Peter Clifton

We had a very successful debut annual conference for Digital Book World last January, even though we didn’t conceive the idea until June, put together a group of helpers (which we now call our Conference Council) until July, or draft the initial program until August. This year we’re way ahead of that schedule. We’ve put together a fabulous Council to advise us this year and we’re having a meeting of many of them next week to discuss the agenda and to start getting suggestions for speakers.

The Council gives us wide exposure and connections to the trade publishing industry. That way we make sure we don’t miss any ideas and we don’t miss knowing about any talented people whom our audience would want to hear.

We have several publishing company presidents and CEOs (Sara Domville of F+W, Marcus Leaver of Sterling, Maureen McMahon of Kaplan, Brian Napack of Macmillan, Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks) and some presidents and CEOs from other companies and support organizations in the industry (Kristen McLean of the Association of Booksellers for Children, Tracey Armstrong of Copyright Clearance Center, Peter Clifton of Filedby, David Cully of Baker & Taylor, Joe Esposito of GiantChair, John Ingram of Ingram Content Companies, Scott Lubeck of The Book Industry Study Group, and Steve Potash of Overdrive Systems.)

We have other senior level executives, many with specific digital responsibilities (Peter Balis of Wiley, Ken Brooks of Cengage, Mark Gompertz of Simon & Schuster, Madeline McIntosh of Random House, Thomas Minkus of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Larry Norton of Borders, Kate Rados of F+W Media, Charlie Redmayne of HarperCollins, Adam Salomone of Harvard Common Press, John Schline of Penguin, Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press, Michael Tamblyn of Kobo, Maja Thomas of Hachette, and Tom Turvey of Google.)

We have agents (Sloan Harris of ICM, Simon Lipskar of Writer’s House, and Scott Waxman of the Waxman Agency) and industry consultants and commentators (Michael Cairns of Persona Non Data, Ted Hill of THA Consulting, and Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners International.) And because he is our media partner, we have help from Michael Cader of Publishers Marketplace as well. And we also get great input from others on the F+W team: David Nussbaum, David Blansfield, Cory Smith, Guy Gonzalez, and Matt Mullin.

So we have all the Big Six represented, as well as small publishers, industry-wide associations and service providers, wholesalers, digital distribution partners, retailers, and agents. All of these people have real input into the topic list and speakers. Many of them are joining us for a meeting next week to review our ideas for the program, which we previewed on this blog about a month ago.

Because Digital Book World tries to be at the cutting edge of trade publishing and digital change, we often face one or both of two challenges. Sometimes we believe something should be happening, or be about to happen, but we may not know where or whether the publishers leading the charge will talk about it. Several topics come to mind that fit that description: vertical efforts inside general trade houses; what houses are doing to adjust to reduced expectations for print sales in bookstores; how houses are gearing up or changing their sales efforts to compete in and serve a growing list of digital intermediaries; how enhanced ebook and ebook first creation change the traditional order of things in product development.

The other challenge we have to work around is when people can say things privately but not publicly. One topic that is very tough to talk about is ebook royalties, which is a major point of contention between publishers and leading agents at the moment. The big houses are pretty adamantly trying to hold the line (publicly) at a royalty of 25% of net receipts. But upstart publishers like Jane Friedman’s Open Road appear to be willing to pay 50%; publishing through Smashwords yields 85% (but sells the books without DRM, which would frequently scare the copyright owners of valuable properties); and self-publishing through a distributor would deliver a yield somewhere in between. (Remember: self-publishing ebooks carries no inventory risk.) In that environment, some agents are able to wring some concessions from some publishers. But the agent can’t talk about that without jeopardizing her ability to get concessions for her clients and no publisher will volunteer to reveal the isolated concession and start turning that into a policy.

Some things are just hard to discuss. Do booksellers, or even the publishers and wholesalers who supply them, want to talk about the possibility of their impending demise? But how can one plan for the future and ignore that elephant in the room? If a publisher suddenly sees the necessity of developing direct selling relationships with end users, after years of telling booksellers he was against it, does that publisher want to talk about those efforts in public?

When competitors participate in industry education initiatives, they must draw lines around what they will reveal and what they won’t. One ebook-responsible executive we know at a major house is persistently reluctant to reveal what he’s doing or what he’s thinking. But he has a boss, one who is proud of what he does and what their house does, who pushes him forward as a speaker.

Frankly, I think these challenges are greater for us than they are for other conferences on digital change that focus more on technology than they do on business practices. Very few publishers are masters of tech; usually they’re working with outside suppliers who are happy to share best practices. But business practices are different; they’re more sensitive. Sometimes the reluctance to share them is sound. Sometimes constraints are even legally required. Since our job is to focus on business practices, we’re glad to have relationships with very knowledgable players who will candidly engage with us on these challenges so we can figure out the best way to protect true proprietary knowledge but still disseminate valuable information.

We’re really proud of the illustrious group we have gotten to advise our efforts, and we get great value from them even though their first responsibility is to the company they work for. We feel confident that this group helps us cast a net that is wide and broad enough to assure us that any major development in the trade book world will hit our radar screen and that we’ll know if there are informed people willing to talk about it.

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Several very recent conversations have come together for me.

1. Joe Esposito, the new CEO of GiantChair, says metadata is the key to publishing in the future; he describes metadata as the modern equivalent of Allen Lane’s discovery that cheaper paperback books sold in mass merchant locations could boost book sales. Of course, Giant Chair is very much involved in metadata as a way to help publishers find marketers and customers.

2. F+W and Ingram have come together to make a deal enabling niche web sites to sell the full range of applicable ebooks to their community. Of course, finding “applicable” ebooks will be dependent on the quality of the metadata that publishers provide to Ingram. I really liked seeing this happen, because it is the first significant example of something I’ve predicted and advocated: that publishers who want to go after communities should sell the books of their competitors and that all web sites should deliver curated ebook stores of the titles of interest to their site visitors.

3. A list discusses whether the publisher has a role in the future, what it is, and how the spoils in a new world should be divided between the publisher and the author. One observer points to the nuances in royalty rates: the royalty implications of the wholesale model versus the agency model, whether or not the commission paid to the agent is or isn’t deducted from “receipts” for purposes of calculating royalties, and what the competitive implications are for publishers going after authors. This gives rise to the next question: are publishers differentiated on royalty rates alone, as though each publisher would sell the same number of books? And that gives rise to the next point: understanding, quality, and richness of metadata can determine how successfully publishers can sell a book.

4. One of the biggest issues for publishers in managing and providing quality metadata is associating all the works and editions of them for each author with that author, and while that challenge intensifies when they look at the author’s books published by others, the fact is that most current royalty systems have plenty of problems keeping track of the multiple titles and editions of any author that they themselves have published.

5. Filedby, the directory of author web sites I co-founded with Peter Clifton, has a new metadata clean-up service called Author Data Advantage that makes it simple and economical for publishers to organize their works and edition data properly tied to each author and to keep it that way as new works and editions are created. Filedby’s service, which any publisher can avail themselves of, can tie all the editions of a work together, relate them accurately to each author or other contributor, and provide each of the authors with a unique ID. That allows the publisher to tie the marketing, reviews, conversation, community, rights, and digital promotions back to the right work and the right author.

Metadata work for publishers is, really, a bottomless pit, since it is, in effect, “information about the book” and there is no limit to that. There will be no end to the categories of quality, interest, and association each book can have attached to it. How many books published in years past, for example, should now be associated with “Gulf oil spill?” If you published one discussing whether using chemical dispersants is a good idea or not, I think you’d probably want somebody googling “Gulf oil spill” to find it, wouldn’t you?

The list conversation referred to above was really about the difference in royalty rates offered by publishers and how the authors cents-per-copy is affected by the agency versus wholesale model. My own hunch is that this won’t matter much in the short run because dollars offered in the advance will still be far more important to the authors’ and agents’ decision than selling policies that can change between signing and publication. In the longer run, differences in the ways publishers handle metadata might be relatively more important because it will affect how many copies they sell.

In an earlier post, I made the point that we’re approaching the day that half the sales of new books will be made online. All the sales of books online are highly dependent on metadata. Very robust metadata can enable a book and author to get discovered when more minimal, even though correct, metadata would omit it from the conversation. Incorrect metadata can prevent a book from being found even if the customer knows pretty much what they’re looking for.

Metadata, what it is and how it affects discovery and sales, is a subject that every book professional will find increasingly important to understand and master in the days to come.

Last year I wrote a post suggesting that one way publishers might deal with piracy is by posting sabotaged files on offending sites, rather than just playing whack-a-mole. This triggered more than a few hostile reactions. I found it ironic to see yesterday that the new Stephanie Meyer ebook could be the occasion for software mischief-makers to come into conflict with copyright mischief-makers, using infected PDFs of a book many people want as a way to gain entree into people’s computers with malware. So now the hackers who want to attack your operating system are the allies of the publishers who want to discourage people from downloading ebooks from anything but clearly-authorized sites.

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