Publishing Perspectives

The end of Borders took place within a larger context.

I was in Italy for the IfBookThen conference last February when Borders’ impending bankruptcy was a rising expectation. Somebody in the audience asked me if I attributed Borders’ difficulties to ebooks. I said:

“When the flu hits town, the old and sick die first.”

Ebooks present an enormous challenge to brick-and-mortar stores. And the growth of ebooks over the past three years or so has been nothing short of astonishing, even to somebody like me who expected a more gradual rise to have started much sooner. (The IDPF chart which shows the growth in the market, sharing data actually collected by the AAP, has apparently not been updated for the past two quarters, but this gives you the idea.)

But the disruption to brick stores started before ebook sales were even visible with a microscope, more than a decade sooner, when bookstore customers started migrating to online buying. Ebooks just accelerated what had been a trend of traffic and sales erosion that had existed for quite some time.

Ed Nawotka of Publishing Perspectives has a nice account of some serious errors Borders made around the turn of the century. Replacing a book-experienced management with merchants from outside the book trade was the gateway mistake. Eliminating the local marketing function was one that probably came from it: the local differentiation and customization required for a successful bookstore is much greater than what is needed for pets or groceries and successive managements from outside the book trade wouldn’t have known or understood that.

Turning over ecommerce to Amazon showed a shocking lack of digital vision. It is often forgotten that Barnes & Noble once made half the same mistake: they originally owned their BN.com ecommerce capability jointly with Bertelsmann until they bought their partner out. And Barnes & Noble had obvious challenges reconciling their online business with their overall business until they brought in new management that clearly saw the online business as the future. That wasn’t until much later in the century’s first decade. The problem both chains probably saw is that the skill sets required to run a successful brick store chain didn’t apply to creating a digital business so they were nervous about investing too heavily in it. When the time came that it was obvious that they had to do so, Borders was too weak to recover and Barnes & Noble, despite a web operation that had serious flaws, at least had a platform and customer base to build on.

And they had strong cash flow from a healthy, well-managed in-store print book business.

The category management idea Borders tried to implement and which Nawotka documents was a fiasco in every way: poorly conceived, poorly executed, and an idea that, if it could work for the book business at all, would have to be selectively applied, not forced on every section of the store.

The reduced selection concept that was underlying category management suggests that perhaps Borders had an early and accurate read on the fact that the Internet had diminished the power of selection in a brick store as a magnet for customers. It is true, and it was true then, that the power of aggregation had shifted from offline to online. It is just impossible for any physical location to deliver the choice that an online bookstore can. Most people now know that if you want to choose from the widest possible selection of just about anything the the last thing to do is go to a store. And that’s particularly true of books, which you don’t have to smell or taste or try on for size.

In my opinion, the defect in Borders that led to their ultimate demise was “none of the above.” It was their supply chain, which for well over a decade has been an inefficient mess.

The irony is that when Borders started, inventory management was their signature strength. The Borders brothers developed a tracking-and-purchasing system which was state of the art at the time (the 1980s) and turned it into an expansion opportunity. It all worked so well that they were able to sell the chain to K-Mart, which already owned the mall store chain, Waldenbooks, in 1992. That was probably the beginning of their downfall.

Borders and Barnes & Noble were on parallel paths building out superstore chains, featuring bookstores that pulled over 100,000 titles together under one roof. Until Amazon arrived in 1995 and started gaining traction, this was a nearly-irresistible proposition to the heaviest book consumers. Both chains, fueled by Wall Street investment, grew their number of large stores quickly. The stores were free-standing destinations, not in large shopping malls.

But this is where the chains diverged. Barnes & Noble made a substantial investment in a supply chain infrastructure. They built what was effectively an internal wholesaling operation, putting backup supplies of the books their stores carried within one day’s delivery of most of their chain and within two day’s delivery of just about all of it. They built systems to set stocking levels and maintain them. My first client work at B&N was in the late 1990s when they were crawling with logistics experts to make inventory management rules and policies, but they were also smart enough to want some book inventory expertise from outside their company (not that they didn’t have plenty of it on their own payroll) to help with the planning as well.

Meanwhile, Borders was working on gimmicks like category management and their supply chain became increasingly bureaucratic and convoluted. They pushed books through a warehouse, but only to put stickers on them. This compounded the irony. In the 1970s, the B. Dalton chain that B&N owned had virtually invented computer-assisted inventory management based on stickers they put on the books carrying an SKU number. Walden, in the days before they were owned jointly with Borders, had leap-frogged Dalton in that regard by scanning the ISBN instead of needing a sticker. Now, 15 or 20 years later, B&N regained that same advantage over Borders. Borders suffered the delay and the cost of stickering new books as they came in and B&N didn’t have to.

But, much worse, Borders backlist ordering was haphazard (almost totally human-controlled, whereas B&N’s was largely automated) and infrequent. B&N literally ordered from many publishers every day; Borders was ordering from major publishers as infrequently as every six weeks.

When you order infrequently, you face two choices. You can be overstocked on many things or out of stock of many things. There is no other alternative.

The complications to inventory management posed by the granularity and diversity of book selection utterly defeated the non-book veterans that serially ran, or mis-ran, the company. The lack of a digital strategy compounded the problem, but the supply chain lunacy was the problem. The cost of inventory is the greatest variable expense of running a bookstore. If you don’t get value for your inventory dollars, your leases and your staff couldn’t save you, even if they were good.

What this means for publishers’ sales is a bit difficult to predict and will even be harder to discern. Sales this year have been skewed by the Borders inventory dump. Publishers’ editions elsewhere and the stores their books are in have been competing with liquidation sales. This depressing effect on other retailers’ business and, as a result, their willingness and ability to order from the publishers, will be coming to an end.

Publishers Lunch got together with Bowker a couple of months ago to ask questions of Borders customers to try to discern where the business would go. They have hard data to the extent that it is possible to develop it, having asked people how their purchases would be affected and where they would buy when their Borders was gone. Only 8% said they’d buy fewer books, although nearly 20% said they’d use the library more.

My own totally hunchy math, checked out in a rigorous conversation at dinner with a good friend who is a publisher, is that Borders constituted about 10% of a publisher’s business until very recently. My guess is that half that business goes to Barnes & Noble, most of the rest is split between online purchasing and independents (with online getting more, much of it in ebooks), and maybe 1% or so, or 10% of the old Borders business, will be “lost.”

Of course, the movement of sales from print in brick-and-mortar to print and ebook online will continue, so how much lift from this will actually be felt by chains, independents, and mass merchants is still up for grabs.

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how I imagine it working.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ed Nawotka, the editor of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s online publication “Publishing Perspectives”, is running a series of pieces responding to his question “what was the most dramatic event in publishing in 2010?” Here’s the answer from The Shatzkin Files.

The most dramatic event in publishing in 2010? That’s easy. It was the face-down between five of the six biggest publishers in the US and Amazon over trading terms in the ebook marketplace: the shift from wholesale pricing to agency.

Even in theory, the shift was complicated. Publishers’ established prices went from near-print to about half-print. Margin offered to the channel was reduced from 50% of the established price to 30%. Control of pricing shifted from the retailer, who could charge whatever it wanted in the wholesale scenario, to the publisher who required the same price across all consumer touchpoints under agency.

But in practice it was even more complex than it was in theory. Shift of pricing control meant shift of responsibility at the point of sale and that meant publishers were now responsible for sales taxes, not the retailer. (Oddly enough, and the lack of public discussion of this point is a dog that didn’t bark, it did not result in the publisher, now seller-of-record, being told exactly who the customer is: the name and email address are still only known to the retailer.) Lawyers advised (at least some) publishers that agency required a contractual relationship between the publisher and each point of distribution, resulting in deal-making complexity that leaves some retailers without a full shelf of agency publisher books more than six months after the shift.

And literary agents representing the top authors required a lot of handholding. Ebook royalties are a raw point in negotiations these days between agents and publishers, and the agency model reduced the royalty per copy on all books, at least during their hardcover life. Of course, the publishers’ take per copy also was reduced, a point the publishers no doubt made as they prevailed on the agents to accept a change they believed was necessary to prevent a potential perpetual monopoly on ebook sales by Amazon.

Adding to the drama surrounding the shift to agency was the fact that the biggest of the Big Six trade houses, Random House, sidestepped it. This put them in a position where they a) sell their books for more per unit, b) see their books offered to the consumer for less per unit, c) can tell agents their royalties are higher per unit, d) are not offered in Apple’s iBookstore (but are available on all Apple devices through Kindle, Nook, and Kobo, at least), and e) have earned the enmity of the other publishers in the Big Six.

The Agency 5 see themselves, not without reason, as having sacrificed revenue at a difficult time for the industry’s long run good while Random House takes tactical advantage of the shift (and, in the words of one CEO, are “gloating” about it.)

(My editorial comment: this may all be true, but isn’t it the job of a company’s management to take tactical advantage of changing industry conditions? The overall point to this piece, of course, is that I applaud the move to agency. But it is hard to see exactly why, from Random House’s point of view, you’d voluntarily give up an advantage that makes all your competitors grind their teeth. As some analysis I did looking at royalties shows, the tactical advantages of wholesale are distinctly greater for hardcover and it may even be disadvantageous for paperbacks, but that’s a balance Random House is very capable of calculating.)

The most dramatic single moment of this long-playing dramatic event was last January when Amazon made a brief, and vain, effort to stop the whole agency movement in its tracks by pulling the buy buttons for Macmillan, apparently because they were the first publisher to officially notify Amazon of the forthcoming change. The giant retailer retreated in about 48 hours marking the first time in anybody’s memory that the publishers had forced them to back down.

Although the Nook and iPad devices certainly have something to do with it as well, agency seems to have accomplished its purpose of preventing Amazon from maintaining a stranglehold Kindle share through their deep-pocketed ability to forgo margin for a pricing advantage. The other retailers in the ebook market have their margin protected. With Google Editions still to join the fray, there is reason to believe that there can be a truly broad-based ebook marketplace for the next few years. What the Agency 5 publishers did was politically and logistically difficult and, because it involved reducing unit margins, somewhat counterintuitive. It would appear more than six months later that the tactic has achieved its most desired result.

Control of pricing immediately challenges publishers to get sophisticated, modern, and scientific at how they approach pricing. That would require, in a formulation I first heard from Peter Wiley (Board Chair of John Wiley & Sons), “constant, controlled experimentation.” Surely, that is taking place on a daily basis at Amazon.

So far, of course, the sales agent is controlling all the customer contact. Sooner or later that is likely to become a point of contention between publishers and their “sales agents.” It might be pushing things to expect that dispute to begin with the next round of agency contract negotiations in 2011, but expect that issue to make its way to the table in 2012 or 2013.

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I’ve been in the book business for a long time, more than 48 years since my first job on the sales floor of Brentano’s bookstore. For over 37 years it has been my fulltime occupation. My father started his career in books just before I was born, so I have been meeting publishing people more or less since I was in the cradle. And it isn’t that big a business. So, over the years, I’ve gotten to know many people in the industry.

But I hadn’t met Markus Dohle, the relatively new CEO of Random House, until we had lunch last month. He proved to be a very sharp, informal, and relaxed companion, very open with his opinions and observations and very straightforward. And since his prior experience was outside trade publishing (the reason I’d never previously met him), he brings a completely fresh personal perspective to the business.

One thing Markus said really struck me because I agree with it so wholeheartedly and because I hadn’t ever heard it said so explicitly by any of his counterparts. “We have to change from being a b2b company to b2c over the coming years,” he said. He expanded on this when I asked him whether I could attribute the quote for this piece. (I don’t want to disappoint my readers, but I make a living as a consultant, not a blogger, and my career would be crippled if I couldn’t have a conversation with an executive without a looming fear that whatever s/he said would end up in print. If some readers wonder why the sources of some comments remain anonymous, that’s your answer.)

Markus replied that he was fine being quoted because he was “convinced that publishers have to become more reader oriented in a marketing and trend finding/setting way rather than in a direct to consumer selling way.” I welcome the clarification and believe it is right in its emphasis on marketing over sales even though I think that sales, inevitably, becomes part of what a publisher has to do too. And direct contact with and tracking of individual consumers both seem absolutely essential.

(The politics of this are worth a digression to spell out. For several more years at least, big trade publishers will continue to depend primarily on a retail network to reach readers. Despite the fact that all the big retailers, in their way, compete with publishers to control content at its source, they are universally resentful if publishers compete with them to serve consumers. On the other hand, it is increasingly apparent that the retail network is reducing its size and scope and, unless publishers develop alternate channels to consumers, they’ll be reduced in size and scope as well.)

Although Markus was the first CEO whom I ever heard say explicitly that the shift to b2c was in any way a priority, there is evidence in other houses that the importance of direct consumer contact is on the radar. A senior digital officer at another large house is directing a wide-scale effort to organize their consumer contact names — which he found, as he would have in every other house — to be scattered, unorganized, and largely unusable. Pulling names together is one of a number of “first steps” the big publishers must take to act on Markus’s insight.

But there are other “first steps” that are just as important as rationalizing the contact database for consumers. Two of them are related. One is being committing to owning specific groups (or, in the current parlance: communities) of interest. This is what I refer to as “verticalization” and I have written and spoken about it exhaustively. But the commitment to verticalization, in order to be captured and turned into real equity going forward, must be expressed in branding.

The names of publishing houses and the imprints they create are their brands today. (Authors are brands for consumer marketing purposes, but publishers don’t own those brands: the authors do.) What publishers own really do work in a b2b context. Bookstore buyers, book review editors, and collection developers at libraries can discern meaning from company names and imprints. They work the way brands are supposed to work: as shortcuts to establish expectations. Brand tells an informed buyer to expect high-quality writing in a Knopf book and high-quality reproductions in an Abrams book. Brands will also signal them, before they see a finished package, whether a book is likely to feel overpriced or underpriced, and whether the publisher’s claims for promotion and media are likely to be fulfilled.

But most of these brands mean nothing to consumers. And mere knowledge of a brand doesn’t necessarily tell you what to expect if you buy it. Nor would knowledge necessarily provide you with a motivation to get “closer” to it.

The one consumer brand in publishing that means the most and provides the most equity to its owner is Harlequin. Consumers recognize it and have understandings about quality and price based on it. But because they also know that the Harlequin name means the “romance” genre, and because many romance readers buy and consume dozens, even hundreds, of titles in the genre every year, they have logical reasons to visit Harlequin’s web site repeatedly and to request and open email reminders of new publications from them.

In fact, Harlequin’s brand is so clear and so powerful that they can get people to subscribe to their books. When you think about alternative revenue sources, that might be the Holy Grail. It will certainly help publishers stay on the right track if they focus on creating brands and clusters of books around them that could conceivably deliver customers for a subscription proposition.

The Penguin brand is perhaps equally well-known, but it isn’t nearly as well defined. Penguin Classics certainly have a collective meaning, but many books are published under the Penguin imprint that aren’t classics. And while it is likely that sometimes the purchasing choice between one edition of Robinson Crusoe or Hamlet and another might be influenced by familiarity with the imprint, it is not clear that the “quality” signal is important there (because, after all, the words were set down long before Penguin or its competitors existed) as it is for a new romance novel. And it certainly would be harder for Penguin to attract regular web traffic with its brand or to make sales through an email list of brand adherents.

A brand that is in between these two is “Dummies.” It definitely creates a meaningful shortcut for a consumer; they recognize it and it tells them “this book explains the basics on the subject in a way that requires you to bring almost no knowledge to it for it to be useful.” But because Dummies covers many subjects under the sun, it would be difficult to make use of it for audience-gathering or direct marketing the way Harlequin is employed.

You wouldn’t “subscribe” to new offerings, sight unseen, from either Penguin or Dummies. That means that, in at least one very important way, those brands aren’t as useful as Harlequin. Why? They’re too broad. General Motors wouldn’t ever have sold nearly as many cars if they called all the cars “GMs” to create a megabrand and had lost the distinction between Chevrolet and Cadillac. Trying to create “one big brand” if it captures unrelated content or unrelated audiences could be “one big mistake.”

My own theory is that publishers have to completely re-think their imprints in light of the need to move from b2b to b2c. Imprints at big houses are almost always silos with no discernible b2c meaning. In fact, the names of smaller houses, because smaller houses tend to focus on subject areas, can more readily have meaning to consumers.

In fact, Random House just faced a branding question of exactly this nature and got it right. They had acquired a smaller, subject-dedicated company, Watson Guptill, a couple of years ago and had some overlap between what WG published and what Random House already did within their Clarkson Potter imprint. RH executives engineered a solution by which they preserved the venerable Watson Guptill name for “hardworking” instructional books on art and photography —  WG’s strongest historical categories — and made made Potter Crafts a subimprint of WG. They invested in building the crafts list to triple the previous output of WG. The two thirds to three quarters of the WG list that is not crafts will still be WG imprint books. By making Potter Crafts, which they owned before, a part of Watson Guptill (joining Amphoto, the well-known photo line, and WG’s other subimprints), they might get the best of all branding worlds.

And it is further worth noting that tripling down on title output to become a serious player in a niche is probably a move very few Big Six companies would be making these days, but it is necessary to think that way if you’re serious about making substantial b2c marketing efforts. Building a subscription business would almost certainly imply a growth in title output in any vertical.

Random House’s clarity on how publishers should structure brands to have content-specific meaning is still unusual. (There are other examples: Hachette’s invention of “Springboard”, a brand to do books for baby boomers, is a nod in the same direction.) Publishing Perspectives, the thoughtful online publication operated by the Frankfurt Book Fair, offered a piece on the subject six months ago that was locked into what is still publishing’s more normal b2b way of thinking. The catalyst for the post you are now reading, actually, was their editor Ed Nowatka’s piece with the provocative headline asking “Does a Publisher’s Brand Equity Translate to the Digital Age?” which (with all due respect, of which I have plenty, to Ed) I thought really didn’t address the question. But at least he asked it. I don’t recall ever reading a single piece on the subject of this one: how do what have always been b2b publishers create b2c brands?

This is a subject that has been on my mind for a long time. I wrote a post 18 months ago about an imprint started at another house that I considered to be, similarly, the product of the same b2b thinking that characterizes the Publishing Perspectives piece. And about a year ago, I stressed the importance for publishers of building b2c brands going forward.

I believe Markus’s insight is the necessary first step that others haven’t yet taken and, whether or not it started with Markus, the awareness of the need for consumer focus certainly helped Random House make sensible decisions to exploit the brand equity in the WG name they had acquired. Once publishers accept that being consumer-focused is essential to their long-term survival, it follows logically (although not automatically or instantaneously) that they need to think about discrete audiences on more than a book-by-book basis; that they need to gather those audiences on web sites and in mailing lists; that they need to publish books that satisfy them repeatedly, not occasionally; and that all these efforts will make more sense if each separate audience has a brand facing them with real meaning. We’re seeing that from the big publishers right now in genres; they are trying to build science fiction and romance communities and branding them. Random House built a vertical in travel earlier in the decade, developing business models out of a critical mass of content that went beyond simply selling books. That, and the efforts at Random and other big houses to build communities around genres, is a start. But a lot more development of this kind is going to be needed to replace the marketing clout being lost as the old channels to consumers wither in the months and years to come.

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