for a publisher of directories bore no resemblance to that of a college textbook publisher; a sci-tech publisher had a different business and, in many ways, a different business model from a trade publisher; and so forth.

General trade publishers are, in my opinion, the most challenged of all by digital change. They have the superficial advantage of having their marketplace “go digital” later than all the others, so there would seem to be an opportunity to learn from the mistakes and the successes of others. But that advantage is illusory because of unique aspects to trade.

Recently, for a new project I’m working on that will become public in the next couple of weeks, I was challenged to enumerate what distinguishes trade publishers’ 21st century problems from everybody else’s. I think all of these things are challenges unique to trade publishing or they have substantially more impact on trade publishers than on any others:

* their channels to get printed books to the customer are consolidating and shrinking which means a loss in margin to intermediaries with more clout, a compressed sales window that leads to more risk-taking with initial placements of inventory and higher returns, and, as volumes shrink and returns increase, actual distribution costs per unit sold will rise as well;

* their principal marketing channels are atrophying, and the new emerging ones are more granular and transient, increasing per-title marketing costs;

* the biggest authors have increased clout for many reasons, increasing title acquisition costs;

* the new technologies both lower barriers to entry for additional competing titles and keep old and even used books alive forever in the marketplace, increasing competition;

* they have unique legacy issues: the backlist rights tangles and undigitized backlists that still sell robustly in print require additional investments now to forestall ultimate sales erosion.  As the overall sales shift to digital some titles on those backlists, depending on rights, might not be able to go (and perversely, could have the copyright licensed for print but effectively orphaned for a digital version);

* they have agents, who have their own challenges (unless they represent one or more of the biggest authors and even that model might be threatened as more digital change evolves) while they add complications for publishers trying to find their way to new models with uncertain costs and revenues.

Trade publishers, much more than their counterparts in school, college, academic, and professional, are bound to the format of “the book”. That is partly because the “value adds” that other publishers can use to justify different (higher) pricing are not natural adjuncts to trade books. Trade publishers can’t boost prices and margins by adding homework helpers as is done for school books, self-testing as is done for college texts, and value-added aggregation, searching, and productivity tools as is done for academic and professional publishing. So the lessons being learned by other publishers just don’t port to trade, any more than the new paradigm for music (give away the content to sell concert tickets) can transfer to books.

Even within trade publishing, there are distinctions that matter. The business of the Big Six general trade houses is quite different than the niche (sometimes called “enthusiast”) businesses run by publishers like F+W Media, Chelsea Green, or Hay House. Niche publishers who have depth of content in verticals can do things that the general trade houses just can’t.

For example, F+W Media has refocused its company around verticals. They used to see magazines and books as the businesses they were in with titles related to crafts and writing; now they see crafts and “writing” as the businesses they’re in with books and magazines in each. That enables them to share marketing costs across many books and magazines and it enables them to market much more effectively to the markets they serve. F+W’s book business is challenged by all the same factors as everybody else’s, but reinforcing their vertical organization creates alternatives, sometimes allowing them to convert essentially consumer audiences to professional audiences so that tricks from other publishing businesses can apply.

Here’s a recent anecdote that, for me, sums up the uniqueness of our challenge.  In a recent conversation with a very sharp and Senior Marketing Person at a major house, I raised a pet question of  mine these days. “What’s the new ‘standard treatment’ for a trade book?” Used to be galleys to selected pre-pub review media, a press release with and without review copies to lists of varying sizes and care of curation, size of the catalog page, and then things we can do for all mysteries, all cookbooks, etc. What should it be now?

So SMP says back to me, “there isn’t one.” But there has to be one, I said. Because only 10% of the books are going to get any unique marketing effort, so 90% have to get something standard. What should it be? If PW and The NY Times and the list of review editors at the various papers and the “usual suspects” aren’t the right thing to do anymore, what is? Or do the 90% get nothing?

What that captured for me is that the Achilles heel of trade publishing has always been that publishers have to reach audiences as numerous as the books they publish and they have mostly marketed books one-by-one, book-by-book. That’s what no other branch of publishing would even attempt. Marketing effort per title is the real point of scarcity in this business — more than quality product and more than shelf space. People outside the trade don’t think about that because, frankly, it’s a problem that doesn’t occur anywhere else. But it’s in our industry’s DNA. And we’re going to have to create some unique answers.

Share this post